Ethnobotonist Gary Paul Nabhan is following food resilience in the desert Southwest. Gary Paul Nabhan wears many hats, but when we recently spoke in his hometown of Patagonia, Arizona, he had on a khaki ball cap emblazoned with a caricature of a horned toad.
Unprecedented pressures exist on food security and farming capacity in the U.S. borderland states, according to a new regional food assessment by University of Arizona researchers and their colleagues. The economic downturn, water scarcity, rising oil prices, climate change and the loss of prime farmlands are creating “a perfect storm” that is likely to leave many hungry people in its wake.