Ed Berg "Walking Without Joe"

Originally published in Colorado Central Magazine

On winter mornings I get up and go out to the back yard while the coffee perks, just to be under the stars in the quiet time before dawn. Our dog Joe comes out with me out to sniff the air for other early morning wanderers. In late November a celestial parade kicks off in the north where Cassiopeia, the vain Greek goddess, is setting. Three of her stars are now known to have planets circling them, like children playing around her skirts. Maybe that’s what she’s proud of. On her left is the Pleiades flock, and just north of west is Orion, finishing the night hunt with his dog Sirius in the west. I used to think that the Dog Star was following the Hunter, but after living with a herding dog, I’ve learned that the Hunter is the one who follows along behind. After settling the stars, we go inside, I pour up the coffee, and Joe joins me on the sunroom couch where I write this stuff.

Joe came into our lives fourteen years ago via a ranch pickup in the Walmart parking lot. He was a Border Collie- Heeler mix who wasn’t allowed to compete in herding trials and needed to be disposed of, one way or another. His humble start didn’t deter him from becoming an intelligent, courteous, and loving member of our family and circle of friends. We’d had good dogs before, but that was before I understood that while dogs can just be pets, some of them have the potential to become family members, if their humans are well-trained. Anyone who’s had a close relationship to a non-human person can understand why indigenous peoples recognize consciousness in all things. It’s only recently that we’ve bought into the illusion that humans are separate from other beings, an illusion that causes untold suffering.

Joe and I enjoyed many of the same things: the sights, sounds and smells of the woods, a game of Chase-Me With-The-Ball, and an afternoon snooze together with him tucked behind my legs on the couch. Unlike me, he took delight in chasing tennis balls and chewing them into shards which we would later find on the carpet under our bare feet. He also took keen interest in smelling things that I thought were distinctly un-interesting. Joe cleaned our plates after meals. Yep: a good dog is also a valuable kitchen appliance. We called his service our Pre-Wash Cycle, and we undoubtedly saved a ton on hot dishwater.

We lived our indoor and outdoor lives together, nearly free of injuries and late-life ailments. We even slowed down together as I moved through my mid-seventies. Joe lost his hearing that last year and his eyesight was dimming. On the next-to-last day in November, he was playful in the morning as usual. Around 2:30 in the afternoon we left to meet friends on the edge of a favorite aspen grove for a last-of-the-year Cocktail Hour. Lately he hadn’t been able to jump up into the truck, so I lifted him into his favorite spot on the back seat floor. When we got up to the grove, he didn’t want to get out, which was odd. It was too cold and windy for sitting out in the sunset, so we all came back to the house for pizza together. But Joe couldn’t get out of the truck.

I lifted him out and he whimpered, which was also unusual. He went ahead into the yard but collapsed to his side just inside the gate. He rested a minute and got up, went inside with us, and lay down on his pillow. We finished our meal without lingering. I sat down next to him and realized he was having a stroke. I got out a sleeping pad and bag and laid down next to him. It was a long night, with him shifting restlessly and me stroking his head or just touching him, telling him it was okay to go on ahead. At about 3:30 he lifted his head, rolled onto his side and was gone.

The next morning, we laid his worn-out, beautiful body in a private spot in that aspen grove above the Valley, thinking his spirit, freed from its cocoon, could roam the places we once hiked together… but darned if he didn’t follow us back down the mountain and is curled up beside me once again on the couch. But now when I think to reach out to stroke his soft ears and muzzle, the thought has a solemn echo, and I don’t move my hand.

My sister, who trains service dogs and their humans, advises me that the process will take time and to let the tears come. She ought to know; she’s loved and lost a few grand dogs over the years, not to mention two husbands and a lovely ranch. I haven’t shed many tears, but while we were up in the aspen grove, some racking sobs broke free. There are frequent catches in the chest and a mental step back from the edge when I glance toward a spot where Joe should be. I stand there, staring at nothing, and realize this will indeed take its own time. The grief of loss is only one side of a coin; the other is the joy of having been together all those years. They can’t be separated.

Someone recently told me that grief lasts as long as love, so I looked up the best description of love that I know of, St. Paul’s in his first letter to the Christians in Corinth. Here’s part of it:

Love … bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.

I always thought the passage was an instruction about how we should love. Now I know it tells us that when love arises within us, it never fails; we can count on it forever.

So you run on ahead Joe; I’ll be along before too long.

Ed Berg "Between Earth and Sky"

Originally published in Colorado Central Magazine

We humans straddle two worlds, one foot in the chop wood, carry water, earthly realities, the other in the heavenly world of compassion, poetry, reverence for nature, and art. We’ve been around for some 300,000 years, a long time to live between earth and sky, but looking at the condition of the planet’s forests, farms, oceans, and war zones, you’d think we could have made more progress. We’ve done well in some things: flutes and drums were being played over 60,000 years ago, exquisite cave paintings and carved figures go back more than 50,000 years ago, and body decorations go back more than 100,000 years BP (Before Pizza). Apparently, all the human types indulged in art back then; there were about a dozen, instead of the solitary Homo Sapiens (“wise human”) we proudly name ourselves.

Prehistoric art depicts scenes from everyday life, like hunting scenes of prey and predators, as well as baffling images from trance states, indecipherable to those of us who live disconnected from the natural world. Still, connecting earth and sky is a powerful element of our lives and is a big part of why we choose to live in these alpine valleys. Last summer I met a concert cellist who also renovates adobe buildings. You can’t get more connected to earth and sky than making a mud house and celestial music with the same pair of hands. So a few weeks after the concert meeting, I drove over Poncha Pass, down between earth and sky through the San Luis Valley, to visit Mark Dudrow in the small town of Jaroso, a half mile north of the New Mexico border. Jaroso is a place where willows grow… like Alamosa is a place where cottonwoods grow. It has a post office open for twelve hours a week, and being the only storefront business in Jaroso, it serves as a community hub where more than willows grow.

