It’s time for a Green Tea Party to celebrate the incremental increase in environmental awareness that has gradually seeped into American culture over the last forty years or so. It’s also time to look around at what is really happening in this sadly bifurcated culture of ours. The political right is now forwarding the new apothegm: “Environmental laws are unfriendly to business.” What does this really suggest?

To me, this substantiates the obvious—namely that much of “business” as practiced here and far beyond is unfriendly to habitat, our sustaining biotic community. This is not to say that all business is harmful. Indeed it is not. But the business of commodifying and developing three million acres in Maine, for example, in the name of supplying jobs for the working man, himself “an endangered species,” is but a cloud of rhetoric intended to hide the true intent. The intention is to turn that three million acres into money to fill corporate coffers and fund their men (and women) in government to create yet another very false sense of prosperity at vast expense to sustaining habitat. Maine is not alone. Many governing bodies in our country share a similar doctrine, including New Mexico.

A hundred years ago, the human population of our planet was just over one and a half billion. Today, our human population is edging close to seven billion. This is the equivalent of multiplying the population of Los Angeles by 1,750. Billions of fellow humans are now scrambling for the resources to survive. Resources dwindle in direct proportion to increased human population.

In 1972, a group of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a book entitled “The Limits to Growth” wherein they provided models of the effect of rapidly growing human population in a world of finite resources. They have updated their book twice, and many reviewers have taken great umbrage at their depressing assertions. Yet their presentations are honest reflections of their interpretations of the exponential increase of five major factors—population, food production, industrialization, pollution, and consumption of non-renewable resources—and their interactions.

“Extrapolation of present trends is a time-honored way of looking into the future, especially the very near future, and especially if the quantity being considered is not much influenced by other trends that are occurring elsewhere in the system. Of course, none of the five factors we are examining here is independent… each interacts constantly with all the others. Population cannot grow without food, food production is increased by growth of capital, more capital requires more resources, discarded resources become pollution, pollution interferes with the growth of both population and food.” (The Limits to Growth p. 97)

Notably, other factors such as pandemic, world war, economic instability, terrorism, global warming, climate instability, and dwindling biodiversity could be, but as yet have not been included in this model. In part, the point of the drill is to perceive all of the factors simultaneously and in constant motion. This requires a sophisticated form of non-linear thinking that may only be possible with the computer for most of us. However, it’s not that hard to memorize the five original factors and then imagine them inter-relating on different levels. Again:

1. population

2. food production

3. industrialization

4. pollution

5. consumption of non-renewable resources

Within their model, exponential increase in any or all of these defined how long we as a species could survive before collapse would ensue. We’ve made strides in certain areas but not others. Over the last forty years, the array of factors has grown in both numbers and complexity to the extent that we now stand on the very edge of catastrophe. Scientists concur that we humans have initiated a spasm of extinction of species the likes of which have occurred but five or six times over the last 540,000,000 years where, on the average, fifty percent of existing species went irrevocably extinct each time. Life continued, but full recovery of biotic diversity required millions of years—with a new regime of species performing in concert after each slow recovery.

Heralding catastrophe is not my cup of tea. I prefer a full cup of good green tea that cleanses my body, fires up my mind, and nurtures my soul. Green tea invigorates my aging mind to be able to grasp the significance of systemic or holistic thinking. Green tea helps me to conceive of clusters of related data, ideas, notions—and to be able to extrapolate various probabilities relative to the subject at hand; in this case, “Environmental laws are unfriendly to business.”

One big thought that pops into my green tea-ified mind is that those politicians and well-healed lobbyists who perpetrate this meager apothegm are functioning from within a paradigm dominated by modern corporate economics, indeed a major factor in today’s global monoculture. However, this is but one of many factors that now have to be regarded simultaneously and with great clarity if we are to understand their collective relevance. Today’s leaders have to be able to extrapolate from within systems of clearly defined factors of which “business” is but one of many. For a political leader to think solely in the short term and from a single point of view is not only erroneous, it is ultimately tragic in its implications.

Today, there is a strong move afoot to significantly lighten the tax burden of the wealthy upper echelons, and their corporate coffers. Very bad idea. Much of that money accumulated as the result of the modern alchemy of turning commodifed common pool resources into lucre while debilitating habitat. Instead, part of those taxes could be well-spent in ecological restoration by employing the “endangered species” of the working class in healthy labor in consonance with cultural restoration, and even consciously forwarding cultural evolution within a new enlightened system of appropriate coordinates. Instead of continued pillaging of non-renewable resources at an ever-increasing rate, spend some of those regained tax dollars toward deployment of appropriate technology to replace the archaic coal-fired cigar breath reminiscent of the early days of the industrial revolution.

