2024 Image Spring 2024, Tumamoc Talks Information about the four talks by Dr. Michael A. Crimmins, Dr. Sylvia Sullivan, Dr. Connie Woodhouse, and Ron Holle from Spring of 2024. Read more 2023 Image Tumamoc Talks, Fall 2023 Information about the three talks by Dr. Jia Hu, Dr. Jonathan Mabry, and Dr. Laura M. Norman from Fall of 2023. Read more Image Tumamoc Talks, Spring 2023 Information about the three talks by Dr. Michael Kotutwa, Dr. Peter Breslin, and Dr. Charlotte Brown from Spring of 2023. Read more 2022 Image Spring 2022 Lecture Series: Planting the Seeds for Tomorrow: The Tumamoc Resilience Garden The Tumamoc Resilience Garden at the base of Tumamoc Hill will be an inspirational setting where the community can have hands-on participation in how to live in the desert in a hotter and drier future. The backbone design allows passive rainwater harvesting to create an environment that supports a wide diversity of arid-adapted food species from the borderlands. The arid borderlands region is home to dozens of species that are the close relatives of many of the core crops species in use today around the world. These seeds represent millennia of adaptive knowledge from the plants and people of our region. The garden space will weave together time and approaches that demonstrate adaptive responses to an extreme environment, all in an inviting community space. Read more 2021 Image Fall 2021 Lecture Series: Tumamoc Hill: Health, Community & Nature in a New Era Health is strongly connected to our interactions with the spaces around us. Tumamoc Hill is emblematic of this relationship, a place where many experience a connection to nature, health, community, self, and others. The importance of these relationships have all been accentuated and challenged in the last year and half. A conscious relationship with the natural world, a critical factor in health, can help alleviate “nature deficit disorder” and help us find balance. Join us for a four-part lecture series that brings together voices in health, environment, community, and food to share emerging perspectives and practical suggestions about the critical role of natural spaces in health and healing. Read more Image Spring 2021 Lecture Series: Agave Renaissance Agave has been a mainstay of culture in the Americas for millennia: food, drink, tool, spirit, utilitarian, sacred. Adaptations to aridity represented by both agave and people hold critical insights into how to live in the desert. This lecture series looks closely at these adaptations and the reciprocal relationship between this desert plant and people. Through presentations, roundtable discussions, tastings, and art we will collectively reconnect to the importance of agave, how this relationship in threatened by climate change and our actions, and also how a resilient future is embedded in the heart of a plant. Read more 2020 Image Fall 2020 Lecture Series: Past Present and Future of the Santa Cruz River Heritage Reach The Santa Cruz River was the life blood of the earliest human settlements in Tucson (Chukshon, O'odham, Black Base) but today has been downcut, drained, channelized, cemented, and ignored. Yet, innovative thinking and actions are working to reverse this trend and revitalize the Santa Cruz river where it once flowed perennially at the base of Tumamoc Hill, reinvigorating a lush ecosystem, the local watershed, and sense of place. This four-part lecture series will explore how the river has coursed through the history of people in this region and how it can continue to do so into the future. Read more Image Spring 2020 Lecture Series: The Cultural Landscape of Cemamagi Du’ag Tumamoc Hill | Cemamagi Du’ag has been a site of culture and gathering for thousands of years. In this lecture series we will collectively learn from key voices about the vibrancy and essential connection between people and place. Join us to see the Hill of the Horned Lizard in a different way and appreciate its meaning through the millennia and into the future. Read more 2019 Image Fall 2019 Lecture Series: New Explorations on the Río Mayo Did you know that the Sonoran Desert originated in part from the tropics? The Río Mayo drainage of the Sierra Madre mountains near Álamos, Sonora, Mexico, is a convergence zone of astonishing biological and cultural diversity. Research into this unique and imperiled ecosystem at the Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill extends back to the 1940s. Please join the Desert Laboratory and The Southwest Center for this series as we venture back to the Río Mayo and hear from a diversity of researchers and community members who will highlight new explorations, biocultural understandings, and efforts to preserve the tropics next door. Read more Image Spring 2019 Lecture Series: La Vaquita Marina La Vaquita Marina, a small porpoise endemic to the upper Gulf of California, is on the precipice of extinction. Global scale economic pressure fuels local gill-net fishing that ensnare the vaquita, driving their numbers down to as few as a dozen individuals remaining. This lecture series with experts from Mexico and the United States will explore what lessons we can learn from an intertwined web of science, local and global economics, politics, black markets, and conservation. What can be taken from this dire situation for future conservation? Where does the middle ground exist and how do we get there? Read more 2018 and Earlier Image Fall 2018 Lecture Series: Campos de Fuego Since the Hornaday expedition set off from the Desert Laboratory in 1907, captured in the book Camp fires on Desert and Lava, there has been a unique connection between Tumamoc Hill and this enigmatic volcanic range in NW Mexico. Read more Previous Lectures Lectures from 2018 and earlier. Read more
