Environmental & Food Justice

More devastating than anything except pouring concrete on the land!

2009-12-24T09:52:00.000-08:00

AGRICULTURE & ECOLOGICAL CHANGE

Shoreline, WA. I just finished reading a book entitled, Just food: where locavores get it wrong and how we can truly eat responsibly (New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 2009). The author, James E. McWilliams is an Austin-based historian with a record of progressive thought. This is not an agrifood industry PR hack. McWilliams has published what appears to be a very rational, thoughtfully-written, and well-argued book that is very critical of the so-called local and slow food movements.

Just food is filled with well-intentioned and provocative arguments. For example, early in the introductory chapter, McWilliams quotes a friend, Nina Federoff, a plant geneticist and microbiologist, who has a rather dim view of the ecological impact of agriculture: "...agriculture is more devastating ecologically than anything else we could do except pouring concrete on the land" (p. 7).

Of course, nature finds a way: Grasses, herbs, and vines growing through the cracks can undermine the best-poured plans in a matter of years.

I can think of a lot of things we do to the land that are much worse than pouring concrete over it, which is not to endorse that sort of less than mindful action. What about: War, with all the bombing, habitat destruction, and toxic waste production that entails? Or, clear-cutting forests to make room for the strip mines that then dump toxic and carcinogenic waste in lakes, rivers, and seas while poisoning the very air we breathe?

Ironically, industrial agrifood monocultures often produce all these effects and so it is easy to see why McWilliams would invoke Federoff to make such a hyperbolic point. But this approach actually perpetuates a lie and a stereotype: Not all farmers, and not all farming systems, are destructive in their relationship to the ecosystems they inhabit. Obscuring this basic idea is the major flaw of this book.

As I read further, I quickly realized that McWilliams or Federoff have probably never seen anything else but corporate agribusiness-styled "factories in the field" or well-intentioned but flawed organic corporate farms not yet weaned from monoculture practices. McWilliams obviously has never taken a slow, observant walk through a classic Maya huerto familiar or home kitchen garden.

If he had, then he would have observed that the average Maya rain forest kitchen garden has a polyculture mix of at least one thousand different types of domesticated plants, wild relatives of cultivars, and other unrelated wild plants with spiritual, medicinal, or nutritional values. That is not a typing error: One thousand (1,000) different plants in one garden plot. That is farming in "nature's image". This is where the anthropogenic disturbances of human activity can nurture and sustain native and domesticated [sic] biodiversity.

Indeed, ethnoecologists have long argued that indigenous farmers are not just principal stewards of our native agricultural crop biodiversity, they are principal architects of the wild biodiversity-rich landscape that they co-inhabit with other living organisms.

Another point in this book that is misleading. McWilliams rightly argues that humans have been modifying plants since the first human, most likely a woman with a digging stick, decided to put a seed in the ground. There is no denying that the domestication of wild plants, without which agriculture is impossible, involves the primary goal of genetic modification and control of the qualities the farmer values.

However, McWilliams oddly and mistakenly takes this as justification for the development and application of commercial agricultural biotechnology. We have been modifying genes all along, now we can do it even better with gene-splicing and dicing technologies, so why not?

All we have to do is get our social ethics together: He admits that most transgenic crops exist for one reason: Sustaining corporate profits. He dispenses with all the philanthropic and humanitarian propaganda the industry is best at. But then he naively assumes that transgenics can be used for more noble purposes like creating new drought resistant varieties to help us adapt to climate change.

The principal problem with this argument is that plant genomics is not the same as rDNA transgenic technology. We have had knowledge of, say, the maize genome for milenia, and indeed new technology allows us to "map" the genome of a plant in a rather perfunctory manner. Mapping is not necessarily a "bad" or "unethical" act. It can provide vital knowledge of genomic diversity.

However, using this knowledge to develop transgenic organisms, that would not naturally occur within the complex nuances of plant evolution, is not just irresponsible, it is unjust to farmers, farm workers, land, water, and other organisms that would be forced to "compete" with the newly introduced organism.

There is complete disregard in McWilliams' argument for a more thoughtful deliberation on the precautionary principle that would have required an appeal to a predictive ecology of transgenics.

Indeed, as Mae Wan Ho and other microbiology critics of transgenics have made clear, this is the equivalent of allowing private interests to dictate the conditions that affect significant quality of life factors like evolution free of anthropogenic effects and large-scale public health and well being. More bluntly: it is an acquiescence to the equivalent of a "biological Chernobyl."

To be continued....

Systemic racism and hunger

2009-12-12T23:08:00.000-08:00

Why kids of color go hungry

Shoreline, WA. In the November 28 blog, I reported on a recent USDA study revealing the disproportionate incidence of hunger across different racial and national-origin groups.

The study reveals that Latina/o and other children of color suffer disproportionately from hunger and malnutrition. This central finding was cited as empirical evidence of what is essentially a form of environmental racism - the inequitable distribution of environmental "rights" and "wrongs."

Access for all to safe, nutritious, and culturally-resonant food is a fundamental aspect of the ethics of environmental justice.

From my vantage point, the structural conditions that produce systemic hunger are related to capitalism's perverse coupling of social and ecological systems in a manner that places harvest work in the hands of slave-wage laboring families with hunger-wracked children.

American consumers enjoy their Mexican green papaya at mid-winter while distancing themselves, cloaked no doubt in comfortable self-interested unawareness, from the connections between indulgence in the niceties of global commodity chains and the structural violence experienced as persistent hunger by the field workers and their children and families.

There is a saying in South Texas that keeps popping into my head, like an unwanted musical tune that keeps repeating: "In the Valley, grasshoppers eat better than farm workers."

I am faced with a desire to explain how such an inhuman and marginalized condition can be allowed to exist.

I ask: What does this all have to do with our unacknowledged complicity in a systemic problem? This is a deep structural problem and cannot be wished away by resorting to a given multitude of individual actions involving an appeal to so-called "green" (pro-environment) and "blue" (pro-labor) consumerism.

To be just and resilient, our food systems will have to break through such forms of complicity in all their banal forms including those posing the danger of succumbing to a "green" or "eco-friendly" version of globalized free market fundamentalism. The market is dead. Long live the "green" market!

Over the past three weeks since I first read the USDA report, I have been reviewing the theoretical literature on racism. This led me to re-read a book by one of my graduate school mentors, Dr. Joe Feagin. I studied with Professor Feagin at the University of Texas in the 1970s and early 80s. His book is entitled Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression (2005). For a preview click here.

I wish to quote extensively from this book because it provides one of the clearest and most persuasive definitions of racism that allows me to explore how hunger and food injustice are systemically linked to a structure that maintains white privilege and perpetuates racial domination across the circuits of the food system.

This seems an especially urgent task today given the premature celebration, in the aftermath of President Obama's election, of our presumed transformation into a more just and harmonious "post-racial" society. Feagin:

I undertake a major effort in what might be termed "leukology"; that is, a focused study of the reproduction of white power and privilege in this society over several centuries...As I will demonstrate, systemic racism encompasses a broad range of racialized dimensions of this society: the racist framing, racist ideology, stereotyped attitudes, racist emotions, discriminatory habits and actions, and extensive racist institutions developed over centuries by whites.

The Leukology of Food Racism

I am fascinated by Feagin's use of the term "Leukology." Leukocytes are, of course, "white blood cells" and they play a major role in defending the human body from infectious agents.

To extend and further subvert the metaphor, I want to propose that we can examine the food system for evidence of structural processes and group practices that constitute a similar society-wide defense of the integrity of the system of white privilege as it pertains to that most essential of all human biological and social reproductive activities - food and nutrition.

The aforementioned USDA study was released durng the first week of November (2009), but two years earlier in December 2007, the National Council of La Raza issued a similar report on "hunger and food insecurity within the Latino community."

That report, Sin Provecho: Latinos and Food Insecurity, examined the effectiveness of food assistance programs in allaying hunger and food insecurity in the Latino community. It found that nearly 20 percent of Latina/os suffer from "limited or lack of access" to nutritious food each year, compared to 12 percent of all Americans.

The NCLR study was prescient but the problems of hunger and malnutrition in Latina/o and other communities of color is actually much, much worse than many of us imagined. And it was bad even before the current economic meltdown, the end of which is not yet in sight from the vantage of the poor who are not privy to the joys of the "jobless recovery" apparently benefitting the Wall Street Mandarins.

However, neither USDA or NCLR reports seek to explain the underlying causes of widespread and persistent hunger among Latina/o children and youth. What causes this apparent racialization of hunger?

One place to start is by recognizing that our foodways have been "colonized" several times over. After conquest, we were told to stop eating corn; that corn was the food of inferior races. Indeed, the Mexican cientifico, or positivist philosopher, Bulnes divided the world into the superior northern temperate "wheat-eating" races, inferior "corn-eaters" of arid and tropical zones, and the cowardly avaricious "rice-eaters" of the "Orient" [sic].

Anthropological research has long held that "we are what we eat." This is not just a cultural notion, it is an essential component of "biopower" - that is, the technologies and strategies for the production of particular types of subjects (meat-eaters, corn-eaters, vegans,whatever) as political projects of domination and/or resistance.

The destruction of heritage cuisines is in this way as much a biopolitical act of structural violence as any act of war like the passing of smallpox-infected blankets to freezing Indians [sic] by Amherst in 18th century North America.

We can clearly see in such acts the presence of racist framing, racist ideology, stereotyped attitudes, and racist emotions: "They were savages and needed to be cleared away to make room for the march of the superior civilization." "They were just wasting everything and not using nature and her resources for economic development and the creation of wealth." "They are lazy and cowardly and could not be assimilated." "We feared the dark interior and needed to sweep away the untamed wilderness and the beasts and savages that dwelt there."

Then we became "assimilated" and joined the Big Mac Super-Size me ranks of obedient fast food eaters. This colonization is killing our children and youth as alarming rates of childhood obesity and diabetes amply demonstrate.

If the reports had asked the question, it seems likely they too would have had to face the evidence and admit that our current globalized and commodified food system, dominated by a handful of transnational corporations, constitutes a fundamental form of environmental racism - the disproportionate experience of hunger, coupled with disparate access to healthy, local, place-based food sources, constitutes a form of structural violence that cannot be eliminated without taking on the structures that support white privilege.

Hunger Hits Latina/o Children the Hardest

2009-11-28T19:19:00.000-08:00

THE 2008 USDA HOUSEHOLD FOOD SECURITY REPORT: 1 IN 3 HISPANIC CHILDREN EXPERIENCE HUNGER AND MALNUTRITION

El Rito, CO. From the comfort of our home, on the day after Thanksgiving, we are enjoying meals made with ingredients we grew on our land over the spring and summer. We enjoy our bounty, but with a restless mindfulness born of the fact that we cannot forget that hunger in the United States is a growing menace that threatens the health and well-being of millions of American families.

Now comes the annual "food security" report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the news is troubling indeed. The report, entitled Household Food Security in the United States, 2008, was prepared by Mark Nord, Margaret Andrews, and Steven Carlson as Volume 83 of the Economic Research Report Series and was released in November 2009. To obtain a copy of the report, click here.

Highlights of the report include data indicating that 14.6 percent of U.S. households, or about 17 million households, experienced "food insecurity" (hunger) at least some time during the year. This translates to roughly 40 million persons. The study also reports that close to 6 percent of American households experienced "very low food security—meaning that the food intake of one or more household members was reduced and their eating patterns were disrupted at times during the year because the household lacked money and other resources for food."

