Notes on the 20th Headwaters Conference

   
Annual Gunnison Conference is Incubator of Bioregional 'Outside-the-Box' Thinking

El Rito, CO. This past weekend (Friday-Sunday), Elaine and I had the distinct pleasure and privilege of attending the Twentieth Anniversary Annual Headwaters Conference at Western State College in Gunnison, Colorado. I guess I am considered one of the "Headwaters Elders." This is a group of "outside-the-box" thinkers that participated in the first gathering back in 1989, an event that was organized under the wisdom and grace of Professors George Sibley and Laura McCall. The "HW Elders" have been regulars of the event over the past two decades.   
   
I attended during the course of the first eight gatherings until 1999 when I migrated with my family to my current academic position in Seattle. That interlude allowed me to attend twice, in 2000 and 2007.
   
It is so, so good to be back, re-rooted as it were, in the Colorado Headwaters. In my case, those roots are in La Cuenca de la Culebra in the Headwaters of El Rio Bravo del Norte (Rio Grande). I live and work at our family's acequia farm in the San Luis Valley during the spring to fall irrigation season and was invited back to HW for the 20th annual meeting to deliver the Friday evening Keynote. Participating in this year's HW's conference was a big part of coming home. The theme was "Redefining Prosperity."
 
Organic bioregional intellectuals?   
  
The Headwaters gathering has shaped much of our work as "organic bioregional intellectuals." Bioregional because all of the Headwaters participants are people who live, work, and are committed to the ecological and socio-cultural wellbeing of our respective bioregions - the Colorado, Arkansas, Platte, and Rio Grande watersheds and their tributaries that slide, gurgling and burbling, east or west off the high peaks of the Continental Divide.
   
Organic in the sense that our intellectual or "knowledge work" revolves around our shared and distinct place-based experiences. The alterNative visions and intense exchanges shared at HW over the years helped sustain my spirit as I pursued a twenty-five year apprenticeship in the art and science of acequia farming. But I was a farmer without land until three years ago when my sister and I decided to establish the Acequia Institute on 200 acres of San Acacio bottom lands irrigated by La Acequia de la Gente de San Luis. I am now practicing what might be called "regenerative" and "resilient" mestizo agriculture.
   
If anything, HW colleagues have always challenged me to be clear about the heritage of acequia farmers and to avoid romanticizing what seems like an often difficult and always conflicted way of life because we are constantly threatened by subdivisions, the arrival of chain stores, genetically-engineered crops, the defection of too many of our youth to modernity and the city, and the lingering cumulative effects of enclosure of the commons and deforestation caused when Zachary Taylor, Jr. ravaged our watershed with stupifying levels of logging destruction between 1995 and 1999.
   
Indeed, I believe it was at HW V (1995) that I invited environmental activists from Earth First!, Greenpeace, and Ancient Forest Rescue to learn more about our struggles against logging in our Sangre de Cristo watershed. The eco-activists ended up staying for four years working with the local farmers and ranchers in opposition to the logging destruction of La Sierra Commons.
   
One of the activists decided to stay and lives in our acequiahood.  He has "gone local" and manages the county's cutting-edge biodiesel plant. I see Ben as a fellow organic bioregional intellectual nurtured by the good thoughts and thinkers that converge on Gunnison every year and radiate their knowledge of place and practice of progressive transformation across the Headwaters communities. None of my own work would have likely happened in the absence of a forum for  "encounters with new and edgy ideas" that is part of the synergy constantly unleashed at HW.
   
Over the decades, I have met with and collaborated with some of the most wondrously open and subversively creative minds in the country at HW: George and Laura of course but also Aaron Abeyta, Art Goodtimes, Patricia Limerick, Phil Crossley, Ed and Martha Quinn, Greg Cajete, Reyes Garcia, Joe Gallegos, and many others. Vandana Shiva graced us with this year's Saturday night keynote on "Earth Democracy."
   
I missed George Sibley who was absent for the first time in 20 years. He has retired from his faculty position at Western - although I have a hard time imagining that he is anything but retired from the task of helping communities build a more just and resilient future. We learned that he was in Wisconsin writing a book and other missives I am sure. He was said to be somewhere close to Aldo Leopold's cabin. A fitting reprieve for one half of our founding scholars, the other being the incomparable Laura McCall, one of the most dynamic and deep-thinking historians of the Intermountain West I have ever had the privilege of knowing. Laura provided a heartfelt twenty-year retrospective.
   
Vandana Shiva presented the Saturday night keynote. This was her first return to the Headwaters Bioregions since 1995 when I invited her to deliver a lecture on social justice at Colorado College and she came down afterward to San Luis to visit the village commons and the acequias.
   
I had last visited with Vandana at another pivotal moment in the history of our social movements for environmental justice and Earth Democracy - the infamous WTO blowout in Seattle (1999). I was at the time a member of the Board of Directors of the Council for Responsible Genetics (CRG) and we collaborated and participated in a "No Patents on Life Campaign" meeting at the Presbyterian Church in downtown Seattle. It was interesting learning that Vandana and I have both found it necessary to shift to the regeneration of local place-based food systems by actually running our own agroecological farms.
     
Learning from Place-Based Colleagues
   
The annual HW gathering always presents provocative intellectual encounters and political challenges and this year was not an exception. I learned much at the gathering this year: From Jessica Young, an ecologist and passionate "bird lady," I learned that the historic range of the Gunnison Sage Grouse once included the San Luis Valley. This shy but fancily-clad ground-dweller was extirpated from our Valley around the 1950s.
   
Her inspired talk, based on more than thirty years of fiercely dedicated fieldwork in the Gunnison Valley, led me to suggest that we work together to re-introduce the "Gunny" Sage Grouse back to the San Luis Valley. Our acequia farm lands are already habitat for other threatened and endangered species including the Southwestern Willow Flycatcher and the Yellow-Throated Warbler, both spotted by an ornithologist at Rancho Dos Acequias this summer.
   
I figure if we can grow the three sisters, a little hay, and then set the rest aside for habitat, then that is exactly what the ancient acequia system can accomplish: Farming in nature's image.
   
While Jessica overreached, in my mind, by blaming "agriculture in general" (including acequia farms) for the extirpation of the Gunny from the SLV, I suspect the principal culprits were center-pivot sprinkler agrifactories in the fields and, of course, the proliferation of roads after WW II; roads are considered the prime source of habitat fragmentation among the conservation biology community.
   
In the Rio Culebra, prior to the 1950s, we had no sprinklers or their leveled homogeneous landscapes. We only had our earthen-work leaky acequias that nourish riparian corridors and wetlands of native vegetation. In other words: we create riparian habitat; center-pivots destroy it as "non-beneficial evapotranspiration" and as a barrier to the smooth operation of these mechanical centipedes on wheels.
   
We had very few roads back then and 90 percent of the roads that exist in the San Luis Valley today were actually constructed after the 1940s as old aerial photography amply demonstrates. In other words, our farms have always been and largely remain habitat-friendly and our roads were few in between until the arrival of center-pivots and subdivision roads. I have a nagging suspicion that not all farmers are equally implicated in the extirpation of flora and fauna like the Gunny Grouse.
   
Regardless, I aim to help this passionate bird lady restore this lovely bird to its rightful place as a fellow denizen of the Culebra watershed. Indeed, bring on the Mexican Gray Wolf, the Mexican Spotted Owl, and other original inhabitants that are needed to make our homeland whole again.
   
There were some awkward moments, as always, and this time it came in the form of the misguided belief expressed by one of the panelists that corn is not very nutritious. Well, yes, nothing if eaten alone is very nutritious and reliance on a single crop is not going to sustain a people very long under the conditions of prosperity that we discussed and envisioned as an alternative to the dominant, money-fetish version.
   
But indigenous peoples, from Maya country in Central America to the desert Southwest, never just ate corn. That is a persisting nasty stereotype (the slash and burn monoculture corn milpas of imperial fantasies) and I couldn't let it pass without critical comment. The "three sisters" (corn, bean, and squash), especially when combined with a thousand wild edible and medicinal plants, fish, deer, elk, turkey, and other game, provided for a well-balanced and healthy diet. Indeed, according to the best available archaeological evidence, until the colonialist invasion and the coming of European disease like measles and smallpox, the average Mesoamerican lived a good ten years longer than the average European in 1519. We were not malnourished corn-eaters.
   
Aaron Abeyta shared a "Letter to Headwaters" that was a sobering reminder that we have a lot of work left to do before we can redefine prosperity. "We have never known prosperity in Antonito," he wrote, so how can we even begin to redefine it? I only partly agree with Aaron because I do think we have known prosperity in the Indo-Hispano part of the San Luis Valley: But this is the prosperity of conviviality, of the art and practice of dwelling in a place together through acts of sharing, cooperative labor, and mutual aid.
   
Every year I irrigate my row and field crops, usually in a solitary fashion. I may water the land alone but it is an activity based on the place-based knowledge of generations of farmers. Then the harvest comes and this is always the work of dozens of friends and neighbors.  This is my idea of prosperity: A bountiful harvest of local, slow, and deep foods produced by an entire community and friends from well across the Headwaters Bioregions.  Our prosperity is a bowl of hand-crafted, home-made chicos stew, kissed with the terrior or terruño of our land, and shared with friends and family. La comida.
   
So I close with a Twentieth Anniversary salute to Headwaters and best wishes to the new generation of dedicated place-lovers (topophiliacs) who have inherited the task of bringing the often curmudgenonly elders and the emerging generation of edge-thinkers together over the next two decades. Here is to Professors Brooke Moran and John Hausdoerffer, the new Headwaters crew that will continue this vital tradition and deep well of our intellectual prosperity.  Here is to Western's President, Jay Helman, surely one of the most visionary and progressive leaders of our Headwaters' institutions of higher learning. I look forward to having these three colleagues, and other Gunnison Valley friends, share in our conviviality next year when we restart the cycle of growing food from our nurturing lands.

