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.