Twenty-five years ago, Mark saw an ad for 16 acres with an adobe house and capilla (chapel), so he bought the place and moved there with his partner and baby daughter. He renovated and enlarged the adobe house (so small that the front and back door hung on the same hinge), and then renovated the church, where he holds concerts and recording sessions in its still-sacred space that echoes both music and memories. Now he rents out the house and lives in a more recently acquired two-story adobe house built in 1910; also renovated by Mark. No, not by a contractor hired by Mark: by Mark. He stacks and burns 6 cords of wood every winter to heat the place. It’s a cool residence: never gets above 710, even on a hot summer afternoon, and on a raw February morning? Cozy if you keep close to the stove.

My neophyte’s image of a concert cellist, (urbane, manicured fingers, polished shoes, living in an elegantly regentrified neighborhood) was pleasantly updated over the next few hours. Mark normally dresses in a T-shirt and jeans, and polish doesn’t stick to sandals and ditch boots.

We went through casual introductions that included Martha Shepp, a pianist Mark is working with to produce a series of concerts and recordings of Spanish and South American composers. Another stereotype went away: my idea of what goes into a project like this. When I arrived, they were finishing a three-hour practice session, one of (how many?) over the last three years. Three years of work for three or four concerts in a sparsely populated region next year. It makes me wonder how many hours (years?) of work it took to produce those cave paintings that no one looked at for thousands of years.

After Martha left, we shifted to the front porch. Mark’s weathered recliner is within easy reach of a guitar stand. Oh, to be a fly on the wall there on a summer evening! Given my background of complete inexperience with interviews, I didn’t attempt to steer the conversation, (much less the flow of this essay) so we spent the time chasing curiosity’s tail between vegetable plantings and dwindling creek flows, to the absence of rabbit damage (Rabbit was there trimming the lawn), to the hole up in a dead cottonwood that shelters Kestrel falcons during springtime child-rearing. Starlings destroy Kestrels’ eggs and hatchlings, but Mark told them to stay away, and they do. Perhaps the rabbit is under a similar caution. Talk wandered to the dried-up Costilla Creek for which the county is named, although willows no longer grow there, due to diversions, water table drawdown and rapidly increasing summer heat, all side-effects of industrial farming practices... locally and globally.

It occurred to me that the connectivity Mark’s life embodies was in high contrast to the separation our industrial economy is based on.

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer (botanist and Potawami Nation citizen) talks about how her people’s language uses verbs to identify things we use nouns for. Indigenous cultures see all things as persons, not the inanimate objects we casually name and exploit. A few summers ago I watched an enormous house being built nearby, a plywood palace completely disconnected from the earth and sky it stood between. There will be no masterpieces painted, no music played there by the hands that built it. Disconnection shows up in the way we value land only by its ability to generate short-term profit. So agricultural land in the West turns into developments to house people who have no connection to the land, severing water and productivity to create a one-time profit for a few who live disconnected from earth and sky. Other disconnections show up in the woods outside town, where summer campsites pop up like sad toadstools, brief shelter for people severed from our society. Seeing them makes me want to head down to Jaroso.

If we would again take our place in connecting earth and sky, maybe all of us can find homes… and make some music together.

Ed Berg "Holding The Center"

Originally Published in Colorado Central Magazine

Sociologists and climatologists say the rate of change is accelerating. We live in a whirlwind of alarming news on all fronts. The September column is due tomorrow and I have confetti-brain, with bits of paper containing alarming thoughts written in tiny letters swirling between my ears. Here are a few:

Bee Colony Collapse: Bees are being infected with mites that kill them. This didn’t happen in the past because bees feed on complex sugars in nectar (obviously) and secreted by fungi in decomposing plants woodlands (not obvious). A certain fungus invades them and kills the mites without harming the bees. But beekeepers feed their bees on simple, sterile sugar to help them survive long hauls from Florida to California, to Maine and Florida and back. We keep clearing forests to grow monoculture crops, so no rotting plants, no fungal protection from mites. Add drought in the West, destruction of soil fungi by tilling and pesticides, and bees will die. Bees pollinate about 80% of our food crops, so I predict food shortages will be food for alarmists in the near future.

The recent heat wave in the Pacific Northwest killed billions of mollusks and millions of tons of the microfauna they feed on. Shellfish rotted on the beaches, dead crabs floated on the water, and baby hawks jumped out of their nests to escape the heat, not to mention burning trees. Other animals that depend on marine life for their food will also die. Back east, Tampa Bay lost 600 tons of fish, dolphins, and manatees due to algal Red Tide. The alga feeds on nitrogen and phosphorus, key ingredients in fertilizer and sewage. Florida’s economy depends on big agriculture and huge tour ships, and both pump their waste into the seas around Florida.

COVID cases are rising exponentially. 99% of all cases are in unvaccinated persons. Not to pick on Florida, but Florida’s percentage of COVID hospital patients are three times the national average, yet Florida’s Governor continues to oppose vaccinations. COVID is now showing up in deer populations, yet Salida shelters hundreds of deer who have little fear of humans. Governmental ignorance is clearly the more dangerous disease.

At least 500 humans are dead or missing after floods in Western Germany. After a disastrous flood in 1910, officials proposed building a retention reservoir, but World War 1 postponed the project. After the war, with the surging interest in automobiles, they decided it would be more profitable to build the now famous Nürburgring motor raceway instead. Turns out Mother Nature wasn’t interested in fast cars.

Once again, the rate of ice melt in Greenland and Antarctica exceeds all predictions.