La lucha por la sierra - Interjection

Elinor Ostrom Wins Nobel Prize in Economics  

El Rito, CO. Those of us who are concerned with the recovery and restoration of the "commons" as a matter of environmental justice were both surprised and delighted that our colleague, Professor Elinor Ostrom of the University of Indiana, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics yesterday. 

This is an historic occasion. The obvious fact most pundits are mentioning in their comments on this year's Prize is that Dr. Ostrom is the first woman in the history of the Nobel to win in the Economics category. Downplayed by mainstream media (MSM) reporting are details on why the Professor won the most coveted honor granted to economists, also formerly known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. 

I was thoroughly taken aback by the timing of this announcement since last week's blog on the "Tragedy of the Commons" was written without my having had any personal knowledge of the Nobel Prize deliberations. This was sheer serendipity and my blog was simply the result of how Ostrom's work figures prominently as an influence in my own work on "The Last Commons," La sierra de la Culebra.

I went directly to the source, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (a.k.a. Nobel Prize Committee), to see why they deemed Professor Ostrom an appropriate choice for this award. Here are several excerpts from their analysis of Ostrom that places her contributions in the larger context of a longstanding and quite controversial debate in academic, governmental, and corporate policy-making circles: "The tragedy of the commons." 

More than forty years ago, the biologist Garrett Hardin (1968) observed that the overexploitation of common pools was rapidly increasing worldwide and provided the problem with a catchy and relevant title: "The Tragedy of the Commons."

....In economics, two primary solutions to the common-pool problem have been suggested. The first is privatization...An alternative solution...is to let the central government own the resource and levy a tax extraction. This solution initially requires coercion, in the sense that original users are disenfranchised...

A third solution - previously discarded by most economists - is to retain the resource as a common property and let the users create their own system of governance. In her book Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (1990), Elinor Ostrom objects to the presumption that common property governance necessarily implies a "tragedy." After summarizing much of the available evidence on the management of common pools, she finds that users themselves envisage rules and enforcement mechanisms that enable them to sustain tolerable outcomes. By contrast, governmentally imposed restrictions are often counterproductive because central authorities lack knowledge about local conditions and have insufficient legitimacy. Indeed, Ostrom points out many cases in which central government intervention has created more chaos than order.

As I read this I was struck by the similarities this language and vantage point shares with the last two blog entries of my ongoing series on "La lucha por la sierra." The local community, as I noted last week, is concerned about being "disenfranchised" by the federalization of La sierra, particularly when and if conservatives retake the White House and Congress.

What is truly significant here is that it now becomes more difficult for opponents of Chicana/o and Native American livelihood rights to use the same old tired and washed-out ideological argument about the "Tragedy of the Commons."

In my next blog in this series, I will outline the norms, rules, and practices that have underpinned the historical practices of commons governance. These are based on a critical reading of Ostrom's magnum opus and my own three-decades of knowledge of Mexican land grant history, law, and ecology. I will also discuss how this applies directly to the case of La sierra commons in Colorado. In subsequent blogs, I will propose a variety of strategies and policies that would support justice, resilience, sustainability, and democracy. I hope to initiate a wider conversation for a radical re-thinking of the management of the "public domain" that examines the prospects for the recovery and restoration of the commons as a "new paradigm" for ecological democracy.

The democratic experiment - and that is all it can be - involves in my estimation not just the two or four year election cycle and our vote-casting among ever more homogeneous options. Instead, democracy involves sustained daily lived experience in the practice of local place-based self-governance. This is the underlying principle that informs Ostrom's work.

Like Elinor Ostrom, I am a passionate proponent of place-based participatory democracy. The embracing of the ideas (and economic theories) underlying the struggle for the recovery and restoration of the commons is perhaps the most profound democratic challenge of the 21st century. I will examine these theories, and the critics' rejoinders, in forthcoming blogs.

For further information on the Nobel Prize in Economics and Elinor Ostrom, please visit: The Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences.

La lucha por la sierra - Part II

Tragedy of the commons, or commoner's tragedy? 

Moderator's Note: As promised in the blog entry of August 30, the Environmental and Food Justice Blog continues to follow the unfolding story of the future of La sierra, the 80,000 acre commons restored to the heirs and successors of the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant (issued 1843) by a 2002 Colorado Supreme Court decision in Lobato v. Taylor. 

On August 28 during a visit to San Luis, Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar announced his intent to acquire, as new additions to the public lands, all the remaining private enclosures in the Sangre de Cristo Mountain Range in south central Colorado and north central New Mexico. This would include the "Cielo Vista Ranch" (formerly the Taylor Ranch) but to locals always known simply as "La sierra." 

This announcement has set off intense local discussions among community members and residents with a wide range of views converging on one common thread: The community fought too long and hard, sacrificed too much, and risked everything including families' acequia farms, in the struggle to restore historic use rights to the commons granted by the 1863 Beaubien deed and confirmed by the 2002 Supreme Court decision. Thus, many locals are skeptical that these restored rights to the Last Commons will be protected if the land becomes part of the federal public domain since it would be subject to the vagaries of partisan politics.

In today's entry, I am using the title, "Tragedy of the commons, or the commoner's tragedy," in deference to Michael Goldman who presented a paper with this title at the 1990 meetings of the International Association for the Study of Common Property (IASCP), now the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC). Please visit the IASC homepage at: International Association for the Study of the Commons.

An excellent bibliography of literature on the "tragedy of the commons," compiled by Charlotte Hess, is available at Hess Bibliography on the Tragedy of the Commons.


El Rito, CO. One of the arguments often made against the land rights claims of Chicana/o communities of the Rio Arriba is that we lack the necessary conservation ethics and scientific knowledge to be responsible "stewards" of our bioregional ecosystems and watersheds. I see this as an ideological expression of environmental racism or at best a racialized view of environmental history that serves to exclude "marked" peoples from exercising self-determination.

Indeed, some opponents of Chicana/o land grant claims, many of them self-professing "environmentalists," have for decades invoked the idea that we are "ignorant ecological thugs," and perfectly illustrate the "tragedy of the commons." Tom Wolf even wrote a book on Colorado's Sangre de Cristo Mountains (1995, University of Colorado Press) in which he argues that in San Luis, Colorado, "Hispano cattlemen are more interested in poaching wildlife than minding their cattle."

I witnessed this very same argument in 1993 during the first of the many meetings of Governor Roy Romer's Sangre de Cristo Land Grant Commission. One of the members of the Commission, at the time the Director of the Colorado Division of Wildlife and a Chicano, argued that local people hoping to buy La Sierra to restore it to the community were unrealistic since it would result in the "tragedy of the commons."

What exactly is this tragedy of the commons? Why is it seemingly invoked anytime we seek to restore historic land rights on Spanish and Mexican land grants (mercedes) that have been unethically or illegally enclosed for conversion to the public domain (national forests, parks, wildlife areas, and range lands) or private mountain range estates for noveau land barons? 

In this somewhat more extended entry, I examine the theory of the "tragedy of the commons" and then argue that what we really have historically is a "tragedy of the commoner" displaced from the direct source of her right livelihood, cut-off from the material and spiritual basis of her lived experience, and prohibited from exercising her autonomy in the form of participation in the local governance of the homeland common. 

Tragedy of the commons... 

In 1966, Garrett Hardin published an essay in which he argued for a modern type of eugenics: He proposed the control of the breeding of "genetically-defective" people, which he viewed as crucial to the future of an Earth threatened by overpopulating hoards of little dark-skinned people. This was like De Gobineau meet Malthus. 

This is largely overlooked since the population biologist and "distinguished" professor is also credited with developing one of the most influential theories ever proposed in the history of American environmental thought: The tragedy of the commons. 

Hardin proposed this theory in a widely cited article published in 1968 in the journal Science. The population biologist basically proposed that natural resources were best managed under a regime of private property rights and under the guidance of keen scientific experts. See: Hardin, "The tragedy of the commons." 

The real tragedy as we will see is that Hardin mischaracterized the "commons." He defined it as a regime in which no one owns the resource and therefore the resource belongs to anyone who can extract and exploit it first. This, he argued, leads everyone to try to maximize their "take" of the resource since everyone else will also be rushing in to "get his first." This leads to the tragedy of the commons, or the over-exploitation and degradation of the environment.

For Hardin, the tragedy of the commons derived from the fact that selfish interest is a universal quality of the human being and this inevitably leads to environmental degradation because too many people competing for limited resources will eventually exceed the "carrying capacity" of the land. This led to the (in)famous tenet: "That which is owned by no one, will be abused by all." The actual quote is: "Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all." 

To illustrate this point, Hardin used a hypothetical scenario from medieval Europe and imagined a group of herders sharing a common parcel of land (the commons) on which they are entitled to graze their cows. In his example, all the herders have an innate desire to maximize the number of cows they graze on the commons in order to realize the most individual profit. 

This leads to a situation in which every herder overstocks the grazing range in order to realize maximum individual benefit, even if this means the resource will be depleted for all users. The inevitable result is uncontrolled consumption of the resource so that the herders come to exceed the carrying capacity of land and the commons is damaged. 

For Hardin, this tragedy was the result of individuals' greedy self-interested behaviors. There is no room in Hardin's world for altruism or cooperative and communal alternatives to individualistic utilitarian values, a point I will return to shortly.

It seems odd then that Hardin would choose to focus on individual self-interest as the solution to this tragedy. Hardin was a proponent of enlightened private property ownership of "natural resources." He believed that private owners would be more responsible stewards of the environment because it was in their own selfish long-term interests to protect the resources on their land so they could always profit from it. This is one of the original principles underlying the mainstream ideology of "sustainable development," but that is a story best left for another blog.

However, Hardin was not describing the commons as it has been known to and understood by historians, anthropologists, and other social scientists. Indeed as Ian Angus notes: "...Hardin didn't describe the behavior of herdsmen in pre-capitalist farming communities - he described the behavior of capitalists operating in a capitalist economy.  The universal human nature that he claimed would always destroy common resources is actually the profit-driven "grow or die" behavior of corporations." See: Ian Angus, "The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons"

According to Hardin, these selfish but enlightened individuals would need help from scientific experts, presumably good old white guys like Dr. Hardin, who could provide guidance and direction on the proper management of the environment and on the basis of pure scientific objectivity (another myth).

