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 "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.