Justin Bendell, Northern Arizona University
Justin Bendell, an Illinois native, earned a B.S. in Wildlife Ecology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He moved west and, in 2008, gained a Master of Liberal Studies degree from Northern Arizona University. He resides in Tucson with three chickens and his partner Rose.
With the progress of civilization, [humans have] learned many skills, but only rarely [have they] learned to preserve [their] source of food. Paradoxically, the very achievements of civilized [humanity] have been the most important factors in the downfall of civilizations.
—Tom Dale & Vernon Gill Carter, Topsoil and Civilization 1
Behold, my friends, the spring has come; the earth has gladly received the embraces of the sun and shall soon see the results of that love.
—Sitting Bull, Lakota elder 2
Beneath the Chinese elms long beheaded, in a front yard the size of a Navajo rug, we overturn a mosaic of non-native grass, dirt, and dandelion in preparation for the planting season. Rose and I rented our east Flagstaff lot and house from a quiet man who owns a heating and cooling business; it is our third rental pad in three years on the southern Colorado Plateau, fourth in four years in Arizona. As perpetual renters, Rose and I have been estranged from the landbase. It is difficult to find motivation to break both backs and soil to grow food when the likelihood of reaping the harvest most years is nil. We—the renting class, the (albeit privileged) landless—have little control over the edible aspects of our lives.
This year we are digging, planting, watering, mulching, composting. Despite the limitations of time, soil, and space, we are determined to raise an ecological garden, a small-scale food system that uses marginal groundwater, takes advantage of micro- climates, and emphasizes drought-tolerant native varieties of squash, corn, bean, chile, and other food crops. If we are not around next year, it will be okay. This is a summer project, an experiment in sustainable living, a quest to understand the constraints of place. Not quite permaculture, our garden is of similar spirit and intention.
We are inspired by ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan’s experiment of eating locally in the Tucson basin, eloquently recounted in Coming Home to Eat.3 Eating within one’s bioregion, or as Nabhan attempts, living off native foods raised within a 250-mile radius of home, is as much political as it is personal—perhaps more so. In an era where most food crops are raised monoculturally on giant industrial farms, soaked in chemicals, genetically engineered, and patented by transnational corporations like Monsanto and ConAgra, shunning industrialism in favor of food sovereignty is a political act.
In a sense, there is also a spiritual danger in not knowing from where one’s food comes. Preeminent ecologist and philosopher Aldo Leopold wrote that this danger lies in supposing that our meals come from the grocer. “To avoid this danger,” he suggests, “one should plant a garden, preferably where there is no grocer to confuse the issue.”4
Well before we began our garden experiment, in late autumn of 2006, I caught a wave to the BBC website and swept over the following headline: Global ecosystems ‘face collapse.’ Typically, headlines like this are limited to environmental newsletters and radical journals, but here it was, a dire statement on the future of the planet on the front (web)page of one of the most-read publications on Earth. The subheading: “Current global consumption levels could result in large-scale ecosystem collapse by the middle of the century, environmental group WWF has warned.”5 These statements came from WWF’s biannual Living Planet Report [ed. download 2008 report], which is compiled by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and the Global Footprint Network. The report summarizes data from the Living Planet Index, which measures global ecosystem health, and Ecological Footprint, which ascertains “human demand on the natural world.”6
The report suggests five future scenarios that range from “business as usual” to “transition to a sustainable society.” According to the report, at the current rate of resource use, “two planets [will] be needed to meet global demand by 2050.” This assumes a globally-averaged use of resources. If the world as a whole consumes at the level the U.K. does, three worlds will be required. And if the globe emulates U.S. consumption, even three worlds won’t be enough to satiate our needs. What about the other end of the scenario spectrum? “To deliver a shift towards a ‘sustainable society’ scenario [will] require ‘significant action now’ on issues such as energy generation, transport and housing.”7
In Topsoil and Civilization, Tom Dale and Vernon Gill Carter examine how and why past civilizations declined. They suggest that war, poor leadership, moral decay, and other factors might have contributed to civilizational collapse in the past, but the primary reason was this: “the deterioration of the natural-resource base on which civilization rested.”8 Archaeologist Joseph Tainter notes that “collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global . . . World civilization will disintegrate as a whole.”9 Not only the WWF and Tainter, but many ecologists, cultural critics, and environmental activists predict ecological collapse looms ever nearer as industrial civilization spreads its influence and promise of a cushy material existence for some across the globe.