I will note here that the author and environmentalist, Mr. Tom Wolf, was a proponent of this view when he championed Zachary Taylor's enclosure of La sierra commons as the best way to guarantee that the private owner in his infinite wisdom would use heroic "industrial forestry" experts and adopt the correct management policies to protect the mountain range from ecological destruction by Hispanic (sic) pasture poachers. 

Of course, the logging destruction unleashed by Mr. Taylor on la Sierra, between 1995 and 1999, involved a "world-class case of deforestation" (as per the views of the conservation biology community). This was conveniently obscured in Mr. Wolf's neoliberal charm tale of a heroic private owner battling the pasture and wildlife poaching commoners with the help of scientific and law enforcement experts from the state and private sector.

But back to Hardin. To this very day, his slight little journal article, and the theory it tragically propounded, is taught as the source of one of the most fundamental tenets of environmental science studies. It is almost held like a biblical belief in today's modern university because of the extent to which the theory is uncritically assumed to be truthful everywhere and for all time. 

There are no cultural or historical exceptions to the economic rationality underlying the theory and its assumption of selfish individualism as an immutable quality of human nature. Despite these obvious flaws, the theory has continued to shape the intellectual outlook of the past three generations of environmental scientists and students of environmental or ecosystem management.

Ian Angus, quoting anthropologist G. N. Appell, notes that Hardin's article "has been embraced as a sacred text by scholars and professionals in the practice of designing futures for others and imposing their own economic and environmental rationality on other social systems of which they have incomplete understanding and knowledge."

Angus further states, "Like most sacred texts, 'The Tragedy of the Commons,' is more often cited than read...[and] although its title sounds authoritative and scientific, it fell far short of science."  

...or, tragedy of the commoner? 

The real tragedy then is not that the commons is destroyed because of some universal and innate quality of human nature - selfishness. Instead the tragedy is that a culturally-specific (qua Eurocentric) individualistic ideology is imposed on all other cultures and places as the measure of their own true being. 

Of course, this presumption of universal selfishness denies the existence of non-European cultures with their own autonomous and often place-based economic rationalities that might better fit to sustaining community-based and democratically self-managed "watershed commonwealths," a term I have long preferred to use in reference to the commons appropriate to our Southern Rocky Mountain biome. 

In other words, not all cultures are wed to the reductionist behavioral economics of the individualistic greedy capitalist. 

Historians have demonstrated that the destruction of the commons resulted not from the actions of selfish and ignorant medieval commoners overusing everything that was "not owned" by any one. It came in the exploitative aftermath of the violent enclosure described by Marx as the "primitive accumulation" - which is to say, in the form of privatization or forcible conversion to the public domain wherein corporations could enjoy rights to log, mine, and otherwise exploit the resources of indigenous homeland commons.

The practice of "defining futures for others" is part of the everyday paradigm in the exercise of power by both private corporations and governments. In the context of governmental agencies or private owners that seek to define our collective "environmental futures," the myth of the tragedy of the commons needs to be challenged. It has been, actually, almost as long as the theory has been around. But the critique usually falls on deaf scientists' and bureaucrats' ears.

Decades of research by social and natural scientists, including anthropologists, paints a radically different picture of the commons. In short: the commons is the oldest form of land tenure on the planet. It is also the most "successful" form to organize "property relations" across various measures: 

(1) Social justice. It is the most likely to promote social justice and equity since it is based on local self-governance under indigenous norms that require participatory democracy in support of fulfilling needs of self-reliance and simplicity of wants. 

(2) Sustainability. It is the most ecologically sustainable since commons rules monitor and regulate use rights to prevent abuse, self-enrichment, and over-exploitation that violate the elegant principles of self-reliance and voluntary simplicity. 

(3) Resilience. It is the most environmentally and socially resilient form of ecosystem management since "nature" is not treated as a wilderness to be kept separate from humans nor as a "natural resource" to be exploited as a commodity; the environment is our home, it is an inhabited ecosystem that is the source of direct livelihoods guided by "original instructions" derived from multi-generational ecological knowledge of place. 

(4) Democracy. It is also the most democratic and the least violent form for the social organization of "livelihood" rights since compliance with the norms of commons use is based on face-to-face ethical "shaming" and expulsion is restricted to repeat violators of local community rules that are defined through participatory everyday practices.

All this suggests that the commons is "owned" by local place-based and multi-generational communities which collectively control use rights and administer sanctions to prevent abuse, self-enrichment, or other selfish activities deemed contrary to community norms that are primarily oriented toward the protection and conservation of the commons for future generations. 

In the Rio Arriba we have a folk tale that teaches this conservation ethic: "The Forest Spirit drove the man out of the forest for cutting too many trees as he was greedy and without shame." The power of verguenza is our "deep" ecology.

Studies of historical (instead of Hardin's imagined or fantastical) commons demonstrate that the typical arrangement involves a local community that does indeed manage the commons to prevent the tragedy of environmental degradation and exhaustion of the sources of direct livelihood. Indeed, one of the oldest commons in the European world is that of Tyrolean peasant villagers who have managed communal grazing lands for more than 900 years without impoverishing the land or depleting the natural resources. The state of biodiversity in their commons is superior to that of private enclosures or public lands.

The management of the commons is usually regulated by and restricted to the members of the local, place-based community. The historical commons is "owned" by the local community, so Hardin's assumption that the commons is owned by no one is mistaken.

So, why does this myth persist? Why is the tragedy of the commons repeatedly conjured, despite evidence to the contrary? The reasons are complex and do not require a resort to conspiracy theories. The myth persists because it serves the interests of those in government who wield public policy-making powers and are themselves often servants of corporate rather than public interests. This is partly an ideological problem.

Ideologies can be understood to constitute beliefs that are so generalized and taken for granted that they are assumed to be true and will be seen to remain true even in the face of evidence suggesting otherwise. This persistence of prejudice against the commons is like a case of the "Birthers" applied to the philosophy of property rights.


Despite the ideological nature of Hardin's tragically misconstrued theory of the commons, it remains the basis for denying the legitimacy and wisdom underlying Chicana/o and other Native American struggles to restore "traditional resource rights." The only thing I can call the invocation of the tragedy of the commons is that it is another misguided case of "neoliberal environmental ethics."

But the myth serves to reinforce a dominant institutional rationality in which corporate and governmental sectors privilege two forms of property: either private property or the public domain. In this manner, the erasure of common property as a Constitutionally-protected category accompanies the erasure of indigenous peoples displaced from their homeland commons to make way for either private property or the public domain.

It seems somewhat difficult to time this critique to the moment when the whole Nation seems fixated on celebrating Ken Burn's current documentary on the National Parks as the "best idea we ever had" as Americans. Perhaps it is, but it was also an idea that came on the heels of innumerable and violent land thefts unleashed by Manifest Destiny against the Native commonwealths.

The continued expropriation of Native land and water rights remains part of what our elected political leaders have defined as a public trust. And therein lies the real tragedy since the public domain technically belongs to all 350 million of us, including corporations and individuals.

Those numbers are a better recipe for a tragedy of the commons public domain than a few dozen Chicana/o herders. Regardless, the dangers of federalization of the commons are already illustrated by the sad state of our existing national parks and forests, which have suffered from decades of neoliberal neglect to follow on a hundred misguided years of "wilderness" preservation and "natural resource" exploitation.

The recovery and resurgence of the "historical" commons is a global phenomenon and is unfolding in the heart of the Culebra watershed, La sierra. The recovery of the commons defies us to question the wisdom of limiting human-environment relations to two mostly ethnocentric possibilities: Either the land is your private property to exploit as you so desire; Or, it is owned by the government which is best suited to manage it for the maximum benefit of society, however vaguely and tumultuously that might be defined in a partisan world where public lands are "wilderness" one moment and "exploitable natural resource" the next.

The recovery of the commons represents a third, even somewhat flawed, pathway to ecological democracy and the resilience of place in a globalized world. But it is an alternative not dissimilar to social movements for slow food, slow money, and workplace democracy (community-owned and democratically self-managed cooperatives and enterprises).

In the next blog, we will examine the actual rules for the granting, monitoring, and enforcing of common use rights. We will also examine how the local self-management of the commons has been challenged and transformed by the advent of global capitalism. This has often resulted in "defections" from the environmental ethics and use norms of the watershed commonwealth as local people sometimes become the very "free riders" that Hardin warned about in his misguided essay on the tragedy of the commons.


The tragedy lies in the displacement of the commoner who was torn from the place-bound fabric of her existence. Until we understand this meaning of the commons, it will be difficult to bridge the divide that separates proponents of the public domain from defenders of the watershed commonwealth.

Food fights: Hunger in a robust local food system

San Acacio Bottomlands, CO.  As the harvest winds down, the smell of adobe ovens filled with chicos is now but a memory. Every time I walk by the spent hornos, I can still catch that smoky aroma of the chicos roast. Embers and corn cobs lay scattered about the grounds, a reminder of the two frantic weeks of horneadas.  

More than thirty people participated in the seven oven roasts we did this year as a collaboration of the Corpus A. Gallegos Ranches and Rancho Dos Acequias. It is good to be part of a community that maintains deep-rooted agricultural practices and foodways as the soil medium for renewing our cultural and familial ties. 

Certainly, this time of year is one of great bounty as we brought not just heirloom corn to harvest but also bolita beans, calabacitas, habas, cilantro, beets, parsnips, turnips, potatoes, apples, pears, plums, chokecherry, elderberry, and numerous other row, orchard, and field crops.

I appreciate the deep wisdom guiding this unique agroecosystem and its food-related practices. The roasting of chicos illustrates this wisdom. The original practice of adobe oven roasts of corn began with the Pueblo first nations and has roots even further deep into the time of the Pueblos' ancestors, the so-called Anasazi. 

The roasting of corn was an adaptation to the long harsh winters that made it impossible to farm for much more than four months out of the year. Lacking refrigeration or elecricity, the Hispanos that came to inhabit the Rio Arriba bioregion adopted the extant Pueblo practice of roasting corn for the vital winter stores. This was food sovereignty at its very best.

