Between July 1999 and June 2005, the border patrol apprehended at least 3.2 million illegal immigrants crossing into Southern Arizona from Mexico. Authorities estimate that each one of them left 8 pounds of trash behind – that’s nearly 25 million pounds of trash. But no one can calculate how many tons of refuse is really out there in the desert, because it is impossible to determine how much has been discarded by illegals who didn’t get caught.

“The trash includes water bottles, sweaters, jeans, razors, soap, medications, food, ropes, batteries, cell phones, radios, homemade weapons and human waste,” according to The Arizona Daily Star. “The accumulation of disintegrating toilet paper, human feces and rotting food is a health and safety issue for residents of these areas and visitors to public lands, a new BLM [Bureau of Land Management] report says.”

[Note: See pages 13 -17 of the report, “Southern Arizona Project to Mitigate Environmental Damages Resulting from Illegal Immigration” for documentary photographs.]

Though area residents and volunteers are doing their best to deal with the colossal mess, they’re fighting a losing battle, because “the trash is piling up faster than it can be cleaned up”:

After three years of cleanups, the federal government has achieved no better than a 1 percent solution for the problem of trash left in Southern Arizona by illegal border-crossers.

Cleanup crews from various agencies, volunteer groups and the Tohono O'odham Nation hauled about 250,000 pounds of trash from thousands of acres of federal, state and private land across Southern Arizona in 2002 to 2005, says the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. …

It has been found in large quantities as high as Miller Peak, towering more than 9,400 feet in the Huachuca Mountains, as well as in low desert such as Organ Pipe National Monument and Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge.

It's even started turning up in smaller amounts in hiking areas closer to Tucson, such as Josephine Saddle in the Santa Rita Mountains on the route to Mount Wrightson, says the Southern Arizona Hiking Club.

"In the Huachucas, you are almost wading through empty gallon water jugs," said Steve Singkofer, the Hiking Club's president. "There's literally thousands of water jugs, clothes, shoes. You could send 1,000 people out there and they could each pick up a dozen water jugs, and they couldn't get it all." …

While nobody has an exact cost estimate for removing all the garbage, it's clearly not cheap. …

The five-year tab is $62.9 million for all forms of environmental remediation for immigration-related damage across Southeast Arizona, including $23 million for the first year.

The Sonoran desert ecosystem is unique to the areas of Arizona and California that share a border with Mexico, and is home to plants and animals found nowhere else on earth. The environmental damage attributable to illegal immigration is incalculable – and may be irreversible on routes favored by human smugglers, if this relentless assault on the land continues unchecked.

The Stiletto proposes having each illegal immigrant apprehended in Southern Arizona spend one week picking up trash before being deported to Mexico – under the watchful eye of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, if necessary. The American volunteers and government employees doing this menial work could sure use the help.

Better Living Through Science

The New York Times reports that in the last 100 years, humans in industrialized nations have become much taller, heavier, stronger, smarter, healthier and long-lived than could possibly have been caused by evolutionary changes on a genetic level. Researcher Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago, says the changes amount to “a form of evolution that is unique not only to humankind, but unique among the 7,000 or so generations of humans who have ever inhabited the earth.” 

Several factors acting in combination created these startling changes in humans: vaccines and antibiotics; improved nutrition; an economy that relies less on farm and manual labor and more on intellectual and service work; and advances in medical science. The first two exert their greatest influence before age 2, say researchers, the last two kick in around middle age:

Today’s middle-aged people are the first generation to grow up with childhood vaccines and with antibiotics. Early life for them was much better than it was for their parents, whose early life, in turn, was much better than it was for their parents.

And if good health and nutrition early in life are major factors in determining health in middle and old age, that bodes well for middle-aged people today. Investigators predict that they may live longer and with less pain and misery than any previous generation.

But living longer – into ones ‘80s, ‘90s and even past 100 – may not be all that it’s cracked up to be, as the sad case of Brooke Astor, 104, so poignantly illustrates. According to The Times:

For the last year and a half, Brooke Astor … sometimes unaware of much of what goes on around her, has been cloistered within the confines of her duplex apartment perched on the 16th floor of 778 Park Avenue, on one of America’s richest blocks.

She rarely emerged, all but vanished from New York life, remote and unreachable even for many who were once close to her. …

There has been one notable exception … Annette de la Renta, who is married to the designer Oscar de la Renta. Every two weeks or so, Mrs. de la Renta made her way into the grand apartment for a visit with the woman who, friends and associates say, had become something of a surrogate mother. …

Mrs. de la Renta’s rare access to Mrs. Astor – who was released from the hospital yesterday after a brief stay – and her devotion to her mentor that ultimately helped place her at the center of a public legal fight over Mrs. Astor’s care.

Mrs. Astor’s grandson Philip Marshall has accused his father in a lawsuit of neglecting the grande dame of New York philanthropy and high society, and he has proposed that Mrs. de la Renta be named legal guardian. …  A dozen friends and associates have said … Mrs. de la Renta … has assumed the task that Mrs. Astor’s only son, Anthony D. Marshall, 82, has abandoned.

For his part, Anthony Marshall denies the accusations of neglect, saying that he had “overseen expenditures of more than $2.5 million a year for his mother’s care and comfort.” The Times, quotes him as saying, “I love my mother, and no one cares more about her than I do. Her well-being, her comfort and her dignity mean everything to me.”

But leave it to the New York Post’s inimitable Cindy Adams to bring her usual bracing dose of common sense to these tawdry allegations: “Elder abuse is a new and growing horror. … [P]eople are living longer. Children who might’ve tolerated aged and ailing parents through their 70s are no longer willing to do it through their 90s. So much for modern science, health-conscious diets, organ transplants and medical breakthroughs.”

Note that Anthony Marshall is in his early 80s. The Stiletto does not hobnob with the Astors or their social set, so she is not in a position to know whether he is, himself, suffering any age-related chronic ailments, aches and pains, fatigue – or maybe just thinks it’s time that someone takes care of him (like that son of his, maybe).