Do these far-apart and far-different events influence life in the Upper Arkansas Valley? Based on my smoke-irritated eyes and nose, I’d say yes. If I had to pick an underlying cause of the floods, fires, and rising seas, it would be short-term, separation-based thinking that ignores long-term natural processes. Because we kill all other animals, we think of ourselves as the top of the food chain, but the chain is really a web: we are only one strand woven into a complex tapestry, with no way to separate one strand or one vested interest from all the others. As a race and as individuals, we think of ourselves as being separate from each other and from “nature”. But nothing is separate; everything is woven together. In nature, this results in resilience and adaptability. In post-industrial humanity, it results in flooded homes, forest fires, collapsing condo towers, and collapsing food supplies.

In Chaffee County, green pastures are irrigated and produce hay, grass, or alfalfa. Some of the brown fields are too rocky to grow crops, but much of the brown is on small plots around large houses. Ranchers and farmers are in a quandary: the development value of land is far higher than the cash value of the crops and cattle the land supports, so when it’s time to retire, it’s preferable to sell the land to a developer than to another rancher. Compensating landowners for loss of development dollars will require a broad-based, well-funded program, plus the cooperation of separate (that S-word!) interests, hopefully before a disaster forces an awakening.

The largest water reservoir in the Upper Arkansas Valley is our soil, and soil’s ability to retain water depends upon roots of perennials like hay, grass, and alfalfa. A 1% increase in organic matter increases water retention by 20,000 gallons per acre. Water enters the soil primarily by irrigation, soaking into properly farmed and grazed ground. On bare ground it runs off, ending up in the Pueblo Reservoir along with thousands of tons of soil every year. Subdivided pastures lose water and soil, physically, legally, and permanently from the Valley, yet we have no system in place to keep agricultural land in agriculture. It’s a nasty problem, with many seemingly conflicting interests to weave into the fabric of the future, including home buyers, developers, ranchers, and citizens in town and country.

Western Europe has stronger government participation in land-use decisions than in the USA, especially in the West where settlement is a recent event, (at least by us Europeans), so land and water are still treated as tradeable commodities. The long-term consequences are degraded land, but this will eventually change, but even in Europe, it took a catastrophe to force it.

Natural disasters in the Upper Arkansas Valley will probably not be dramatic events killing hundreds of people. It will be the slow conversion of a lovely but brittle agricultural setting into a Disneyland of retirement homes, eroding recreational trails, and brown fields sending dust into the air and mud into the river.

The confetti whirlwind is settling, and the bits of paper are spelling something: “Hold the center.” It’s each of us thinking about the separation-based things we do, buy, and say, and turning toward doing, buying, and saying things that connect. We can live in the calm at the whirlwind’s still center of turning.

Ed Berg "Lessons From Muddy Footprints"

       Originally published in Colorado Central Magazine

Some 12,000 years ago, in what is now White Sands National Park, a teenage girl left her footprints along the muddy edge of a playa. The prints show that she was carrying a small child on her hip, stopping from time to time to adjust her load. We don’t know where she was going or the purpose of her journey, but she was walking quickly, about 4 mph, in spite of her burden and small size. A few hours later she returned along the same path, apparently still carrying the child.

In the meantime, some large animals had crossed her trail, but her tracks show that she was not concerned about them; they weren’t predators. One was a giant ground sloth, the others were Columbian Mammoths, part of the megafauna that inhabited North America during the Ice Ages: woolly mammoths and rhinos, sloths, giant armadillos, and the humans who hunted them. Also giant wolves and saber-toothed cats… and the humans they hunted.

That little gal must have been tough, smart, and self-reliant, to have left no trace of concern about large predators in her neighborhood. But then, she didn’t have the internet and public media telling her about the dangers lurking around her, about how bad the situation was with global warming, and those other humans rumored to be moving into her clan’s hunting territory. “They’re different from us, they worship different gods, they won’t leave any game for us to hunt, and they wear funny clothes.” She trusted her own first-hand observations and her ability to interpret the signs, and she stuck to her mission with the baby.

Change is commonly seen as a threat. We get used to a way of thinking, or a way of earning a living, or of enjoying life, and when the situation changes, it’s damned uncomfortable. Since the new things aren’t familiar, we fall back on second-hand news to inform us, and fall in with our tribe’s opinions about things.

This sounds all too familiar here in the Upper Arkansas Valley, our little microcosm of the larger world. The racket from loud motorcycle exhausts, camping vehicles parked along country roadsides where they don’t belong, increased trash along roadsides, off-trail damage to sensitive ranchland, and the homeless camps in the hills around town; all these are part of the New American Rural Landscape. “They’re different than us, they’re ruining our playgrounds, and they wear funny clothes.”

The backdrop behind our new landscape is the short-fuse rage and intolerance visible in video coverage of very angry people, and the news media is too often the only beneficiary of the conflicts, (although gun and liquor sales are doing well too). Events are reported through a megaphone, and we are all trained to ridicule, blame and stereotype, and sadly, increasing numbers of us are ready to shoot those who don’t think the way we do.

The mountains offer relief from city heat, traffic frustration, and urban crime. But even living here in partial isolation from the issues, I find it difficult to take a deep breath and step back from whatever aggravation is in front of me, whether on a trailside, a news screen or a spam phone call, and think about what I actually know, versus what are only claims made from a biased viewpoint. The young woman carrying the child through dangerous territory didn’t worry about media reports of big carnivores that might eat her, even though campfire stories back then surely included exaggerations and over-simplifications, just like now. She could see for herself that the nearby animals were herbivores, and that they were not acting as if there were predators in the immediate area. She didn’t act frightened, but neither did she take one minute more than necessary away from her clan’s protection.

Living in Salida, I enjoy the community of my own clan, and I enjoy being in the surrounding countryside. Over the years here, my enjoyment has been increased by contributing something of value to the community, and for me, that means helping to preserve the countryside from damage by thoughtless human activity. Like that young woman, I have a brief mission that I need to focus on without being distracted by potential, but not present, dangers.