It is frightening, the word collapse, more fear-inducing than American militarism, the persistence of slavery, or fundamentalist religiosity. It is even scarier than Del Webb’s chia-pet idea of community: Anthem, Arizona.10 As a child, I assumed empires and tyrannies and incalculable evils were products of the past. South Africa, the U.S.S.R., and other peripheral places aside, freedom and democracy prevailed; that is what the history textbooks instructed. It was discomforting to later learn that I was born and raised in the agricultural heartland of the American Imperium—like waking one morning and finding yourself a denizen of Caesarian Rome, burdened with all its ideological and philosophical baggage and implications.
Collapse.
Jared Diamond defines it as a “drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time.”11 Employing this definition, it is clear looking back in time that a great many civilizations have followed this course: Mesopotamia, Mycenaean Greece, Angkor Wat, Indus Valley, Inca, Classic Maya, Rome, Easter Island, Cahokia, Anasazi. Why did these advanced societies fail? As mentioned before, “the deterioration of the natural-resource base on which civilization rested,”12 but is this the only reason? Diamond suggests that past civilizations unintendedly committed ecological suicide, or ecocide, in eight different ways: deforestation, soil loss, water issues, overhunting, overfishing, effects of exotic species, human population growth, and increased per-capita impact of people, but that other factors were also at play, including non-human-caused climate change and hostility between cultures.13
Dale and Carter argue that earlier civilizations rarely interpreted and applied the lessons of history, believing their situation to be exceptional and therefore without precedent. Diamond illuminates the point of exceptionalism, but also ideas such as groupthink and psychological denial. The reason for a civilizational collapse, especially one that is complex, cannot be deduced by a basic mathematic formula. With so many factors at play, each collapse is a unique case study; even so, some general trends can be gleamed from collapses of the past, most notably the preeminence of severe ecological calamity as a factor. They can serve as lessons for us today. In a failure to conserve natural resources—forests, grasslands, water, soil—civilizations failed. “[The] chief troubles came from [the] delusions that [one’s] temporary mastership was permanent,” Dale and Carter write.
He thought of himself as “master of the world,” while failing to understand fully the laws of nature. Man, whether civilized or savage, is a child of nature—he is not the master of nature. He must conform his actions to certain natural laws if he is to maintain his dominance over his environment. When he tries to circumvent the laws of nature, he usually destroys the natural environment that sustains him. And when his environment deteriorates rapidly, his civilization declines. —Dale and Carter. 14
It is again happening, though today the problem is global; we’ve reached the supposed end of history, and we must pillage on with myopic diligence, in denial that the civilized life we created, as “masters of nature,”15 will be the end of us unless we reconsider our relationship to the earth, the soil, each other. We have reached what Derrick Jensen calls the “endgame,”16 and the question remains: if what is required to ease ecological and thus civilizational collapse is “significant action now,” where do we begin?
I’ve cast my lot with the soil.
In the small dirt space between the sidewalk and front yard, Rose and I nestle native sunflower seeds into the parched earth. Soaking dirt and seed with snowmelt from our metal watering can, we envision a six-foot-tall living fence, deep green with a red-orange array of petaled heads up top, rising in mid-summer to protect our garden from tomfoolerous teenagers and midnight foragers. But the house sparrows must have been watching from a lookout perch in the lilacs. Later that day, having already devoured the millet in the bird feeder, the sparrows hop down to the moist soil and swallow our future fence, cheap-chit-chirping like sugar-drunk children at a birthday bash. We will have to put in more seeds, and perhaps some chicken wire, if the sunflowers are to have a chance.
Our intent is to cultivate—along with the sunflowers—two gardens, one small and semi-circular abutting the house, and a large horseshoe plot in the center of the yard. On a balmy seventy-degree afternoon, we dig up the earth near the front window and plant I’itoi onions and purple garlic. Both species were introduced by the Spaniards in the 1500s; the I’itoi, bred and reared by the Tohono O’odham, has adapted well to the harsh Southwestern climate.
