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 "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.

Ed Berg "Land, Water and Food Go Viral "

Originally published in Colorado Central Magazine

During the first week of quarantine I went for a walk in the hills east of town, seeking stillness in the midst of turbulence. Eventually I came upon some Tibetan prayer flags, and a meditation labyrinth all neatly laid out nearby. So I walked it. The two collie dogs I hike with were puzzled by this: herding dogs believe that all who wander are lost, and as I circled back and forth, it must have seemed to them that I’d lost my way, when actually I was finding it.

By the time you read this, we will all be more aware of the effects of epidemics and the differences between the world’s best medical system and its most expensive one, of dysfunctional governance, and of the brittle links in our long and costly food supply chain.

It was illuminating to read of customers finding empty shelves at Safeway and Walmart, then raging against helpless checkout clerks. We are so accustomed to shelves full of every conceivable item that we now assume an inalienable right to consume as much as we want from an unlimited supply... a supply that exists only in our minds. The pandemic will remove a few presumptions, there will be some discomforts and fears, but it will create some opportunities to improve the way we use our land and water and how we supply our food.

Store managers don’t decide how much we can buy and consume; natural systems do that, and the penalties for overconsumption are unavoidable. Albert Einstein said, “You cannot solve a problem using the same thinking that created it.”, but thousands of internet voices are attempting to predict and create the future using the same thinking that created our vulnerability to the virus and the resulting financial mess. You can hardly blame them: it started in Mesopotamia ten thousand years ago. Babylon fell into ruin not because of invading hordes but because they allowed their overworked fields to erode and fill in their irrigation canals. No hordes were needed to wreck the biggest military/economic entity then on Earth: no soil, no water; no food, no empire.

But this isn’t Mesopotamia…yet. They didn’t have historical precedents or the internet to learn from. We can instantaneously search out information, make a choice of whether to believe it, and then decide how to act on it.

This Valley has a history of being occupied by waves of immigrants. Before the Europeans arrived, the Valley was occupied by immigrants from Asia. It was a grassland that fed a huge variety of grazing animals, and the immigrants had little impact on the ecosystems. Then Europeans immigrated from well-watered lands, who didn’t understand the fragile, complex relationships between grasses, herds, soil, water and food in the west, and we impacted it greatly.

Salida is here because the railroad was here, and the railroad is here because mineral wealth was discovered some 160 years ago. As wealth was discovered across the American West, whether silver, lumber or beef, the railroads arrived, and as soon as that happened, mountainsides were lumbered off, mines leveled whole mountains, and cattle herds were increased tenfold, all to supply markets in the east. Studies have shown that it only took about ten years after the arrival of railroads in any area for the grasslands and mountainsides to start eroding and the all-too familiar arroyos of the west to appear.

The question is, will we learn from that and act on it?

The NO side of my brain says, “Look at Google Maps. See the patches of green and brown all across the Valley? Green is where fields are still being irrigated, brown is around subdivisions. Little deserts are spreading virally (hah!) into green pastures. We’re recreating a little Babylon, one country home at a time. We’ll never learn.”

The YES side of my brain says, “Look at what our business owners are doing, shifting food service from tabletops to curbsides, taking links out of that long, rusty supply chain. Look at what some local ranchers and farmers are doing, selling direct to consumers. There are LOTS of opportunities!”

The NO side replies: “We’re creating our own Babylon. Nestle Waters North America is applying to Chaffee County to renew their water extraction from the Upper Arkansas Valley. The 65 million gallons of water they extract every year are supplied by agricultural irrigation up-valley. Down-valley from Nestle’s wells are fields that depend on aquifer water to grow meat and vegetables. We’ll never learn.”

To which the YES side quietly responds: “We have a chance to change the way we occupy the land and produce our food. We have Zoom teleconferences to share ideas and design better ways to supply our needs than shipping in everything we use in from some other state or country. We have a Farmers’ Market and we have ranchers and farmers who can stock some of those supermarket shelves with fresh, wholesome food. We have social media to reach the consumers. There are LOTS of opportunities! “

But farmers and ranchers need capital to gear up, expand their operations and shorten those supply chains.

Yes, no, yes, no. Where’s the serenity I found walking the maze? We can help create our future; it doesn’t have to just fall on us. We can continue dreaming that wealth is a shiny new vehicle or a luxury home, or shift to the dream of knowing a local farmer who offers you healthy food in return for your investment in a crop share, funding a greenhouse or cash for irrigation equipment. It will be more satisfying than a closetful of toilet paper or a new granite countertop. We can break the chains that tie our tables to farmers in China and India, and at the same time help to keep some green pastures from becoming little deserts.

There are easy ways to contribute to the YES and the green. Guidestone Colorado supports local farmers through networking their needs, resources and markets. You can make a tax-deductible contribution by emailing info@guidestonecolorado.org.