I deeply rue the present political polarities that blindside us to the extraordinary array of factors that require our immediate cultural attention. I believe that we as a culture have not outgrown, but rather rendered more levels of complexity than our current political system can accommodate. Our elected and divided “politco-tariat” locksteps to its respective party’s march rather than redefining itself relative to the ever-evolving antiphony sung by culture in habitat.

I propose a Green Tea Party from within a watershed of common pool resources where we celebrate our common interests within our common habitat, where our understanding of proper governance springs from the grassroots, from the Commons. Our current political system has gone awry, navigated by special interest groups, modern day carpetbaggers who want to make a quick buck with which to fortify themselves against the inevitability of disaster that they themselves have spawned (with a lot of help from the rest of us who have lived in luxury relative to the quality of life that our descendants can anticipate).

We, as a culture, have evolved a system of mores that is now out of sync with the flow of Nature. Natural systems can no longer accommodate our collective proclivity for growth for its own sake. We have little time to realign—indeed maybe time has run out. We must not lose the tiny foothold of environmental regulations that were brilliantly wrought to protect us from ourselves. We must not be bamboozled by slick-talking lobbyists and politicians whose own points of view are simply too limited for wise and intelligent governance. We must not allow continued evisceration of the arts and humanities, from which comes intelligent and intuitive criticism of culture as well as enormous waves of creativity. And we must never, ever allow the fatal luxury of cynicism to over-color the timbre of our cultural perspective. Cynicism is as leprosy of the soul.

Many years ago, my old friend Jon Sanford rendered a poster that advised, “Search for Truth and Honesty in American Politics.” Even today, that serves as a beam of light with which to scour the darkening corners of the body politic. I am a strong advocate of governance grown from within the grassroots rather than from on high. Non-tenured governance based on truth, honesty AND mutual cooperation from the local level is to be aspired to. That serves to defuse special interests funded by shifting, faceless, corporate, power-driven aristocracies.

The only true aristocracy is one of consciousness. And the truly conscious share an egalitarian perspective that includes the complete realm of life as an integrated whole that must be defended against self-serving predators. Life feeds on life but not at the expense of the whole. When legislation violates natural law, question the source of legislation. Predation to extinction is an unnatural act.

Instead, let us sip from a common pot of green tea, and share an infusion that might well lead to clarity in this land of clear light. Put the workforce, the new “endangered species” to work restoring habitat so that other endangered species may continue to proliferate and contribute to the greater biotic community. Do not view environmental laws as unfriendly to business. Rather, create businesses that are environmentally friendly, even restorative. Consider gradually reducing the power of centralized government and entitle localized governance from within the region, the watershed, and the foodshed, thus creating a form of reciprocal governance that is more honestly democratic and less subject to corporate manipulation.

And ponder the heretical notion that in all likelihood, the population of the human species has long since exceeded the carrying capacity of the capitalist system.

“He, of all the environmental thinkers I’ve read, put together perhaps the most cohesive view of the natural world, and he did it in a way that is more accessible and more persuasive than anyone else has done. So I see him as the essential man, the touchstone to whom we all go back, no matter our disagreements with him. And we should always be in tension with our mentors in a sense. We should always be re-examining what has been passed down to us.

“But he is a giant, and no one has given us a more complete view and a better expressed view than Aldo Leopold.” So says author and environmentalist William de Buys, himself in the vanguard of a cadre of conservation-minded activists.

Indeed, Aldo Leopold was a giant whose influence continues to spread like a blaze fanned by the wind. He was born in Burlington, Iowa, in 1887, and died of a heart attack in 1948 while fighting a grass-fire. The singed pages of an ever-present journal were found in his pocket.

Leopold grew up in a house that over-looked the Mississippi River. He attended the Yale School of Forestry, graduated with a master’s degree in 1909, and at th(is) point a century ago, made a move that would change his life and his mind: Aldo Leopold came to the American Southwest. It was here that his thinking was refined by the rough and tumble reality of this arid landscape then sparsely populated by Indians, Hispanos and ranchers, all of whom took their survival cues from the flow of Nature.

In those days, many recalled the Indian wars that had dominated the nineteenth century. Those ranchers and rangers who rode the rangeland considered shooting bear, bobcats, cougars, and wolves to be their contribution to taming the West. Young Aldo was no exception. There are photos of him astride his horse, the very image of the pistol-packin’ hero of cowpoke mythology.