According to the report, "Prevalence rates of food insecurity and very low food security were up from 11.1 percent and 4.1 percent, respectively, in 2007, and were the highest recorded since 1995, when the first national food security survey was conducted." In other words, hunger has increased dramatically in the U.S. over the course of the previous eight year Bush II administration and especially ever since the current economic meltdown increased unemployment and underemployment.

Not only are more people going hungry, even the "typical food-secure household" is spending more of its monthly income on food. "Food secure" households are "typically spending 31 percent more on food than the typical food-insecure household of the same size and household composition."

One especially significant finding of the report is that food insecurity [sic] is basically an aspect of continued structured racism since the incidence of hunger is more likely to affect Latina/o and African American communities. It is also a form of structural violence against women since households led by single mothers suffer some of the highest rates of hunger and malnutrition. As the report states:

...The prevalence of food insecurity varied considerably among different types of households. Rates of food insecurity were substantially higher than the national average for households with incomes near or below the Federal poverty line, households with children headed by single women or single men, and Black and Hispanic households. Food insecurity was more common in large cities and rural areas than in suburban areas and other outlying areas around large cities.

The study further reports that hunger affects nearly 27 percent of Hispanic [sic] households; this constitutes more than 1 in every 4 Hispanic households (Table 2 on page 10). The situation is even more desperate for Hispanic households with children: The food insecurity rate for this group is an astounding 32.1 percent or about 1 in every 3 households (Table 3 on page 12). This compares with 15.5 percent of White non-Hispanic households and 31.9 percent of Black non-Hispanic households.

The report also suggests that hunger among the "undocumented" immigrant population is even more widespread than these averages indicate. One reason is that undocumented households are not eligible to participate in "safety net" programs like food stamps and other social welfare services. While many low-income Latina/o families are hamstrung by higher rates of joblessness, they do generally have access to these federally-funded food and nutritional assistance programs. This is not the case with undocumented households.

It seems more than amazing and unbelievable that the "World's Bread Basket" is also a place where 1 of every 3 Latina/o children go hungry and face chronic malnutrition. One has to ask why the U.S. food system has failed to provide access to safe, nutritious, and culturally-resonant food for one-third of its youthful population. This is more than a call for righteous indignation, it is a call for action. It is perhaps also a grave signpost on the continuing crooked road toward the graveyard of American capitalism? Maybe that is the only corpse we ought to starve to death?

La lucha por La Sierra - Part III

2009-11-24T14:32:00.000-08:00

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE ENDURING COMMONS

La Sierra Commons at sunrise.

Common-property regimes have existed in various communities, and in places continue to exist. These institutions are not anachronistic relics of mere anthropological interest, but flexible devices with potential value for addressing current environmental problems if they are properly understood. It seems that generations of culture and experience [in place] have instilled productive norms in human behavior and crafted rules that have the potential to steer us away from commons tragedies.
Mulder and Coppolillo (2005:155)

EL RITO, CO. It long has been established within the field of environmental anthropology that the "common pool resource" or CPR constitutes the oldest form of social organization for long-term resilient human inhabitation of places. To understand why this is the case, it is important to consider that most local place-based cultures do not think of the commons as "property," at least not in the sense that it is thought to be some "thing" you can sell for money to the highest bidder. The commons is instead considered a "place-based natural asset." It is the legacy of future generations and the source of their prospects for continued right livelihood in ancestral "home lands" rich with meaning, memory, and feeling.

Native American cultures already inhabited the "commons" as such, and well before the concept came into widespread use in social science circles. To this day, these aboriginal territories are not thought of as property to be owned by individuals. Instead, the land, water, and all living things are considered participants in a mutually-constituted existence. The protection of these interconnections implies a set of "original instructions" that forbid behavior that misuses or brings harm to the land, water, and biota. For recent discussions of the concept, please consult the book, Original Instructions, edited by Melissa K. Nelson and available from the Bioneers Store by clicking here.

The concept of original instructions is based on an ontology of "mutual obligations" rather than "individualistic property rights." Humans are obliged to respect and nurture the environment as a "home" rather than treating it as property to be exploited for individual gain or uninhabited wilderness to be kept separate from humans. Since the ecosystems we inhabit are shared with other living beings, humans are obligated to care for and not diminish the health of this shared space I call "homeland common."

This does not mean that the human inhabitants must keep their "hands off" the environment. It does imply that humans must follow "rules" if they are to act as responsible residents of their own neighborhood on the planet, that is, in a manner that nurtures both biological and cultural diversity.

Ostrom's Principles of Enduring Commons Management

Studies of the commons initiated by Nobel Laureate, Elinor Ostrom, suggest that CPRs are in many cases the most effective strategy to organize environmentally-sustainable and socially-just inhabitation of "natural resource domains." A fairly recent summary (2005) of the evidence is presented in the book, Conservation: Linking ecology, economics, and culture by Monique Borgerhoff Mulder and Peter Coppolillo. For a preview of Mulder and Coppolillo, click here.

The traditional commons is a closed-access system, which means that only those users within the established community in clearly-defined boundaries have rights to the CPR. This is distinct from the open-access commons (really public domain) that was criticized by Garrett Hardin (1968) in his classic (mis)statement of the issues, “The tragedy of the commons.” (See my blog entries for Aug 30, Oct 7, and Oct 14).

Decades of research on CPRs have led to the identification of eight principles for successful (resilient, enduring) intergenerational use of the commons. The design principles for enduring commons institutions were first described and outlined by Elinor Ostrom (1990) in work recently recognized by the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics as a truly distinguished contribution to theories of economic behavior and organization. Ostrom identified the following eight principles of the enduring commons:

1. Clearly defined boundaries: Individuals and households with rights to withdraw resource units from the CPR, and the boundaries of the CPR itself are clearly defined.

2. Congruence: The distribution of benefits from appropriation rules is roughly proportionate to the costs imposed by provision rules; appropriation rules restricting time, place, technology, and quantity of resource units are related to local conditions.

3. Collective-choice arrangements: Most individuals affected by operational rules can participate in modifying operational rules.

4. Monitoring: Monitors, who actively audit CPR conditions and appropriator behavior, are accountable to the appropriators or are the appropriators themselves.

5. Graduated sanctions: Appropriators who violate operational rules are likely to receive graduated sanctions (depending on the seriousness and context of the offense) from other appropriators, from officials accountable to these appropriators, or from both.

6. Conflict-resolution mechanisms: Appropriators and their officials have rapid access to low-cost, local arenas to resolve conflict among appropriators or between appropriators and officials.

7. Minimal regulation of rights to organize: The rights of appropriators to devise their own institutions are not challenged by external governmental authorities.

For CPRs that are parts of larger systems:

8.    Nested enterprises: Appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises (Burger et al. 2001: 29)

These eight design principles have worked effectively in a wide range of cultural contexts. In most cases, a recurring critical issue is that resilient inhabitation of the commons depends on the ability of use rights holders to associate as common's members and to balance their uses (consumption of forage, timber, medicine herbs, etc.) with the restoration or regeneration of the "resource units." The exercise of use rights can be sustained if the community fulfills its obligation to protect the resource base and this requires active local governance and adaptive management, including the ability to impose sanctions on violators of association rules for the exercise of use rights.

Can These Principles be Applied to La Sierra Commons?

In the case of La Sierra, the answer to this question is a qualified "yes." Research conducted over the past fifteen years suggests that the local community of heirs and successors with use rights to the commons are indeed already organizing a framework to exercise their use rights. This currently involves a newly-emergent process that nominally meets the eight criteria for long-term resilience and sustainability as originally outlined by Ostrom and others (e.g., Mulder and Coppolillo cited above).

Striving to fulfill each of the eight principles in the context of La Sierra will involve resolving serious deep-seated contradictions and tensions among various "stakeholder" groups who will need to negotiate and adapt with one another to implement and sustain these principles over time. The results of this contentious process are not in, but the signs of progress (including effective mobilization of the community of use rights holders) are encouraging.

1.    Clearly defined boundaries: La Sierra has clearly defined geographic and legal boundaries. Individuals and households with use rights to the “Mountain Tract” are also clearly defined by legal standing and court decisions (Lobato v. Taylor). For the text of this landmark decision, click here.

However, the lower court has very likely created a potential source of conflict for effective and enduring management by including a vast class of newcomers who have been, in my opinion, erroneously considered eligible "successors." These are the class of "beneficiaries" consisting of recently settled retirees and second home owners residing on subdivisions on La Mesa de San Pedro. Truthfully, they have little, if any, interaction with the local community and can demonstrate little depth of shared history or family roots in the area.

The lower court likely should not consider this population as successors because: (1) The mesa-top landholdings, while technically part of the historic vara-strip long-lots deeded by Beaubien with use rights to the commons, actually involve parcels that were never intended to be settled as independent residential or agricultural areas. (2) Thus, no new use rights would have been attached to these as separate extensions of the original vara strips. (3) None of the newcomers to these upland areas exercised use rights through adverse possession or prescriptive easement. Therefore, none of these could have been denied their due process since these home lots did not exist in 1960. (4) These uplands were set aside for communal hunting, grazing, and gathering activities. In a sense, they too functioned as part of the watershed commons.

The court remains therefore still to be challenged into setting a more strict standard for "successor status" involving only those deeds related to the acequia-irrigated portions of the historic acequia-riparian long-lot settlements. [This incidentally is already implied in the language of the new "Acequia Recognition" law signed by Governor Ritter in April of this year]. The court must come to understand that the commons use rights are not just attached to an entire vara-strip, but to the occupation of the arable lands served by acequias in the bottoms and that these water use rights were effective only through participating with and belonging to a community. The lower court, in implementing the Supreme Court decision, must hold that heirs and successors meet the standard of sustained (daily, direct-lived) interaction in the affairs and livelihoods of the community. Anything less will make the challenge of an enduring commons regime more difficult.

Another challenge is that there may be additional individual "heirs" with legitimate use rights, confirmed and unconfirmed, who may refuse to join the association. This means that issues of boundary maintenance will occur until the scope of heir and successor use rights is affirmed and all use rights holders agree to participate in the association.

Finally, the internal boundaries for (shifting) grazing and non-grazing areas need to be determined. The association must map these areas in a realistic way that does not over-estimate forage and stocking potential. Mapping must correspond to specific uses and users, preferred types of rotational grazing practices (e.g., transhumance), use of fire and grazing to expand and sustain the health of upland forage meadows, introduction of longer duration rotation islands for wood harvest as part of an aggressive reforestation program, and protection of all other ecological values and especially those related to watershed integrity and acequia functioning.

2.    Congruence: The use of the land grant commons could serve to maximize beneficial use for all association members while protecting and expanding the livelihood value of the "resource base." This also means that the costs of provision of use rights will not exceed the costs of participation. The costs associated with membership in the association (dues, work duties) could be roughly proportional to the benefits accruing to individual households, including rights of access to a revolving credit fund for start-up herders. The appropriation rights may also be subject by the association to participation in ecology restoration and regeneration projects to address the need for more pasture lands (i.e., expansion of middle elevation meadows through prescribed burning and selective logging, etc.) The rules of appropriation clearly include time, place, and extent of use (by grazers and gatherers), number of association members, and “dues” which will allow the association to purchase infrastructure (corrals, cross fencing, repairs to culverts and roads), pay for legal expenses, and hire consultants or camp workers.

