This week on Arizona illustrated rescuing cacti.

It's really cool because I'm looking at these swallows and in my pickup truck this morning and saying, Hey, guys, wait until you see with your new home is going to look like a miracle medicine.

I tell scientists to come into my lab that this is not science This is social justice digging for the root.

And it's kind of like setting up to friends.

You know, you're like, Well, this these plants have these virtues and these strengths and and this person is needing or yearning for these aspects in their life to bring balance.

So I want them to meet.

And in Arizona, sunset from Gates Pass, we had our first date here and then we stayed and watch the sunset and went stargazing at the end of the.

Welcome to Arizona illustrated, I'm Tom McNamara, and we're out here at Gates past surrounded by cacti.

You know, southern Arizona is a succulent paradise But despite their ability to thrive, these plants are in danger of being destroyed.

Just ask the Tucson Cactus and Succulent Society.

It's their mission to save and protect these plants.

And although they've saved more than 120,000 plants since 1999, they'll tell you their job is far from over.

[music] (Steve) We're going to start with a little Charlie Brown saguaro that we're going to take to Waterman and then the second one is about three and a half foot.

It's about on the upper end of his range and it's just beyond that palo verde at the property line.

And we're going to go just a little bit west of that and we'll find that plant.

All right, let's do it.

(Dick) When cactus people close their eyes and think about what heaven looks like, this is it.

Starting in 1999, we started working with developers as they have an area that they want to develop in their homes, schools , et cetera.

They call upon us to come in prior to them doing any blading, and we rescue all the small plants, the plants that they would never consider taking out.

We also take out any saguaros that they'll let us have.

(Steve) So now we just wind the maypole.

(Donna) Let's go this way over by the cholla maybe.

We have to get permits from the Arizona Department of Agriculture and we have to get tags.

(Grace) My grandparents bought this property in 1946, it was originally 160 acres and they built one home towards the west side of the property.

But then one day my grandmother counted twelve cars on the road and that was just too much.

So instead of relocating, they built a second bigger home further back on the property in 1966.

My dad and his brother were both born in Tucson and grew up on this property, and my sister and I were both born in Tucson and grew up on the property.

So it's been three generations of us to live here.

(Claire) I don't think most kids have this much space to run free so there's definitely lots of exploring the desert building forts.

(Grace) We've definitely had to run from javelina a time or two.

The property is being sold to a developer of homes.

So what you see around us all this desert is going to be turned into ranch style homes.

It's going to be a big neighborhood.

But we are keeping five acres of it.

Every time we've come back on the property It has changed so much and more and more plant life has been cleared out and it looks completely different.

And it's hard to look at because it's just not the same as when we were little, and we know that it's going to be unrecognizable pretty soon.

So we're thankful to have pictures and memories as it is going to change quite a bit.

[power tool noise] (Steve) All right, so we're right here.

Okay.

And so we're doing this narrow.

It's going to be a sewer line.

Gotcha.

The boundaries are not well marked.

OK, you're going to have to give it your best guess.

And then once you take the plant, remove the flag and so everybody else doesn't come out of there looking for it .

I coordinate the training out in the field.

I have about six folks that work with me.

They're designated to monitor the boundaries, help people with the technique of rescuing the plants so that the plants will have the best chance of survival after transplant.

Theyre instructors, as well as safety enforcers, so they help people know how to do all of this without any injuries.

(Dick) All the rescue people know that if I don't bleed on a rescue, it's not very good.

We're not afraid of getting stuck by spines.

We enjoy it.

We're crazy.

There's no getting around it.

(Steve) This one is so light that Dick normally throws this over your shoulder and walks out.

(Dick) My favorite cactus, of course, is the queen of the night the Peniocereus greggii.

Sometime in June, it starts producing a flower.

Fairly large blooms at night attracts moths.

It's a fascinating plant, and it really just excites everybody because of its beauty when it blooms and it's its lack of of anything when it's not in bloom.