Our community still has a robust local food system based on the acequia agroecosystem and a huge capacity for the production of traditional food and forage crops that have been adapted to the environment over dozens of generations.

Yet, despite the persistence of the capacity to be completely food self-reliant, there is much hunger and malnutrition in the acequia communities of the Rio Arriba. This hunger, like other parts of the U.S., remains largely hidden. 

Research on hunger in Costilla County, like other areas of the Rio Arriba, is scarce and social scientists have not yet shown much interest in documenting hunger and malnutrition beyond the "remote social science" surveys that are routinely done by concerned federal and state agencies.

Judging from the county level statistics available on-line at the State of Colorado websites, and extrapolating from what we know about rural hunger in other parts of the country, it seems likely that fully 30 to 40 percent of the full-time residents of Costilla County, are receiving some sort of food assistance including food stamps, "WIC," meals for the elderly, and emergency relief on a routine basis. 

So, could one surmise that the safety net has worked and that there is no hunger in Costilla County? Such a conclusion would be inaccurate and misleading. There is not only hunger but extensive malnutrition in our communities as indicated by a childhood obesity rate that remains one of the highest in Colorado.

Just because people have access to food does not mean that they have access to the right kinds of food or that they are no longer hungry or malnourished. Indeed, one of the most devastating consequences of the rise of convenience shopping, fast food, and supermarkets is that people, even when capable, have stopped producing their own heritage cuisines.

Why should this matter? Is access to food not the key to resolving hunger and malnutrition? Nutritional anthropologists and other social scientists have long documented a strong correlation between the health of a given population and the persistence of traditional diets and food practices. Distinct human groups co-evolved with their environments; we are not just skin-bags filled with immutable genetic destinies. You know the saying: We are what we eat.


Indeed, the co-evolution of human health is profoundly affected by the nutrients, vitamins, minerals, and anti-oxidants that we derive from our own place-based, multi-generational cuisine and food practices. It is the breakdown of heritage cuisines that is as much as anything else to blame for the continued deterioration of our health status in rural Hispana/o communities. That, and the closing of our health clinics.

How do we restore a more healthful and culturally-appropriate heritage cuisine? Is it enough to denounce fast food when fresh, natural, and culturally appropriate foods may not be available or accessible? How can we become healthy when our grandmothers' recipes are gathering dust in an attic somewhere above the kitchen table with a KFC spread for tonight's rushed family dinner?

While hunger and malnutrition are mostly aspects of the structural violence unleashed by global capitalist commodity-chains that are the dominant food system, we are also responsible at the local level for regenerating and sustaining our own autonomous local food systems.

I did an informal survey the past four months (June through September) to begin to get an idea of how much local food is actually consumed. When the first alberjon (summer peas) show up in May, they do indeed become the talk of the town. I visited with a dozen random families and all of them were enjoying the fresh peas that they purchased from local growers like Adelmo Kaber. 

So, at least for peas and other summer vegetables, there does seem to be a direct link from field to a good portion of local tables.

However, the same cannot be said for the crops that are vital for the winter stores. Despite the rage for chicos indicated by the high demand from grocers spread from Denver to Albuquerque, local people are not generally taking advantage of local access to this vital crop that figures so prominently in the winter seasonal cuisine.

During this informal survey, one thing I noticed is that some families have a sharp generational divide over the matter of food and diet choices: The elders (grandparents and parents) still want to eat root-cellar tubers like beets and turnips, but the youth hold sway and get the family instead to go out shopping for fast food or processed foods from the supermarket. Our youth have lost their sense of appreciation for the local place-based heritage cuisine.

In this regard, we have a lot of work left to do in the acequia communities of the Rio Arriba. While we produce enough food to be self-reliant, we are not engaging in the other extended practices that allow the local people to eat locally and seasonally. In the middle of winter, instead of heading to the root-cellar to grab some beets and parsnips to go along with that delicious chicos stew, our families head to Walmart in Alamosa to purchase cheap meats and processed foods or to grab a burger and fries at McDonalds.

The community needs to extend its heritage agroecosystem into a more elaborate local food system that reaches every family in the watershed. More root cellars; more adobe ovens; more canning and preserving practices; all these and other practices could become part of a strategy to transform our fast food nation addictions into a local place-based heritage cuisine that is in balance with our bodies and the seasonal changes brought by nature.

Acequia farming families can lead us back toward the healthy heritage cuisines that located us as a place-based people who ate with the seasons and recognized the limits imposed on us by the forces of nature, the environmental conditions of our existence. Getting our youth to eat chicos stew for a week with home-grown beets and turnips this winter might just be a place to start.

The Challenges of Acequia Farming - Part III

Un anciano comparte su sabiduría/An acequia elder shares his wisdom

Adelmo Kaber

Moderator's Note: Today's contribution is by our oldest acequia farmer in San Luis, Adelmo Kaber (83 years old). The selection is excerpted from a chapter in a forthcoming book, Voces de agua y tierra: Cultural and Environmental Histories of Acequia Farms in the Rio Arriba (forthcoming from University of  Arizona Press).

Adelmo Kaber

Parciante, Acequia del Cerro

Adelmo Kaber cultivates the corn field at Rancho Dos Acequias

My mother, Romaldita, will be 95 years old on August 13.  Many years ago, she gave me some seed for calabasita (Mexican squash).  I planted the seed again this year like I have since I was a boy.  This seed has been in my family for at least one hundred years because my grandmother gave the seed to my mother when she was a child.  The bolita bean and the corn seed we plant are also very old.  These seeds have been in the family for many generations.

You cannot buy this kind of calabasa anywhere because they call it calabasa mexicana.  The sweet peas, I buy those from Rocky Mountain [Seed Company] there in Denver.  Joe [Gallegos] has given me seed for corn but it is the same as me and we pass it back and forth. But these old seeds, you just can’t find those varieties in stores or with the suppliers.

The alfalfa seed, I buy that from Denver also.  And the name of the alfalfa is Colorado Comet.  That’s the way they call it.  The potato seed, I used to buy that in Center at a warehouse there.

I have been farming the place since the time when I lived in Pueblo and I would come to San Luis to help my Dad, Charlie K. Lucero.  He was adopted by Ramon Lucero.  His real last name was Kaber, a German name.  But twenty-two years ago my Dad passed away and that is when I started to run the ranchito by myself.  My Dad used to run a lot of cattle.  He had sixty head of cattle.  He also had a lot of sheep, about two hundred.  My Dad was about eighty-five years old when he died.

I was ten or twelve years old when my Dad first showed me how to irrigate with the acequia.  In the old times, we used to plow and cultivate with horses.  There were no tractors back then.  So I learned how to work with the horse team at an early age.

I remember that we used to cut the alfalfa with the horse teams.  There were no bailers then so we had to bring the alfalfa and hay in on wagons with wooden wheels.  We called these huarañas (hay wagons) and my Dad built them.  We had to go for fire wood on horses too.  On the wagons.

The first time I went to get fire wood I was about fifteen years old.  I used to go with my Dad.  We used to bring the wood from la Mesa, Wild Horse Mesa now.  Everybody could go there and get it.  And from Taylor Ranch too.  But that was before it was the Taylor Ranch.  You could do it any time up there. No one would stop you or nothing.  You didn’t have to ask for permission or nothing.  But not anymore.

I get about two and a half [cubic] feet [per second] of water.  That is all the water I can get.  To water the whole thing I have planted it takes me about eight to ten days.  The alfalfa has to be watered about four times a year.  The beans, I have to water that, and the corn, at least four times a year.  The sweet peas has to be watered more.  Five times a year.  That depends if we get a lot of rain.  It has been raining a lot now, so this year the is the last time I have to water the alfalfa.

We have had different ditchriders.  We have to pay for the assessment and the ditchrider.  The assessment is to keep some money in case we need to do some work on the main ditch.  Like this year, they had to clean the main ditch.

In the old times, they put a certain day, and everybody had to go and get the willow out of the ditch, and the branches.  They had to get a drag line this year.  It was getting to narrow and we had to widen the ditch.  And we get the water from the Culebra.  This is the Cerro Ditch.

I was the ditch rider one year, about four years ago.  They [the irrigators] call you and ask you when they can have the water.  You have to work hard to make sure everyone gets water on time.They irrigate about two thousand acres, but over there where it starts [the ditch] holds about thirty feet.  There are about sixty people that are farming now on the ditch.  A lot of people are just wasting land any more.  They don’t irrigate.  But back then, everybody got along.  You have to ask permission before you irrigate.

NOTE: This essay was originally written in 1998.

The Challenges of Acequia Farming - Part II

Cambiando aqua:  Water, landscape, and place

Cambiando agua at Rancho Dos Acequias. Photos by Elaine H. Peña

Devon G. Peña
Parciante, Acequia de la Gente de San Luis

San Acacio Bottomlands, CO.  In 1989, I received my first lesson in acequia flood-irrigated practice. My lesson was under the expert guidance of the late Corpus Aquino Gallegos. He was irrigating native hay meadows for a friend in the San Pablo bottomlands and invited me along. It was the first of the many five o'clock-in-the-morning chores I have learned to love over the years. Corpus called this activity, "Cambiando agua," or "Changing water."

Flood irrigation, he explained, involves patience, diligence, and above all your willingness to "listen to the water." Corpus waved his hand at the water gently burbling through the ditch: "The water will tell you what to do, if you listen."

Over the past two decades, I have listened to the movement of acequia water as it percolates and saturates the soils at Rancho Dos Acequias. I have learned much about flood irrigating but this year presented a unique set of challenges.

My sister, Tania, and I acquired 200-acres of San Acacio bottomlands that are home to Rancho Dos Acequias and The Acequia Institute in 2007. We inherited a fairly large mechanical center-pivot sprinkler run by diesel in the middle of the north half of the ranch. The use of center-pivot circles is an anomaly in the acequiahood where gravity-driven flood irrigation across the riparian long lots is the local art of preference for the acequia farmers.

The mechanical centipede on wheels.