Twenty-five years ago, Gary Nabhan acquired the nearly extinct I’toi onion while working with the Tohono O’odham in southern Arizona. A woman had planted them in her garden, and she kindly gifted some bulbs to Nabhan. With the work of Native Seeds/SEARCH, a Tucson nonprofit Nabhan helped establish, the I’toi now flourishes on farms and garden patches throughout Arizona.20 The I’itoi onion is not the only desert heirloom to be restored from the brink of extinction. Native Seeds/SEARCH “safeguard[s] 2,000 varieties of arid-land adapted agricultural crops.”21 These plant seeds are valuable not merely for the sake of scientific inquiry. Native seeds, bred by indigenous cultures long on the brink themselves, offer a low-impact, ecological alternative to industrial agriculture and dependency on the global capitalist system. They are seeds of hope distributed to subsistence farmers in Ajo, sustainable agriculturalists in Phoenix, and others who believe that “food is not a weapon,”22 but a basic need. Native and semi-native seeds are woven into the desert fabric—it will be the I’itoi onion, not maladapted Old World cash crops, which survive these dry lands.
The tempestuous weather of spring reveals our vulnerability. Winter and summer wage war and our inaugural attempt at food sovereignty, our hope for Halloween pumpkins and jarred salsa in December, is cast to the wind. I realize subsistence gardening is a far cry from garden-as-hobby. Not a leisurely distraction from the real world, gardening is the real world itself—dry winters, flash floods, blowing snow—magnified down to dirt particles, microbial agents, and seeds seeking emergence from insulated darkness to surface light.
Michael Pollan writes, “It is gardening that gives most of us our most direct and intimate experience of nature—of its satisfactions, fragility, and power.”24 There is a quality of the wild in a garden, and if one is willing to relinquish oneself to this “fragility and power,” the rewards are great; the process becomes as important as the produce. However, the purpose behind our gardening is not limited to hoeing and spading our way to a more intimate relationship with nature. It is also about food, about regaining a physical and spiritual reconnection to the soil, and about the self-reliance that comes with removing oneself from a corporate food system that has no interest in the long-term health of soil or self.
It is dawn and the wind whips snow into the windows. The flakes loop in midair and land on the overturned dirt in the front yard. In the semi-circle garden, green garlic leaves peek out from a thin blanket of white, a sign of hope in spite of the wintry weather. Snow into soil, soil into seed, seed into plant, plant into soil. Taking a sip of coffee, I notice dirt from yesterday is caught beneath my fingernails.
If we do not take the time to review the past we shall not have sufficient insight to understand the present or command the future: for the past never leaves us, and the future is already here.
—Lewis Mumford 25
Technics and Human Development
As a child, my mother gardened, though inconsistently and sometimes reluctantly; the toil of child rearing and maintaining a job limited the energy necessary to engage in a culture-nature throw-down in the backyard. Amidst the mosquitoes, woodchucks, rabbits, and a dysfunctional husband, I am surprised we had a garden at all. But we did, and in my teenage years, I contributed to the tilling of the soil and planting of vegetables. Mostly, it was a task forced upon me by a good-willed taskmaster. I worked the dirt and learned a valuable suburban lesson: planting seeds into the soil was not as boring as it sounds. It was certainly better than mowing the lawn, a chore I had always dreaded. I queried my mom, “Why can’t we just let the grass grow?” A reasonable question, I thought. Her response was along these lines: “Because we can’t.” It took reading Michael Pollan’s treatise on U.S. lawn history to help me understand.
