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| Peanut Goodness in New Mexico, Four Bridges Permaculture Institute, Santa Cruz, NM (Photo Taken by Matt Young, June 29th, 2011) |
"Most of us in the well-fed world give little thought to where our food comes from or how it's grown. We steer our shopping carts down supermarket aisles without realizing that the apparent bounty is a shiny stage set held up by increasingly shaky scaffolding. We've been hearing for some time about the loss of flora and fauna in our rain forests. Very little, by contrast, is being said or done about the parallel erosion in the genetic diversity of the food we eat."
--Charles Siebert, "Food Ark," National Geographic, July 2011 issue
There's just no way of sharing this full story without admitting the following: It was a weird morning.
Granted, New Mexico in general, let alone the Old Mexico-meets-New Mexico feel to Santa Cruz, an agricultural and trailer settlement on the east side of the Espanola Valley in northern New Mexico, possesses more than enough paradox to go around. Where one can walk into a centuries-old adobe church with intricate santos and comparably-illustrated Catholic decor, a few tenths of a mile up along El Llano Road leads to a literal strip of residential trailers, double-wide modular housing, howling with dogs along dusty lanes. Yet, all of this exhibits another New Mexico, where a significant population resides alongside the fertile banks and alluvial plains of the Rio Grande, even in a months-long drought cycle.
So, alongside the place-based weirdness (at least initially), two wildfires were burning Wednesday morning June 29th within 40 miles of Santa Cruz. The Pacheco fire had been burning since almost two weeks prior, scorching Nambe, Tesuque, and federal lands some miles east and thousands of feet uphill. Nearly due south and west, what would become the largest wildfire in New Mexico history, the Las Conchas blaze continued burning on the outskirts of Los Alamos and through Jemez & Santa Claran tribal lands in the Jemez hills.
Essentially, many of our Cadre members (including myself) found ourselves almost enveloped on all sides by smoke plumes with yellowish-blue-gray haze and wafting wood smoke surrounding us that Wednesday morning. Yet even so, we essentially found ourselves not so much nervous, as curious to hear more from Lorraine on the Four Bridges Traveling Permaculture Institute. I said this would all be pretty strange, no?
Lorraine, an Akwesasne Mohawk from the St. Lawrence river valley of upsate New York, came out to New Mexico two years previously to help organize an indigenous seed conference in Espanola. Somehow, even with years of facilitating farmers' markets, being active in St. Lawrence food systems, and raising six children, Lorraine still felt the urge to move and re-settle in northern New Mexico. In spite of contending with drought cycles unheard of in New York, whole new crop varieties, differences in child-raising among her neighbors, dysfunctional electrical systems, and more, Lorraine said she had no regrets about the decision to move.
With her partner Emigdio, Lorraine has slowly, steadily renovated a once-derelict adobe casita and barbed wire, trash-littered plot into cozy homestead. Dozens of square feet behind the casita currently house 2-3 varieties of chickens, Alpine goats, rabbits, and turkeys. In front of the house lies a well-tended herb realm, with the reuse of pottery shards to form a walkway to spiral & mandala garden space in the back for raising medicinal stinging nettle, tobacco, clover, and more. With brown all around in the distance, this pocket of green shocked and then soothed our eyes.
Tracing our steps back, we crossed a low acequia and into a field also remarkably verdant. Bindweed, young Russian thistle, and not so preferred vegetation comingled with up and coming Hopi blue corn stalks, Anasazi beans, Tesuque chiles, tomato plantings, basil growth, buckwheat stems, and such. In the foreground, waffle gardens supported more delicate growth with larger holdings in the back lots. As rustic as it may have initially looked, the sheer biodiversity within thousands of square feet just took us all in.
As we then assumed myriad tasks of weeding in the waffle gardens & between rows, planting marigolds, cutting & splicing Chinese elm branches for miniature coyote fencing, and assembling a metal-mesh-framed plot to house nursing goats, self-sufficiency with collaborative, communal workings became more and more realized. By no means did we stop noticing the smoke plumes, but rather we worked as if somehow, someday our steps at permacultural action would at least alleviate having more smoke-plumed days.
The following day, I found myself reading an insightful article in the July 2011 National Geographic, Charles Siebert's "Food Ark," highlighting how we can feed seven billion people via seed storage, heirloom crop & livestock raising & cultivation to create a global "food ark." Lorraine's Santa Cruz plot intrinsically shares much in common with the Whealy's 890-acre Seed Savers Exchange acreage in Decorah, Iowa; or with Cary Fowler's brainchild Svalbard Global Seed Vault tucked under a snow mound on an Arctic island; or with Jemal Mohammed's five-acre hillside farm in northeastern Ethiopia covered with East African onion, garlic, cilantro, sorghum, barley, chickpea, and teff varieties.
All are unique terrestrial zones where their stewards realize how we cannot sustainably manage landscapes or feed populations or even ensure food justice if we face the loss of 1,600 livestock species, over a 75% national loss of varieties in peas, radishes, & more within 80 years, and ultimately jeopardize 10,000 years of human and nature interfacing in agriculture to create such astounding, critical biodiversity (Siebert, "Food Ark," National Geographic, July 2011).
Hence, global actions that can manifest themselves in local pockets, as in Lorraine's Four Bridges Sacred Garden and broader permacultural exercise in Santa Cruz, should give us hope for sustenance and justice. No wonder that when Lorraine showed some of us a few rows of peanut plantings taking root in the dry yet wet enough New Mexican soil, it was nothing short of wonder. Wonder in the belief that even with wildfires burning, soils cracking under heat, and beyond, cultivating food arks could be a nourishing path to food justice.