3.    Collective-choice arrangements: The "grazing" association will be managed through participatory governance which might include mandatory attendance at meetings and establishment of avenues through which members can modify, challenge, and create the association rules. Since the association will be composed of grazers and gatherers, who will (most likely) be using the land grant at different times and who compose different social groups, participation in set meetings is necessary to promote collaborative decision-making among different use rights holders. There are also some likely difficulties that may stem from the current organizational form that requires direct "heir" status for membership in the grazing association. This would exclude the class of beneficiaries defined by the court as "successors" of original land grant heirs with historically-deeded long lots. The bifurcation of heirs and successors could undermine the effectiveness of managing against any "free riders." There are also some heirs that refuse to join the association and they too may come to represent a "free rider problem" from the vantage of the association's management objectives.

4.    Monitoring: Members could be elected to serve as section representatives to monitor and enforce association rules of appropriation; these monitors should be frequently re-elected. It would be in the association’s best interest if there was a coalition of monitors including at least one individual from the “gatherers” and the “grazers.” Responsibilities of this position might include: inspecting for ecological damage (overgrazing, over harvesting), encouraging attendance to meetings, organizing meetings, overseeing finances, and enacting sanctions. Monitoring requires a "base-line" of forage and other relevant ecological and watershed conditions. What is the state of the watershed that the association seeks to protect, or perhaps restore? Monitoring thus would involve not just gathering information to regulate use rights and to set the groundwork for imposing sanctions against violators of use norms; monitoring would also entail collaborating with natural scientists to collect long-term observations on the changing condition of the range lands and the watershed values essential for acequia functioning.

5.    Graduated sanctions: The association must enforce sanctions against users who violate rules. Enforcement of rules works best when monitors rely on “norms” rather than coercion. Sometimes invoking verguenza is all it takes to get a user to change the behavior that is causing harm to others or the ecology. There will be cases where the association will have to deal with repeat violators of association rules. These may receive graduated sanctions (depending on the seriousness and context of the offense) from other appropriators, from officials accountable to these appropriators, or from both. This could start with a reprimand, proceed through cooperative work requirements on reforestation projects, etc., and finally fines or varying lengths of expulsion.

6.    Conflict-resolution mechanisms: The enduring commons management institution provides “rapid access to low-cost, local arenas to resolve conflict.” This might be difficult to provide since the association is in a geographically-isolated area and access to appropriate local legal venues might be limited. Furthermore, local, low-cost systems might be overburdened and conflicts might take an inordinate amount of time to resolve. So, what are some alternatives to the official legal system? Legal pluralism establishes that “lawyerly law” is not the only form used by local place-based cultures to resolve disputes. Compadre and comadre networks have long played this role informally and it may be possible to establish a system similar to the acequia in which a mayordomo (or section representative in this case) serves as the mediator. The resolution of conflict within the informal channels of the community is the preferred form that emphasizes local control and autonomy and signals a willingness to forego turning to more formal state and administrative systems.

7.    Minimal regulation of rights to organize: This principle might be problematic in this case due to the overlap of rights pertaining to the “private owners,” use rights holders, owners/developers of adjacent properties, and the continuing interests of the state through the supervisory court system overseeing implementation of use rights and management practices. One issue is determining which of the stakeholder groups (private owners, use rights holders, or the state) will have ultimate or overlapping authority to set policies on matters such as controlling the large elk population on the land grant. Elk compete with livestock for forage and, since the granting of elk hunting licenses is an important source of state revenue, the association may encounter opposition in efforts to control the elk population. There are also continuing equity questions of subsistence hunting rights that were not granted under the terms of the 2002 court decision. The association might develop an annual conference to address these issues in an on-going and highly adaptive manner.

8.    Nested enterprises: In this context, the nesting together of different user groups (grazers, wood gatherers, herb and berry harvesters, etc.) in the association is critical to establish countervailing influences and to promote participation of households across all the villages and including both genders.

Research on the commons includes numerous cases where the community of use rights holders encounters and resolves a similar set of problems. These obstacles and contradictions can be overcome but it takes a concerted effort by all stakeholders to respect the historic community and its own sense of place and understanding of the "original instructions."

In subsequent blogs we will examine this issue and provide some preliminary comments on the changing land and water ethics of the Rio Culebra acequia communities. There are numerous difficulties posed to the survival of the ethics that sustain a sense of obligation to follow the original instructions. These include the effects of a deep history of environmental injustice and racism experienced by the land grant community of the Culebra watershed. This requires that we also examine the environmental history and political ecology of the bioregion. In our next blog entry in this series, we will turn to an examination of the environmental history of La Sierra.

Notes on the 20th Headwaters Conference

2009-10-21T16:53:00.000-07:00

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.

For more information on the Headwaters Conference, please click here.

La lucha por la sierra - Interjection

2009-10-14T10:24:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-07T15:24:00.000-07:00

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 Torbel 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

2009-09-30T13:17:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-13T07:33:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-06T17:42:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-30T13:50:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-08-17T07:06:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-31T13:55:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-25T08:40:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-20T17:55:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-24T15:52:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-09T05:42:00.000-07:00

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.

Tania P. Hernandez and Praxedis Ortega, Jr. pause for a photo op.

The parciantes of the San Luis Peoples Ditch, now renamed as La Acequia de la Gente de San Luis, include some of the first farming families in Colorado like Praxedis Ortega, Jr., the owner of a Colorado Centennial Farm. "Prax" is the fifth generation in his family to farm off La Acequia de la Gente de San Luis.

The mid-day comida.

The day's proceedings always revolve around a collective luncheon of local foods prepared with ingredients from the previous year's harvest. This year we were treated to chicos del horno, chile verde and chile colorado, habas, bolita beans, corn bread, corn tortillas, and even hot dogs and burgers (prepared with locally butchered ground beef).

Sisnaajini (Mount Blanca) and the Gallegos-Peña haystacks.

This year was an especially memorable one because we engaged in our collective labors fully aware of and in the mood to celebrate the passage of Colorado's new "Acequia Recognition" law that formalizes the customary law of the acequia as an alternative to the Doctrine of Prior Appropriation. The new law also states that the collective work of limpieza y saca is legally required for all the farmers on the ditch.

The annual limpieza y saca de acequia is above all an important social event. It is the "cultural glue" that binds neighbor to neighbor in a spirit of conviviality.

This year's snowpack is about 110% of the annual average so we will have plenty of water for all 74 acequias in our local watershed. Even the "water hogs" might have an easier time than usual if they take water out of turn or take too long to irrigate their fields.

Yet, despite the spirit of community, a deep rooted sense of place, and the new Acequia Law, we face some serious challenges in our little bioregion. I am just now waiting for Joe Gallegos to drive to the Torcido Creek Gate of La Sierra Commons (formerly known as the Taylor Ranch) for the first of what I am certain will be a long series of protest events by local people against subdivision developers.

A new subdivision is being developed on the Torcido Creek Road that provides entry to our common lands. The subdivision developer claims that this is a private road and we can no longer use it for access to the commons. The local people and the County Commissioners disagree and rightly assert that this is a county road and must therefore remain open for local people to gain access to the mountains.

A critical issue of concern to us is that this development represents yet another act of environmental racism that will affect the quality and quantity of water moving from the mountains and into our streams and acequias. The 35-acre lots need roads and the developer constructed what must be close to a hundred miles of new erosive surfaces.

It seems our struggles for environmental and social justice never end, they simply enter into new chapters of resistance to those who treat water and land as mere commodities instead of the ecological basis of life to be cared for under Original Instructions. Another summer of civil disobedience is in order. We will prevail; we always have.

2009-04-18T22:06:00.001-07:00

El amanecer, Taos. El espiritu de
nuestra comadre seguira con nosotros.

Sodbusters and the 'native gaze' - Part VII

2009-04-17T08:02:00.000-07:00

Diversity: The key to resilience

I conclude with a photograph and accompanying epigraph: “Diversity is the key to resilience.” This photo shows some of the heirloom land race maize harvested from our Culebra bottoms in September 2007. The rainbow bundle of maize includes many “chimeras” and represents 25 years of collecting and seed saving of Zea mays.

I should clarify the first statement and note that my acequia-hood vecinos harvested the seed corn. That single act of tequio demonstrates the importance of collective community work in sustaining a local food system.

All my neighbors wanted to see my corn harvested. They appreciated the fact that one of the heirloom lines I have collected is a drought-resistant white flint from the Seri people in Baja California. This white corn is a lot like our heirloom concho varieties, a local white flour corn that also comes in dent and flint iterations and is the basis of our annual oven-roasted chicos production. Both the Seri white flint and the concho are short-season varietals and do not require a lot of irrigation.

This motivated everyone and so Joe Gallegos organized much of the harvest work. Indeed, I was at the time preoccupied with arranging for my Father’s funeral and also engaged in a wearisome, stressful battle to redefine my future not only as a member of an embattled Department but indeed as an activist-academic.

I will always connect the three events: Death; Rebirth; Survival.

I am bound to reflect not just on the diversity of our corn, but on the diversity of other plants including the many beneficial weeds that co-inhabit our field crop, orchard, and meadow landscapes. These “beneficial weeds” include the edible and medicinal wild relatives of cultivars that prefer to grow alongside the corn, bean, and squash trinity.

Certain “weeds” are essential to our local heritage cuisine. One should not have a Lenten meal in La Plaza de San Luis de la Culebra without freshly sautéed quelites (Lambs Quarters) to give you one interesting example.

I sort of feel that way sometimes: Like a weed, not yet proven beneficial, that has to survive by negotiating some level of acceptance and co-existence within the given association of “Native” plants to find solace in the soil medium of the modern western university.

I know I am often seen, or even see myself, as an exotic weed that refuses to be naturalized to these soil conditions. I am immutable in resisting academic monocultures of the mind. I imagine that perhaps I might sometimes even be misconstrued as a noxious weed according to someone else’s framing of my intellectual being and my presumed “faculty politics.”

Such feelings born of misrecognition or narrow, even fear-based, ideological proclivities are really not my concern. I am concerned with what I perceive as the structures of knowledge production that academic communities are sometimes prone to engage and reproduce, and which can indeed constitute acts of epistemological violence since they force the Other into the kind of troubling genuflection we have had to endure over the past hour or so.

I can’t say I always relish the challenge of presenting a parallax-shifting vantage point epistemology. My family’s acequia farm in Colorado constantly tugs at me, filling my mind with the presence of a place that zigzags me between Seattle and San Acacio. These thoughts are the liminal result.

