The University of Arizona Press

February 20, 2024

Restoring the Pitchfork Ranch tells the story of a decades-long habitat restoration project in southwestern New Mexico. Author A. Thomas Cole explains what inspired him and wife Lucinda to turn their retirement into years dedicated to hard work and renewal. The book shares the past and present history of a special ranch south of Silver City. The ranch is home to a rare type of regional wetland, a carbon-capturing sweet spot, a fragile desert grassland ecosystem, archaeological sites, and a critical wildlife corridor in a drought-stricken landscape.

Why did you write this book?

George Orwell identified four reasons for writing a book, one of which is the political purpose of wanting to push the world in a certain direction. We bought the ranch to restore the land and improve it for wildlife and at-risk species to breed, birth and raise their young. Along the way we realized our restoration of the ranch’s near-extinct watercourse, the ciénaga, can help address the climate crisis.

The book uses the captivating history of the ranch as a platform to describe our multiple planetary crises: climate, species extinction, soil depletion and loss, among others, who caused these crises, how they knowingly created it, our government’s complicity and how long this civilization-threatening crisis, the biggest crime in human history, has been known, and the corruption to conceal it.

Why did you and Lucinda decided to retire to the ranch, off-grid, 6 miles from neighbors and an hour from town?

Cinda’s interest is based on her fondness for nature, mine comes from the summer of my eleventh year when my parents took our family to harvest an apple orchard in Oak Creek Canyon, Arizona, and run a fruit market near Slide Rock. I roamed wild-like in the mountains. Running free through the woods set a hook in me I’ve never spit out. During our marriage, we helped out with a number of two-week volunteer restoration trips that were gratifying and offered a template for retirement.

What do you want to accomplish with the book?

The land restoration we’re doing here can be done by anyone, anywhere, on any size property. We all need to team up and take the myriad crises overwhelming the planet seriously, adopt the well-established solutions and take part in fixing the mess we’re in. Congress ignored science when the West was re-settled by Americans and that mistake is being repeated today, caused by the same greed that led to thousands of failed western homesteaders. Despite terrifying weather, fire, and bad environmental news, there is much to be hopeful for because there is so much individuals can do. Solutions are well established. The only thing missing is the political will.

What is your biggest worry?

The rich one percent have many billions invested in fossil fuels that need to remain in the ground, yet they are insisting the Congress they bought and paid for: drill, drill, drill. And we’ve all become so accustomed to convenience that we might not be able to adapt to a different lifestyle: consume less, fly less, eat less meat and a number of “must-do” adjustments. Despite having entered a permanent era of boiling, cauldron-like weather, our preoccupation with fortune, fame, and fashion may cause us to ignore these ecological and biological threats, forestall the pivot from consumption and so-called progress to saving our wounded world.

What is the most important sentence in the book?

This quote:
“By far the most fundamental driver of environmental destruction is the excessive consumption by the wealthy.”
***
A. Thomas Cole spent thirty-two years as a small-town lawyer in Casa Grande, Arizona—in which A.T. Cole successfully defended a dozen murder cases, two of which risked the death penalty, and co-counsel in the largest personal injury jury verdict in Arizona history. For his so-called “retirement,” Cole and his wife Lucinda have been rehabilitating a ranch in southwestern New Mexico, where they focus on protecting wildlife and wildlife habitats, wetland restoration, and carbon sequestration. Their aim is to draw down their carbon use and to encourage others to do the same. Cole once Chaired the Arizona Humanities Council. Restoring the Pitchfork Ranch is A.T. Cole’s first book.