Conveniently, the modern lawn—an obsessively maintained and open stretch of grass and shrub linking suburb to suburb from California to Maine—was created by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted with the development of Riverside, a small community within fifteen miles of my hometown.26 Lawn maintenance became a social prerogative, and remains so today. Some sociobiologists have suggested that our fondness for grass is a product of evolution. Calling it the “Savanna Syndrome,” they’ve hypothesized that because of Homo sapiens’ rise from the short-grass savannas of Africa, we are genetically predisposed to valuing a grassy landscape.27 Perhaps this is true, but it does not explain the obsession with keeping grass neatly cut two-and one-half inches above the soil, or why individuals have been fined for not adhering to strict neighborhood codes about proper lawn maintenance. For this, Pollan explains that the exposed, connected lawns of the U.S. are symbolic of middle-class democracy but a rejection of the brick-walled barriers that enclosed English lawns. However with this bluegrass democracy came a darker side, a demand for conformity and rejection of individualism. Up-keeping the lawn is also anti-nature, perhaps stemming from America’s puritan past. Pollan writes that while “gardening was a subtle process of give-and-take with the landscape, a search for some middle ground between culture and nature[,] . . . a lawn was nature under culture’s boot.”28 He sees the lawn, more so than agriculture or gardening, as our disconnect with the natural world. At least gardening might result in food.
When I gardened in my mother’s backyard, I felt like I was doing something productive, conditioning and planting so vegetables might grow. Even if I wished to be doing something more exciting, gardening offered the hope of results; mowing the lawn only assured that I would have to mow it again the following week. Lawn care was never the least bit satisfying for me at the age of fifteen, and while I now listen to more diverse music than Def Leppard and Guns N’ Roses, opposing the totalitarian nature of lawn care is one aspect of my youth that I hold on to dearly.
Fast-forward several years. I was attending the University of Wisconsin in Madison, plunging headlong into wildlife ecology and the politics of conservation. Yearning to be outdoors and useful during summer break, I volunteered at the fledgling Midewin Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve near Kankakee, Illinois, and fell in love with native prairie. For the first time in my life, grass had beauty, and my desire was to sustain and promulgate that beauty. The following year I worked tallgrass prairie in Minnesota, and researched small prairie mammals at the Arboretum.
The University of Wisconsin Arboretum, a 1,200-acre sanctuary surrounded by the sprawl of Madison, was the first attempt at restoration ecology in the world. In Curtis and Greene prairies, where I live-trapped shrews and voles with peanut butter bribes, the wind blew through big bluestem and Indian grass, a scene reminiscent of times before Europeans forcefully colonized the Middlewest. The Arboretum is home to the “oldest and most varied collection of restored ecological communities in the world.”30 But in the 1930s, these prairies were not here. When the University purchased the Arboretum after being strongly persuaded by Aldo Leopold and other scientists, it was a composite of woodlots, pasture, and intensive-use farmland. Aldo Leopold, who in the 1930s established the first department of Wildlife Management on Earth, spoke at the inaugural address when the Arboretum opened in 1934. “Our idea . . . is to reconstruct . . . a sample of the original Wisconsin – a sample of what Dane County looked like when our ancestors arrived here during the 1840s.”31 Leopold then answered why it is important to study “original” Wisconsin. “Because we are just beginning to realize that along with the intentional and necessary changes in the soil and its flora and fauna, we have also induced unintentional and unnecessary changes which threaten to undermine the future capacity of the soil to support our civilization.”33
Knee-deep in the history of two disciplines, in the place where both were founded, I felt myself a living, breathing, extension of Leopold’s legacy, determined to continue his work to the best of my abilities. Returning home one summer, I proposed restoring our Kentucky bluegrass lawn to pre-colonial conditions. My mother was not persuaded. Perhaps the idea had merit, but she knew enough of my past garden reluctance to suspect my dedication. Correct she was. A year later, I was more likely to plant a crop of marijuana than a field of Echinacea, coreopsis, and rattlesnake master. I had the right intention, but at age 21 my commitment to place, being increasingly rootless myself, was fleeting.
