|
Adios to the Brushlands by Arturo Longoria |
Since childhood, the brush itself—thick, briary, and still—has been the breath of my life. . . . It was always the brush with its collage of shrubs, trees, and cacti that possessed and nursed me. The brush, for me, offered the simplest of loves, profound and undying in its effect. It drew out of me fears and feelings of hopelessness. In subtle ways it was a teacher as well as a sanctuary, offering me the spiritual awareness that on occasion I have so desperately desired.In an area of South Texas extending across the Rio Grande into Mexico, the land was once lush and mysterious, harboring trees, shrubs, and grasses that were home to an abundance of wildlife. In Adios to the Brushlands native son Arturo Longoria remembers this chaparral land of his childhood.
At once a celebration of a region's nature and a call to preserve the little bit of it still left today, Adios to the Brushlands is to South Texas what Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was to the nation's wetlands or John Graves's Goodbye to a River was to the Brazos River. Rife with the natural history of an endangered ecology and capturing as well the binational culture of the region, Adios to the Brushlands draws readers into a land as raw, beautiful, and complex as life itself. A unique descriptive documentary of a disappearing natural treasure, it is a slice of the new natural history that weds the details of the physical world with their significance to the human heart.
A trained biologist and one-time investigative reporter, Longoria brings his skills of observation and expression to sing the song of this vanishing habitat that once covered nearly four million acres of the Rio Grande Valley. Longoria recalls the hours spent with Papagrande, his grandfather, and with his best friend and cousins: hot summer days and frigid winter mornings walking through the dense underbrush, watching birds, studying reptiles, identifying plants. Descriptions of boyhood hunting and varmint calling, and encounters with rattlesnakes and fierce pamorana ants all bring to life another time and place.
In moving but understated prose Longoria captures the wonder of the brushland and symbolically and emotionally links its loss, through rootplows and bulldozers, to the death of his grandfather, who had introduced him to that world.
He reports as well the public policies and private actions that have reduced the brushland to less than five percent of its former extent. He chronicles the efforts to publicize the brushland's destruction and to save the remaining richness for future generations.
ARTURO LONGORIA is a fifth-generation Texan. Now a teacher of biology at South Texas Community College in McAllen, he is a former newspaper reporter and stringer for Time magazine. He has also written numerous articles for Texas Parks & Wildlife and Texas Highways magazines.
A Wardlaw Book
Adios to the Brushlands
0-89096-769-5
$19.95
LC 97-14541. 6x9. 136 pp.
Borderlands Studies. Ecology. Texana. Multicultural Topics.
Publication Date: October 1997.
Terms of order and other ways to order