His first job was in the Apache National Forest in the Arizona Territory where he became deeply attached to the landscape. In 1911, he was transferred to the Carson National Forest in northern New Mexico where he achieved his great ambition to become the supervisor of a national forest. It was during this period that he met Estella Luna Bergere, a lady born into one of New Mexico’s oldest and most distinguished families. They fell in love and were married in 1912. Together, they built their first home, a rustic hand-hewn cabin situated in Tres Piedras, New Mexico. It was from here that the new supervisor administered the Carson National Forest.

Leopold spent much of his working life on horseback. The Carson National Forest is spread across different ranger districts that span an immense landscape. At one point he was returning from a trip to Durango, and while riding through the Jicarilla Ranger District, harsh weather knocked him right out of the saddle.

His younger daughter, Estella, now 83 and Professor Emeritus*, Department of Biology at the University of Washington, Seattle, recounts that her father “was sick for two years flat after he had ridden across a pass and a snowstorm fell on him. Everything was wet, and he had to sleep in that wet bedroll for a couple of nights. By the time he made it to Mother, to home, he had a bad kidney infection, or condition, and it knocked him out for a couple of years. It was terrible.”

Once he was well enough to work again, Leopold took a position as the executive secretary for the Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce. During this period he befriended a young insurance executive and fellow Midwesterner, and the ramifications of his friendship with Clinton B. Anderson had extraordinary significance.  As Stewart Udall recalled in a speech given at the Sixth National Wilderness Conference in Santa Fe in 1994, “Anderson developed a love affair with the natural world. He acquired many of his conservation convictions as a result of a friendship he formed with Aldo Leopold . . . on trips they made into nearby mountains.”

Leopold returned to the U.S. Forest Service, after World War I and was assigned the position of assistant regional forester in charge of operations throughout some twenty million acres within the Southwest. He revisited areas he had first seen ten years earlier and was deeply aware of how the lands had eroded.

Courtney White, is the author of Revolution on the Range, and cofounder and executive director of the Quivira Coalition in Santa Fe, an organization dedicated to “broadcasting the principles of ecologically sensitive ranch management”. He explains, “Leopold saw tremendous gullying, deep arroyos in these landscapes that he suspected were not natural as he was taught. He began to make connections between grass and soil and rain and slope and overgrazing, principally by cattle. He wasn’t anti-grazing but he certainly was anti-bad management. Leopold wrote an amazing essay called ‘Pioneers and Gullies’ published in Sunset Magazine of all places—one of the popular magazines—in 1924, where he decries the pioneer attitude towards land and how they just had come in, taken a European way of living in a wetter environment with certain kinds of agricultural practices, put it in an environment that he called a ‘hair-trigger ecological environment,’ meaning the desert Southwest—and not understood the effects.”

Leopold scholar Susan Flader, Board Member with the Aldo Leopold Foundation in Baraboo, Wisconsin, advanced the notion that this concept became the basis for his celebrated essay “The Land Ethic” that appears as the final piece in Leopold’s masterwork, A Sand County Almanac.

It was apparently in the Jicarilla Ranger District of the Carson National Forest where Leopold seriously ruminated on cattle-wrought erosion, the same ranger district where earlier he was stricken with the near fatal kidney malaise.  It was at the north end of this ranger district that I served as a fire lookout atop Caracas Mesa for a few seasons during the 1960s.  Few cattle ranged there during my time, but evidence of the presence of cattle, sheep and horses remained.  It was through this same forest that the Old Spanish Trail had meandered during the Mexican Period of the nineteenth century when caravans of traders wended west to California where sheep were sold, and New Mexican trade goods were swapped for horses that were driven back to New Mexico.  A herd of wild horses still ranged throughout the Jicarilla landscape.  I once witnessed a curandero, Felipe Madrid, slowly walk up to one of these wild horses and gently slip a lariat over its neck to then lead it peacefully back to his place in the village of Caracas near the banks of the San Juan River.

Camped beneath that open sky for months at a time, looking out over a vast landscape, listening to the wind pass through the Ponderosa Pines bearing occasional choruses of wild turkeys and coyotes, visiting with deer and bobcats, watching eagles hover, and savoring the night time when no light of human provenance intruded, I came to know my own kinship with the wild, to recognize that an ethical relationship to homeland comes from within, and that Aldo Leopold had hit the mark as he clearly articulated his own deep wisdom that was to influence generations as yet unborn.