Like her, we are all members of clans that come together for support, understanding and protection against threats. Her threats were large, furry, and well-armed with teeth and claws. Our threats are more complex. Yes, we face some physical threats, largely due to our overproduction of bombs, plastic and, frankly, ourselves. But we also face non-physical threats: perhaps more dangerous than any of these. To paraphrase Lord Nelson: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Maybe her tribe had a consumer culture like ours, and they spent all their energy building ever- bigger stone buildings they soon had to abandon because the forests had been cut down for construction materials, and the soil had been over-used for their crops. When the weather got hotter and drier, there was no fuel for cooking and no food to cook. Sound familiar?

Or maybe they had a weapons culture like ours, and the young woman had a stockpile of spears and extra stone points at home and would have carried as many as she could on her journey with the child. That would have slowed her down and would not have saved her and the child from being eaten by a very large critter attacking from behind with better weapons. Sound familiar?

Maybe we could learn some things from a small young woman carrying a child across dangerous territory 12,000 years ago: act on first-hand information, be skeptical of fireside stories, and stick to the business at hand. Even if it’s the business of enjoying the view, sipping a locally- fermented beverage (a stone-age invention) with your tribe.

Ed Berg "Trails, Crossroads and Wine"

                  Originally published in Colorado Central Magazine

There are many trails in the Upper Arkansas Valley, and they all tell us something about who passed over them, and how they lived. The oldest ones we know of were footpaths used by the Ute peoples for centuries before we Anglo-Saxons invaded them 150-200 years ago. We still refer to part of Chaffee County Road 175 as the Ute Trail. The most common trails are the ones many of us hike and bike on, and those are very new, built to accommodate the invention of the mountain bike some fifty years ago. Most of those trails were built in the last 5 to 10 years in response to the growing numbers of tourists seeking refuge from city life.

People started wandering into this area some ten thousand years ago, after a long journey by sea and land from Asia. Four hundred years ago, Spaniards ventured north along the Rio Grande Valley, bringing their herds of sheep and cattle into the San Luis and Arkansas Valleys, leaving a few still-visible cart tracks. Because they employed herdsmen to keep their herds bunched together and moving, they left few trails and did not damage the grasslands, so the Upper Arkansas Valley has little more than a few place names to record that time. Three hundred years later, cattlemen and miners from Northern Europe arrived and started to make the big changes that characterize the Industrial Revolution around the globe. The record of that arrival can be seen in countless abandoned mines and waste piles, roads paved and unpaved, railroads, gullied rangeland, and an enormous county dump.

Last summer, some four million tourists did about $75,000 dollars of damage to private land in Chaffee County. Tourist numbers are expected to reach eight million in the next five years and the trail of damage will be more than can be measured by cut fences, trailside trash and new tracks cut by off-road vehicles. The various governmental functions here are cutting some new trails in land management, trying to not only minimize damage but to find ways to let landowners benefit from the modern-day invasion.

Every new arrival makes a change here, and we all have a few things in common: we value being closer to natural surroundings and escaping crowded conditions somewhere else. We also share a history of not understanding the impacts of our arrival. We leave ever-more obvious traces of our activities here, from footpaths and tepee rings to paved roads, from diminishing water supplies to accumulating trash. In the last few years, piles of discarded plastic food containers, clothing and camp gear in the hills surrounding us record the brief presence of the wandering people discarded by our culture and economy.

Yogi Berra said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” We hope things won’t change too drastically in our lifetimes, but the fact is, we are at a crossroads and no matter which path we take, drastic changes are in our future. Our way of life is destroying the systems that support it, globally and locally, and a profound change in direction is now critically necessary. We have two choices: continue down the paths of disconnection (consumption + waste=fragility) or turn toward reconnection (regeneration + diversity=resilience). So how do we identify a regenerative path?

Vino Salida is a local business founded on building connections. Winemaker Steve Flynn took his hobby passion to the commercial level in 2009, starting small, engaging neighbors for seed money, building his business within his community, and combining resilience and persistence in the face of setbacks to create something new here.

Steve understands wine as a connector, not just for connecting friends enjoying a glass at the tasting room, but for connecting people to the winemaking process, from the bottle to the grape stomp at harvest, to Colorado vineyards and their growers, right down to the soil around the roots.

It’s about “terroir”; territory. Locale. Belonging to a special place on the Earth. A glass of wine from a Colorado vineyard contains something unique produced by the region’s soil and the weather in the vineyard during the year of the harvest. It is a trail connecting the vineyard to the glass. A local wine communicates something missing in a wine made to meet a certain price point or sales volume or preconceived taste. Maybe there’s magic in the glass fermented from the thousands of hours of imagination, hard work and lessons learned from preparing the vineyard soil, through nurturing the vines and the crop, caring for the harvest until it’s in the winery’s barrels, then watching over the grape juice until it becomes wine ready to bottle.

The weather in Colorado is less forgiving than in France or California, and that means different grape varieties thrive here. The vinifera strains bred over the centuries since the Roman occupation of Europe frequently don’t survive our sudden shifts of temperature: early warm spells in spring that expose buds to late frosts, early frosts in the fall before the grapes are ripe, root-killing sub-zero cold in early winter. You won’t find a Zinfandel or Cabernet Sauvignon labeled as a Colorado wine at Vino Salida. Other varieties, like Riesling and Cabernet Franc and cold-hardy hybrids are better representatives of Colorado’s terroir.

Last year was a case in point: an early freeze virtually eliminated the vinifera harvest and almost all of the hybrid varietals. A few growers had some grapes available, and because Steve has a record of staying with small producers and not simply buying from wherever a particular grape is available, he had top priority for the rare 2020 crop. One grower, Bruce Talbot, was able to freeze crushed grapes in an unused dairy, so in March, Steve was thawing and processing Colorado grapes… a prime example of local resilience.

Vino Salida sits in two crossroads: the intersection of US 50 and US 285, and in the intersection of very different paths to the future.  Take the fork in the road!