We used the sprinkler that first year (2007) but the results were less than satisfactory and the use of the mechanical sprinkler seemed contrary to our expectations for a more sustainable and fossil fuel-free approach to farming in the Rio Culebra.

The sprinkler delivered an adequate amount of water to the hay fields but it had two serious drawbacks: First, it cost a good sum of money to run the sprinkler and our annual fuel cost that year exceeded $800 for the diesel engine that runs the apparatus. Second, I noticed that the sprinkler method does not flood the meadow very well and so one result is a profusion of prairie dogs and their endless tunnels, which of course undermine soil quality and reduce the productivity of the hay fields from the effects of their tunneling and mound-building.

Prairie dog tunnels and mounds.

In 2008, we decided to dismantle the sprinkler and reintroduce acequia flood irrigation methods to this middle meadow. This is a bigger task than one might surmise because this meadow has not seen this method applied since the mid-1970s and the reach from the San Luis Peoples Acequia Madre to this middle section is a long stretch.

With the "mechanical centipede" disassembled, we now faced the challenge of irrigating the former circle without the benefit of acequias. In 2008, we ran water through the acequias that irrigate the upper (north-end) fields but this proved inefficient and ineffective as little water reached the lower half of the circle. Without ditches reaching to the middle circle, the water could not be spread evenly across the landscape. Our hay production went down that year by about 40-50 percent in the circle.

Finally, about two weeks ago I worked with Corpus's son, my neighbor, Joe C. Gallegos, to cut three new ditches, two linderos (pathway acequias, so-called because these follow a perpendicular line away from the acequia madre) and one espinazo (spinal acequia, because it delivers water to either side of the ditch). We constructed the three ditches to more easily and efficiently reach both the upper and lower halves of the circle hay field.


I have been flood-irrigating the circle with these new acequias for the past five days and I have learned some fascinating details about the "lay of the land" and my own "sense of place." I have been "listening to the water."


Only now I realize that listening to the water, as Corpus long ago instructed me, is much more than a "technical" skill. It is almost like a principle right out of "Buddhist economics," the kind of principle that emerges only through sustained lived experience in a place.


This is not something one can learn in a classroom, unless of course one thinks of the irrigated landscape as a place of learning. Only a lengthy artisan-styled apprenticeship can produce an irrigator with such compassion for the land, that she or he cannot help but be filled with "mindfulness."


Since the circle is populated with a prairie dog "town," the flooding of the area is forcing the critters to abandon the meadow for the drier margins along the fence lines.


Everytime the flood reaches a mound with its hidden maze of tunnels, the water starts singing. "Blurp, blurp, bloop, bloop," it goes.  The water slowly enters the tunnel entrance and then pops up like a spring, un ojito de agua, issuing forth from under the land a bit down stream from the entrance. I know Corpus is watching me, smiling and nodding his head as he too listens to the water.

La lucha por La Sierra - Part I

Secretary of Interior Salazar Plans Massive Buy-Out of Privatized Sangre de Cristo Mountain Range

El Rito, Co. Ken Salazar, Obama's Secretary of the Interior and a native son of the San Luis Valley, visited San Luis this past Friday (August 28). The official purpose of the visit was so the Secretary could participate in the dedication of the newly designated "Sangre de Cristo National Heritage Area" (SCNHA).

While in San Luis, Secretary Salazar also made a bombshell announcement: The federal government plans to purchase all of the rather large privately-held high mountain estates that have long defined "legal ownership" of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in southcentral Colorado and northcentral New Mexico.

Culebra Peak (14,047 ft.) with its signature snowfield known as "El Pajarito," the little bird.

The lands in question are currently owned by wealthy elites. These include the former Forbes Trinchera Ranch now owned by Louis Bacon and consisting of close to 180,000 acres; the Cielo Vista Ranch (former Taylor Ranch) owned by Bobby and Dottie Hill (77,000 acres); and Ted Turner's Vermejo Park Ranch which is approximately 588,000 acres or an astounding 920 square miles.

These landscapes include two fourteen thousand foot high peaks (Mount Blanca and Culebra Peak) and more than a dozen peaks in excess of thirteen thousand feet in elevation. This central section of the Sangres is also absolutely critical to the future of biodiversity conservation and watershed integrity in the Southern Rocky Mountain biome. How we as a society got into the business of allowing the rich and powerful to gain private ownership of entire mountain ranges is a matter left for a future blog entry.

Snow winds on Culebra Peak.

At more than one million acres, this purchase (probably involving a transaction of close to a billion dollars) would constitute one of the largest acquisitions for the public domain in the Southwest in more than 100 years.

However, there are older, much more deeply rooted, claims to these mountain lands. All of these lands include the skyline mountain watersheds that are also the historic common lands of the original settlers of the Sangre de Cristo and Maxwell Mexican-era land grants.

To those who claim that Mexicans (and now Chicana/os) have no more right to these lands than Anglos because these originally belonged to Native Americans, I can state unequivocally that Chicana/os are "Native Americans," and indeed the first Mexican-origin peoples that farmed New Mexico were Tarascan and Tlaxcaltec native peoples. Intermarriage between these and the original Pueblo and Plains peoples forged a native identity and place-based character in the emergence of the Chicana/os. It is significant that the Ute Nation endorsed the land rights struggle of the people of the Culebra River land grant communities.

"La Sierra" or "Mountain Tract" is the subject of the 2002 Colorado Supreme Court ruling in Lobato v. Taylor that partially restored the historic use rights, sans subsistence hunting and fishing, for some 500 families of heraderos (heirs) and successors with a stake in those use rights to the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant commons (a.k.a. Cielo Vista Ranch).

The Last Commons?

Over the past twenty years or so, I have interviewed dozens of participants in the original Rael v. Taylor and the successor Lobato v. Taylor land rights lawsuits decided in favor of the plaintiffs in 2002. These interviews are part of a long-term and in-depth ethnographic and historical study for a forthcoming book I am preparing, The Last Commons: Endangered Landscapes and Disappearing People in the Politics of Place (University of Arizona Press, 2010).

La Sierra or "Mountain Tract," the middle section of the million-acre Sangre de Cristo Land Grant, granted in 1844 and permanently settled in 1851, was the last of the Spanish and Mexican-era land grants to be issued and settled. It was also the last land grant commons to be enclosed in 1960, much later than the land grants in New Mexico that suffered unethical partitioning and enclosure by the end of the 19th century under the onslaught of Anglo land speculators, corrupt court officials, lawyers, and a federal government eager to add holdings to the national forests and other public lands. This is why I call La Sierra the "Last Commons."

It is also the first Mexican land grant commons to be restored as a community resource for the local farming families as a result of the aforementioned and historic Colorado Supreme Court decision in Lobato v. Taylor. This was an unprecedented legal decision that restored historic use rights to a commons that is still under private ownership. This has never happened before and could have a profound impact on pending claims involving more than 120 such common lands in New Mexico alone.

Every family involved in the land rights case sacrificed a lot over the more than 30 years of litigation. Some even had Zachary Taylor place liens on their historic acequia family farms to guarantee payment of attorney and legal fees before the 2002 ruling reversed the lower court. They risked everything including the possibility of losing their ancestral farms to get their day in court and find justice.

Heir and Successor Farm Families Concerned about 'Federalization' of la Sierra

Obviously, these same families are now concerned that their life-long sacrifices and cherished traditional resource rights will once again be trampled under the proposed "federalization" of La Sierra Commons.

Some of these families fear that even if the Obama Administration and Secretary Salazar make a deal that includes respect for and security of these historic use rights, the political reality is that when and in the event that Republican conservatives retake the Presidency and Congress those rights will likely be challenged and undermined. It has happened before and some pledge to engage in direct resistance to prevent a public domain enclosure that fails to secure and respect the historic use rights in perpetuity.

Others fear that the conversion of La Sierra to the public domain will close off the dream shared by the majority of the heirs to directly purchase the lands through a community land trust. This too has a precedent in the form of the Rio Costilla Cooperative Livestock Association (RCCLA) that wisely gained ownership control of a significant chunk of a southern portion of the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant in New Mexico.

In Colorado, such an effort begun in 1992 was sadly interrupted and ended when then-Governor Romer signed an Executive Order creating the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant Commission in 1993 in an unsuccessful effort to secure a local community-state partnership acquisition of the land from Zachary Taylor, Jr.

Yet others object that the land was stolen and should be returned to its rightful heirs, the acequia farming communities that rely on the mountain as their watershed and for their livelihoods.

Some heirs point out, rightly so in my view as an environmental historian, that the experience of Chicana/o people with federal ownership of these lost land grants in New Mexico has been anything but positive. They point to the bitter and tragic experiences of the acequia/land grant communities in the Vallecitos Sustained Yield Unit (Kit Carson National Forest) who saw their old-growth Ponderosa forests destroyed by outside corporations only to be harassed by the Johnny-come-lately environmentalists that tried to shut down the traditional resource rights these communities had fought for over more than six generations.

We should not forget: Reís Lopéz Tijerina staged the Tierra Amarilla Courthouse Raid because Chicana/o civil rights have seldom been respected and la floresta (USFS) has seldom acted to follow the law or its own regulations to invest in stabilizing traditional rural, cash-poor, and resource-dependent communities that often are the best "stewards" or caretakers of the land.

The Environmental and Food Justice Blog will follow this unfolding story very closely. In our next entry, I will examine the issue of the so-called "tragedy of the commons," and argue that what we really have experienced historically is a "tragedy of the commoner" displaced from her lifeblood and sustenance. We will explore the history of Chicana/o land grant community relations and conflicts with federal public land managers and introduce readers to the growing body of evidence from anthropologists and conservation biologists that place-based commonwealth management by local communities is the most enduring, sustainable, and just form of inhabitation or "environmental management." There are proven and viable options to privatization or public ownership of our landscapes.

Ultimately, we belong to the land, not the other way around. We would do well to listen to those voices of place-based people who understand La Sierra is there to sustain life and not to become a commodity for the rich and powerful or an uninhabited wilderness kept separate from humans. La Sierra is an "inhabited wilderness," and as such would best be protected by those who directly depend on the watershed forests for their right livelihoods.

