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.