Closing now with a brief lesson from linguistics or if you prefer semiotics: The word “weed” is variously defined in Spanish as 1. mala hierba (bad herb or plant); or 2. debilucho,-a (bad person). It can also be used in a transitive verbal and figurative sense as escardar (to weed out). I have learned through my own experiences that academics are prone to engage in the weeding out of the soil of knowledge production. That itself is the most demanding epistemological contradiction of our time and place. Perhaps to rebuke all that and signal some semblance of audacious hopefulness, I want to close with a poem I improvised to end this paper:

I am a weed

Soy hierba;
I am a weed
Unwelcomed; exotic;
soiling the ground
Bringing unwelcome thoughts…
Soy debilucho,
soy una amenaza
I am a threatening Other:
Porque creo en las instrucciones originales
I believe this place teaches me
Sacred ground of all my being
Epistemology does not beget ontology
Being here in place
Blesses me with the knowledge
Of inhabiting not conquering
Of coevalness not greedy usurpation

Translation plantation
Homogenization
Fast food for all
GMOs will be your fall!
The hunger is not
In the eyes of the child
It is in vacant hearts
Yearning to find freedom
From deconstructed
Onco-burgers
And napalmed Freedom fries
The thirst is not in our bellies
It is gnawing away inside our souls
Exhilio, memorias de pérdida
Los buitres sobre vida muerta

The thirst for justice
Against the aridity
Of capitalist desire
Is a burning that leaves
Not even figurines etched
Under the heat of nuclear-blasted
Walls in Nagasaki
It is, I am a weed:…A hunger that thirsts for justice.

This is Part 7 of 8 of an original as yet unpubished essay prepared by invitation for the Department of Anthropology, Spring 2008 Colloquium, “Epistemologies of Anthropological Research,” University of Washington, May 23, 2008. It is presented here free of the footnotes in the original. Sources cited in the text will be posted at the end of the series of 8.

This is a work in progress; please do not quote, cite, or circulate without the author’s permission. Send inquiries to: dpena@u.washington.edu. The author thanks Elaine H. Peña and Mario Montaño for comments on earlier drafts.

"Recognition of Acequias" - Colorado State Law Forwarded to Governor Ritter

2009-04-10T18:17:00.000-07:00

Moderator's Note: We are providing without comment the text of HB 09-1233 as amended and passed on third reading by the Colorado General Assembly House Committee on Agriculture, Livestock, and Natural Resources. The bill has also received the approval of the State Senate and awaits the signature of Governor Bill Ritter.

The "Recognition of Acequias" Law re-establishes the norms and practices of acequia customary law in certain southcentral Colorado watersheds. This includes important principles that define water as a communal asset-in-place and bases allocation of water rights on equity and not just priority; the one farmer equals one vote rule; the sharing of scarcity; the expectation of communal labor and mutual aid in the maintenance and cleanup of acequias; and the possibility of a ban on the sale of water away from acequias.

NOTE: This bill has been prepared for the signature of the appropriate legislative officers and the Governor. To determine whether the Governor has signed the bill or taken other action on it, please consult the legislative status sheet, the legislative history, or the Session Laws.

UNEDITED TEXT OF COLORADO LEGISLATION (HB 09-1233):

AN ACT
________

HOUSE BILL 09-1233

BY REPRESENTATIVE(S) Vigil, Court, Curry, Fischer, Frangas, Hullinghorst, Labuda, Looper, McNulty, Merrifield, Pace, Tipton;also SENATOR(S) Schwartz, Bacon, Foster, Gibbs, Groff, Heath, Hodge, Newell, Romer, Sandoval, Tapia.

CONCERNING THE RECOGNITION OF ACEQUIAS, AND, IN CONNECTION THEREWITH, AUTHORIZING ACEQUIA DITCH CORPORATIONS.

Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Colorado:

SECTION 1. Legislative declaration.

(1) The general assembly hereby finds that:

(a) The first nonnative Americans to settle in Colorado were Hispanics from colonial Mexico, who brought with them their ancient irrigation practices based on a community ditch called an "acequia", pursuant to which water was treated as a community resource and allocated based upon equity and need rather than priority of appropriation;

(b) Colorado's territorial session laws from 1868, 1872, and 1874 recognized the validity of acequias within the counties of Costilla, Conejos, Huerfano, and Las Animas, including the requirement for irrigators to contribute labor to the upkeep of the acequia and a preference over other diversions for acequias' diversions regardless of priority;

(c) As the general assembly recognized in the following excerpt from Senate Joint Resolution 02-028, the continued operation of these historic acequias is an "essential foundation for the sustenance of the local economy":

"WHEREAS, Spanish American settlers founded the Town of San Luis in the Culebra Valley in 1852, thus making it the oldest town in Colorado; and

"WHEREAS, In keeping with their ancestors' acequias tradition, these settlers quickly initiated an irrigation system; and

"WHEREAS, The oldest water right in Colorado is attributed to the San Luis People's Ditch, with a priority date of April 10, 1852, in the amount of 21 cubic feet per second from Culebra Creek in Costilla County; and

"WHEREAS, Originally, the land adjacent to the Ditch was divided into strips approximately 100 yards wide and 16 to 20 miles long, allowing settlers to have irrigated farmland near the Ditch and also to have access to range and timber land, and today, the Ditch is 4 miles long and irrigates 1,600 acres of farmland; and

"WHEREAS, The San Luis People's Ditch has been continuously operated for irrigation purposes for 150 years, thus making it an essential foundation for the sustenance of the local economy; . . ."

(d) Upon adoption of Colorado's constitution, the prior appropriation system became the law governing water allocation; and

(e) The prior appropriation system is, in fundamental ways, inconsistent with the community-based principles upon which acequias were founded.

(2) The general assembly hereby determines that:

(a) Notwithstanding the constitutional establishment of the prior appropriation system, communities that were historically served by an acequia have used informal methods to continue to allocate water based upon equity in addition to priority and to treat water as a community resource; and

(b) Recognition by the general assembly of the continuing existence and use of acequias, while continuing to comply with the constitutional requirements of priority administration of tributary water, is critical to preserving the historic value that acequias provide to the communities in which they are located.

(3) The general assembly hereby declares that the purpose of this act is to promote and encourage the continued operation of acequias and the viability of the historic communities that depend on those acequias.

SECTION 2. Article 42 of title 7, Colorado Revised Statutes, is amended BY THE ADDITION OF A NEW SECTION to read: 7-42-101.5. Acequia mutual ditch - definition - powers.

(1) FOR PURPOSES OF THIS SECTION, "ACEQUIA" MEANS A DITCH THAT:

(a) ORIGINATED PRIOR TO COLORADO'S STATEHOOD;

(b) HAS HISTORICALLY TREATED WATER DIVERTED BY THE ACEQUIA AS A COMMUNITY RESOURCE AND HAS THEREFORE ATTEMPTED TO ALLOCATE WATER IN THE ACEQUIA BASED UPON EQUITY IN ADDITION TO PRIORITY;

(c) RELIES ESSENTIALLY ON GRAVITY-FED SURFACE WATER DIVERSIONS;

(d) SUPPLIES IRRIGATION WATER TO LONG LOTS THAT ARE PERPENDICULAR TO THE STREAM OR DITCH TO MAXIMIZE THE NUMBER OF LANDOWNERS WHO HAVE ACCESS TO WATER;

(e) HAS HISTORICALLY BEEN OPERATED PURSUANT TO A ONE LANDOWNER-ONE VOTE SYSTEM; AND

(f) HAS HISTORICALLY RELIED ON LABOR SUPPLIED BY THE OWNERS OF IRRIGATED LAND SERVED BY THE ACEQUIA.

(2) SUBJECT TO ANY CONTRARY PROVISION OF SUBSECTION (3) OF THIS SECTION, THE PROCEDURAL AND SUBSTANTIVE REQUIREMENTS OF THIS ARTICLE OTHER THAN THIS SECTION THAT APPLY TO THE CREATION, POWERS, DUTIES, AND GOVERNANCE OF A DITCH CORPORATION SUBJECT TO THIS ARTICLE SHALL BE DEEMED TO APPLY TO THE CREATION, POWERS, DUTIES, AND GOVERNANCE OF AN ACEQUIA DITCH CORPORATION.

(3) AN ACEQUIA DITCH CORPORATION MAY BE ORGANIZED PURSUANT TO THIS ARTICLE, AND A DITCH CORPORATION ORGANIZED PURSUANT TO THIS ARTICLE MAY CONVERT TO AN ACEQUIA DITCH CORPORATION, IF:

(a) AT LEAST TWO-THIRDS OF THE IRRIGATED LAND SERVED BY THE DITCH IS PLATTED OR ORGANIZED INTO LONG LOTS, THE LONGEST AXES OF WHICH ARE PERPENDICULAR TO THE STREAM OR DITCH;

(b) SURFACE WATER RIGHTS PROVIDE ALL OF THE WATER RIGHTS USED FOR IRRIGATION IN THE DITCH, AND SUCH WATER RIGHTS HAVE HAD SUBSTANTIALLY UNINTERRUPTED USE SINCE BEFORE COLORADO'S STATEHOOD;

(c) THE IRRIGATED LAND SERVED BY THE DITCH IS LOCATED WHOLLY IN ONE OR MORE OF THE COUNTIES OF COSTILLA, CONEJOS, HUERFANO, AND LAS ANIMAS; AND

(d) AS REQUIRED PURSUANT TO SECTION 7-42-101, THE STOCKHOLDERS OF THE DITCH FILE ARTICLES OF INCORPORATION, OR AN AMENDMENT TO THE ARTICLES OF INCORPORATION, THAT STATE THE STOCKHOLDERS' INTENTION TO CREATE OR CONVERT TO AN ACEQUIA DITCH CORPORATION.

(4) AN ACEQUIA DITCH CORPORATION, IF ITS ARTICLES OF INCORPORATION SO STATE, MAY SPECIFY IN ITS BYLAWS THAT:

(a) ITS ELECTIONS MAY BE HELD PURSUANT TO A ONE LANDOWNER-ONE VOTE SYSTEM;

(b) OWNERS OF LAND IRRIGATED BY THE DITCH CAN BE REQUIRED TO CONTRIBUTE LABOR TO THE MAINTENANCE AND REPAIR OF THE ACEQUIA OR, IN THE ALTERNATIVE, TO PAY AN ASSESSMENT IN LIEU OF SUCH LABOR;

(c) WATER IN THE DITCH MAY BE ALLOCATED ON A BASIS OTHER THAN PRO RATA OWNERSHIP OF THE CORPORATION; AND

(d) THE CORPORATION HAS A RIGHT OF FIRST REFUSAL REGARDING THE SALE, LEASE, OR EXCHANGE OF ANY SURFACE WATER RIGHT THAT HAS HISTORICALLY BEEN USED TO IRRIGATE LONG-LOT LAND BY THE ACEQUIA.

SECTION 3. Safety clause. The general assembly hereby finds, determines, and declares that this act is necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health, and safety.

____________________________ ____________________________
Terrance D. Carroll Peter C. Groff
SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE PRESIDENT OF
OF REPRESENTATIVES THE SENATE
____________________________ ____________________________
Marilyn Eddins Karen Goldman
CHIEF CLERK OF THE HOUSE SECRETARY OF
OF REPRESENTATIVES THE SENATE

APPROVED________________________________________
_________________________________________
Bill Ritter, Jr.
GOVERNOR OF THE STATE OF COLORADO

A culinary journey through Ecuador

2009-04-09T09:35:00.000-07:00

Andean Foodways: Del maiz a las abas, papas, y verdes

Seattle, WA. Most of us rightly think of Mexico as the cradle for the origin and domestication of Zea mays (maize, corn). That may be, but on a recent trip to La Mitad del Mundo, I learned that Ecuadorians are probably much more focused on the diversity of corn as a matter of vernacular (everyday popular) cuisine.