I was later relieved to find that I was not alone in my fondness for native grass. Prairie grass also holds meaning for Wes Jackson, founder of The Land Institute.34 Amidst tallgrass prairie near Salina, Kansas, Jackson studies “a 10,000-year-old problem—agriculture. Not simply problems in agriculture, but the problem of agriculture.”35 For the past 27 years, Jackson and colleagues have researched polyculture, or “natural systems agriculture (NSA),” using grasses native to the central plains. They hope NSA might replace industrial monoculture as a paradigm in food production, as an “agriculture that will allow people, communities, and the land to prosper in sustainable fashion.”36
Agriculture had its beginning 10,000 years ago. What were the ecosystems like 10,000 years ago, after the retreat of the ice? Those ecosystems featured material recycling and they ran on contemporary sunlight. Humans have yet to build societies like that. Is it possible that embedded in nature’s economy are suggestions for a human economy in which conservation is a consequence of production?37
Wes Jackson is not the only person to propose an ecological model for raising crops. Bill Mollison and David Holmgren—initiators of the permaculture movement—published their first book on “edible ecosystems” in 1978.38 Defined as “consciously designed landscapes which mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature, while yielding an abundance of food, fibre and energy for provision of local needs,” permaculture has taken root in communities throughout the world as a sustainable alternative to inefficient monoculture farming.39 Unlike industrial agriculture, which thrives on uniformity and mechanistic problem solving, permaculture relies on systems thinking and diversity, the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.
With industrial agriculture, if pests are the problem, pesticides are the solution. Reductionist thinking approaches problems individually, and separately, failing to draw connections between the subject being studied, and the ecosystem to which it is connected.
But to strike closer to the root of Wes Jackson’s NSA or permaculture, we must look deeper into human history. Both permaculture and NSA weld ideas from western science and traditional ecological knowledge into a synthetic framework. Indigenous peoples were the early innovaters of ecological farming systems, cultivating native plants over many generations and developing agricultural models that functioned well in the unique ecologies of home. To plant a garden is to participate in 12,000 years of human history, a history modern humans rarely contemplate.40
A caveat. The glance backward to pre-colonial conditions is precarious, and oftentimes leads to misconceptions about the past. Pre-European North America was diverse culturally as much as ecologically. Native peoples were no more homogenous than peoples of Europe, Asia, South America, or Africa. And they were not ecological savants; they often learned how to reside in place through the lessons of their ancestors, by learning how not to become estranged from the lands they lived. It is with this acknowledgement that I delve into the origins of global agriculture and the rise of agriculture in the Mogollon bioregion.
The origin of agriculture is tricky to assess, though archaeological evidence suggests that harvesting of grass seeds for porridge or bread may have started in the Levant (the eastern Mediterranean region) 15,000 years ago. Flint blades used to separate seeds from stalks have been uncovered in the lower Nile valley, the Maghreb, and in Europe, indicating a rapid desemination of this new food procuring strategy.41 The domestication of grasses and a reliance on farming appears to begin in the Fertile Crescent in 12,000 Before Present, encompassing the whole region by 8,500 years ago. It is one of the great mysteries how the domestication of once wild plants happened nearly simultaneously throughout the world, in northern China 11,600 years ago, in the Andes 11,300 years ago, in central Mexico 10,000 years before present, and New Guinea, southern China, west Africa, and the Mississippi watershed not long after.42 Was this coincidence? Jared Diamond suggests that farming “evolved as a by-product of decisions made without awareness of their consequences.”43 Developing independently in several locations, the switch to a sedentary agriculturist lifestyle from a hunter-gatherer one was a reaction to a decline in wild game and a rise in wild cereals that could be domesticated through trial and error. Other cultures, in Western Europe for example, switched to agriculture only after founder crops from the Fertile Crescent were introduced. In this case, hunter-gatherers could make conscious decisions about whether or not to farm.44
The domestication of plants and later animals dramatically altered how humans related to their surroundings. Diamond calls it “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”45 There is a lot of disagreement as to whether agriculture was the beginning of the end, or the dawn of human greatness. I believe both are accurate assessments, based on different perceptions and definitions. As a precursor to western civilization, agriculture is widely considered a brilliant accomplishment. Without agriculture, there is no ideal of Jeffersonian democracy, no Nebraska Cornhuskers, no amber waves of grain. But if one is considering the detrimental effects on the biosphere—dramatic human population growth, an increasing divide between humans and nonhuman nature, the rise of hierarchy and patriarchy—then agriculture must not seen as nearly so triumphant, but more like a Faustian bargain.
