Word reached me just this very morning about something I have long been anticipating: the publication of new editions this October of Charles Bowden’s classic works Blue Desert and Frog Mountain Blues by the University of Arizona Press.
Blue Desert, Bowden’s 1986 reflective investigation of the increasing pace of development across the American Southwest, and how that development has affected both the natural as well as the human environments where it has occurred, will be graced with a new forward written by Francisco Cantú, himself the author of The Line Becomes a River; Dispatches from the Border. Blue Desert, Bowden’s third book and the first to receive a far wider readership than his earlier, more specialized ones, has become known to many of his readers as the one in which what will become his famous “take no prisoners” writing style is first seen.
In his 1987 Frog Mountain Blues, Bowden returned to the subject of creeping developmental sprawl, this time focusing on the basin area below the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson. Accompanied by Jack W. Dykinga‘s photographs from the original edition and with a new forward by noted poet and essayist Alison Hawthorne Deming, this new edition promises to carry Bowden’s prophetic warnings about over-development and abuse of nature to a new audience (perhaps one that will better heed them this time).