Susan Flader reveals, “There is a concept that he got from Ouspensky (Russian philosopher and author of Tertium Organum), although he never credits Ouspensky directly with it. It’s the concept of the noumenon as distinct from phenomenon: phenomenon being the outward manifestation which you can easily see and understand, and the noumenon being the inner meaning, the essence of something. One of the first times that he wrote about it was actually in another unpublished manuscript. He was writing a book on Southwestern game fields. In one of the early chapters, he writes about the deer as the noumenon of the Southwestern mountains. He says, ‘Without the presence of the deer or the possibility of seeing a deer in each new dip and bend in the hillside, the Southwest would be empty, a spiritual vacuum.’”

Leopold perceived deer as the noumenon of the wild Southwest. Later he would regard the wolf, which he and others had caused to be extirpated from the landscape, to be the noumenon of the wild. He would laud every attempt to restore the wolf to the Southwest, so that the green fire of the wolf’s eyes could burn once again in the mind of the mountain. The presence of the noumenon embellished Leopold’s vision of the Spirit of Nature.

William de Buys expands this notion when he says, “One of the things that I think he glimpsed that is now sort of a cornerstone of ecological thinking is the idea of energy flowing through land: of water moving, of air moving, of nutrients moving and so forth. He had this vision, this integrated holistic vision, of the flows through the ecosystem, and they took place often within the watershed unit. So he saw the watershed as being a primary unit for land management and even more for land understanding.”

Nina Leopold Bradley adds to the breadth of her father’s scope: “I could say that he is the most religious person I ever knew, and he never went inside of a church. He knew right from wrong. He lived his life ethically. He, I guess, didn’t need the guidance of a deity. …He was always teaching us, but never did you know he was teaching us. If you asked him a question, then he would just do everything to try to draw you out, make you think. But he never said ‘This is so-and-so and you should understand that it is related to the things next to it.’ He was very subtle in the way he taught.

In 1922, Aldo Leopold submitted a formal proposal that part of the Gila National Forest of southern New Mexico be administrated as a wilderness area off limits to vehicular traffic, mining, timbering, and heavy machinery. His proposal was accepted by the Forest Service in 1924, and thus the Gila Wilderness became the first such wilderness area in the United States. Forty years later, the Wilderness Act was passed into federal law. The passage of this occurred on the watch of Stewart Udall during his tenure as Secretary of the Interior.

In the words of Stewart Udall, “Clinton Anderson was an insurance man in Albuquerque, and he and Leopold became friends. I think this is probably in the early 1920s in Albuquerque. They used to discuss the national forests, and Leopold convinced Anderson that the Wilderness Bill was a good idea and there should be a law protecting wilderness. Anderson became a congressman and … became a senator in 1948 and he became chairman of the Interior and Insular Affairs Committee in 1960 right after Kennedy was elected. He went to the White House and he told Kennedy to sponsor a wilderness bill, and he handed him a copy of his bill, Senate Bill 5. He said ‘Call for the enactment of a wilderness bill.’ Kennedy agreed and put it in his conservation message… Lyndon Johnson signed it (Wilderness Bill) into law, I think in September 1964.”

Thus the trail was blazed for protecting wilderness for its own sake.

Aldo Leopold twice journeyed into the Río Gavilan watershed in northwestern Mexico.  It was here that he stepped into what he regarded as true, unsullied wilderness for the first time.  He perceived that earlier on, people had lived in this watershed and had fashioned terraces and check dams where small plots of land had once been transformed into gardens, and were now long abandoned to the deer and other wild creatures.  Leopold wrote his provocative essay entitled “Song of the Gavilan” wherein he reflected on how indeed humans had lived in harmony with this habitat.  His essay clearly reveals the nature of his mind and intuitions: “…On a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand.  Then you may hear it—a vast pulsing harmony—its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and centuries.”

Gary Paul Nabhan is the author of many books and is regarded as one of America’s great natural historians: “You know, I’ve been meditating on Aldo Leopold’s second trip in the Río Gavilán in the Chihuahuan borderlands that he took with his brother Carl and his son Starker and a number of friends from both New Mexico and Chihuahua. It was ostensibly a hunting trip, but what he harvested there was far more than venison or quail or bear meat. What he found there was the concept of ecosystem health that we now use. He called it ecological health. That concept included rather than excluded land-based cultures. And after living in New Mexico with the Luna family, after growing up in Iowa among many land-based ethnic cultures, he had thus in his background (the understanding) that stewardship of the land, whether it’s done by hunters and gatherers or whether it’s done by farmers and ranchers, can stabilize, enhance, or restore the diversity of depleted places and does not inextricably mean that humans will deplete that diversity.”