Genetically-engineering our way out of the climate crisis?

El Rito, CO. While re-reading the book, Global Warming: The Complete Briefing (3rd edition) by John Houghton, I came across a passage that is disturbing not just for its display of underlying arrogance but its naive belief in the possibility of technical fixes to problems of such great complexity as to demand a bit more modesty on the part of humans.

Houghton believes we can use genetic engineering technologies to adapt our agriculture and food systems to climate change. Discussing the impacts of dramatic climate change on agriculture and the food supply, Houghton states: "With the detailed knowledge of the conditions required by different species and the expertise in breeding techniques and genetic manipulation available today, there should be little difficulty in matching crops to new climatic conditions over large parts of the world. At least, that is the case for crops that mature over a year or two." (pg.165 par.2)

I am not a technophobe, but we need to acknowledge that this display of arrogance and lack of humilty before the complexity of natural ecosystems is irresponsible. Admittedly, all agriculture is based on the genetic modification of wild plants that are transformed into domesticated cultvars. Humans have been genetially-modifying wild plants for a long time to make them into more palatable or storeable foodstuffs .

This belief in the technical fix has been around at least as long as scientists have been available to consult for the highest bidder (often the state) and play the role of "servants of power." You have a new technology that can make someone money? Hmmmm. Okay, so you probably need a scientific expert to say it is safe and sound and maybe even "sustainable." Hire your own expert and you can have your excuse to unleash your experiment on nature and the human community.

The sad truth is that we do not know much about the long term and "stochastic" (unpredictable) effects of genetically-engineered crops on the environment, other plants, or human health.

To demystify this problem, we might do well to understand that genetically-engineered organisms (or GEOs) are not the same as genetically-modified organisms (or GMOs). GMOs have been around since the origin of agriculture. Every cultigen (a domesticated food crop) is a genetically modified wild plant. Every domesticated plant and its thousands of alleles (horticultural varieties) are the result of human modification of the plant genome. This has been accomplished through thousands of years of careful selection and cross-breeding, processes that already occur within nature itself.

GEOs are different from GMOs because they involve unique technological processes that DO NOT occur in nature:

1. The use of transgenes: Transgenes are genes or genetic sequences that have been cut from their location in the genome of one species and relocated (combined) in the genome of another completely unrelated organism. This means we are recombining plant genomes with fragments of bacteria, virus, animal, and even human genetic materials. Biotechnology allows humans to "play God" and cross the boundaries of phylla with technical impunity. GMOs might cross species boundaries but they cannot cross boundaries of phylla. To genetically-engineer across phylla, the biotechnologist must work at the molecular level, or else humans cannot modify the genome through recombinant technologies.

2. Predictive ecology: or the lack of it, really. Since we are crossing the boundaries of phyllum, we have little in the way of empirical scientific knowledge of the implications of horizontal gene transfer, especially on evolutionary biology and environmental health issues for humans and non-humans. This is not an issue with conventionally modified organisms like domesticated cultivars developed through centuries of seed saving and selection.

Capitalists like to use the environmental crisis as a chance to make a profit. Capitalism is resilient; provocative; disturbing; innovative; and disingenuous: It creates the climate crisis and now it wants to profit from climate change by selling untested genetically-engineered crops adapted to the changing biospheric conditions created by the very same type of anthropogenic change (e.g., increased carbon dioxide levels are a direct result of the capitalist industrial revolution).

When Houghton states "With the detailed knowledge of the conditions required by different species and the expertise in breeding techniques and genetic manipulation available today, there should be little difficulty in matching crops to new climatic conditions over large parts of the world...." This not only shows an arrogant attitude and enslavement epistemology, it represents a strategy that allows us to excuse ourselves from climate change since after all we can genetically engineer our way to a total anthropogenic and synthetic environment where we are the principal evolutionary engineers!

The Challenges of Acequia Farming - Part I

MODERATOR'S NOTE: Today's blog marks the start of a new series by acequia farmers of the Upper Rio Grande bioregion. The series will focus on the everyday and long-term challenges facing acequia farmers. These challenges include legal, economic, technological, social, political, and ecological issues. Some of the forthcoming entries will, by preference of guest bloggers, feature anonymous voices. We encourage acequia farmers to discuss these challenges and analyze our successful or failed strategies and tactics. How do we sustain place-based agroecosystems (resilience) and civic institutions of self-governance (autonomy)? We believe these two - resilience and autonomy - are interrelated values central to sustaining Rio Arriba acequia watershed communities into the far future.

NOTICIA: Ofrecemos una traducción en español despues de la entrada en inglés.

Carl Cormier of Charlotte, North Carolina makes the round bales
at Rancho Dos Acequias, San Acacio Bottom Lands, Colorado.

Acequia mutual-aid before technology


Devon G. Peña
Parciante, Acequia de la Gente de San Luis

San Acacio Bottom Lands, CO. The central challenges I have faced this year as an acequia farmer involved technology or, more precisely, the breakdown of our farm machines. This is common around here since most of the equipment is "old" to "very old."

I faced a chain of breakdowns in the old seventies Sperry-New Holland "swather" that I have used for the past three years to cut our alfalfa and grass meadows.

The first breakdown involved the ignition system and it took Joe Gallegos and I a week, finally with the help of a Colorado College bus driver, to rewire the ignition system and repair this problem.

The second failure involved the pair of eight-foot sickles (with multiple knives). The hay is so thick this year, and the knives dull, that it became impossible to keep cutting. We had to unplug the machine from built-up hay "nuggets" once every half hour or so. This calamity took some time to resolve since the sickles had to be replaced and that unfortunately involved an error by the supplier who initially ordered 14 instead of 16 foot replacement sickles. Another 3-4 days lost.

The third and catastrophic blow arrived two days after the sickle problem was fixed with the shearing of the "Pittman" joint that holds the shafts and sickles together in jib-jabbing harmony while the hay is being cut.

I swear that at times I felt like that befuddled farmer in Wendell Berry's story about the strangely unfolding complexity of something as seemingly and routinely simple as fixing a flat on a large tractor tire, which nowadays must be filled not just with air but calcium chloride or some other chemical mix to appropriately balance the tire given the demands of the ever-larger implements we pull with our machines.

The bigger and more complex the machine, the greater the potential for localized failures leading to system-wide shutdown. This seems an appropriate rule for the state of our ever more complex technological systems in agriculture.

My experiences with the old swather illustrated something very important and it is that social cooperation and mutual aid in the acequiahood are the practices that sustained us in the midst of constant breakdowns of machinery.

We did finish our hay cutting and indeed produced a record 100+ half-ton round bales. That is a lot of hay. This was possible because we could turn to other farmers in the face of a mechanical failure and found improvised solutions through the opportunities our acequiahood neighbors generously offered. My neighbor Joe Gallegos finished the hay cut with his Case disk mower and we got the baling done on time without further incident.

This year, our first cut of hay at Rancho Dos Acequias was produced through the collaboration of four different local farmers and a friend visiting from North Carolina who is married to a local woman with historic farm land on the Peoples' Ditch. This sort of "social capital" is an especially significant community resource in the survival of acequia farmers and is the source of our resilience in the face of technical or mechanical breakdowns.

Ayuda mutua de acequia frente tecnología


Devon G. Peña
Parciante, Acequia de la Gente de San Luis

Las Vegas de San Acacio, CO. Los mayores retos que encontre este año como agricultor de acequia involucraron tecnología o, mas precisamente, el descompanamiento de la maquinaría del rancho. Esto es común por estas partes por el hecho de que el equipo es “viejo” o “muy viejo.”

Enfrenté una cadena de descompanamientos en la vieja maquina de los sesentas que es la Sperry-New Holland cortadora de heno que he usado los ultimos tres años para cortar nuestras vegas de alfalfa y zacate.

El primer descompanamiento involucro el sístema de arranque y José Gallegos y yo nos tardamos una semana, finalmente con la ayuda de un chofer del Colegio de Colorado, para componer este problema.

El segundo fallacimiento involucro el par de hozes de ocho pies (con multiples navajas). El heno (alfalfa y zacate) esta tan grueso este año, y las navajas tan embotadas, que fue imposible seguir cortando. Tuvimos que desenchufar la maquina como casi cada media hora porque se atoro con trozos de heno. Esta calimidad se tardo bien tiempo para resolver porque tuvimos que reemplazar los hozes y eso desafortunadamente involucro un error por parte del abastecedor que inicialmente ordeno hozes de 14 en vez de 16 pies. Perdímos otros 3-4 días.

El tercer y catastrófico fracaso ocurrio dos días despues de que arreglamos el problema de los hozes con el cizalladuramiento de la ensambladura “Pittman” que detiene los ejes y hozes conjuntos en harmonía cuando estamos cortando el alfalfa y zacate.

Lo juro que a tiempos me sentía como el ranchero en el cuento de Wendell Berry sobre la complejidad extranjeramente desplegandose de algo aparientamente sencillo y rutino como el hecho de arreglar una llanta de tractor ponchada, que en estos días se llena no solamente con aire sino con cloruro cálcico o algúna otra mezcla de químicos para balancear apropiadamente la llanta dado las demandas de los implementos siempre mas grandes que jalamos con nuestras maquinas.

Lo mas grande y complicada la maquina, lo mas la potencia para fracasos localizados que nos llevan a un derramiento del entero sístema. Esto parece ser una apropiada regla para describir el estado de nuestros siempre mas complicados sístemas de tecnología en agrícultura.

Mis experiencias con el viejo cortador de heno illustraron algo muy importante y esto es que la coperación social y ayuda mutua en el barrio de la acequia son prácticas que nos sostienen en medio de los constantes derrumbes de la maquinaria.

En fín, acabamos con el corte de heno y seguramente producímos una nueva tasa alta con más de cíen pacas redondas de alfalfa y zacate. Es mucho heno. Fue possible este esfuerzo porque podímos contar con la ayuda de los otros parciantes para enfrentar el fracaso mecaníco y hallamos solucíones improvisadas por medio de las oportunidades ofrecidas por nuestros graciosos vecinos del barrio de acequia. Mi vecino José Gallegos acabó el corte con su guadañero tipo “Case” con discos en vez de hozes y terminamos con el trabajo de empacar en tiempo sin incidente adicional.