Ubiquitous maize

Corn is ubiquitous in both places and is of course Mexico's great gift to the world. But the Ecuadorians approach corn with a great deal more fanfare and nuance in their everyday cuisine. Mexicans might eat tortillas everyday, and munch an occasional corn-on-the-cob, but Ecuadorians prepare myriad everyday foods based on distinct land race varieties of corn in ways that range from simple toasted flint kernels to nuanced corn-based batters for empanadas or corn cakes with cheese.

Let's start with some basics: Tostados are the original "Corn Nuts." These fried kernels of Andean white or yellow flint corn can be prepared with a variety of ingredients but my favorite version involved a street vendor's use of clarified butter mixed with home-made pig fat (lard) with a dash of sea salt, cinnamon, and clove.

Yet another variant of maize cuisine involves the preparation of mote, which is the Ecuadorian version of Hominy. This white, cal-soaked, white corn is used as a condiment side or ingredient for soups including consomes of pork or fish, amid variations that reflect the coastal or mountain contexts.

Choclos are the Ecuadorian version of corn-on-the-cob. These are a truly ubiquitous food staple and can be found on close to every restaurant menu, in every street-vendor's warm bucket, and in every household's kitchen table. Choclos, steamed sweet yellow corn, are the preferred daily snack and are often paired with fresh cream for slathering or slices of quesos frescos during the merienda.

Of course, choclos are also a basic accompaniment to ceviche, and Ecuador counts with numerous regional variations of the lime-soaked mariscos and pescados dish. Choclos also show up at the dinner table besides a bowl of fanesca, the Lenten stew prepared exclusively during Holy Week. A good bowl of locro, potato-cheese soup, is also usually accompanied by a side of choclos.

Corn meal is used to make a wide variety of savory and sweet empanaditas. In one favored savory version, the corn meal is the envelop for a filling of local Mozarella cheese and sweet choclo kernels. Another version has the corn enveloping verde, the fried sweet green plaintain, often paired again with the cheese. Another sweeter version is the humita, or the Ecuadorian tamal.

Quimbolitos are "corn dumplings" made from corn meal infused with lard, raisins, choclos, and vanilla extract. We enjoyed these dumplings during our first almuerzo presented in a clear chicken broth that served as the opening course by our host family.

Beyond maize: yuca, plantains, and potatoes

Muchines de yuca are tasty cassava balls with a crunchy outside protecting a soft, savory filling. Favored in the coastal towns, the muchines are mostly served as an appetizer or side dish topped with salsa de ají, Ecuador's contribution to hot pepper sauce.

The nearly bewildering array of cuisine dedicated to the plantain in Ecuador is a delight to explore. As far as I could tell, there are three principal types of plantain used in everyday cooking: Large Yellow, Medium Green, and Small Yellow plantains.

The patacones are the fried medium-sized green plantains and are also known as verdes; these unripened plantains also play a big role as filling for empanaditas. The small yellow plantains are preferred for use in the puree for potato cakes, or llapingachos.

Yuca (cassava) is as ubuquitous as maize and plantain and is utilized across a wide variety of preparations. The one that most intrigued me was how it is used in its pureed form to prepare llapingachos (potato cakes). Yuca is also used in the preparation of a wide range of soups and stews and certain land race varieties are imbued with medicinal properties including the treatment of enlarged prostate.

Yet another snack we tried are the chifles, or fried yellow plantain chips. For a sweet and piquant effect, chifles (and dried yuca slivers) can be used to dip into salsa de ají.

A word about papas (potatoes). Ecuador is not Peru, or even Bolivia, in its diversity of perennial land races in the tribe of Solanum tuberosum in the Solanaceae or deadly nightshade family. But it does have some hardy native high altitude potatoes. There are some small yellow potatoes that seem to be the preference in the preparation of llapingachos (fried potato puree cakes).

Globally, there are about five thousand potato varieties and three thousand of these are found in the Andes across high altitude Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile and Colombia. There are also about 200 wild species and subspecies, many of which can be cross-bred with cultivated varieties, and are protected by indigenous inhabitants.

In urban Quito and Manta, the chain grocery stores offered a reduced range of only 3 or 4 different varieties of Ecuadorian potatoes: a medium white; a large red; and a small yellow variety.

However, rural roadside stands presented a much wider variety of potatoes from one place to the next. It seems potatoes are a serious place-based matter in Ecuador and the mass marketing of this diversity has not yet co-opted this traditional practice of heirloom preservation. Each place seems dedicated to the cultivation of 4 to 6 varieties that are consumed or sold locally.

A range of slow-cooked pleasures for the omnivore

Speaking of meats, Ecuador's regional cuisines vibe with creative dishes involving beef, chicken, pork, sea and freshwater fish, shellfish, and lamb or goat. We sampled various parrilladas, grilled meat and sausage assortments.

In Manta's Martinique Restaurant we had an amazing serving of appetizer mollejas (beef sweetbreads) stewed in a simple but eloquent neo-French dressing of whole cream, white wine, peppers, and garlic. The same restaurant served outstanding plates of corvina (Sea Bass) in various guises including our favored version, a la plancha (open-grilled).

Even the local cold cuts from the deli at the Supermaxi in Manta made for excellent sandwich fill when paired with freshly baked bolillos (round buns).

Pig's heads are commonly used by street vendors and puestositos as the source of delicious fritadas. The shredded pork is combined with fried sweet yellow plantains and boiled skinless potatoes. We ate our sampling of fritada at a puestosito on the Panecillo (Bread Loaf Hill) underneath the towering figure of La Virgen de Quito, a monument featuring the only winged-Virgin in the world.

Truchas at Two Mile High

Some of the best food we sampled in Ecuador involved both simple and complex fish recipes. This was especially the case in the upland area of Papallacta (House of the Potato), an eco-tourist volcanic hotsprings resort and sustainable community in the mountains lying one hour east of Quito at an altitude of 10,086 feet.

The thermal springs here are at the entrance to one of Ecuador's most cherished cloud forests and páramo (high altitude grasslands). Yet, the restaurant at Papallacta derives all of its vegetable, tuber, grain, and herb supply from the organic 3 hectare polyculture huerto familiar. The home kitchen garden, despite the high altitude, produces food year-round.

The Ecuadorian government, working with local indigenous communities and Japanese scientists, developed a fish hatchery that serves to restock streams in the Cayembe-Coca Ecological Reserve while providing fresh brook trout (trucha) directly to local restaurant tables.

At Papallacta we sampled truchas in two different presentations: a la plancha with a white wine sauce and a breaded and baked cordon bleu trout stuffed with local melting cheese and ham. We also sampled a fish and prawn soup prepared in a base infused with cream, coconut, yuca, and mote.

Ceviche was everywhere but we followed local advice and waited till we got to the central coast at Manta before sampling this classic seafood dish. Some 20 kilometers east of Manta is the inland village of Montecristi, best known for its misnamed "Panama"-styled hats. We sampled three versions of ceviche in Montecristi and all of them involved fresh ingredients (fish and shellfish) and careful skilled preparation. The local honey bees agreed and they danced and flitted about our table.

The ceviche in Montecristi included corvina, or what is sometimes called "Gulf" or "Chilean Sea Bass." This delightful, flaky white fish meat melts in your mouth like butter. The Monterey Bay Aquarium lists this species as endangered but many different white finfish are also presented with the name, corvina, and I suspect that was the case in Montecristi.

Some missing elements

Through the course of our "local, slow, and deep food" tour of Ecuador, I am sorry to report that we did not try encocado, a concoction of shrimp (or sometimes fish) smothered in a rich, spiced coconut sauce. We cook a Thai version of "coconut fish stoup" in Seattle, so we truly regret missing this version.

We also did not sample the presumed "National Dish" of Ecuador consisting of roasted guinea pig or cuy. This was not due to any food prejudice on our part perhaps stemming from reservations many Americans have over eating something we consider household pets.

We never returned to the old barrio in Quito that was reputed to have the best version around. I did not get the sense, in the long days spent in the northern lake district uplands or the central coastal area (Manta), that cuy was as big a part of the regional cuisine in those areas as it seems to be in the more urbanized places like Quito or rural mountain locales.

We also did not sample the range of cuisine from the "Oriente," the vast Amazon jungle that lies east of the Andes and is the third major geographic subdivision of Ecuador in addition to Mountains and Coast. Of course, we heard not just about lemon-flavored ants but about the many selva creatures, usually egg-laying flies, that slowly eat you. How is that for an inversion of the slow food chain?

Is it sustainable, resilient and just food?

Ecuadorians are into their food as much as any other comparable Latin American culture. The question that comes up of course: Is the Ecuadorian food system sustainable, resilient, and just?

Ecuador has hunger, but in relative terms the number of hungry and malnourished persons is relatively low. Indigenous areas that have experienced an economic and cultural resurgence show little signs of widespread hunger. Our visits to Cayembi indigenous strongholds of Cotacachi and Otavalo in the Northern Lake Districts of Imbabura Province revealed a well-fed and well-nourished population.

Some environmentalists express concern that maize terraces have spread across the entire foothills biome of Imbabura and pretty much all of the montane ecosystems of the Andean Cordillera.

It is true that maize sembrados are an ubiquitous feature of the foothills landscape; indeed every urban household lot seems to have a bit of corn and other grains planted. However, it is not clear that this represents a recent encroachment and intensive cultivation of the Imbabura Province predates the repelled Inca incursions of the late 15th century.

The Ecuadorian hill terrace agroecosystem seems well-suited to extant local conditions and is by and large well-maintained. I did not notice extensive evidence of erosion or landslides (there are always localized exceptions). The intensive labor necessary to maintain these soil conservation structures and landscape features is present and this is likely a result of the fact that 30 percent of Ecuador's population is indigenous. The terracing system adds depth and stability to the rich volcanic soils that underlie most of the arable uplands.

These traditional agroecosystems have been displaced in some areas of the Andean corridor but the most severe transformation involves the establishment of large tropical fruit plantations in the coastal litorals.

In the mountain valley surrounding Otavalo, thousands of invernaderos (greenhouses) have been built on former farm land for the production of flowers for national and export markets. The tales of poisoned workers and degraded environmental qualities associated with the cut-flower industry are well known. This case involves foreign investors including interests that were first rooted in the Colombian cut-flower industry, Israeli capital and technology, and Dutch investors.

The big agro-industrial export crops remain bananas, coffee, and cocoa. The 1998 El Nino event destroyed the coastal banana plantations and that sector is only now undergoing a recovery of sorts but exports have already reestablished Ecuador as the world's leading banana exporter. Banana plantation workers, many of them Afro-Ecuatorianos and itinerant indigena migrants are ununionized and earn an average of $2 a day.

Despite problems in the "Banana Republic" sector, it seems the independent small and medium sized producers of plantains are doing well. This sector was not as severely affected by the 1998 drought in part because many of these smaller producers can still flood irrigate with acequias, are located in more rainy montane valleys, or remained small and diverse enough to survive disturbances affecting banana production.

Coffee is a growth industry both domestically and in the export-oriented sector. While cocoa is still principally produced for domestic consumption, more than anything else, it is witnessing rapid increases in exports spurred by the search for organic and socially responsible (Fair Trade) sources by high-end specialty chocolate manufacturers in Europe, Asia, and North America.

The most important lessons I learned during this food tour occurred while visiting the village of Cotacachi in the Northern Lake District outside of Otavalo. I learned that the native Cayembi people of this bioregion managed to repel Inca intruders who arrived in the 15th century. They were also never fully subordinated by the Spaniards in the 16th century due to the remote and mountainous nature of the area.