In 1944, Aldo Leopold wrote an essay entitled “Thinking Like a Mountain” wherein he reflected on an incident that had occurred in 1909 when he was still a greenhorn ranger in the Blue Range of the Arizona Territory. He and others happened onto a small pack of wolves. They emptied their rifles into the wolf pack, and as they examined the carnage, one wolf still lived. Leopold looked into the eyes of this dying wolf and watched the wild, green fire in those eyes blink out. The memory haunted him into an epiphany of recognition that the living spirit of the wolf was integral to the mind of the mountain. It took thirty-five years for this epiphany to be fully realized and manifested in one of his greatest essays that appears in A Sand County Almanac.

Sand County is located in Wisconsin where Aldo Leopold, his wife Estella, his sons Starker, Carl and Luna, and his daughters Nina and Estella lived for many years. It was here that Leopold purchased a soil-starved farm, rebuilt the Shack into a livable dwelling, and over the weekends of the rest of his life restored the wasted land to wildness. The Leopold family were tightly knit. They worked together to restore the land, and they played together and ate together. Aldo and his wife, Estella sat at the dinner table and held hands throughout their marriage. Their daughter, also named Estella had this to say: “Mom was wonderful. And they were very, very close. Dad came home every noon for lunch and walked in the door and mother would greet him with her apron on and they would hug and he would say, ‘Estella, the house looks so beautiful. How do you do it?’ and sit down and have lunch and hold hands, which was great. They were very warm and she was, of course, very supportive”.

Nina Leopold Bradley recalls, “Dad had a wonderful sense of humor. There was never any small talk around Dad. It was always very, very serious. But if something really captured him, he would just dissolve. I remember one time my sister (Estella) was late in arriving at the shack. We were all there for the weekend. So she took the train and her bicycle and her pet—her pet squirrel—and took the train to Baraboo and then rode her bike in to the edge of the marsh, and then she had to swim across the marsh. My father and I, we just happened to be out taking a walk and Dad saw this creature swimming along with this squirrel on her head, and I thought he was going to collapse in laughter. He just absolutely broke down. He had a wonderful sense of humor.”

The entire Leopold family brought their land in Sand County back into a state of wild balance and harmony, actually practicing restoration ecology, the concept for which had germinated in Leopold’s mind during his years in the Southwest as he gazed out over cattle-burnt lands. He wrote A Sand County Almanac in Wisconsin from within the fomentation of a mind honed in the Southwest, a mind that came to understand independently what John Wesley Powell had realized half a century earlier, that the watershed is the basic component within the mosaic of watersheds in the arid landscape of the American West.

As scholar Susan Flader points out, “…He (Leopold) was invited to give the John Wesley Powell address to the Southwestern Division of the American Association of Science. He took as his title, ‘The Conservation Ethic’. That was the first published version of what would later, after several other principal addresses over the years, be combined in his seminal article, ‘The Land Ethic’, which is the capstone of A Sand County Almanac…It has seemed to me that his concept of the land ethic grew very much out of his concern for the southwestern watersheds and the problem of soil erosion.”

For generations, America and western culture have been dominated by an economic paradigm founded largely on turning habitat into money. Aldo Leopold came to understand the folly and error of that thinking over sixty years ago. He also came to understand that we as a species are but a single species within the community of life on our planet, and that indeed we are rooted in Nature. At this point in time, it is absolutely imperative that we heed the heart of his message in this final essay from A Sand County Almanac:

“A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity…Quit thinking about land-use as solely an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise… By and large our present problem is one of attitudes…”

©2009

One of the joys of being a member of the animal kingdom is our propensity for mobility.  We began as a peripatetic species, but evidence suggests that sometime between 6,500 and 8,000 years ago, some of our ancestors took up horseback riding, thus significantly increasing our speed limit through space.  Then sometime between 5,000 and 5,500 years ago, someone invented the wheel, possibly some brilliant Mesopotamian potter who wanted to round out her pots in more facile fashion. Thus, what some regard to be the single greatest human invention of all time made its quiet, relentlessly mud-splattered debut.

