Oct 19, 2026 · 43 min · 31 segments
In the first of a two part series, James travels to Lochiel, Arizona, to interview land defenders occupying a historic cottonwood known as grandmother tree in order to prevent the tree being destroyed…
James StoutHostPhilipGuestPetraGuestRyanGuestEncampment ParticipantGuest
An hour's drive from the nearest pavement, down a long and winding dirt road that cuts through the Coronado National Forest, after leaving little mountain town of Patagonia, lies some of the most beautiful cattle country I've ever seen in the United States.
When you think of southern Arizona, you probably think of saguaros, sand dunes, large mesas and scorching temperatures.
But then luckily, all after the monsoon season, my drive was accompanied by views of rolling green hills, mesquite-covered slopes, and giant cottonwoods granting shade and a sense of majesty to the landscape.
It looks like the pastoral idyll that people who haven't worked in farming think that farming is.
It's the valley where the European settlers first entered what we now call the Southwest, and where some of those settlers have lived and raised cattle for more than a century and a half.
Nonetheless, it's a beautiful country, and the intensively farmed cattle I saw on my way east from San Diego will probably dream of living out their lives here, not under solar shades in the desert.
To the south, across the wall, is the town of Kostolitsky, its name for the Russian and Mexican soldier who earned the right to have a valley of someone else's land named after him by participating in the oppression of the Yaki and their revolutionary comrades, as well as putting down the miners' strike at the US-owned mine in Kananeya.
Kostolitsky, who came to the continent in the Russian navy, which he then deserted, became one of Porfirio Diaz's most potent enforcers.
punishing the working people who fought alongside Diaz at the Battle of Puebla for cresting the general's right to rule as a dictator, and the indigenous people of the region for defending their lands, water, and communities.
And it was Villa and the revolution that eventually displaced Kostolitsky from the region, if not the map.
For more than a century, people and cattle and castle rustlers could pass through this valley more or less like they always had.
A raindrop that falls in L'Aquille, in the USA, runs into Mexico, and the mule deer doe and her fawn I watched in a meadow on my way down could, for now, jump a barbed wire fence and make a journey that would require me to drive several hours and bring my passport.
But as I came up over the last hill before L'Aquille, I set eyes on the reason I was here.
and the reason that deer and the jaguars who move through here might soon be cut off from the pond she was drinking from and the meadow she was grazing in.
This landscape is just like people run cattle with, I'm sure there are barbed wire fences, I can just see one, but it's not visibly broken up in the same way that so many of our landscapes are, right, by property ownership.
An hour's drive from the nearest pavement, down a long and winding dirt road that cuts through the Coronado National Forest, after leaving little mountain town of Patagonia, lies some of the most beautiful cattle country I've ever seen in the United States.
When you think of southern Arizona, you probably think of saguaros, sand dunes, large mesas and scorching temperatures.
But then luckily, all after the monsoon season, my drive was accompanied by views of rolling green hills, mesquite-covered slopes, and giant cottonwoods granting shade and a sense of majesty to the landscape.
It looks like the pastoral idyll that people who haven't worked in farming think that farming is.
It's the valley where the European settlers first entered what we now call the Southwest, and where some of those settlers have lived and raised cattle for more than a century and a half.
Nonetheless, it's a beautiful country, and the intensively farmed cattle I saw on my way east from San Diego will probably dream of living out their lives here, not under solar shades in the desert.
To the south, across the wall, is the town of Kostolitsky, its name for the Russian and Mexican soldier who earned the right to have a valley of someone else's land named after him by participating in the oppression of the Yaki and their revolutionary comrades, as well as putting down the miners' strike at the US-owned mine in Kananeya.
Kostolitsky, who came to the continent in the Russian navy, which he then deserted, became one of Porfirio Diaz's most potent enforcers.
punishing the working people who fought alongside Diaz at the Battle of Puebla for cresting the general's right to rule as a dictator, and the indigenous people of the region for defending their lands, water, and communities.
And it was Villa and the revolution that eventually displaced Kostolitsky from the region, if not the map.
For more than a century, people and cattle and castle rustlers could pass through this valley more or less like they always had.
A raindrop that falls in L'Aquille, in the USA, runs into Mexico, and the mule deer doe and her fawn I watched in a meadow on my way down could, for now, jump a barbed wire fence and make a journey that would require me to drive several hours and bring my passport.
But as I came up over the last hill before L'Aquille, I set eyes on the reason I was here.
and the reason that deer and the jaguars who move through here might soon be cut off from the pond she was drinking from and the meadow she was grazing in.
This landscape is just like people run cattle with, I'm sure there are barbed wire fences, I can just see one, but it's not visibly broken up in the same way that so many of our landscapes are, right, by property ownership.
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