The native peoples of the Imbabura bioregion remain well positioned to maintain some semblance of local governmental autonomy. Indeed, Cotacachi has received recognition from the United Nations (UNESCO) for its progressive work on participatory democracy and transparent municipal government.

This political and cultural climate contributes in no small measure to the sustenance and success of an organic, resilient, culturally-appropriate, and socially well-embedded local food system. People in Cotacachi are eating well; they are eating local; and they are eating heritage cuisines instead of westernized fast foods. Obesity is rare and malnutrition has been greatly reduced among Cayembi youth, elderly, and underemployed workers.

The lessons of Cotacachi present hope for an alterNative place-based approach to indigenous inhabitation of homelands linked to resilient local food systems. This Cayembi automous village illustrates the possibility that local food self-sufficiency is an inextricable quality of food justice. Most of the rest of Ecuador is still struggling to understand that lesson.

Fanesca, or food as syncretic conviviality?

There is one more thing to say about regional cuisines and local food systems in the areas of Ecuador that we visited. Coastal plains and mountains; rural and urban locales; all these places shared the common occurrence of acts of food-sharing in public or in the household. The act of sharing food is an important social event in and of itself. It is a dedicated form of conviviality.

I witnessed and participated in this everyday lived practice of la comida. Every day we spent in Quito with our gracious host family, we were summoned to the familial daily rounds of almuerzos and cenas. As Gustavo Esteva has observed, the consumption of food is not just for purposes of bodily nutrition, it is also a powerful cohesive symbolic practice imbued with interpersonal and collective meaning. Food in this way nurtures souls and promotes social bonding and reciprocity in small groups and large.

An example of a food that captures this symbolic gesturing is fanesca, the Lenten chowder that is served exclusively during Holy Week before Easter. The recipe for fanesca reads like a fascinating "who's who" of ecuatoriano ethnobotanical diversity. The grains and legumes used are all local land race varieties.

There are actually twelve grains used in the traditional quiteno recipe for fanesca. These are said to represent the "Twelve Disciples" of Jesus Christ. Most recipes include chochos, abas, lentils, peas, and two or three varieties of corn.

The inclusion of chochos (tarwi) is interesting because chocho (Andean Lupine flower seeds) is said to represent a "wild indigenous" grain that has been collected by Cayembi and other native peoples for millennia. Fanesca in this manner is rooted both in the Western Christian worldview and in the indigenous ethnobiology of place.

We can call this food "syncretism" but the deeper history of these indigenous grains and legumes, including abas which are a "naturalized exotic," signals something a bit more profound.

Fanesca is fastidiously tied to a Christian religious calendar cycle so that the temporal frame freezes or subordinates the indigenous agricultural cycle and the cosmovision that underlies it. The aboriginal cycles are partly defined by the autopoetic condition of alternating seasonal patterns involving both the collection of wild "pulses" and the cultivation of domesticated crops in an extended agroecological mosaic that includes wild relatives and not just the cultivars.

In other words, there is no "wild" and "domesticated" space in the indigenous food system or its cuisine. The presence of Lupinus mutabilis (Andean Lupine or chocho) in fanesca recipes is thus for me an intriguing indicator of a dialectical tension between a multicultural and largely land race-based recipe and the presentation of the chowder as a featured Holy Week entree that has been reinvented as an icon of food conviviality in Ecuador.

Acequia Recognition Law is Passed by Colorado General Assembly

2009-04-07T07:59:00.000-07:00

Acequia recognition law

Moderator's Note: We are posting a journal kept over the past five weeks since I testified with Joe Gallegos and others on February 18 in Denver to support passage of Colorado General Assembly House Bill (HB) 09-1233. The proposed law recognizes acequia systems and re-establishes traditional norms of self-governance for our historic community ditches. HB 09-1233 was passed by the House on February 25, 2009. On March 23, 2009, the Colorado State Senate passed their version of the House Bill. As of April 7, the legislation awaits the signature of Governor Bill Ritter.

February 18 (Denver)

By the time this news report and commentary is posted, we are certain to have been waiting for several weeks to learn of the destiny of the "Acequia Recognition" law introduced two weeks ago by our incomparable salt-of-the-Earth Colorado State Representative, Edward Vigil (D) of Ft. Garland.

Mr. Vigil is a first-year, freshly-minted, State Representative from our district in south central Colorado which includes the Chicana/o strongholds of the San Luis Valley and Pueblo. He is the first acequia farmer from the San Luis-Ft. Garland area to serve in the state legislature in close to a hundred years.

I admire Rep. Vigil for having the courage and vision to be so bold as to introduce a law, in his frosh year at that, presenting a challenge to the dominance of a singularly Anglo-American legal regime for water allocation and governance in Colorado.

At the invitation of Joe Gallegos, I came to testify before the Colorado House Committee on Agriculture, Livestock, and Natural Resources. The testimony was to support legislation entitled HB 09-1233 "Recognition of Acequias." The bill was developed by Rep. Vigil and Thomas Morris, legal counsel to the House Committee. Joe Gallegos and I provided some input on the first draft over the past few weeks. Mr. Morris drew ideas and concepts from an article published in the Colorado Law Review (see Hicks and Peña 2003).

We have remained quiet and reserved, but the breaking news will soon require us to offer commentary and perhaps a note of celebration.

The hearing before the committee went well and four people testified in support of the proposed statute. Rep.Vigil led off by presenting the amended bill and discussing its merits. Rep. Vigil was followed by three other voices. These included Mr. David Robbins of the Colorado Water Congress (CWC). Not much in matters pertaining to water law in Colorado goes through without first being vetted and approved by the CWC. Mr. Robbins was knowledgeable and gracious, demonstrating a sense of appreciation and respect for the historical, cultural, and ecological significance of acequia systems.

Next was Joe Gallegos, the lifelong advocate of acequia farmers and hailing from one of the oldest farming families in the State of Colorado. Joe's great-great-grandfather, Dario Gallegos, established Colorado's "Oldest Town" (La Plaza de San Luis de la Culebra) in 1851.

The first thing Dario and his compatriots did, way back in April of 1852, was to dig by hand the town's first acequia madre or "Mother Ditch," La Acequia de la Gente de San Luis (a.k.a. San Luis Peoples Ditch). This was more than ten years before Colorado became a Territory and a quarter century before the creation of the Centennial State (1876).

Testifying last before the House Committee, I briefly described the legal history and the principles of acequia self-governance. I outlined the ethnoecology and agroecology of the acequia-riparian long-lot. The acequias provide vital ecosystem and economic base services that have been valued in excess of $300 million a year in benefits accruing to the seven-county area known as the Rio Arriba (Upper Rio Grande) in New Mexico and Colorado. I will post my testimony on the blog at a later date.

Our expectations remain so high that the disappointment of a loss is imponderable. We are all jitterbugging through time and space.

February 19 (Denver International Airport)

Acequias and the 'Lords of Yesterday'

As I sit here waiting for my flight back to Seattle, I am reflecting on the day's proceedings. I can't help but recall the excellent book by Professor Charles F. Wilkinson, Crossing the Next Meridian: Land, Water, and the Future of the West (1992). The opening chapter, as I recall, is entitled "The Lords of Yesterday" and it outlines and then criticizes three laws that have come to shape pretty much close to everything about the "settling" of the lands West of the 100th Meridian, an area Wilkinson calls the "Intermountain West."

The three "Lords of Yesterday," Wilkinson explains, were the EuroAmerican settler miners, ranchers/farmers, and loggers that relied on the federal government and three laws to settle, exploit, and transform "the West" into an extractive resource colony that displaced native cultures, laws, and ways of life.

The General Mining Act of 1872, the Homestead Act of 1862 , and the Doctrine of Prior Appropriation with roots in the California (1849) and later Colorado (1859) "Gold Rushes" were the three most significant legal frameworks imposed on native peoples in the "conquest" and enclosure of the "West."

Punching a Hole in the Doctrine of Prior Appropriation?

The water law of the Intermountain West has been defined by the prior appropriation doctrine ever since hardrock miners in California and Colorado declared themselves to be the "first in use" and thus "first in right." Never mind that Native Americans and Chicana/o communities had their own laws for the allocation and use of land, water, and other resources. In recent decades, researchers have deemed these alterNative systems to be more democratic, resilient, and ecologically-sustainable compared to the modern regime of land and water law.

The acequia legal code, rooted in deep antiquity, clearly predates the advent of the prior appropriation regime. Yet, in 1882 the Colorado Supreme Court affirmed in Coffin v. Left Hand Ditch that the only true water law of Colorado was the principle of first in use/first in right. This tragically mistaken and ethnocentric decision erased hundreds of years of legal evolution in the water allocation and use practices in upland headwaters territories that had been sovereign parts of local place-based water institutions under Native, Spanish, and subsequent Mexican rule.

The Colorado Supremes enshrined "Prior" in Left Hand Ditch despite the fact that the Colorado Territorial Legislature had just enacted three laws recognizing acequia governance norms during the 1870s, a few years before statehood.

While acequia principles are as true to place (if not more so than Prior), Left Hand Ditch nonetheless imposed Prior as the only water law held to be "true to place" in the State of Colorado. This has had the effect of erasing the institutional memory and codification of the earliest forms of watershed governance and local democracy in the region.

Despite this legal erasure, the acequia water democracy and its forms of local self-governance persisted over time through informal arrangements deriving ultimately from the strength of mutual reliance interests that are the heart and soul of acequia place-based cultures.

The proposed new law will restore some crucial aspects of the legal paradigm of acequia customary law and practice and make Colorado a more progressive and "legally plural" state in the area of water law. Will the General Assembly see fit to allow us to punch albeit a small hole in the edifice of one of the three principal laws of the Lords of Yesterday?

February 25 (Shoreline, WA)

This morning I finally received a call from Joe Gallegos informing me that the House of Representatives of the Colorado General Assembly had just voted unanimously on third reading to pass HB 09-1233 on the "Recognition of Acequias." Full passage of the bill is expected once the Colorado State Senate votes sometime during the first half of March. Senator Gail Schwarz is the principal sponsor carrying the bill in the State Senate.

Restoring the Resilient Water Democracy of the Acequias?

This bill is significant because it recognizes that acequias have "...historically treated water as a community resource and...allocated water...based on equity in addition to priority." Moreover, the law states that the acequia "has historically been operated pursuant to a one landowner-one vote system."

In one short but pithy paragraph, the law legitimizes five central norms of acequia water law that are distinct from the principles enshrined in the Doctrine of Prior Appropriation:

(1) Water is a communal resource and not a commodity.

(2) The principle of the one farmer-one vote rule. This restores our long cherished democratic practice that was lost with Prior's shift to a share-based system in which larger landowners had more votes.

(3) The law also specifies that acequias may rely on "labor supplied by the landowners of irrigated land served by the acequia," a phrase that restores our customary practice of cooperative labor and mutual aid.

(4) Since the law establishes that water is a community resource for purposes of acequia governance, incorporated ditches will be able to adopt by-laws or modify existing by-laws to exercise a "right of first refusal" on the sale or transfer of water to non-acequia uses. Incorporated ditches may also use conservation easements to restrict water transfers or sales.