The wheel was subsequently applied to the chariot, and the science of warfare took an exponential leap forward.  And while the horse, donkey and camel remained beasts of burden, the cart and the wagon entered the domain of commerce.  Game trails widened to accommodate commercial caravans, and for millennia, a good day’s travel spanned about thirty miles depending on the nature of the terrain.

With the arrival of Europeans, horses and wheels changed the way humanity comported itself on the North American continent.  Not only did wheel ruts widen game trails, and paths followed by humans afoot along rivers and streams, and through forests, and across plains and deserts, the increase in mobility by horseback affected Native American cultures profoundly, allowing expansion of hunting territories and concurrent broadening of trade not only among existing indigenous cultures, but also with newly arrived Europeans.  This also vastly changed entire points of view that included embedding an economically dominated paradigm over the face of the land supplanting that deep sense of the sacred quality of homeland shared by all indigenous peoples.  Human use of the horse and the wheel greatly hastened the pace of change.

By the fifteenth century C.E., the American Southwest had been richly hued by human presence and invention for many millennia.  By the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution and its concurrent burgeoning system of commercial enterprise began to splay into the Southwest along the Santa Fe Trail.  Earlier, El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro had done the same from the south.  Thus, the American Southwest became an inter-cultural proving ground of enormous magnitude.

Many years ago, in a recorded conversation with the late author, Paul Horgan, I asked him to address his assessment of the arrival of the Anglo along the Santa Fe Trail.  This was his reply:

“Of course, the very first motive was commercial, the coming of the Anglos.  And though not a wholly ignoble motive, it certainly was a selfish one.  Therefore, something of that emotional commitment to a purpose had an enduring effect on all relationships that resulted between the occupants—namely, the Indians and the Hispanos and the incoming Yankees, Anglos… It was the enormous power of the commercial interests that were first to invade New Mexico and get established—that got the upper hand very fast because of their superior economic weight.  And that endured.”

For many years, Harry Myers was the Superintendent at Fort Union National Monument, a major 19^th century military outpost well situated to provide protection for travelers along the Santa Fe Trail. In his own words from our recorded conversation:

“It’s cheaper to bring goods from Missouri into New Mexico than it is from Spain to Veracruz to Mexico City and 1,800 miles up the Camino Real to Santa Fe. Most of that trade was cloth. … So cloth and turning that cloth into the current fashions of the day is what’s driving the Santa Fe trade. New Mexicans start almost immediately in that trade also, taking things back to Missouri. …

“Then the traders moved on down into Mexico. Santa Fe almost becomes a way station for trade down into Mexico. Eventually the New Mexican Hispanic traders would go from New Mexico to New York to London and Paris and get goods and bring them back through the states and down through the Santa Fe Trail. So it became an international trail of trade in more ways than one with New Mexicans participating in it, the Americans participating in it, and going to Europe. So it was, as I see it, bigger than how we usually interpret it just from Missouri to Santa Fe and all of these Indian battles and [adventurous] episodes along the trail.”

Humanity spawned an industrial revolution in the 19^th century that re-arranged cultural coordinates worldwide.  In North America, the application of steam to power mobile machinery was cause for great celebration on May 10, 1869 when two sets of railroad tracks were conjoined in Promontory, Utah that resulted in the spanning of America east to west with the “iron rail”.  A decade later, the railroad chugged into New Mexico near Raton following a twenty-seven mile long toll road constructed by “Uncle Dick” Wootton..  “Uncle Dick” had been a trapper, mountain man and imaginative entrepeneur who earned his sobriquet one Christmas in Taos when he opened two barrels of whiskey offering everyone free drink.  He thus became so popular that he was nick-named “Uncle Dick”.  The story goes that when the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad Company, later to become the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad reached the area around Raton Pass in 1878, Wootton was offered $50,000 to buy out his toll road.  He turned them down, instead settling for a free-for-life railroad pass for his wife, as well as all the groceries she would need for evermore.  The deal was sealed with a handshake.

Railroad track was lain at the rate of about three miles a day bound for Las Vegas, New Mexico and beyond.  Santa Fe was by-passed for lack of industry, however many other communities became important railroad depots including Albuquerque, Belen, Mountainair, Deming, Tucumcari and Gallup, so named after the railroad paymaster, David Gallup.

Fred Friedman retired after thirty years as New Mexico Railroad Bureau Chief.  He is one of the great authorities concerning the history of the railroad in New Mexico, as well as a fine storyteller.