Tom Sheridan, citing archaeological data, suggests that the introduction of agriculture into the U.S. Southwest occurred around 1000 B.C., when squash, maize and other crops were introduced from Mesoamerica to southern and eastern Arizona and the highlands of western New Mexico. Late Archaic groups—and later the Mogollon, Anasazi, Hakataya, and Hohokam peoples—incorporated agricultural practices into an already established hunting and foraging lifestyle, the cultivation of crops supplementing rather than replacing traditional means of obtaining nourishment.46 Colorado Plateau peoples congregated in places suitable for farming, the Mogollon in the pine-forest meadows of the Mogollon Rim, the Anasazi in the canyon country of the Four Corners region.47 The Mogollon exploited many environmental niches for the sake of dry farming, including the top of mesas. This innovation did not prevent environmental conditions from frequently forcing Mogollon populations to move.48 Much like “snowbirds,” early Southwesterners migrated on a fairly regular basis to escape the cold, hunt animals, or locate water; migration was a necessary part of living within the limits of the landbase.
Around 600 A.D., some ideas regarding farming, pottery, and stone-work filtered down the Little Colorado River from people dwelling near the Petrified Forest to a small group of hunters and gatherers living near Sunset Crater. These new ideas shaped, in years to come, the cultural development of the semi-sedentary Sinagua people.50 The Sinagua were initially a hunter-gatherer people, consuming mostly rabbits, rodents, and deer on land both above and below the Mogollon Rim. There is debate as to when and why the Sinagua became committed to agriculture, some archaeologists arguing that it was due to a climatic shift to more favorable growing conditions. Others claim it was a result of the eruption of Sunset Crater in 1064 and 1067, resulting in deposition of nutrient-rich ash east and south of the San Francisco volcanic field.51
Between 700 and 900 A.D., the Sinagua moved closer to the San Francisco Peaks to farm in the pinyon-juniper and grassland steppe near Mount Elden. The cinders conserved moisture, making non-irrigated farming possible in an arid land.52 The cinder farming must have yielded well—between 900 and 1050 A.D, the population doubled, growing from 380 to 800 people in the forests, meadows, and cinder soils in the shadow of the San Francisco Peaks. Anthropologist Peter Pilles argues that the population growth is overestimated, believing instead that the prevalence of field houses near Sinagua agricultural sites was the product of multiple relocations, not a surge in population.53 Because the population was small and the land base vast, it was easy to pack up and move to a new site once the soil resources were depleted. Another factor in early Sinagua success has to do with a topic familiar today: climate change. Hohmann suggests that the Flagstaff area was more appropriate for hunting and gathering prior to 1100, after which the climate warmed and rainfall increased.54 The growing season was extended, and increase in monsoonal and winter precipitation nourished squash and maize. But this was not the event that is remembered nearly as much as when the bowels of the earth blew.
A deep rumble, a crack and a massive hiccup of trapped gas. In the volcanic field east of Elden Pueblo, a fissure opened, and molten lava spat into the surrounding vegetation while cinder and ash shot skyward, blocking the sun from view. Sunset Crater was in the state of becoming. For five months, lava continued to spurt, growing into a fierce black mound. Three years later, it erupted again, building Sunset Crater to its current elevation, 1,000 feet higher than the pine and juniper forests below.55
Those Sinagua who lived in the volcanic field fled the massive prolonged eruptions, settling with their neighbors near present-day Flagstaff. Confusion and cosmological uncertainty prevailed. In a short time, though, vegetation returned to the cinder-blackened terrain. A new layer of nutrient-rich ash and water-absorbing cinder proved to be a boon to farming. Arable land, previously limited, became commonplace in the region. A group of Anasazi, drawn to the rich ash for farming, built settlements in the Wupatki basin (now Wupatki National Monument). Hohokam, living in the Verde Valley, migrated north to join the Sinagua in the Rio de Flag drainage area. The arable land was a big hit in the region. But the bountiful times, inevitably, did not last. The soil not exhuasted from intensive agriculture was removed by one of the region’s most persistent natural forces. Northern Arizona is a windy place, and ashy topsoil—composed of fine particulates—is easily lifted and carried away.56
It has been suggested that the remaining Sinagua migrated to the Verde Valley, while some joined with the Hopi on Black Mesa, 70 miles away.