(5) Finally, the law allows acequias to allocate water on the basis of principles of equity and fairness and not just priority. This is an especially important principle since it allows irrigators to share scarcity in times of drought instead of following the "priority call" system imposed by Prior Appropriation that provides water only to the most senior water rights at the expense of more junior rights. We have restored the principle of shared scarcity.

I will have another report on the new Acequia Law as soon as the Colorado State Senate vote is in. Some questions are emerging: Are we are on the cusp of a "minor" revolution in the evolution of water law in the Intermountain West? Are Prior's days as a singular normative regime for water governance and allocation numbered? Will a plural regime emerge in the Colorado watersheds with historic uninterrupted acequia water use and customary allocation practices embraced by these resurgent place-based principles?

Colorado acequia communities will seeks answers to these questions soon. At the behest of fellow parciantes, I will on occasion report to this blog on emerging local plans and discussions for the convening of the Congreso de Acequias (Acequia Congress) for Colorado. Our efforts likely will be modeled to some extent on New Mexico's Congreso de Acequias.

We will need our colegas in the New Mexico Acequia Association to help our communities find a process to discuss and define the values, norms, and rules that acequias in the four counties of Colorado included in the bill (Costilla, Conejos, Las Animas, and Huerfano) might use to implement the new law.

This must derive from a process of collective action drawn from the fullest participation of acequia parciantes across the bioregion. El Congreso de Acequias de Colorado promises to initiate the resurgence of acequia water democracy as an institution of place-based cultures in the headwaters of the Upper Rio Grande bioregion.

March 28, 2009 (Cotacachi, Ecuador)

I have not yet heard from Joe or Ed about the status of the Acequia Recognition bill. It went to the Senate two weeks ago and received a generally positive first reading. I have been anxious throughout this trip without news. My access to the Internet has been spotty....so my mind drifts into place....and I find connections.

There are acequias in Ecuador. Maize and acequias.

There are indigenous communities, resurgent participatory democracies, and their place-based communally-oriented agriculture, artisan production, and the albeit conflicted local management of the protected areas and ecological reserves.

Ibambura is the principal maize growing area in the Andean corridor of Ecuador. Located in the northern highlands close to the border with Colombia, this area includes several blue volcanic-origin lakes and is thus known as the Imbabura or Blue Lakes District.

One of the Cayembi villages, Cotacachi, is known for its leather-making and wool-weaving artisan traditions. Less recognized is that the bioregion is also vested with profound agroecological richness: Both rain-fed and acequia flood-irrigated polycultures are evident here.

This involves close to continuous year-round production of annual grains centered on the diverse land races of maize, various tubers including potatoes and yucca, and perennial and annual grains like quinoa.

There are numerous other perennial heirloom fruit vines, bushes, and trees and wild relatives of cultivars like the Andean Lupine and its ubiquitous chochos, the flower seeds so big they are presented, after careful steeping and rinsing to remove water-soluable toxic alkaloids and a soft boil, as beige-hued medium-sized habas next to a bowl of salsa de aji. The chochos are like our own quelites or verdolagas, the edible wild relatives of plants that are present with domesticated crop mosaics in polyculture huertos familiares.

Indeed, the word in rural areas like Cotacachi is that President Correa is making indigenous autonomy a vital part of the agenda of post-neoliberal state making policies. This process is riddled with contradictions and the constant threat of illegal loggers, drug traffickers, and military operations related to the intrusion of the FARC from Colombia into northern Ecuador's Imbabura bioregion.

I think back to our little valley in south central Colorado and our efforts to succeed in much the same manner as the indigenous people of Cotacachi, who are working to restore the Acequia de la Victoria as part of their place-based governance in and of place.

These are the ties of people and their memories intertwined with the land and water, clouds and skies, plants and animals, and living processes of change, disturbance, and resurgence. These are the presence of life as a process of change bound to place, a process of regeneration (autopoesis).

April 5 (Quito, Ecuador)

I arrived in Quito today after ten days in the Northern Lake District and Manta on the central coast. Finally received word from Ed Vigil that the Senate approved the Acequia Recognition Law on March 23, the day I left for Ecuador.

It seems almost anti-climatic now. We are waiting for Governor Ritter to sign the legislation.

Perhaps it may seem a bit trivializing, or a slip beyond the obvious, to state that the Acequia Recognition Law can be read as a central "watershed" event in the history of water law in the Intermountain West? Environmental justice ethics have prevailed in challenging yet another form of disparate impact resulting in this case from the subjection of place-based law by "positive" law.

For the first time in the history of Western water law, water has been declared a communal and place-based resource rather than a commodity. The value of water as an asset-in-place is thus re-affirmed. This opens the door to the acequia watershed democracy, which can now unfold in its own "natural" habitat as a mutual-aid commons freed from the tethers of individualistic and commodity forms of value.

Local, slow, and deep

2009-03-19T10:28:00.000-07:00

Theorizing Food Justice: A Brief Conceptual Note

SHORELINE, WA. Yesterday, I had a brief but fascinating conversation with an acquaintance who identifies as a vegan activist. She is highly committed to the "slow" food movement. She explained her "slow" and "local" food philosophy:

If you "go slow," that means you also "go local." Slow leads to local. I only eat local grains, veggies, fruits, and nuts. Every meal is slow-cooked from organic ingredients grown slowly by farmers that I know personally. Many are close friends and I often work on their farms for the food I need. I have become self-reliant and I have helped the local farmers become self-reliant. This unites slow and local food ethics. Together with my vegan diet, I am reducing my own carbon footprint...The vegan philosophy means I am not guilty of inflicting pain on others including animals or the people who go hungry because so many of us still eat dead animal protein.

As a consumer of "dead animal protein," I am of course guilty of perhaps leveraging a larger impact on the planet's environmental space compared to my vegan colleague.

I asked my friend to tell me more about the communities where her farmer friends live and work. It turns out that most of them are white farmers who live in the Skagit watershed north of Seattle or the Chehalis watershed south.

I asked if she knew which Native American "first nations" inhabited those watersheds. Her response was a disappointing surprise:

Well, in the Skagit, you know, there are a lot of multi-generational farmers who are not Native American. They have been here a long time and have as much stake in this watershed as any one else. But I don't remember the names of, you know, any tribes. I haven't met any Indians myself, so I really can't tell you much about the cultural history of the area...It is also a problem with, or because of the conflicts over salmon recovery. The Indians and the farmers are fighting it out but I am not that well-read on the matter.

I was surprised because I sort of naively expected that anyone with the intelligence and ethics to become a local/slow foodie, would also be "well-read on the matter" of Native communities in a given watershed. It is not like we just disappeared. Surely one must also become knowledgeable of the "deep" history of places in practicing a slow/local food politics?

How can one go local and not know the "deep histories" and continuing Native struggles in and of place? How can one not know about the crippled state of local Native food systems and the impact that even the most organic, vegan-friendly settler-farmers might be exerting on the survival of salmon and on the prospects of the Native struggles to restore salmon runs and indigenous resource rights?

My vegan friend was oddly also lacking knowledge of Native ethnobotany, the rich traditions of the collection and use of wild plants for their recognized and valued nutritional, medicinal, and spiritual properties. She did not know any of the wild mushrooms in the Skagit or Chehalis that are still harvested by Native people. Camus bulbs? Not aware.

She did not seem to fully realize the impact that modern "forestry," agribusiness (including organics), and urban sprawl have had on fish and shellfish habitat in the Skagit.

In other words, my vegan acquaintance overestimated the degree of the reduction of her personal ecological footprint. Lacking depth about the environmental history of the lands of the Skagit, she assumed that organic farmers were indeed sustainable and equitable.

But compared to what? Should not the Native local food system be the standard rather than just the settler's organic alternatives to corporate monoculture factories in the fields? Lacking deep local knowledge she could not estimate a more accurate rendition of the "ecological footprint" she partakes in by being a beneficiary of generations of structural violence and historical trauma experienced by Native peoples and their animal and plant co-residents in the Skagit or Chehalis.

This means that when we start to build a "theory" of food justice, it is simply not enough to examine the ethics of "going slow to go local." One has to "go deep," first and foremost, and this means respecting "local knowledge" including especially the multi-generational place-based agroecological, ethnobotanical, and gastronomical knowledge of Native cultures.

Sodbusters and the 'native' gaze - Part VI

2009-03-12T09:37:00.000-07:00

Other’s foods: limpiezas y la comida

I leave the lands of our acequia farm to engage in a promised critical appraisal of recent work in the anthropology of food. One especially good recent collection of essays on anthropological and cultural studies of food (Counihan 2002) presents an intriguing range of contributions on “just what food means to Americans.”

Here we go again, I thought, when I first started reading the book: Another set of deconstructed Happy Meals.

The contributors actually cover much wider ground and this includes an excellent essay on the political economy of global food production (Friedmann) and a decent critical treatment of the environmental, political, and economic problems posed by agricultural biotechnologies (Middendorf et al).

However, the editor (Counihan) and her husband ethnographer (Taggert) contribute two separately-authored chapters on food in the San Luis Valley in Colorado that I find incredibly problematic and indicative once again of a type of anthropology badly in need of getting grounded in the two meanings of the term I have adopted for this paper.

Counihan starts well enough intent on revealing how Hispana women’s food-centered stories break through the silences in the discourse on food and culture. She asserts, “…food can be a channel of oppression.” Yet: “Because food is so often the work and language of women, food stories emphasize the importance of women and challenges [sic] the centrality of men.” (2002:295) In the end, the author presents a fairly bleak picture of a patriarchal culture that forces women, really one woman, Counihan’s source, to “cook for others” and yet insists that women, or at least this particular woman, must remain invisible in the kitchen.

This essay over-generalizes from one interview to an entire culture and its history of food practices. It simply overlooks the rich nuances in Chicana/o gendered divisions of labor surrounding food production, processing, preparation, and sharing.

There is a lot of differentiation in who grows, cultivates, harvests, processes, prepares, serves and shares food in Chicana/o communities but, like many other groups, this follows more complex age, class, national origin, as well as gendered locations that are actually quite fluid and intersecting from one family to the next and within the same family over time. Chicana/os are not fixated on one immutable gendered division of labor when it comes to food production and consumption as Counihan misleadingly suggests.

The men of the San Luis Valley are no more central to food production than women are presumably to food preparation. Chicanas, as Sarah Deutsch (1989) demonstrated two decades ago have had to take command of farming operations in the Rio Arriba acequia communities since at least the 1880s when men often left for work in mining camps, sugar beet plantations, or sheep camps as far north as Wyoming and Montana.

Men have always played a significant role in food preparation. During my first sabbatical at Colorado College (1990-91), I lived and worked at the Gallegos Ranches in San Luis. Yvette Gallegos was retired from a successful career as a schoolteacher while Corpus A. Gallegos had returned from an equally distinguished career as a teacher and principal. They were hosting me at their ranch. Corpus did most of the cooking including a wonderful breakfast served at 5 a.m. before we set out on daily farm chores. Corpus always prepared this multi-course breakfast since Yvette insisted we needed energy to carry us through the morning tasks. This typically consisted of grilled vegetables from the kitchen garden, home-cut bacon, huevos con papas fritas, chicos-bolitas stew, and tortillas with roasted green chiles.

Yvette still fancied canning and she continued to process, with all the men helping, the farm’s produce. The Gallegos’ cupboards were filled with chokecherry jam, elderberry jelly, and other home kitchen-processed foods.