Image Spring 2024, Tumamoc Talks Information about the four talks by Dr. Michael A. Crimmins, Dr. Sylvia Sullivan, Dr. Connie Woodhouse, and Ron Holle from Spring of 2024. Read more
Image Tumamoc Talks, Fall 2023 Information about the three talks by Dr. Jia Hu, Dr. Jonathan Mabry, and Dr. Laura M. Norman from Fall of 2023. Read more
Image Tumamoc Talks, Spring 2023 Information about the three talks by Dr. Michael Kotutwa, Dr. Peter Breslin, and Dr. Charlotte Brown from Spring of 2023. Read more
Image Spring 2022 Lecture Series: Planting the Seeds for Tomorrow: The Tumamoc Resilience Garden The Tumamoc Resilience Garden at the base of Tumamoc Hill will be an inspirational setting where the community can have hands-on participation in how to live in the desert in a hotter and drier future. The backbone design allows passive rainwater harvesting to create an environment that supports a wide diversity of arid-adapted food species from the borderlands. The arid borderlands region is home to dozens of species that are the close relatives of many of the core crops species in use today around the world. These seeds represent millennia of adaptive knowledge from the plants and people of our region. The garden space will weave together time and approaches that demonstrate adaptive responses to an extreme environment, all in an inviting community space. Read more
Image Fall 2021 Lecture Series: Tumamoc Hill: Health, Community & Nature in a New Era Health is strongly connected to our interactions with the spaces around us. Tumamoc Hill is emblematic of this relationship, a place where many experience a connection to nature, health, community, self, and others. The importance of these relationships have all been accentuated and challenged in the last year and half. A conscious relationship with the natural world, a critical factor in health, can help alleviate “nature deficit disorder” and help us find balance. Join us for a four-part lecture series that brings together voices in health, environment, community, and food to share emerging perspectives and practical suggestions about the critical role of natural spaces in health and healing. Read more
Image Spring 2021 Lecture Series: Agave Renaissance Agave has been a mainstay of culture in the Americas for millennia: food, drink, tool, spirit, utilitarian, sacred. Adaptations to aridity represented by both agave and people hold critical insights into how to live in the desert. This lecture series looks closely at these adaptations and the reciprocal relationship between this desert plant and people. Through presentations, roundtable discussions, tastings, and art we will collectively reconnect to the importance of agave, how this relationship in threatened by climate change and our actions, and also how a resilient future is embedded in the heart of a plant. Read more
Image Fall 2020 Lecture Series: Past Present and Future of the Santa Cruz River Heritage Reach The Santa Cruz River was the life blood of the earliest human settlements in Tucson (Chukshon, O'odham, Black Base) but today has been downcut, drained, channelized, cemented, and ignored. Yet, innovative thinking and actions are working to reverse this trend and revitalize the Santa Cruz river where it once flowed perennially at the base of Tumamoc Hill, reinvigorating a lush ecosystem, the local watershed, and sense of place. This four-part lecture series will explore how the river has coursed through the history of people in this region and how it can continue to do so into the future. Read more
Image Spring 2020 Lecture Series: The Cultural Landscape of Cemamagi Du’ag Tumamoc Hill | Cemamagi Du’ag has been a site of culture and gathering for thousands of years. In this lecture series we will collectively learn from key voices about the vibrancy and essential connection between people and place. Join us to see the Hill of the Horned Lizard in a different way and appreciate its meaning through the millennia and into the future. Read more
Image Fall 2019 Lecture Series: New Explorations on the Río Mayo Did you know that the Sonoran Desert originated in part from the tropics? The Río Mayo drainage of the Sierra Madre mountains near Álamos, Sonora, Mexico, is a convergence zone of astonishing biological and cultural diversity. Research into this unique and imperiled ecosystem at the Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill extends back to the 1940s. Please join the Desert Laboratory and The Southwest Center for this series as we venture back to the Río Mayo and hear from a diversity of researchers and community members who will highlight new explorations, biocultural understandings, and efforts to preserve the tropics next door. Read more
Image Spring 2019 Lecture Series: La Vaquita Marina La Vaquita Marina, a small porpoise endemic to the upper Gulf of California, is on the precipice of extinction. Global scale economic pressure fuels local gill-net fishing that ensnare the vaquita, driving their numbers down to as few as a dozen individuals remaining. This lecture series with experts from Mexico and the United States will explore what lessons we can learn from an intertwined web of science, local and global economics, politics, black markets, and conservation. What can be taken from this dire situation for future conservation? Where does the middle ground exist and how do we get there? Read more
Image Fall 2018 Lecture Series: Campos de Fuego Since the Hornaday expedition set off from the Desert Laboratory in 1907, captured in the book Camp fires on Desert and Lava, there has been a unique connection between Tumamoc Hill and this enigmatic volcanic range in NW Mexico. Read more