Ed Berg "Cows Keep the Valley Green"

        Originally published in Colorado Central Magazine

Back in 2019 I attended a meet-your-neighbors open house for a new landowner who wanted to set up a tourism business; eco-tourism was to be part of it. He stated that they would not be letting “destructive cattle” graze on the riverside property. He didn’t know that the lady standing next to me was one of the most effective regenerative-practice ranchers in the Valley. And he clearly knew nothing about the most effective element in rangeland restoration: properly grazed cattle.

He was no worse than any of us when we move here. He liked the views of mountains and pastures and had the money to buy a piece for himself. I did the same thing: I assumed that my mental image of the place was the reality. Fifteen years later, having added some information to that image, it’s clear that I am still ignorant of most of the processes, human and natural, that make this place what is. And what it is, is changing rapidly. It is not the snapshot in time that every tourist or home buyer assumes is the way it was and always will be, world without end, amen.

The Upper Arkansas Valley is in a time of rapid change, as is the world. Economies of all scales, from households to empires, are butting into the limits of ten thousand years of extracting energy and wealth from the land and its inhabitants to improve the way we live. This would be a little more admissible if it didn’t include increasing our numbers… on the planet and in the Valley. I moved here to improve my lifestyle and added my bit to the numbers of human critters inhabiting this beautiful, dry, mountain valley. I added a little car exhaust, consumed a little water, and helped increase the cost of land that was already too high for the local economy to support. For a few years it was carefree and recreational, a delight. Then I started learning that situations in the towns and county were changing, and not for the better. I learned about how things were when we Europeans arrived and drove off the Indians, blasted open mines for “strategic” metals, and killed off the large predators to make it safe for our livestock. For those settlers and miners, the wide vistas and abundant water, ores, grassland, and timber must have caused feelings similar to mine, 150 years later. Unlimited possibilities!

Now the Valley floor that was a grassland is split up into green, irrigated hay and alfalfa pastures, large homes scattered around on small plots of brown dirt, and wide-open spaces with little growing except brush and annual weeds… and gullies deepening between.

To an incoming tourist or homebuyer fresh from urban landscapes, this description seems far too negative. After all, it’s a damned sight prettier than downtown Wherever. But ask a rancher who grew up here how the valley compares to what it was like 30 years ago, and you will not get the idea that things are improving. Snowmelt comes sooner, summers are hotter and drier, wells are drying up, the cost of fuel and electricity are ever higher, and beef prices won’t support the family… unless you sell off the land to pay for the kids’ education and to replace worn-out equipment and fall-down fences.

Given that admittedly bleak hindsight, what does the future look like? If we continue under the old paradigm that the Valley offers great opportunities for more rural homesites and larger towns, it will degrade ever more rapidly, with more barren land between fewer green pastures, more wildfires and those gullies working up under sagging roadsides.

It doesn’t have to go that way. Now we know about regenerative grazing practices, about the critical role the riparian zones play in keeping agricultural land productive, and we can now forecast long-term climate changes. We have the knowledge, but do we have the will to use it? Hard to say. We don’t have a sterling record of community wisdom. We have inspired leaders and brilliant scientists and engineers, but we don’t seem able to put it all together in a healthy direction. This last year our political process resulted in chaos and violence. Our farming practices produce a well-fed but poorly nourished population with growing disease rates in spite of having the world’s most costly medical system. If you think we’re better off than the cities, consider that virtually all of our food depends on daily truckloads from Front Range distribution centers, and while our ranchers and farmers struggle to keep their land productive, the local medical racket is growing by leaps and bounds. Most of our restaurants have survived by offering more takeout meals, but not one of them is able to offer food produced here. Local conservationists know that building along the rivers destroys habitat for the birds and insects that pollinate the crops in those green fields, but developers still want to build along stream sides.

We’d all prefer to fix the blame rather than fix the problem. It’s easy to blame ranchers and their cattle for eroding rangeland, but it doesn’t solve the problem. Spanish settlers grazed herds of sheep, goats and cattle here for 200 years without wrecking the grassland. What are we doing wrong? Do we want to fix it and keep the Valley green?

Local beef can’t compete with Great Plains and eastern suppliers. Local workers can’t compete with urban salaries and retirement savings for housing. Local farmers can’t compete with those daily Sysco truckloads of factory produce. If we want this Valley to stay green, we will all need to contribute to the new ecosystem. No, not pooping in the fields. But we all need some fertile thinking in the organizations that support our local producers. We can add some green to their balance sheets at the farmers markets, and above all, we can take part in the organizations and governance that is critical to herding us toward a new, non-extractive, balanced system.

Ed Berg "Brinksmanship in the Valley"

                Originally published in Colorado Central Magazine

A few weeks ago I woke from a dream where I was in a tiny village in steep mountain terrain, talking with some folks outside a cottage on a dirt road. I noticed a gulch dropping off the roadside next to the cottage and stepped closer to peer over the edge… then jumped back. It dropped vertically out of sight into nothingness. A misstep would be fatal. End of dream.

The day before I’d driven through suburban Colorado Springs for the first time in years and was dismayed by the ocean of look-alike homes and shopping malls that replaced the farms, pastures, and grassland that was there not long ago. Thousands of residences served by look-alike chain stores selling mass-produced food, clothing, and stuff, with no sign of the faraway sources of the fuel, food, water, or materials that supply the system. There were none of the mountains of throw-away plastic containers, old appliances, tires, and vehicles that are the system’s end products, that we don’t want to think about. The suburban dream has come true: millions of homes separated by miles of pavement, all built on the brink of the consumption chasm.

Here in my own part-of-the-problem suburban home in Salida, I’m reading through the third draft of the County Comprehensive Plan, a 113-page guideline for changing the Land Use Code that could help avoid turning the Upper Arkansas Valley into another suburban sprawl on the brink of the consumption cliff. The existing code contains regulations that were made when we happily threw things away, things like plastic containers, synthetic clothes, or feedlot animals, or people in homeless camps. Now there is no more “away”. Our County Dump grows by dozens of truckloads every day, and the hills on the edge of Salida are dotted not only with dream homes, but with the litter of summertime homeless camps for discarded people. We live closer to the sources that supply suburban supermarket shelves, lumber for houses, water to spread on lawns, mines for the metal in cars.