There was a spirit of collaboration across age, gender, and city/village resident status. This issued from the kitchen, which was the business nerve center of the household, to the fields, acequias, orchards, and beyond into la Sierra. I should note that in my family, my Father-in-Law is the cook; always has been. When I visit, he serves me a Laredo version of the breakfast Corpus prepared for me in San Luis. In my own household, my wife and I usually share cooking duties everyday and are most delighted when we can share a gastronomic innovation with our friends and neighbors down in San Luis.

Regardless of the cook’s gender, there is one thing I am absolutely certain about: The families, at least those I have dined with over the decades that I have spent researching acequia farms while sharing heritage foods and bioregional cuisines in the Rio Arriba, all want to eat together.

As Esteva and Prakash (1999:55, 65-7) have noted, la comida (the shared meal) is at the heart of the food culture of Mexican-origin peoples everywhere. That is not a stereotype but a serious observable pattern of preferred cultural organization and behavior. Sharing a meal is a signifying event of utmost importance because it conveys a commitment to conviviality – the act of sharing is what the meal is about and not just nutrition.

While Counihan acknowledges “Hispanics expressed sociability and social equality by sharing food,” she also notes that they “marked class differences and borders by not eating together.” (2002: 299) She goes on to describe how “People in Antonito defined class according to wealth and education” and how “Hispanics from the laboring classes rarely ate in the homes of the wealthy Hispanic landowners and professionals.” Class breaks down the conviviality of food in Counihan’s take on the gendered food practices of Colorado Hispanics [sic].

In Counihan’s version, the father of her primary informant refused to share food, least of all with Anglos, because this refusal meant he “refuted the class subordination expressed through making food for others.” (2002:300)

James M. Taggert echoes this theme of class division in an equally misguided take on masculinity and food among the Hispano men of Antonito. Taggert mismanages the information provided by his singular ethnographic source. In this version of Hispanic food ways, food becomes a hidden code for class stratification and resistance.

According to Taggert (2002) people in the San Luis Valley do not cross class divisions to eat together. The working class eats in its space separate from los ricos (the rich) who have their own differentiated space.

However, this too is something I do not recognize at all in San Luis, Antonito, or any other acequia community I have had the privilege of visiting in response to invitations for la comida. It seems intriguing that Anglo anthropologists appear overly preoccupied with demonstrating that, gosh darn it, Mexicans are just as riddled by patriarchy and class hierarchy as any other ethnic group and we therefore need to stop romanticizing these folk as paragons of some equitable and sustainable future. That is the subtext I disentangle from these two essays.

The sharing of food, la comida, at least in San Luis, Antonito, and other acequia farming villages in the Rio Arriba that I know first hand as a resident farmer and fellow gastronome, is precisely one of the most significant “sociable” events that is used to cut across class, gender, and racial divisions.

It must be understood as well that the imaginary world of ricos y pobres (rich and poor) in the Counihan-Taggert narrative is a bit of a stretch since the acres separating “wealthy” and “poor” landowners is negligible at best (although there are growing numbers of landless Chicana/os in our bioregion).

Also, every person, at least within the context of acequia culture, labors long and hard hours at farm and ranch work; no one is above getting their hands dirty since all of these are small family farms. Everyone in the acequia community is in other words part of “the laboring class.” For example, no one escapes la limpieza (0r saca), the annual ritual of the communal work of springtime irrigation ditch clean-up.

The annual Saca y Limpieza de La Acequia de la Gente de San Luis de la Culebra, which I participated in this April 19, involves a multi-generational, mixed gender and mixed class contingent of helpers. This year, about eight of the forty-two crewmembers were women. The largest landowner has about 160 acres of irrigated land; the smallest has about ten acres. Both shared equally in the work of ditch maintenance.

In the middle of our cleanup day, there was a two-hour break for la comida, a communal meal prepared by two men and three women who used local organic ingredients and recipes handed down over the generations. The multi-course meal became the endless subject of our “idle chit-chat” as we traded glowing reports about how that corn in the chicos stew came from Sally Chavez’s garden or how those outstanding creamy bolita beans came from the Gallegos boys and so on.

Everyone present – male and female, young and old, and large or small landholder – understood that the Acequia Madre cleanup in April is a necessary precondition for the production and preparation of the meal we shared that day. These interconnections are silenced when anthropologists, however progressive and supportive they might be, quickly rush to pen the next best critique of patriarchy and masculinity in Mexican communities, obscuring the changing practices of our dynamic and ever-expanding networks of local ‘foodies.’

I just don’t believe that, epistemologically, it is a very good idea to engage in remotely directed research even over a period of long visits and many years. Grounding any given anthropology of food requires sustained participation in the entire local food system. It is this system that seems absent in these accounts by Counihan and Taggert.

There are some significant differences between San Luis and Antonito in matters of food, class, race, and gender. I believe these are rooted in the organization of the food systems in each community. Both communities include original Chicana/o settlements that date back to claims based on Mexican-period mercedes (the Conejos grant in Antonito and the Sangre de Cristo grant in San Luis). Both have long-established acequia systems but the level of organization regionally has the San Luis-area acequia associations well ahead of Antonito. Many of the acequias in Conejos County have taken hard hits and have even lost significant portions of quite senior water rights.

Agriculture remains a vital force in both areas and there are many remaining multigenerational farming families, both Chicana/o and white. Antonito is located in Conejos County, an area that was demographically and religiously transformed beginning in the late 1870s with the establishment of Mormon communities and later railroad grid towns settled through in-migration of white Americans including many Midwesterners. San Luis never experienced such a demographic and cultural transformation and remains a predominantly Mexican-origin and Catholic community.

To some extent, this was a consequence of geography: The establishment of railroad grid-towns in our own Costilla County was limited to the higher plateau desert scrub country around present-day town sites like Fort Garland and Blanca to the north and Mesita and Jaroso to the South-Southwest, some 10 to 30 miles from the Culebra bottomlands.

This is where the industrial monocultures, with their center-pivot irrigation circles, were established, far away enough from the acequia-hood that their disruptive influence was limited to the usurpation of more than half of the original water rights decreed to acequias in a legal battle stretching from the 1880s to the early 1900s. (Hicks and Peña 2003)

Antonito has grocery chain stores, convenience marts, and fast food outlets. San Luis has none of these. Much of the agriculture in the Antonito area does involve larger homesteaded acreage irrigated by mechanical sprinklers in alfalfa-hay monoculture production. Some corporate seed potato and potato growers are also evident. Grain producers and other fairly large thousand-acre operators are producing biodiesel and ethanol fuel sources (canola, sunflower, and corn) and becoming a bigger part of the reshaping of the environs of Antonito and its neighboring towns. Cattle ranches west of the Rio Bravo are much larger than those east of the river.

However, the practice of maintaining home kitchen gardens, orchards, and polyculture milpas appears to have fallen by the wayside across much of the Antonito area although some acequia farm families in Ortiz, Mogote, Conejos, and other largely Hispana/o rural hamlets still raise home kitchen gardens or maintain family orchards.

Another difference is that the acequia ranchers in Antonito have access to grazing permits on public lands while Chicana/os in the San Luis area do not have immediate access since all the local headwater forests are privately owned. Many Antonito-area acequia ranchers run cattle in federal public domain areas located within the Conejos watershed in the Rio Grande National Forest and BLM-administered holdings.

Costilla County has no such public lands and it was only in 2002 that the courts restored grazing rights to the enclosed land grant commons, another important story that lies beyond my scope today. The dependence of the acequia ranchers on grazing permits in the high country likely changes local food practices as well since it marks a shift away from a focus on polyculture milpa agroecosystems. Ranching on public lands carries a different set of strong relationships but it lacks the dense network of social interactions focused around food production and consumption that farming creates.

I think that together these conditions – the availability of grocery stores, convenience marts, and fast food outlets; the decline of home kitchen gardens and orchards and therefore the loss of heritage cuisines, canning, and food preservation practices; the demographic shifts that produced greater class stratification and altered the quality of agriculture into a form dominated by larger corporate-styled operators; the corresponding decline of acequia governance; and the displacement of Hispano males from traditional skilled artisan craftwork and hence a retreat into the home as a patriarchal refuge – contribute to a sharpening and heightening of racial, class, and gender divisions in Antonito that perhaps do get played out in some of the ways described by Counihan and Taggert.

In contrast to this, however, the smaller family farms of San Luis-area acequia farmers continue to produce many of their own local crops that are destined for home consumption, local barter, and sales. These include chicos, bolitas, calabacitas, alberjones, habas, and many other staple vegetables and orchard crops. This does not mean we are fixated on static traditions or are failing to adapt and change.

Culebra acequia farmers are engaged in wholesale and retail marketing of organic heirloom chicos and bolitas. These crops fetch premium prices in Taos, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Denver, Pueblo, and Colorado Springs. The most successful marketing of organic heirloom “value-added” products in San Luis involves “Pepitas,” a heritage cuisine company started by three local Chicanas with deep roots in the acequia tradition. Surely, Counihan would not object to women in acequia farm communities organizing themselves to make a good living by retailing traditional recipes and mixes, in effect creating livelihoods by “cooking for others.”

This is Part 6 of 8 of an original as yet unpubished essay prepared by invitation for the Department of Anthropology, Spring 2008 Colloquium, “Epistemologies of Anthropological Research,” University of Washington, May 23, 2008. It is presented here free of the footnotes in the original. Sources cited in the text will be posted at the end of the series of 8.

This is a work in progress; please do not quote, cite, or circulate without the author’s permission. Send inquiries to: dpena@u.washington.edu. The author thanks Elaine H. Peña and Mario Montaño for comments on earlier drafts.

Obama's Department of Agriculture Budget

2009-03-02T08:42:00.000-08:00

Excerpts from White House Home Page Agriculture Funding Highlights

Moderators Note: As a public information service and without comment, we are re-posting excerpts on the USDA budget as highlighted by the White House Home Page on the Web:

The budget proposal for the USDA:

• Provides over $20 billion in loans and grants to support and expand rural development activities, including small businesses, renewable energy, and telecommunications.

• Includes a $50 million increase to address deferred maintenance on the most critical health and safety infrastructure within our national forests.

• Supports the implementation of a $250,000 commodity program payment limit. The payment limit will help ensure that payments are made to those who most need them.

• Reflects the President’s commitment to wildfire management and community protection by fully funding suppression costs at the 10-year average, establishing a discretionary contingent reserve for wildfires, and including program reforms to ensure fire management resources are focused where they will do the most good.

• Fully funds the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) to serve all eligible individuals.

• Includes $1 billion per year for the Child Nutrition reauthorization.

• Supports a pilot program to help increase senior participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

• Reflects the President’s commitment to supporting independent producers through improved enforcement of the Packers and Stockyards Act and investing in the full diversity of agricultural production, including organic farming and local food systems.

• Reflects the President’s commitment to fiscal responsibility by reducing direct payments to the largest farmers, reducing crop insurance subsidies, eliminating cotton storage credits, eliminating funding for the Resource Conservation and Development program, and reducing program funding for overseas brand promotion.

The White House homepage explains that the budget:

Supports rural revitalization, education, and land grant programs…[and] includes an additional $70 million for rural areas, for competitive research grants that provide incentives for teachers working in rural areas…

This page corrects an amount erroneously included in the printed version of A New Era of Responsibility.