David Yetman retires, more or less

How do you summarize David Yetman? You don't, you just gesture broadly at northwest Mexico and hope for the best. A research social scientist at the Southwest Center since 1992, David arrived with a PhD in philosophy from the University of Arizona (all three of his degrees are from the UA, making him arguably more Wildcat than the actual wildcats) and promptly put it to work not on Kant, but on the peoples, plants, and landscapes of Sonora. The result: a shelf-bending body of scholarship in the form of books that gave voice to communities and ecosystems most academics never got dusty enough to know. If it grows spines, stores water, or lives quietly in the Sierra Madre, David has…