At that point it was called the Living Desert Reserve. The local individuals that had started this were very well connected in the little community of what was Palm Springs at the time. They actually went to the Disney family who had a home in Palm Springs, got permission from… Read More
And so, but he liked this particular property and that’s why he was able to get it leased from the water district. He was very well connected and our water district is, in the desert your water district is probably your biggest public agency. And they have all the power,… Read More
What year was this?… Read More
I don’t know anything about starting a facility from scratch.” And he said, “Well, I was a young herpetology student just out of college when I got the job at Arizona Sonora Desert Museum to help start it at scratch.” He said, “I didn’t know anything either. You’ll figure it… Read More
So- They hired you as what?… Read More
The only employee and I was, my first title was Resident Naturalist because my first job was to help raise enough money to put a small building on the property that they had leased. And I was supposed to live there and interpret the property, just be like a park… Read More
And this was called the Living Desert Project?… Read More
And he said, “Well, it’s kind of odd because I’m bringing somebody here that lives there (chuckles). Why don’t you go back and talk to her?” And so, they came back and found me and talked to me about starting a nature center. And I didn’t know quite what to… Read More
And so, I drove over to Arizona and I sat on the floor of Bill Woodin’s house on his floor and I said, “What on earth should I do?… Read More
So, some of these techniques you were able to transfer over?… Read More
In the summer of 1970, you traveled 10,000 miles to study nature reserves?… Read More
Right. Well, by that point, I’d been hired by the Living Desert. That in itself was kind of an interesting piece of luck, although I always tell young people, you make your luck to a certain degree. You gotta have some luck, but you can’t stay at home waiting for… Read More
I thought it was everything a zoo could be in terms of interpretation. I mean, it was so far and so different and so far beyond what zoos were in my mind, that it was the catalyst for, there were two catalysts organizations and people that led me to build… Read More
There’s nothing out there. And that what’s ever out there is either gonna poison you by being a rattlesnake or stab you by being a prickly plant. Read More
I mean, other than that, what’s out there?… Read More
So, how could you have a whole monument or how could you have a zoo around a desert when there’s nothing out there?… Read More
And so, just waking people up to the knowledge that there’s a lot of stuff out there and that it’s really highly adapted to be out there, and trying out different things while I was in the park service in terms of interpreting that to people, and just seeing what… Read More
Certainly interpretive things about how to, what people that didn’t understand the environment, how to help them see the environment, and since it was desert environment and that’s what I was interested in. I think I, I certainly learned a lot of hands-on interpretation, which when I started designing Living… Read More
Can you give me a specific or an example of that?… Read More
Well, I mean, for most folks that would come at that point to the Monument, and then ultimately when they started coming to Living Desert they would arrive and they might not even want to go because it’s a desert and what could possibly be out there?… Read More