Este año, el primer corte de heno en el Rancho Dos Acequias fue producto de la colaboración de cuatro diferentes rancheros y un amigo visitando de Carolina del Norte que esta casado con una mujer local con raízes históricas en la tierra de la Acequia de la Gente. Este tipo de “capital social” es un recurso comunitario especialmente significativo para la sobreviviencia de los parciantes de acequia y es el fuente de nuestra resilencia para enfrentar los retos técnicos o mécanicos.

La comida

Fiestas de Santana y Santiago: Food, Family, and Place Ways

EL RITO, CO. Since April 23, and the annual limpieza y saca de acequia, we have been through the planting of heirloom crops, first and second irrigations, first hay-cut and baling, and the interminable chore of fence-building and mending. It has been an intense cycle of communal labor and cooperative endeavors in our acequiahood. The climatic and agriculture cycle sets the conditions but the social relations of production on our Acequia Madre determine the pace of our work days and weeks.

It has been another good year for collaborative labors as neighbors plowed, planted, and cultivated our fields while we lent a hand by harrowing and disking our neighbors' field and row crop plots. We have a lot of new acreage under production this year in the acequiahood including Felix and Steven Romero's organic Peruvian Purple and Red McClure potatoes. Rancho Dos Acequias, home of our Acequia Institute, has two acres of heirloom maiz de concho for our forthcoming annual chicos roast in late August through mid September. We also planted a half acre of bolita beans for our seed "memory bank" project.

There are also a lot of gardens around the villages this year including the half-acre community garden maintained by the Sembrando Semillas youth and hosted by Fernando Martinez at his family farm on Acequia del Cerro.

Santa Ana y Santiago: A Celebration of Place Ways

This is the weekend that the villages of Chama and San Luis, Colorado celebrate their respective patron saints - Santiago and Santa Ana. This celebratory weekend is really a collective family reunion and the population of our six villages mushrooms from about 800 to a record 10,000. The visitors are mostly folks rooted in multiple generations of local acequia farming families and their friends from across the United States.

This year's events seem especially noteworthy because the youth of the area took the lead in organizing many of the activities planned for the festivities including the parade, an auto show, pie, jam, and biscochito contests, and a theatrical performance on local culture presented under the auspices of the Novela Project. "Mi Tierra Natal" will be performed at the San Luis Museum and Cultural Center and is the result of the collaborative work of Sandra Santa Cruz with the youth of our Sembrando Semillas acequia agricultural heritage project.

The public events are a vital part of this celebration, but the most compelling reason everyone comes out for Santiago y Santa Ana is that this is an annual opportunity for large family reunions. We participate in the annual family and friends reunion with the Corpus A. and Yvette Gallegos family at their historic Centennial Farm a mile west of the village of San Luis.

The main event is a matanza, the slaughter and preparation of a locally-raised barn animal. This traditionally involves a lamb, goat, or hog although some years we include more than one of the critters and throw in a turkey or ham. The roast occurs in a poso, a fire pit in the sandy loam of the Gallegos Ranch. The overnight fire pit roast culminates in a large and festive comida, a shared ritual meal, that is part of the "cultural glue" that holds our multigenerational families together with a strong sense of place.


This year, the Gallegos Family annual comida has a suckling pig at the center of the ritual meal. The pig will be roasted overnight in a fire pit with pinon and apple wood. The pork carnitas will be accompanied by sweet Olathe corn and vast salad fixings from our home kitchen gardens.

The front half and head of the pig is thawed in the Gallegos Family fire pit.
The pig will be skinned and then wrapped in foil for a slow overnight roast.

La comida: More than nutrition

In their book, Grassroots Postmodernism: Remaking the Soil of Culture, Gustavo Esteva and Mahdu Prakash make the following observation about la comida:

There is no English word for comida. It is not easy to explain why. Thinking of that makes us feel sad. While “feast” comes closest in its implication of eating together, it refers only to a special occasion, while comida is eating by the “social majorities” in the “normal” course of every day. Perhaps we need to recall that the Anglo-Saxon world was the cultural space in which the industrial mode of production was established first and foremost. There, vernacular activities related to comida have been suffocated or suppressed (Esteva and Prakash 1998: 59).

The Culebra River acequia villages are one of those few remaining places in the U.S. where the "social majority" (everyday people) are still nurturing a robust local food system that is decidedly non-industrial and place-based.

While la comida celebrated annually during Santiago y Santa Ana is a "ritual feast," this special event is rooted in the cultural foodways of the Culebra River villages. Daily shared meals are indeed an example of "eating together" as an ordinary part of everyday lived experience where the point is not just to fulfill nutrition but engage in the social act of conviviality.

This everyday conviviality is the living root of the practice of slow, local, and deep foods. La comida shared on the feast days of Santiago y Santa Ana is merely the luminous signpost that celebrates the everyday sharing of food and the local place-based wisdom that makes it possible.

Testimony on Acequias Before Colorado State Legislature

Acequias: Water Democracy and Ecological Resilience

Moderator's Note: We are posting the testimony (February 18) of Devon G. Peña before the Colorado General Assembly, House Committee on Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Livestock. The Governor signed an amended version of HB 09-1233 in April. See blog entries for April 7 and April 1o.

Acequia de sangria (bleeding ditch) delivers water to a two-acre field of
heirloom maiz de concho at Rancho Dos Acequias, San Acacio, Colorado.

COMMENTS PREPARED FOR THE AGRICULTURE, LIVESTOCK, & NATURAL RESOURCES COMMITTEE, 67TH GENERAL ASSEMBLY, STATE OF COLORADO REGARDING THE PROPOSED BILL ON “RECOGNITION OF ACEQUIAS” (HB 1233)

Prepared by Dr. Devon G. Peña
Denver, Colorado. February 18, 2009

I. Introduction

Madam Chair, thank you for allowing me to testify; it is a real privilege. My name is Dr. Devon G. Peña and I am a Professor of Anthropology, American Ethnic Studies, and Environmental Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. I am also a landowner, farmer, and irrigator in the San Luis Valley. Indeed, I am one of the fortunate souls to have land with water rights on Colorado’s oldest irrigation ditch, La Acequia de la Gente de San Luis, a.k.a., the San Luis Peoples’ Ditch, established in 1852. I am here to testify in support of the passage of the legislation that is before you on the “Recognition of Acequias.” My testimony will draw from my qualifications as an expert research scholar and as an acequia farmer. Over the past 27 years, I have organized and directed interdisciplinary research teams of natural and social scientists to carry out comprehensive studies of the history, culture, economy, and ecology of the acequia farming system.

II. Cultural and Historical Significance of Acequias

Research scholars have long recognized the acequia as a significant part of the cultural heritage of humanity. Indeed, the acequia, because of its thousand-year history as a cultural and civic institution, is being considered for designation as a world heritage resource by the United Nations at the request of the government of Spain and the famous water commissions of Andalucía.

Aquino Gallegos irrigates family' garden plot at Colorado's oldest
Centennial Farm, the Corpus A. Gallegos Ranches (est. 1852).

Congress long ago granted this sort of recognition under the terms of the 1986 Water Resources Development Act that declared acequias to be valuable cultural, historical, and engineering resources important to the development of agriculture in the American Southwest. The State of New Mexico, of course, has long recognized the legal status of acequias as bonafide sub-county institutions of local government with wide-ranging authority relevant to the protection and conservation of water resources for agricultural uses.

III. Acequias Renowned as “Water Democracies”

The acequia is more than just an irrigation ditch. Indeed, the term refers as much to the form of local democratic self-governance based on the association of acequia parciantes (landowners with irrigation use rights on a community ditch). Acequias have been celebrated by natural and social scientists as “water democracies” (see Rivera 1999, Peña 1998, 2003, 2005) in recognition of their traditional “one farmer-one vote” form of decision-making within the community ditch. Indeed, John Wesley Powell, in an 1897 Survey article, celebrated the acequia systems by characterizing the association of irrigators as a “watershed commonwealth.”

This legislation will recognize and value the fact that acequias, and their unique system of customary democratic law, is as true to place as any other legal principles governing water use and conservation in Colorado’s Upper Rio Grande bioregion. This legislation will allow acequias to revitalize the traditions of local self-government and thus preserve the acequia “way of life.”

Indeed, as my colleague Dr. Jose Rivera of the University of New Mexico has observed, the acequia is not just an irrigation ditch nor is it just a form of agrarian democracy, it is a “culture” in the sense of a whole way of life. This cultural diversity is an important source of the resilience that makes this one of our most important cultural and historic resources in the State of Colorado.

IV. Ecosystem Services of the Acequia System

One of the areas of research that recently has occupied the attention of scientific scholars is the study of the ecosystem services provided by the acequia irrigation system and its tradition of gravity-driven flood irrigation. Indeed, in looking toward the conditions of a Post-Peak Oil world, the gravity-driven traction of the acequia system is being reevaluated as an important contribution to agriculture based on sustainable and renewable use of energy.

More recent studies by hydrologists, ecologists, conservation and wildlife biologists, edaphologists (soil scientists), and environmental economists are verifying research I directed in the 1990s under grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation on acequia farming families in Northern New Mexico and Colorado’s San Luis Valley. Our study found that acequias provide a wide range of ecosystem services including the conservation of agrobiodiversity, provision of wildlife habitat and movement corridors, soil conservation, and the preservation of water quality.

Fernald et al. (2007) report that acequias are important in providing water quality services that maintain native vegetation associations. Shallow groundwater flows caused by ditch seepage and flood‐irrigation methods dilute contaminants present in pre‐existing shallow groundwater and protect the deeper groundwater by transporting contaminants away from the deeper aquifer (Fernald, Baker, and Guldan 2007). In this manner, acequia systems provide vital hydrological, agroecosystem, and riparian functions and thus support biodiversity at the species, population, and landscape ecology levels. Few modern-day agroecosystems in the United States follow this habitat-friendly pattern at the landscape ecology level. Fernald et al (2008) further report that recharging of in-stream flows by means of sub-irrigated flows means that acequias do not necessarily damage riparian lifezone conditions downstream of ditch diversions.