(Steve) They're very hard to spot.

They look like a dead stick.

[power tool noise] So the first part is like a little archeology dig here.

Oh, here it is.

See that how I scratch it a little bit right there, the dirt.

They'll excavate all around it and then they'll come in from the side and they'll carefully brush the dirt off of the tuber.

That looks like a little elongated turnip.

And then the connective top is so fragile that then when they do take it out of the ground, they'll carry it like a baby back to make sure that it doesn't break away the tuber in the top.

This year, they bloomed over about a three week period.

In one microclimate they'll all bloom at the same time.

That alone is enough for an excuse to get out and walk in the desert at night and have a margarita after and just enjoy June in Tucson.

[music] (Steve) Shall we?

(Donna) So it's really cool because I'm looking at these saguaros in my pickup truck this morning and saying, Hey, guys, wait until you see what your new home is going to look like.

And it really is spectacular.

The saguaros that we rescued at the construction site, we drove them out here.

We're out at the Waterman restoration site and we're planting the three saguaros that we rescued.

And then they have new homes and they have a spectacular view of the mountains.

It's really a lot of fun to plant them.

And the other thing is that we can come visit them because this is public land (Dick) We are the largest local cactus and succulent society in the world, and we've rescued over 120,000 plants in the last 22 years.

(Steve) There's a good number of people that just come out and want to make sure that all native plants we can get find a home.

We don't want to see them bulldozed.

We want to see them transplanted somewhere in the Tucson area and saved.

Dr Chilton has dedicated his life to helping people around the world overcome health challenges.

But his latest discovery may be his most important children and his team at the U of they are developing a drug that could drastically reduce the risk of death from COVID 19 And this could save millions of lives in places like Africa with low vaccination rates.

I'm so fortunate - dare I say, blessed to have 21 of the most talented students in the world in my lab, we do what's called multidimensional data analysis in which we can take clinical data and biochemical data and metabolomics data and genomics data.

And we can put it all together and we can make sense of it.

The hard thing right now in science is making sense of so much complexity.

This transdisciplinary approach was critical to our COVID findings.

My name is Dr.

Ski Chilton I'm the director of the Precision Nutrition and Wellness Initiative here at the University of Arizona.

(chatter) When the pandemic broke out, we realized that we could examine patterns, molecular patterns, that might be different between mild and severe and those individuals who died.

[Ski] Do we know what that compound is?

[Student] The data are actually very interesting.

[Ski] And when we look for those patterns, we saw evidence for this enzyme that I'd studied 25 years ago called We then went and looked and sure enough, we saw the highest levels that have ever been seen in humans circulating in those individuals who died of COVID.

[Ski] So you say you're shooting for 1.7?

[Student] Yeah, 1.7 to 1.8.

[Ski] So 25 years ago, when we were looking at this enzyme, we were looking at its role in initiating inflammatory responses.

There became more and more evidence that this enzyme was playing a critical role in human defense against, in particular, bacterial infections .

And if it sees membranes which are around all cells as foreign, it will completely shred those membranes.

So the surprise in COVID was when levels get to be this high, it turns on the host, it turns on the organs and plays a pivotal role we believe in causing the death from COVID.

So now I'm working with some of the largest global operations in the world to take inhibitors to this enzyme and put them in clinical trials.

And it's a good chance that those clinical trials would start in Africa.

They would start in places where the vaccination rates are 2% and they desperately need specific therapies.

My other passion is Africa.

For the last decade, we've been in Sudan.

We were in Darfur when 2 million people were killed to genocide during Darfur.

We were able to build a runway, bring in tons and tons of supplies.

And most recently, we built a hospital, one of two hospitals in the whole South Kordofan region, a region the size of Georgia.

The first time I had gone to Darfur, a mother brings me a four year old child that weighed 11 pounds.

And this four year old child, the mother is saying, "Please keep that child alive."