“Early railroad passengers were pretty hard-pressed to find a decent place to stay when they were waiting at a depot…The depot in Gallup had a number of waiting rooms…There was a ladies’ waiting room, a men’s waiting room.  There was an outside waiting room for Mexicans, and apparently Native Americans waited outside. As a result of the confusion and poor service for a growing number of passengers, an Englishman by the name of Fred Harvey developed a chain of restaurants and places to stay that had increasingly better service in the 1880s and early 1900s.  There are a number of Fred Harvey hotels and restaurants still in existence.”

Fred Friedman went on to mention that for a period of time, Navajo railroad gangs came to be regarded as masters of laying railroad track in New Mexico and Arizona, and achieved a comparable legendary status as those of the World War II Navajo Code Talkers.

Paul Horgan spoke of the daily arrival and departure of trains in Albuquerque during his youth.

“I was twelve years old when my family removed to Albuquerque from Buffalo, New York, and Albuquerque then was a Rio Grande small city of 14,000 people.  Its main concerns economically were the Santa Fe railroad, which was a division point and had great shops.  The great transcontinental line was the lifeblood of the city, going east and west many times a day—many trains a day.  It was a local rite to go and visit the arrival of the important train, the California Limited, one east and one westward every day.  Celebrities would disembark and stroll the platforms at Albuquerque and visit the Indian exhibits and the Fred Harvey establishment with its collection of regional antiques and so forth.  So it became a citizen’s promenade, really, to go and witness this every day as the great trains went east and west.

“This is more than romantic to me.  It was a great vein of contact with the farther world.  Albuquerque felt very isolated to me and, I think, to my family, coming from the metropolitan east.  …  The thing that struck me most curiously living in Albuquerque, in the town itself, was that at the end of every street you could see the country, which was not true of a city like Buffalo or any other metropolitan center in the east from which we came.  And that to me was a kind of metaphorical horizon, so that past the dwellings and past streets and houses there was the great vision of the country, and it’s never lost its mystery and wonder for me.”

Fred Friedman gives a sense of the magnitude of the presence of the railroad in New Mexico.

“There is a general conception that the railroad replaced wagon traffic on the Santa Fe Trail.  And that certainly was a more gradual undertaking….

“The big changes that the railroad brought to the country were not only an increase in land value and the developing of communities and dissolving of other communities, but prior to the coming of the railroad, anything heavier or larger than could be fit into a wagon simply wasn’t transported.  Railroads had the effect of changing construction, architecture, culture, even music.  Church organs were able to be transported by rail as well as glass and jalousies for buildings—flying buttresses and building material.  And people were able to travel a lot faster than they had before.  Passengers moved at about thirty or forty miles an hour.  Prior to that, anybody that traveled had probably been going at about the same rate of speed that Julius Caesar or anyone in the Middle Ages had traveled.  The railroads were essentially the space program of the 1800s, and New Mexico was a proving ground.  New Mexico changed everything from communities to the economy to even legislation.”

It would take less than half a century before the automobile would initiate yet another major paradigm shift by manufacturers launching huge numbers of automobiles out of Detroit like an anthill discharging an endless stream of red ants.  And they turned trails into dirt roads that came to criss-cross the landscape in an ever-growing pattern that finally demanded massive identifiable organization. And thus highly traveled roads became named highways, some of which were hallowed with an aura of mystery and high romance.

Mile Taylor, a National Park Service historian tells of the genesis of Route 66 that extends from Chicago to Los Angeles.

“Route 66 comes into the eastern part of the state at Tucumcari, and from 1926 to 1936, more or less, the road went from Tucumcari to Santa Rosa, and then up to Romeroville just west of Las Vegas, and there it joined the old Santa Fe Trail.  From there they didn’t have to build anything.  It traversed Glorieta Pass, went right through downtown Santa Fe, through Agua Fria, out to La Bajada Mesa to the escarpment, down through this series of switchbacks to the village of La Bajada.  From La Bajada it continued down 4^th Street in Albuquerque down to Isleta Pueblo to Los Lunas where it caught a nice grade to be able to hook up to an area close to the Laguna Pueblo.  So it basically made a big S. It made that big S because it stayed where the existing roads were. Route 66 originally followed existing historic trails.

“Then in 1936, the road was straightened.  About a hundred miles was taken out of that route, out of the S curve.  Instead of going up towards Romeroville from Santa Rosa, the road was struck directly to the west right through Albuquerque where Central Avenue is today, then straight west up Nine Mile Hill directly to the Laguna Pueblo.”