V. Economic Base Services of the Acequia System

In addition to these ecosystem services, the acequias also provide a vital set of economic base services that are crucial not just for the agricultural sector but for the regional tourism economy that is associated with the beautiful cultural landscapes created over generations by the acequias.

Rivera (1999) and other researchers have demonstrated that much of the tourism industry in New Mexico owes its existence to the verdant cultural landscapes created by acequia farming practices. Indeed, with the growth of New Mexico’s wine industry, most observers note that this too would not be possible without the existence of acequias and their rich, deep soil-horizons on properly irrigated bottomlands. This is also the case in our own San Luis Valley where tourists are attracted to our area largely because of the presence of the historical and cultural landscapes that were created by acequias.

One recent study (Peña 2003) estimates, conservatively, that a seven-county area in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado with large numbers of acequia farms receives a net economic benefit of between $280-300 million a year in economic base services from the acequias. The estimates, as I said, are conservative and do not include the direct sales of heirloom organically-certified crops like the famous roasted white corn known as chicos del horno, prepared in our iconic adobe ovens.

The San Luis area is known for its religious tourism sites like the fabled Stations of the Cross Shrine and the Capilla de Todos Los Santos. Increasingly, we are attracting another brand of cultural tourist, the agri-tourist. Indeed, San Luis is home to various 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations that are promoting agri-tourism through the preservation and prosperity of our historic acequia farms. Since at least the early 1980s, the San Luis area has hosted students from high schools, community colleges, and universities from all over Colorado and New Mexico who come to study, work, and live among our acequia farming families. This law will greatly strengthen the ability for acequia associations to organize initiatives that protect and maintain an attractive environment that draws these growing numbers of cultural and educational tourists.

VI. Concluding Remarks

For too many decades, the farming and ranching and the environmentalist communities were at loggerheads. The world is changing and environmentalists are learning to recognize and value the vital role played by farmers in Colorado in preserving open space, wildlife habitat, and thus biodiversity. I am proud to have been one of the first social scientists to make the argument that farming in nature’s image produces vital ecological and economic services to our cherished bioregion. I am blessed to be an acequia farmer entrusted along with my neighbors with the preservation of the land, water, and local place-based culture.

References Cited

Fernald, A. T. T. Baker, and S. J. Gulden 2007. Hydrologic, Riparian, and Agroecosystem Functions of Traditional Acequia Irrigation Systems. Journal of Sustainable Agriculture, 30:2:147-71.

Hicks, G. A. and D. G. Peña 2003. Community Acequias in Colorado’s San Luis Valley: A Customary Commons in the Domain of Prior Appropriation. University of Colorado Law Review 74: 387-486.

Peña, D. G. 1998. Chicano Culture, Ecology, Politics. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Peña, D. G. 2003. The Watershed Commonwealth of the Upper Rio Grande. In James K. Boyce and Barry Shelly, eds., Natural Assets: Democratizing Environmental Ownership. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.

Peña, D. G. 2005. Mexican Americans and the Environment: Tierra y Vida. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Rivera, J. 1999. Acequia Culture. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

The Bolita Bean Wars

Homespun heirloom varieties are endangered

EL RITO, CO. More than two decades ago in 1987, I made my first visit to the Corpus A. Gallegos Ranches at the principal headquarters a mile west of San Luis, Colorado. This is one of Colorado's famed and distinguished Centennial Farms, a designation given only to those farms that have been in continuous operation under the same family for at least 100 years. I was privileged to meet Corpus and his wife Yvette as well as three of their children - Joe, Rafaelita, and Aquino (Jerry). This is the oldest, continuously operated (non-Native American) family farm in Colorado (established in 1851).

What I remember most vividly about that visit was the meal: The centerpiece was chicos del horno and bolitas. Both of these dishes were new to me. I'll never forget the bursting flavors that issued from each roasted corn kernel imbued as it was with the burnt earth terroir of the adobe horno. At the time, the Gallegos family was without their own horno (earthen-work oven), but that is another story best left for later.

The bolita beans were also spectacular. I was raised on a diet that included a lot of pinto beans. The main difference I tasted was that the bolitas produced a rich creamy tan-hued broth that seems as if some sort of sweet cream was added. I asked Corpus and Yvette to explain the preparation: How did you all get this creamy broth? Water, salt, and pepper and an overnight simmer was their response.

I was stunned. So much flavor and rich, creamy good eats; and all of it coming from the bean itself and not some secret spice or additive.

The following morning Corpus pulled out a large Mason jar filled with bolita beans. He had come to show me the secret of the bolitas. The bolitas, Corpus explained, get their name from the fact that they are shaped like tiny little round balls. (See photo below).

The beans on the left side are heirloom bolita beans from
the Corpus A. Gallegos Ranch in San Luis, CO while the
beans on the right side are a commercial hybrid variety
from Dove Creek in western Colorado.

The shape, size, and color of the bolitas was distinct: Round or really oblong and ball-like, beige-tinted, and quite petite. These beans were about half the size of the typical pinto bean which has squared edges instead of soft rounded curves to its morphology [a branch of biology that deals with the form and structure of animals and plants; or, the form and structure of an organism or any of its parts.]

Bioinvasions alter the bolita

Flash forward 22 years and I find myself irrigating the hay and heirloom crops fields on the ranch my sister, Tania, and I recently acquired as a home for our non-profit organization, The Acequia Institute. I am a third-year parciante of the acequiahood. As Joe Gallegos tells me: "You are one of us now. No more 'You all' and that kinda talk..."

Yet, not all is well in our Culebra acequiahood.

This year, as is usual every April and May, I went about town collecting seeds from local acequia farmers for the Institute's ongoing work on in-situ agro-biodiversity conservation. The Institute is home to a "Memory Seed Bank" that is part of my personal 25-year effort to protect the unique variety of native heirloom crops of the Rio Arriba bioregion.

Our focus at the Institute is on the "three sisters" endemic to native South and North American agroecology and ethnobotany - corn, bean, and squash - and their wild relatives. The preservation of the genetic distinctiveness of bolitas is a primary concern of ours since this bean variety has outstanding culinary qualities and has been adapted by local farmers to a 90-day growing season at an average elevation of 8,000 feet above sea level.

What I found this year was deeply disturbing. The bolitas of the acequia farms of the Rio Culebra watershed are "genetically contaminated," a condition most likely resulting from open cross-pollination with other hybrid and land race varieties of Phaseolus vulgaris (the common bean) that farmers here may have inadvertently introduced.

We have been silently invaded by cheater bolitas.

Food sovereignty is built on a foundation of locally-adapted seed stocks

The common bean is an herbaceous annual plant. The dozens of native land race varieties of the common bean were domesticated in Mesoamerica and the Andes at least 5,000 years ago. The ancestor of the domesticated varieties is the Frijol de Rata and this "wild relative" is still found throughout Mexico, the Andes, and the American Southwest. Beans, squash, and corn are the "Three Sisters" that provided the foundation of Native American agriculture. Beans are a legume and are thus appreciated by Native farmers for their nitrogen-fixing qualities that naturally enrich the soil medium.

The bolitas I collected this year (nine samples from different families and corresponding to most of the distinct riparian zones associated with the original long-lots or vara strips) show signs of contamination from the introgression of genetic traits associated with non-Native, non-heirloom varieties including the commercial hybrid or "cheater" bolitas marketed out of Dove Creek, Colorado.

This biological contamination is caused by "foreign" sources of bolita-like beans that have cross-pollinated with the local heirloom varieties. I discussed this problem with Linda Prim, formerly of the Ghost Ranch in Abiqui and now a consultant with our local acequia farmers' coop, the Culebra Coperative Growers. Linda is a leading expert on seed saving and land race biodiversity conservation.

Linda verified my worst fears: "The bolita is in danger of extinction," she explained. It has been widely contaminated by cross-pollination with other beans and the introduction of commercial hybrid versions of our beloved creamy bolitas.

This constitutes not just a threat to the genetic integrity of our local heirloom beans, it is an assault on our food sovereignty. If we cannot protect and nurture the preservation and exchange of our native land races, we may very well lose the capacity to remain self-sufficient in the sustenance of our local food system. If we cannot protect our bolitas, this will be a first step toward granting corporations control of our seed stocks.

As a result, the Acequia Institute has been working on a seed saving and exchange "Memory Bank" that focuses on re-establishing the integrity of our local heirloom varieties. This summer, the Institute is planting five experimental plots, in isolated locales, to begin the process of restoring the integrity of our local beans through careful "natural selection" of those beans that exhibit the morphological and culinary qualities we have grown to appreciate over the generations of place-based farming practices. This will be followed by genetic testing to set the benchmarks for our Culebra bolitas.

We will report back on the results after our Fall harvest in early October.

Limpiza y saca de acequia - 2009

Parciantes, familia, y amigos on the San Luis Peoples Ditch (April 23, 2009)

The San Luis Peoples Ditch Annual Clean-Up

EL RITO, CO. Every spring, the parciantes of the acequias of New Mexico and Colorado gather to engage in the collective labor of cleaning up the acequias to get ready for the irrigation season which around here starts around May 15 (The Feast Day of San Isidro Labrador).

Tania P. Hernandez on the acequia clean-up crew.

This year, on the San Luis Peoples' Ditch, we had more than sixty people turn out for this communal endeavor. We had a dozen students and three faculty from Western State College join us this year. There was even a self-identified tourist by the name of Mark who toiled alongside the rest of us.

Elaine H. Peña cuts weeds from the bank.

The limpieza y saca de acequia is an ancient custom that has been followed throughout the history of Chicana/o acequia farming in the Rio Arriba. This is a very important part of our local food system as it prepares our irrigation system and nurtures the bonds of mutual obligation and cooperative labor among the parciantes of the acequiahood.