For the next month I was on a SAT phone with the neonatal intensive care unit at Wake Forest, and we kept that child alive.

That child is right there in that picture.

That child's name is Abuk.

And every time I went to Darfur after that, I would find Abuk and I was forever changed by that.

I tell scientists who come into my lab that this is not science.

This is social justice.

In all cases, there is a consistent theme of helping the people who are most persecuted.

Clearly, what we've discovered here, what we've been fortunate enough to find with this transdisciplinary team, is by far the most important thing I've ever done, maybe 100 1000 times more important.

What I love to think that I work for and accomplish is to love the world, and that has been able to be done through my science, my work in Africa, my books, and that seems to be the driver.

But everything else has just been a miracle.

Modern medicine has made many life saving and life extending advancements.

But now a growing number of people are embracing a more natural and organic approach to health therapies and remedies and cures, some of which are centuries old (calm music) - We do it without even noticing it.

There's some kind of innate knowing that it improves the quality of our lives to be around plants.

(calm music) St. John's wort and chamomile were these two herbs that allowed me to remember that like life, it still happens and they just brought in this positivity that I felt like I was really without.

- I had really incredible memories of my Great Grandma Lupe coming over to my house in Phoenix when I was a really young kid and kind of boiling herbs on the stove.

We had just yerba buena growing wild in our back yard, and she saw it and recognized it as something that was edible, that we could drink, and even though I must have been really young, that really stuck with me for some reason.

I'm Carla Vargas-Frank, I'm an herbalist, I have a private practice here in Tucson, and I also do education, herbal education.

Herbalism is using plant material from everything from food to ritual to medicine.

It can be vibrational, it can be more allopathic, but I think just kind of using the natural world as a way to balance and heal oneself.

Healing resource for the community.

So when I sit down with a client it's gonna take at least two hours.

I wanna look at their, you know, their history of health, I wanna look at their family's health, I also wanna hear about the experiences that they've had growing up, whether or not they've come to me for a physical issue or a mental issue, that may have affected how they live in the world.

And so then when I get that initial knowledge from that person, I can sort of kind of piece together sort of like a team of herbs that I think would be helpful to that person in this time.

And it's kind of like setting up two friends, you know, you're like, well these plants have these virtues and these strengths, and this person is needing or yearning for these aspects in their life to bring balance so I want them to meet.

Herbal medicine and the healing philosophies that come out of a lot of these traditions, we look at people as a whole, and I think that people are really yearning for that.

- I've had experiences where I've gone to a practitioner, a Western doctor, and instead of them asking me what I'm dealing with or what I'm going through, or how I'd like to deal with what I'm going through, they would tell me, and so many times those things didn't work.

It started with mental health for sure, because when I was living in Seattle I struggled a lot.

I felt very lost at that time, I felt very depressed and very lethargic.

I had no health insurance.

I started to think about where my resources were and what I felt like I could obtain, and it was a lot of herbs like St. John's wort and chamomile, and things like that, and they just brought in this kind of springtime feeling of kind of growing and being like, you know I'm capable again of leaving my house and I feel like I want to do these things.

I think there may be a new awareness of connecting back to the earth and back to our ancestral traditions, especially among, I think women and queer folks, and non binary people.

I think we live in a world where we feel really secluded and sometimes ostracized.

- I think that people are feeling disempowered by being looked at sort of in pieces, and so I think the similarity between a lot of these traditions, no matter where they come from is that we're looking for the root.

We're digging for where it started, and it's impossible, really, I think, to find that root without, you know, looking at all of the things and the situations and the environments that have brought us to this point.

This is something that people can afford, they can access, there are less kind of gatekeepers in terms of at least looking towards solutions, and this is a way that people can take their health into their own hands.

Arizona sunsets are so iconic.

They inspired the design on the state flag, and one of the best places to catch a sunset in southern Arizona is right here at Gates Pass.

