Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

Magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting

ecology, culture, and spirituality.

In this article, writer Boyce Uppold travels to the U.S.-Mexico border in the Sonoran Desert,

where the Tihona-Odom people have long revered the saguaro cactus as a being with personhood,

a belief that is congruous with the recent Rights of Nature movement that has been growing around the world.

As existing legal protections, where the cactus come up against the push to build a border wall,

this article explores how can we defend the beings and places that we hold sacred.

The soirro can be understood as free of the earth, like human beings.

Jane H. Hill and Ophelia Zepeda.

In 1982, a man named David Groomman shot a 27-foot-tall Sawaro cactus. His reason remains unarticulated in the Arizona Republic article that recounts the crime,

but we know that Groomman managed to get off two blasts from a 16-gauge shotgun

before the cactus enacted its revenge.

23 feet of its central column, thousands of pounds of cactish flesh, fell atop his body.

According to witnesses, he had only gotten halfway through the word timber.

Groomman was dead before authorities arrived on the scene, though he lives on now as the subject

of our sardonic country ballad.

Sawaro, a menace to the west West as the chorus goes.

Shooting is only one of the crimes perpetrated against this species, which can stand as high

as 50 feet and weigh up to two tons.

The soarro is such a popular yard ornament that a good specimen can fetch $100 per foot

...