SOIL Sangre de Cristo, (Slow Opportunities in Investing Locally) is the local member of Slow Money Institute, which provides interest-free loans to producers through tax-deductible contributions. Contact them by emailing soilsangredecristo@gmail.com.

Check them out. Their directors and the farmers they support are your neighbors.

When I finished walking the labyrinth, the dogs were lying in the shade of a juniper, having given up on me ever finding my way out of the maze. Perhaps you have too, so I’ll stop here by thanking salidamountaintrails.org for the labyrinth.

Ed Berg "Copy and Paradigm Shifts"

Originally published in Colorado Central Magazine

Here begins a bi-monthly column about living in Central Colorado in ways that make the place healthier and lovelier than when we moved here. Place is important, whether we make a living on the land raising cattle, or carrots, or fixing cars, or building houses, or making music, or making policies. Connection to place and its inhabitants is the basis for living well. Disconnection tends to create unhappy endings.

Max Plank said, “Old paradigms die one funeral at a time.” He should know; he was one of the founders of a new paradigm that flew directly in the face of everything that was believed about the nature of the universe, back in the first quarter of the 20th century. It drew criticism and ridicule from those who believed that Isaac Newton’s physical principles could describe all of observable reality. The new paradigm described the nature of things smaller than we could see. It was quantum physics, the foundation of the electronic age we now live in.

At about the same time, Albert Einstein developed the theory of relativity that described the motion of stars and galaxies at the very large end of things. Neither of the new paradigms described the whole range of things from sub-atomic to intergalactic. For the next century, the holy grail of physics was the Unified Field Theory, and it has only recently been discovered, and this new theory is receiving its due share of ridicule and criticism. But that’s another story.

What’s this got to do with living in Central Colorado? Paradigms shape our actions. The paradigm of our age is that separation defines our relationship to the world around us. If we believe that those who are different from us are somehow less than we are, what’s to stop us from enslaving them? If we believe that maximized cash flow is the ultimate measure of the worth of an enterprise, what’s to stop us from turning a fertile land into a desert?  If we believe we can fly, what’s to stop us from jumping off the roof of a ten-story building?

The way we live in the American West is heading for the sidewalk. Virtually everything we do as a consumption culture has a short life expectancy and is based on I-can-fly beliefs based on the paradigm of cheap, abundant energy, land and water. The West is occupied and used by newcomers who see the attractive wide-open spaces through a lens that was shaped by the rain-greened landscapes of the East, or worse, the well-watered lawns of suburbia. But the paradigm that shapes our actions isn’t based on the whole reality of the West. We believe that the land we see is as it has been and will be forever. We believe that if we “own” the land, we should be free to use it pretty much any way that profits us. We newcomers don’t see the land as it was two hundred years ago, and even those who were born here rarely see the changes that have occurred in the landscape since their grandparents were the newcomers. The whole reality is that we are creating a desert around us, one subdivision and parking lot at a time.

Part of the old paradigm that is changing in central Colorado is that technology and free enterprise can insure us against catastrophic failure. The change is toward a deeper understanding of long-term natural processes, coupled with economic practices that are based on feedbacks instead of extraction.

A hundred years ago, more than ninety-five percent of the food we ate here was grown here in the Upper Arkansas Valley. Now, more than ninety five percent of the food we eat is shipped in from over one thousand miles away. We have become accustomed to eating food that doesn’t grow in our climate, or that doesn’t ripen in a season when we have a craving for it. But there are problems with a diet that depends on food wrapped in plastic containers that degrade into nanoparticles that strain the endocrine systems of every animal that drinks the water, even here at the upstream end of the water supply. There’s a disconnection here.

Every time I buy a seductively packaged food item from halfway across the hemisphere, with a shelf life that approximates the half-life of uranium, I do my small part to grow the desert around me. It isn’t just that eighty-five cents of my food dollars disappear from Colorado, those eighty-five cents are no longer available to invest in local businesses, local land and water management, and maybe houses for local people.

A small community here is seeking ways to increase the amount of healthy food we produce locally. It sounds like an obviously good cause, but it is caught between two entrenched and opposing forces, neither of which encourage a resilient economy that improves the land and the lives of its tenants. One force is the existing paradigm of using water and land as profit-generating commodities apart from their ability to support life. The other force is the lack of consumer awareness of the long-range consequences of their shopping choices, whether for a meal or a homesite.

Chaffee County is in the midst of updating its Comprehensive Plan. The wisdom we embed in this plan will determine what our place looks like in the near and distant future. It will directly affect the quality of life of those who live in this place, and it can be a beacon for much of the Rocky Mountain region, or it can be reminder of  what went wrong, like the crumbling ruins of the deserts of the Middle East in what was once the Fertile Crescent. It all depends on how we change our paradigms, and there isn’t time to wait for funerals.