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This June brought the 2024 season of Borderlands Earth Care Youth (BECY) to a close. BECY took place over multiple sessions, with two weeks of work during spring break and weekends in March-April and another five-week segment over summer break that concluded in the June graduation. This year’s interns - representing both high school and university, north and south of the border - completed a wide variety of work projects restoring the watershed, ecosystem, and community of the borderlands. Here’s a look into what BECY was up to this summer!
For their first project of their summer session, the crew improved the Patagonia Butterfly Garden by cleaning leaves for donation to the town’s Community Gardens, reinforcing fences that had been damaged by javelina, and planting native pollinator flowers sourced from BRN’s native plant nursery, Borderlands Nursery & Seed. Next, we toured The Canelo Project - a permaculture demonstration site near Elgin - and learned about natural building and farming techniques with Bill Steen. Bill and Athena Steen’s work is featured in some structures at Borderlands Earth Care Center (BECC), BRN’s permaculture farm, and the location of BECY’s next work project. Formerly Deep Dirt Farm, BECC is undergoing a transition to involve new programming since BRN acquired it last year. To prepare the site for the upcoming events season, our interns turned garden beds, prepared compost, and harvested crops and seeds with the organic farming group Women Grow Food. Also joining us was the University of Arizona Field Studies in Creative Writing fellows Dillon Clark and Claire Taylor, who led a workshop in which our interns produced an 8-page pop-up book envisioning future uses for BECC.
In the second week of summer, BECY joined the conservation group Friends of Sonoita Creek in a survey of watershed health indicators, starting at Patagonia Lake. The lake is an endpoint of Sonoita Creek, and the water it will carry from South32’s Hermosa mine during their dewatering operations. The BECY interns measured pH, dissolved oxygen, and turbidity and used field microscopes to measure the biodiversity of microbes and larvae from both water samples. Next, the crew participated in a wet/dry mapping study of Harshaw and Sonoita Creeks, starting at the top of the watershed in the Patagonia Mountains and taking GPS points of all dry and flowing stretches. The data from both studies will be used as a baseline for measuring any future impacts the Hermosa mine will have on Patagonia’s water cycle.
This year’s BECY curriculum included an environmental literacy exercise centered on the mine. Our interns met with Carolyn Shafer, co-chair of Patagonia Area Resource Alliance, to discuss the group’s research and concerns surrounding mining activity in the Patagonia Mountains. Later, we toured the Hermosa mine with community and natural resource specialists from South32, allowing interns to see the project’s progress and ask questions about the company’s plans for mitigating environmental risk and restoring the affected area. By getting up close to the project and talking with specialists representing multiple perspectives, our interns were empowered to learn about the issues faced by their own community and seek information from diverse sources.
After their work in the Sonoita Creek watershed, the BECY crew transitioned to helping with BRN’s Native Plant Program. The interns cleaned blue grama grass seed at the seed lab and created grow pellets out of clay, compost, and a native grass mix to restore native habitat at heavily eroded sites. The seed balls protect their contents from predation and dissolve in a puddle of earth, seed, and nutrient-rich compost with the monsoon rains. BECY transplanted 268 Palmer’s Agave at the nursery, a vital food plant for migrating nectar-feeding bats in the Sky Islands.
For the ecology unit of our curriculum, BECY hiked the Borderlands Wildlife Preserve with Cholla Duir from the Northern Jaguar Project and Eamon Harrity from Sky Island Alliance as their guides. Interns identified native fauna’s scat and tracks and saw glimpses of wildlife, including the North American jaguar, taken from Cholla’s wildlife cameras in the Sky Islands region. We also heard from Patagonia local Dr. Jason Botz for a career conversation on entomology and how healthy ecosystems and agriculture depend on insects.
BECY featured another career presentation with staff from the National Park Service at Tumacácori National Historical Park, where we completed four days of agricultural land restoration. The interns maintained a historical orchard of Spanish food trees, removed 1,132 gallons of trash from the Santa Cruz River, pulled 1,000 feet of dilapidated fence, and took 167 GPS points of cultural and natural resources on the park.
Our final BECY project occurred over four days at The Nature Conservancy (TNC) Sonoita Creek Preserve. The interns removed a patch of Vinca by hand and prepared a patch of Tree of Heaven for upcoming chemical removal. Next, the crew planted 30 pollinator plants in TNC’s visitors center garden, watered by a reclaimed irrigation system that the interns repaired and installed. By managing invasive species and planting native pollinator food, our interns helped to ensure that the Preserve’s future stays biodiverse and beautiful.
We finished the season in Patagonia’s Tin Shed Theater with a graduation ceremony attended by community partners, friends, and family of the interns. Each intern received a certificate of technical experience in restoration and delivered their final reflection project - a creative presentation showing what they learned throughout the internship. These included a 9-minute video documentary, an introductory brochure for BECC, and an educational presentation on the Sky Islands’ endangered animals. Our facilitators were impressed with the crew’s passion and curiosity and look forward to seeing what the next season of BECY brings. Congrats, BECY graduates!