The Comprehensive Plan will require concessions from separate interests with apparently conflicting needs and goals. Among them are agricultural producers, real estate developers, tourism business owners, and residents in town and county. Deciding which interests are best for the long-term quality of life in the Valley will be critical... and difficult. But I say “apparently conflicting” because these different interests actually have common needs.

For example, our high property values benefit developers and realtors and give ranchers a chance to monetize property they’ve managed at marginal profit for decades, and maybe replace a worn-out tractor or send a kid to college. At the same time, they force our workers to live in substandard housing or commute here from out of town. Subdivision is like a prescription opioid that suppresses a symptom for the short term, but creates nasty side-effects, with no plan for getting off the drug. Farmland keeps getting subdivided while workers keep struggling to find homes. The side effect is that every pasture taken out of irrigation decreases the water supply in the Valley, not through increased consumption, but because without crop roots in the soil, it loses its water-holding capacity and erodes in summer thunderstorms or blows away in dust clouds that don’t really attract a lot of tourists... or home buyers. Our soil ends up in the Pueblo Reservoir, steadily reducing the volume available for the farms that grow much of the produce we consume in Salida… and elsewhere in Central Colorado.

More people move here every month, but the land area doesn’t grow to meet demand, while the water supply decreases, not only due to development, but reduced rainfall and snowpack. Many newcomers want new homes in attractive rural settings, but very few know anything about the land they (we) enjoy hiking or biking through or are living on. It’s like handing over your checkbook and car keys to a fourteen-year-old: the end result is going to be expensive. In the last year, agricultural landowners incurred $75,000 in cut fences, eroded roads, and harassed livestock. Yet those fence-cutting tourists love their hamburgers, and every new home built on irrigated land invades someone else’s view and reduces everyone else’s water supply. Roads originally built to serve the ranchers now bring in tourists. It’s easy to be destructive if we’re disconnected from the source. The path away from the edge is reconnection: land to water; property values to productivity; health to food and land instead of pharmaceuticals and hospitals, well-being to community instead of possessions; tourists to respect for the land, and ranchers to tourist dollars.

The changes sweeping across the planet has casualties: one must be our practice of separating things that cannot survive without connection. Way back in high school biology class I had to dissect a frog. I separated the skeleton, muscles, and digestive tract, but didn’t learn anything about the frog’s diet and its role in controlling insect-borne diseases. In the end, I had a dead frog in front of me, in pieces. Separated parts don’t make a whole.

There are parts coming back together here. If you shop at Safeway after 7:00 pm, you’ll find some of the disconnected people, buying factory-made food, not looking happy and healthy and not connecting to other shoppers. In contrast, at the Winter Farmers Market on a Saturday morning, you’ll see people chatting with other shoppers and the vendors. You will see and smell livestock and delicious food cooking, but you will not see throwaway plastic shopping bags, nor smell disinfectant. Instead of fluorescent lights overhead, there is blue sky. Instead of partially- empty shelves of foodstuff from far-off places in glitzy plastic containers, there are cardboard boxes full of fresh produce. Instead of linoleum floors underfoot and steel shelves on either side, you will walk on dirt, with snow-capped mountains around you. Reconnecting health to food to water and land is one of the steps we can away from the edge. And it is pleasant.

Ed Berg "Water and Wellness in the West"

Originally published in Colorado Central Magazine

Solitary hikes with the family dogs are a relief from the intolerance and antagonistic noise of this tipping-point election year in the USA. I recently discovered a gulch north of town that is too boulder-choked for a bike trail… even for a deer trail. I was clambering up it at that magical moment when the sun gets high enough to pour into the gulch and backlight the foliage with brilliant halos. (I avoid using the word “coronas”.) So it was dismaying to find an empty plastic one-gallon water jug lodged between two boulders there. I checked the label before crushing it to stow in my backpack. Arrowhead “Spring Water”. A gift from Nestle. It was labeled “A Local Favorite”. My knee-jerk reaction was that it felt like salt in a wound mixed with the stink of fresh bull-oney. Then it occurred to me that although Nestle spreads billions of plastic bottles around the world, someone else tossed away that bottle. Finally it struck me that this was not the convenient half-liter throwaway we pick up on our trails and riversides: no one carries an eight-pound jug of water on an afternoon bike ride.

Walking across the mesa above the gulch, I bypassed two homeless camps; jumbled piles of discarded sleeping bags, clothes, tarps, and plastic wrappers from convenience foods. The dogs alerted, so I knew the camps were occupied. When homeless wanderers abandon their camps, they walk away from the tarps and trash; discarded refuse left behind by the discarded humans of our consumption economy. Here was the real origin of the water jug: not vagrants, not even Nestle. The source of waste in our hills, our water, and our growing homeless camps is the careless self-absorption of our society. We have met the enemy and he is us.

If there Is a positive spin on the otherwise absurd “A Local Favorite”, it is that Nestle recognizes the market power of “local”. The word connotes authentic, healthy, and fresh, and “local favorite” suggests that the local people know a good thing. I agree. We are here because we know a good thing. The Envision Chaffee County survey showed that preserving agricultural land and keeping the rural character of the County were the local qualities we value most highly.

That is why, during a time of extended severe drought, with more drought years coming, with over 90% of the food we eat shipped in from all over the world and gaps showing up on grocery shelves, with farmland in the Central Colorado headwaters region still being subdivided and turned into mini-desert subdivisions, the idea of permitting the removal of 65 million gallons of water every year from the Valley’s irrigation system doesn’t seem like a local good thing so much as local slow suicide.