Every evening, hundreds of locals and tourists gather here setting the stage for a unique combination of human interaction because you never know what you'll find or who you'll meet.

I'm Lucius, and this is my fiancee, Rebecca.

Hi.

So we're from D.C., Washington, D.C., and her uncle brought us out here.

I have no idea where I am right now other than in the mountains out here and outside of Tucson.

Coming from the East Coast, first of all, just the change in climate and scenery.

It's kind of like being in an alien landscape, you know, and of the cactuses, like they're much bigger than I think I imagined, but it's really beautiful, really, really beautiful.

I'm Trevor, and I think that this is really, really remarkable in terms of like the transfer between the sort of flat land out there toward the desert and then you have these extremely steep mountains I don't really see, of course, being from the Great Plains, you know, steepness like this so much.

I've been up to like through the Appalachians and up in New York, but the the mountains out here produce a completely different impression because of how clear the air is.

My name is Wayne Han.

I'm from Newfoundland, Canada.

We drove over 5000 miles to get here to visit family.

We have lots of mountains and lots of rock, but we don't have not one single cactus.

And Wayne ran into one.

The other day, he found out what it was like.

They hit 40, 40 or 50 needles pulled out of my back and my rear.

What a good wife I got.

It took us probably a good hour, and it seemed like they were never ending.

I told someone else that story and they said, Welcome to Tucson.

I'm Dolton Thompson.

I'm originally from Indiana and now live in Tucson.

I'm Katherine White and I'm a sophomore at U of A.

We had our first date here and then we stayed and watch the sunset and went stargazing at the end of it.

Yeah.

Did it go well?

It clearly went over you because I'm here now.

Just a little over a month ago.

Yeah, lucky you.

I don't come here often.

But when I went to a pretty view, this is a wonderful place to stop my stepdaughters being married here today at this spot.

I hope so.

That's why I'm here.

Heather Pars....well, Heather Bradford, now my husband and I just got married.

We want to mountains and we wanted outside, so we chose to get married here.

That's my wife!

It's a beautiful place.

We wanted to sunset.

We wanted the mountains.

We just wanted something small and easy.

Hi, I'm Erica, I live here in town and I'm meeting some friends here.

My friend Dean, he works at the U of A, astronomy in the Mirror Lab, and he wants to come try and photograph the comet.

Comet Leonard was discovered by University of Arizona program that looks for comets and asteroids that pass close by the Earth.

Grew up out here going to Boy Scouts, camping.

Kids come up here get a little rowdy sometimes, but yeah, it's a good spot.

My name is Ryan Valentine.

I'm here with my friend usually, and me and him are like, very close with each other.

So we just made a song.

So like, once we do something big, also like we go somewhere cool, you know, so they celebrate or something.

It's called Save You by Antoine and Kid Valentine.

We just make like music for vibes like anyone that's like feeling something.

You cannot save me.

I love how it's just a place to bring people like if you have a girlfriend or something, you bring her her to be someone beautiful.

You take pictures here.

A lot of people take pictures here.

I had a back then a band and we did a photo shoot here.

It was awesome.

It was a Christian rock band that we had back in the day, playing around local churches and stuff like that.

We wanted to have Tucson represented on the pictures of fliers that were going to go all over, and we thought this spot was like very representative of that and who we were as a band.

Took pictures here about a month ago, with the sun going down so.

He didn't want to take pictures He wouldn't want to go nowhere.

But they came out beautiful the pictures.

My name is Jesse and I've lived here most of my life I spent four months in Florida.

I didn't like it.

You don't have views like this there.

My mother lives right down the hill back here, and I used to ride my bicycle up the hill and then shoot back down.

After talking with all the tourists for a couple of hours.

There's sunsets that are really pretty other places, but there's not nothing like an Arizona sunset, really.

I mean, hell, it's on our state flag.

Like what you see on Arizona illustrated.

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Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara, we'll see you next week.