The families and loved ones who walked among the tombstones on Monday, many of them wielding gardening tools as well as flowers, spoke of the importance of cemeteries as a vital piece of public life, an innate part of the grieving process. They said the opening was like a reunion with lost loved ones not just with their grave.
Invasive grass is overwhelming U.S. deserts providing fuel for wildfires
Volunteers are yanking the dangerous grasses from public lands across the American Southwest.
ByShaena Montanari
Email
In recent years, large swathes of the desert landscape in the parks around Tucson, Arizona have started to look a lot like grassland. And that’s a problem.
Buffelgrass, a perennial arid climate-adapted grass from Africa, was brought to the United States in the 1930s and planted throughout Arizona, Texas, and Mexico to control soil erosion and provide cattle forage. In the 1980s, it started to take over the Sonoran Desert including state and national parks causing a multitude of ecological issues and fueling wildfires.