Sadly, the basis for the relationship of water to humans in Colorado is that it is a commodity to be traded for profit, rather than nurtured as the bloodline that ties plants, animals, and soil and humans together in a complex web of well-being that we understand only poorly. No human system can trump natural law. Nature has no agenda and makes no judgement between good and evil, never lies and never fixes blame. But nature, with no malice at all, quickly eliminates unworkable organisms and systems, and leaves no discarded waste in the process.

Extracting water from a local ecosystem, burning thousands of gallons of diesel fuel to truck it 150 miles away to a factory so it can be put into billions of plastic bottles that we flawed humans discard to break down into particles that are toxic to plant and animal life, is a prime example of an unworkable system. It’s a system that is currently supported by human laws, but nature will slowly and surely trump these as the plastic waste slowly poisons us and our food supply, and we either replace the water extraction with a regenerative use, or we cease to occupy the land that we ourselves made barren.

Nature is in the business of creating beauty from chaos. Life is opportunistic and uses whatever comes to hand to continue to survive. Why don’t we take the same approach? Nestle owns the land and the water rights, and it isn’t likely that we can overturn entrenched laws, but those laws give County Commissioners the right to set conditions for granting the extraction permit. Why not create an opportunity for Nestle to convert part of its permitted water extraction and part of its profit to a model of regenerative resource use?

Abandoned mining towns are mute testimony to the short life-expectancy of extraction economies. Why not give Nestle an opportunity to create a more wholesome future for itself than extraction offers, by converting part of it to local regenerative agriculture? There are several projects and organizations that would benefit from support and create a more positive public image for Nestle than its currently negative one.

A model for this already exists in Alamosa: the Rio Grande Farm Park Chaffee County already has all the elements needed to create a beacon for local agriculture: we are a magnet for outdoor tourism, and there is ag land close to towns. A mobile processing unit would hugely benefit meat producers who now drive hundreds of miles to process their animals. 

We have investment vehicles like SOIL Sangre de Cristo and the Central Colorado Conservancy, and we have collaborative farming organizations like Guidestone Colorado, the Upper Arkansas Conservation District, and Chaffee County Local Food Coalition, to facilitate gathering the threads and weaving a tapestry for the future.

A contribution by Nestle to fund a beacon project should be a condition of their permit renewal. Maybe we could transform the “Local Favorite” salt and bull-oney into something lovely, lasting, and true, something that benefits everyone… including Nestle, maybe even something that could benefit a wandering vagrant or veteran in need of a healthy meal… or a job.

Ed Berg "Separation and Reconnection"

Originally published in Colorado Central Magazine

 If you’re reading this, you’re one of a fortunate tiny minority of people. Nothing to do with this column, just that you live in a region close to the outdoors and agricultural lands, and you’re not watching television, at least at the moment. Yet early COVID fears of running out of toilet paper are being replaced by fears of running out of food, which may be a self-curing situation. As we move into the pandemic experience, we are beginning to understand that this is not a one-time event that will soon return to normal. It’s a part of awakening to the fragility of the normalcy we have been taking for granted, from commuting to dining to democracy. But there is a bright side to it: COVID is uncovering the intolerable practices that sustain our way of life, practices that include the way we use land, water, animals, and other human beings. We are participants in an extraction-based society, and extractive practices end in change and conflict.

We have created fearful shortages in the past, but the response was to move somewhere else, and when somewhere was already occupied, it ended in warfare, enslavement, and genocide. It was easy to believe that wars with rifles and cannons could have a good ending with victors and vanquished. Wars with thermonuclear bombs; not so easy to believe.

Every day we are inundated with choices in what to believe; for instance, choices between worrisome but well-documented statements by experts about how to deal with COVID, versus nonsensical reassurances of why not to wear masks, or of miracle drugs that will take care of the problem, or of why it’s safe for grownups to congregate in bars and for children to attend summer camps. Bad choices yield bad outcomes, but good choices depend on good information, and it isn’t easy to separate sense from nonsense, even using my favorite scientific research tools: Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, TED talks, and yes, plain observation.

So where’s the melody in all the noise? The good news and bad news are the same: we are living in the sunset of a 10,000-year-old culture of separation and extraction. As soon as we learned how to store grains, special people started controlling the distribution of the goods and inventing gods, laws, and weapons to control those who didn’t follow the rules. We created separations based on property, status, beliefs, and skin color. Even our science was based on the idea of separate things, from apples (Newton’s physics), to galaxies (Einstein’s relativity) to subatomic particles (quantum mechanics), yet even these powerful tools describe only the material portion of reality. Fortunately, our science is also changing rapidly.

In Central Colorado, especially the agricultural San Luis and Upper Arkansas Valleys, the casualties of separation and extraction are arising. The climate is drying throughout the Rocky Mountain region, in large part due to the ways we use land and water. This has happened before, but it was easier to pick up a teepee and move closer to a river than to feed tens of thousands of people who produce only a tiny fraction of their food. We may be the new Anasazi, the ancient Puebloans who abruptly deserted their homes and emigrated to the Rio Grande Valley when the rains failed in the 13th Century.

Our extractions during the last 150 years have put us in the same position as the Anasazi. Our first extraction was land. We Northern Europeans moved west from the eastern USA without understanding how to sustainably graze our livestock. The grasses that held water in the soil were grazed off and summer thunderstorms quickly excavated the gullies we see throughout the entire region.

The next extraction was water. We treat water as a tradeable commodity separated from the land, not as an integral element of the land and living systems it falls on. The reservoirs and irrigation ditches we built for farming the land carry water that is valued not for the food it can grow, but for the revenue it generates when sold to the highest bidder. Much of the water in our rivers is committed to surrounding states, and the terms ignore our decreasing rainfall and snowpack. Farmable land is valued not for the food it produces, but for the revenue it generates by being subdivided for rural homesites surrounded by new mini- deserts.

