These ‘great old broads’ are serious about science, wolves and reversing climate change

• Great Old Broads for Wilderness has taken on public lands use, climate change, mining and other issues aimed at keeping wilderness and wildlands intact.
• One of the group’s signature issues is the Mexican gray wolf recovery, a process group members say is struggling more than federal officials admit.
• Border issues have also become important to the group, including military activities and the environmental damages caused by the border wall.

This is the first in a monthly series highlighting Arizona climate leaders and answering readers’ climate-related questions. The stories, which will appear in print and online the first Sunday of the month, aim to help to connect and inspire Arizonans who care about protecting a livable climate and may be struggling to find hope in that effort lately. You can nominate an Arizona climate leader for a story or ask a question by filling out the form at https://forms.gle/QCCxBPSHGy1bUJQ99 or by emailing climate reporter Joan Meiners at joan.meiners@arizonarepublic.com.

Roz Switzer remembers the day she met Kathy Ann Walsh in the White Mountains of Arizona as a howlin’ good time.

“I had heard about a comment period for a Mexican gray wolf recovery plan, so I thought ‘I’ll just wander up to Pinetop and see what this is about,’” Switzer said. “Kathy was there, and we just clicked. And that’s how I got involved with Great Old Broads for Wilderness.”

At the time, Walsh was leading the Phoenix area chapter — members refer to them as “Broadbands” — of the national organization and invited Switzer to join. Switzer did, then she also ended up starting a more rural Broadband, The Middle Gila, spanning Casa Grande through Superior, “the whole rural suite between Tucson and Phoenix,” she said.

When Walsh died, Switzer stepped into the leadership role for both groups before consolidating them back down to one: the Sonoran Broadband.

Today, the Sonoran Broadband and its sister chapters in Arizona — the Tucson Broadband, the Yavapai-Prescott Broadband and the Northern Arizona Wild Broadband — offer hikes, community, citizen scientist opportunities and campouts for (mostly) women over 50 who want to get involved in wilderness conservation and wildlife protection. But Switzer said they welcome anyone with these interests, and have members as young as 30 and some men involved.

“We say broadness is a state of mine,” Switzer laughed during a recent interview with The Arizona Republic.

In a couple of weeks, Switzer and her current Sonoran Broadband leader, Emily Matyas, will gather the Old Broads together for a campout at Pinal County’s Peralta Regional Park from Friday, March 14 to Sunday, March 16. Reportedly, Yavapai-Prescott Broadband leader Jenny Cobb will be serving up hot meals in the wild as the group chef. Those interested can email sonoranbroadband@greatoldbroads.org to learn more.

Matyas and Switzer connected when Switzer put out a call to the mailing list for help leading the Sonoran Broadband, which consists of a core group of about 15 consistent, active members, another 20 who participate in events occasionally and about 100 who signed up for emails. Switzer had retired from a career in the pension business and Matyas was winding down her work as a photography teacher and art photographer. The women had a few long conversations about their visions for the Broadband, time commitments and priorities for the environment, and decided to team up.

They’ve since led Spring Seeker hikes to locate and survey springs in the Sky Islands, answering questions on a smartphone app designed by the Sky Islands Alliance about whether water is flowing, the health of nearby vegetation, and if the area looks to have been recently impacted by cattle. They’ve partnered with Wildlands Network and the Madrean Archipelago Wildlife Center to map environmental destruction and the status of wildlife movement corridors along the Arizona border near the San Pedro River after the expansion of the border wall. And in June, they put on a wildlife tracking workshop in the White Mountains near Big Lake Reservoir, and were rewarded with the discovery of Mexican gray wolf tracks traversing a meadow.

“This work is so important, and it’s fun, frankly,” Matyas said. “And we’ve got a great group of people.”

But these old broads aren’t just fun, they’re also serious about science.

“We have position statements on particular public land issues such as climate change, mining, roads and vehicular traffic, grazing and the use of fossil fuels,” Switzer said. “Our mission is basically keeping wilderness and wild lands intact and protected, and ecosystems healthy.”

Learn about Arizona’s famous “Five C’s”: ‘C’ is for Climate: How the force that built Arizona’s ‘sunshiny’ frontier turned deadly

Under Switzer’s leadership, the Southwest coalition of Broadbands has also gotten deeply involved in recovery efforts for the Mexican gray wolf. They’ve taken the bold position that the federal species reintroduction approach has not followed the best available science, even that of their own scientists.

“In our opinion, it’s not as rosy a picture as has been painted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, especially after their recent five-year review,” Switzer said. “They know what the best science is, it’s been documented by their own work groups that they put together. But it’s not being followed, where we really need to have three populations of wolves within the United States in appropriate ecosystems, so that if one catastrophe happens, you have two other populations that you can pass genetics between and the habitat is there.”

The Broads have been active in public discussions about wolf management and in educating people about the best scientific approach, in the hopes that priority might rise above other competing and powerful forces.

“I always say, ‘more wolves, less politics,” Switzer laughed.

Matyas brings more of a focus on the border. She used to live in Tucson and travel back and forth to Mexico for work, which helped her get to know not only people but the environments on both sides. She saw how communities ran out of water when corporations drained too much in one spot or when farm irrigation expanded while climate-intensified drought persisted.

When Matyas and her husband started going camping in the Barry M. Goldwater Range in the relatively undisturbed Sonoran desert expanse between Tucson and Yuma, her continued observations of the contrasts across landscapes fueled a passion.

“I got really interested in the environmental issues around the border wall,” she said. “When they’re building the wall, they’ve got water trucks going up and down spraying the ground to keep the dust down. The water in sacred Indigenous springs is being used up for this, and degraded by the contaminants they’re using. They’ll blow up a mountain to put a wall on top when the environment is already a natural barrier.”

Read our climate series: The latest from Joan Meiners at azcentral: climate coverage from Arizona and the Southwest

In response, the Sonoran Broadband developed a position on behalf of wildlife against an effort to lower military flyovers at the Range, and they work to bring more attention to the many ways human-caused climate warming is changing every conceivable situation at the U.S.-Mexico border.

“Climate change is such a top priority for us to try to mitigate and get the word out about as well as the truth, and having boots on the ground to monitor things and show what is actually happening really helps,” Matyas said. “I’ve also been doing some hiking on South Mountain recently and it is the driest I’ve ever seen it. So we can see that with our eyes, but we don’t always think about it enough.

“As citizen scientists, we may not be the schooled experts,” Switzer added. “But by collaborating with other organizations and with scientific experts, we can get something done. We can expand environmental knowledge.”

“And enjoy ourselves,” Matyas agreed, finishing Switzer’s sentence.

The two women then looked at each other and broke into howls of laughter.

Joan Meiners is the climate news and storytelling reporter at The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Her award-winning work has also appeared in Discover Magazine, National Geographic, ProPublica and the Washington Post Magazine. Before becoming a journalist, she completed a doctorate in ecology. Follow Joan on Twitter at @beecycles, on Bluesky @joanmeiners.bsky.social or email her at joan.meiners@arizonarepublic.com. 

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