—Albert H. Schroeder57
The forests of the Mogollon Rim and San Francisco mountains have, aside from human manipulation, little changed since the time of the Sinagua. Conditions for agriculture, be it industrial or ecological, are less than ideal, especially now that human populations far exceed that of pre-Columbian peoples. Lack of water, nutrients, and soil have been and will continue to be a problem for anyone attempting to live a sedentary life on the windswept forests and sagebrush country of the southern Colorado Plateau.
The importance of the Sinagua story is how it highlights the ephemerality of favorable conditions, even when living within means. Sedentary peoples in the Southwest were not sedentary for long; climate, natural disruptions, and culture shaped how and where people settled, and when they left. However, the Sinagua and other peoples still managed to call this arid landscape home for many centuries, a period much longer than European settlers have existed in the U.S. and Mexico. It is possible to live on the Colorado Plateau for long stretches of time. Ask the Hopi, who have resided near Black Mesa for nearly a millennium. The question comes down to how we choose to live. In our “post-scarcity” world of surplus, the civilized west has sought not to respond to the rhythms of place. If a garden fails, we head to Safeway. If the water runs out, we conspire to invade Canada and redirect the Yukon River into the desert.
Might we look ahead and find our own edifices abandoned, dust-covered, and lonely in the valleys and plateaus of a peopleless land?
We have—fortunately—the benefit of hindsight.
We also have the brilliant work of people like Wes Jackson, Gary Nabhan, Aldo Leopold, myriad anthropologists, and thousands of traditional Indigenous agriculturalists to help guide us on the path to ecological living. It is up to each of us—farmers, landowners, renters, squatters—to adapt our perspective to the lands where we live, and begin to see our balconies, yards, and farms not as places to ignore or control, but as members of our community. We need the eyes of an ecologist, the hunger pangs of a food lover, and the hearts of those who love where they live. Then, perhaps, we might get Homo sapiens, at least locally, off the road to self-imposed ruin.
Seven years graduated from the University of Wisconsin and beyond the urge to farm marijuana, my love for plants has grown roots and deeper purpose. Like a sandbox, healthy soil can incite the imagination. No longer is it my desire to restore prairie—a senimental longing for the primeval in opposition to the gray shadow that industrial society casts upon the earth. I desire to raise edible crops ecologically, as a perma-fixed passion, a craving to re-create and restore my relationship with the natural world, find out first-hand where my food comes from, and learn what it takes to live the land ethic. How do we, as Leopold put it, “change the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it”?58
We will use these beans for next year’s seeding.
What about the long term? If we were to stick it out, to re-rent our home and garden and commit ourselves to this place, might we depend on our garden for self-sufficiency? How might one live locally, consume locally and thrive despite the ninety-day growing season and the frosts that occasionally descend upon us even in the midst of summer? What are other people doing, what have other people done in this cold, mountainous bioregion to secure food over the long dark months?
There are some who have devoted their life’s energy to growing food in Flagstaff for the long haul. Mountain Meadow farm is the primary example. But even their situation is tenuous, at best. Chuck MacDougal, owner and primary farmer at Mountain Meadow, still relies on Flagstaff tap water for irrigation, and struggles with the climatic variability. This is despite a reasonably healthy three acres of land in Flagstaff’s “banana belt,” a small area hugging the base of Mount Elden where temperatures are about ten degrees warmer than the rest of the city. Utilizing a multipurpose bioshelter,59 MacDougal produces food year-long and continues with an experiment that is hopeful, but not easily emulated by those not living in the banana belt and without the means to afford expansive greenhouses for their crops. But then again, the Hopi, while not in this bioregion, have survived for centuries by dry farming on nearby mesas that receive less water than Mountain Meadow. Is it possible to live in the Mogollon and eat well off the land?
I sit outside now in early October and listen to ghosts of house sparrows chipping in the lilacs. Summer is long gone, and our tomatillo plant is brown and crackling. Rose and I no longer water the gardens in the early morning, and our dreams of future harvest have become distant. However, there is hope here, in the soil. I hope our seeds and bulbs will grow next year, nourishing us in two winters’ time. Derrick Jensen argues against hope, suggesting that too much faith in hope has gotten us a big mess and has prevented us from resolving major ecological and economic problems.60 I agree with him in part—to hope all the problems in the world will magically resolve themselves is foolish. But to hope for little things—there is value in hoping for the little things.