When they abandoned their homes, the Ancient Puebloans left behind empty granaries and untilled fields. Our own granaries are emptying as well: the empty spaces on our supermarket shelves will expand now that warehouse supplies are depleting, and COVID-reduced harvests around the world won’t refill them. 

There is no physical Rio Grande Valley for us to move to. The food and water that supply Front Range cities come from right where we now live. Our Rio Grande refuge is that we now know what changes we must make to survive and thrive, but the changes require abandoning the practices that created the subdivision deserts, eroding rangeland, poisoned soils, and the diseases that originate in the ecosystems we disrupt. We won’t find solutions in the upper management of supermarket chains, or the corporate owners of mega-farms and stockyards in the Midwest. The solutions are emerging in local organizations now forming to regenerate our food systems.

The best strategy for brightening our future will be acts of generosity and service within our local communities; dedicating our resources to organizations like Chaffee Local Food Coalition, Colorado Food Systems Coalition, Guidestone Colorado, or SOIL Sangre de Cristo, to name just a few. Get to know the vendors at your farmers’ markets and find out what they need to be here next year. ​Get your backyard greenhouses and cold frames into production and grow some herbs and veggies, swap your surplus with your neighbors and freeze, can, or dry your harvests. It could put food on your shelves that is far healthier than almost anything you can buy at the supermarket.

Ed Berg "Wildflowers and Masks"

Originally published in Colorado Central Magazine

             Setting out on an early morning walk with Joe Dog, I passed two men on their way toward the F Street parking lot. They were obviously homeless. One was in bad shape, walking slowly with a stick and coughing hard enough that he had to pause to catch his breath. The other was pushing their belongings in a shopping cart. I said good morning, and he replied with a big smile, “Good morning! Another beautiful day!”, to which I responded, “It certainly is!” And we went on our economically and socially distanced ways.

As we walked, I pondered the ways of our different worlds while Joe investigated trailside smells. I wondered what my responsibility to those two guys might be, and Joe didn’t. He lives in a state of satori, entirely present in every moment. On our way back toward town, a Claret Cup cactus caught my attention, just starting to bloom by the trailside. Here it was, in the midst of a severe drought, looking like it was going to its first prom. My first thought was that plants are optimists, spending all their energy on finery when their future is uncertain. The second thought was tempered by old scientific habits, knowing that seed production is a flowering plant’s best bet for propagating its species. To do that, it must attract a pollinator; thus the flashy advertisements. The cactus was responding to a survival challenge in a form that is attractive, in harmony with the present situation, and rooted in the future. The beauty and the optimism were in the eye of this beholder, but were no less real than the thorns and flowers.

So here we are, living more or less socially distanced in our desert valley during our own survival challenge, with herds of cattle grazing in fields growing green with snowmelt irrigation and the streets of town growing crowded with herds of tourists bringing us their greenbacks from the cities. Things seem to be getting back to normal, whatever normal was, and some of us are wondering if that’s a good thing.

“Normal” describes a situation that has existed long enough that it escapes our notice. It doesn’t mean the situation is healthy. “Normal” in the Upper Arkansas Valley includes pleasant restaurants and pubs serving food and drink prepared here… but not made from ingredients grown here. It includes pastoral scenes of grazing cattle being raised by ranchers who struggle to find markets for their beef while the shelves in the meat sections of our supermarkets are half empty. It includes miles of prepared recreational trails and homeless men pushing shopping carts. It includes folks driving their cars wearing masks with the windows rolled up, and grocery shoppers wearing no masks bending over produce displays. Fortunately, here in our valley “normal” doesn’t include police brutality and angry crowds looting stores. Life here includes a lot of contrasts, connections, and disconnections.

We enjoy enough connections that we won’t loot a store that may belong to one of our neighbors. We suffer from enough disconnections that we choose to eat foods grown in countries that have poor medical systems and are experiencing huge outbreaks of COVID. The more I learn about our industrial food supply practices, the happier I am to spend more to buy food grown on a farm I can visit.

How do we heal the disconnections? Some of us work to enhance connections, volunteering to build mountain trails, creating local businesses, or growing healthy food. Some of us enhance the disconnections, and speaking from personal experience, it is often the same person doing both, choosing between offering assistance instead of judgement, seeing an opportunity versus a threat, or  giving a neighborly “Good morning!” versus insisting on my personal freedoms, shifting my personal paradigm from wanting more to having enough, even if it can all fit in a shopping cart.

The scientific paradigms of reality are shifting away from understanding it as being made of separate objects, to seeing it as being holographic. A hologram is an image that contains the whole of the object. No matter how small you divide the image, it still portrays the whole. Advancements in physics during the last fifteen years show that every part of the universe right down to the subatomic level is in instantaneous communication with the information contained in the rest of the universe. It’s called quantum entanglement, and it means that you and I and Joe Dog, Claret Cups and cops are in touch with each other at a deep level, just the opposite of the centuries-old paradigm that we are separated by species, education, distance, our bodies, our wealth, and our status.

At the same time, advances in epigenetics show that our thoughts and attitudes shape our physical condition: we aren’t tied to the DNA molecule we were born with. We can change who we are at the deepest level through those daily choices. And that, friends, opens broad vistas of opportunities to shape our individual lives, our town and our nation.

We will see more food shortages in the near future, more conflicts and more pandemics. It is an election year, so we will see wild accusations and wilder promises. We will also see new norms replace the old norms that support our western consumer culture, norms that include slave-level labor in mines, lettuce fields, and meat-packing plants. They are the old norms of deforestation to supply our beef, coconut oil and avocados, and it includes the trillion-dollar expenditures necessary to improving the weaponry that guarantees our consumption.

Our little valley and the way we choose to live here is a hologram: our daily responses to the threats and opportunities not only mirror the global changes that are taking place, but actually shape them. Whether we live in a dream home or out of a shopping cart, we can see the new day as a good morning or a threat, and respond like those thorny, beautiful, trailside cactuses.