Extractive Harvests
Despite the commonly-held perceptions that deserts are either economically-worthless wastelands
or untouched wildernesses, there is an astonishingly high diversity of plants within the bioregion
which are the subject of extractive harvests for commercial purposes. A recently-initiated
biodiversity inventory of native plants used for indigenous crafts marketed from the region
has already identified more than 80 species currently in use by basketmakers and other artisans
(Turok and Nabhan, eds. In prep.) Of the 350 or more edible wild plants in the Sonoran Desert
proper, only a few such as saguaro, organpipe, prickly pear, chiltepines, acorns and mesquite
have entered the marketplace within the last twenty-five years. The same is true for medicinal
plants: perhaps only creaosotebush, ratany, yerba mansa, jojoba, and damiana have been commercially
marketed on any scale.
The major commercial non-timber harvests occurring in the region are for mesquite and ironwood
(treated together in statistics for charcoal and fuelwood), jojoba, croton ("vara blanca")
tomato stakes, cottonwood, bacanora and lechuguilla agaves, beargrass, damiana, oregano, candelilla,
and chiltepines. Other forestry products include resins and barbasco. Table 8 provides
a comparison of Baja California Norte and Sonora in terms of the number of "rural production
units" for non-timber forest products in 1990.
While it is difficult to gain from these statistics anything more than a sense of the magnitude
of area where harvesting occurs, Table 9 highlights recently-available yield data for selected
wild harvests for native plants being commercially harvested in Sonora.
The increase in exploitation of ironwood and mesquite in Sonora and Baja California since
1975 illustrates how quickly the slow-growing vegetative cover of the Sonoran Desert can be
depleted, thereby depleting attendant biodiversity as well. More than 165 plant species use
these two desert legumes as nurse plants, while numerous birds and mammals use these trees
for nesting and roosting (Nabhan and Carr 1994). However, since "mesquite charcoal" became
a craze in United States restaurants in the early 1980s, both mesquite and ironwood have been
harvested off the same lands, with as much as 15-40% of each mesquite charcoal bag consisting
of ironwood prior to 1991. As a result, both trees were locally overexploited in Sonora and
Baja California Sur, to the extent that ironwood received special federal protection status,
and is now a priority species for sustainable use.
Sources
- Nabhan, G.P. and Carr, J. (ed.s). 1994. Ironwood: A Cultural and Ecological Keystone
in the Sonoran Desert. Conservational International Occasional Paper No. 1. University
of Chicago Press, Chicago.
--From State of the Sonoran Desert Biome: Uniqueness, Biodiversity, Threats
and the Adequacy of Protection in the Sonoran Bioregion
by Gary Paul Nabhan and Andrew R. Holdsworth
Sponsored by The Wildlands Project
March, 1998
pp. 42-43 |