[1] Tom Dale and Vernon Gill Carter, Topsoil and Civilization, preface.
[2] Sitting Bull quote acquired online; also found in slightly different form in Stan Padilla, A Natural Education: Native American Ideas and Thoughts.
3 Gary Paul Nabhan, Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods.
4 Aldo Leopold, A Sand Country Almanac, p. 6
5 World Wildlife Fund
6 BBC News online. Global ecosystems ‘face collapse.’ (Accessed Oct. 31, 2006)
7 Ibid.
8 Emphasis added, Tom Dale and Vernon Gill Carter, op cit., p.13
9 Robert Wright, The History of Progress, p. 125
10 Anthem is a manufactured community north of Phoenix. All the homes, shopping malls, even a school (which looks like a prison), were built first. Later, middle class “lifestylists” were invited to what is described as “a place as original as you are.” Del Webb is also known for the construction of Japanese internment camps in Arizona during World War II.
11 Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, p. 3.
12 Dale and Carter, op cit., The use of masculine pronouns was their choice, not mine.
13 Jared Diamond, op cit., pg. 6.
14 Dale and Carter, op cit., pg. 2.
15 Ibid.
16 Derrick Jensen released the two-book set titled Endgame in 2006. Vol 1: The Problem of Civilization; Vol. 2 Resistance.
20 Nabhan, Coming Home to Eat, p. 58.
21 From www.nativeseeds.org (Accessed May 5, 2007)
22 Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, p. 9.
24 Michael Pollan, Second Nature, p. 4
25 Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: Vol. 1: Technics and Human Development
26 Pollan, op cit., p. 69
27 Ibid, p. 68
28 Ibid, p. 74
30 From www.uwarboretum.org/about (Accessed Sept. 13, 2007)
31 Aldo Leopold, “What is the University of Wisconsin Arboretum, wild life refuge, and forest experiment preserve?”
33 Ibid.
34 From www.landinstitute.org (Accessed April 15, 2007)
35 Quoting Robert Jensen from an interview he conducted with Wes Jackson. From www.counterpunch.org/jensen07102003.html (Accessed May 10, 2007)
36 From www.landinstitute.org (Accessed May 10, 2007)
37 From www.counterpunch.org/jensen07102003.html (Accessed May 10, 2007)
38 Patrick Whitefield, Permaculture in a Nutshell, p. 4
39 David Holmgren, Permaculture: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability
40 Kirkpatrick Sale, After Eden, p. 94.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid.
43 Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, p. 106
44 Ibid., p. 108
45 Jared Diamond, Collapse, p. 99
46 Tom Sheridan, Arizona: A History, pp. 4-19
47 Lisa M. Classen, Hidden Harvests, pp. 22-23
48 Sheridan, op cit., p. 15
50 Albert H. Schroeder, Of Men and Volcanoes: The Sinagua of Northern Arizona, pp. 17-19
51 Linda M. Blan, Sinagua Subsistence Behavior: Inferences Derived From Faunal Analysis at Elden Pueblo.
52 Schroeder, op cit.
53 Blan, op cit., p. 10. See also Peter Pilles, Sunset Crater and the Sinagua, in Volcanic Activity and Human Ecology, pp. 459-485.
54 Ibid., p. 9. See also John Hohmann, Sinagua Social Differentiation: Inferences Based on Prehistoric Mortuary Practices.
55 Schroeder, op. cit.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid.
58 Aldo Leopold, The Sand Country Almanac, pp. 139-144.
59 “Mountain Meadow Farm’s Bioshelter allows us to not only grow organic foods year-round but also to support plant and animal propagation in an ecological, sustainable manner. The Bioshelter features several major functional zones: A greenhouse. . ., a barn for animals. . ., a large root cellar, a crop/food-processing area. . ., a potting and propagating area. . ., [and] an area for cleaning, dehydrating, and storing herbs, vegetables, and fruits.” From www.mountainfarm.org (Accessed Oct. 9, 2007)
60 Derrick Jensen, Endgame Vol I.
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