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.