There are photographs that show 1920s and ‘30s model cars going up and down the switchbacks on La Bajada Hill.  The reason that they are all aimed uphill is because in order to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of the fuel systems, they had to back down the hill which took tremendous toll on the nerves of flatlanders from the mid-West who were utterly out of their element in the wild and wooly landscape of New Mexico.

For the next three decades or so, Route 66 was the fabled highway that became the subject of films, folklore and music.  John Steinbeck’s great American novel, “The Grapes of Wrath” tells of the good family Joad who made their way from the Dust Bowl Depression Days in Oklahoma across Route 66 to California, and the broken promise of a better life.  In 1946, songwriter Bobby Troup wrote, “Get Your Kicks on Route 66,” a great song that joined the repertoire that musically portrays mid-20^th century America.

The Great Depression blues caused many a tippler to spend a night in jail along Route 66 after having fallen prey to the wrath of grapes.

In 1952, Adlai Stevenson from Illinois lost the presidential election to Dwight D. Eisenhower, the celebrated military commander of the allied European Theater during World War II.  “Ike”, as he was known had been greatly impressed with the Autobahn, a high-speed freeway in Germany.  Earlier in his career, he had been part of a military convoy that crossed the unpaved back-roads of America in a drill designed to determine the efficiency of automotive military transport in America.

Recalling both the vagaries of his military convoy of yore, and the efficiency of the German Autobahn, Eisenhower forwarded the idea of what was to become America’s Interstate Highway System initially as an efficient means of delivering military personnel and supplies quickly to any place in America. In reality, this Interstate System became the largest public works project to date in America’s history.

As of 2006, the total length of the interstate system in America came in at 46,876 miles, distinguishing it as the largest highway system in the world.  About one-third of the long distance miles driven in America are driven on the interstate highways.  New Mexico has three interstate highways.  Interstate 10 enters New Mexico west of Lordsburg, passes by Deming and Las Cruces, the drops south and into Texas near El Paso.  Interstate 40 parallels Route 66 from Tucumcari in the east past Gallup to the west.  Interstate 25 parallels El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro from Las Cruces in the south past Raton in the north.  In Albuquerque, the “Big I” is where Interstate 40 and Interstate 25 intersect, and is an intelligent and artful example of highway engineering.

In New Mexico, there are nearly one thousand paved miles of Interstate Highway, and while this magnificent highway system has eased automotive travel allowing motorists to cruise along at up to 75 miles an hour, we have to ask ourselves if we are now moving too fast to genuinely reflect on the nature of our magnificent landscape.

Thirty years ago, Governor Toney Anaya forwarded the idea of a “bullet train” that would connect Albuquerque and Santa Fe.  More recently, Governor Bill Richardson grabbed the idea, and ran with it.  The result is the RailRunner, a magnificent incarnation of a railroad train.  Governor Richardson appointed Lawrence Rael, Executive Director of the Mid-Region Council of Governments, to see the RailRunner to fruition.

Governor Richardson held a press conference in August, 2003 where he unveiled his plans to go forward with the commuter train.  Both Lawrence Rael, and former Secretary the Department of Transportation, Linda Faught were invited to attend.

In a recent interview, Lawrence Rael had this to say:

“Governor Richardson said to the Department of Transportation, ‘I’m giving you a million dollars, and Lawrence, I’m giving you a million dollars.  I want you guys to start to work on the commuter train.’

“We divided the project into two phases.  Phase One was from Belen to Bernalillo, and Phase Two was from Bernalillo to Santa Fe.  The major challenge to this project was looking for a corridor, and looking at the existing Burlington-Northern Railroad Line to use the existing track that was in place.  The next part was to get it up the extremely difficult area of La Bajada and finding the corridor to take it into Santa Fe.”

All of this was done in record time and for a cost of less than 500 million dollars. In June, 2008, the RailRunner logged its one millionth passenger.  During the summer of 2009, the RailRunner carried nearly 5,000 passengers per day. As Lawrence Rael pointed out, that displaces a lot of automobiles that would otherwise be pumping greenhouse gases into our atmosphere. And thanks to Rael’s astute direction, New Mexico now owns the railroad corridor that extends from Belen to the Colorado border.

Fred Friedman has spent his lifetime thinking about transportation and mapping transportation routes, and says:

“I think that first the Santa Fe Trail, then rail traffic, and now Interstate 25 all following the same corridor really speaks to the idea that there is really a larger transportation network and system that goes through New Mexico that has been recycled by different forms of technology throughout the centuries.”

What will the 21^st century bring? A bullet train from El Paso to Denver? A spaceport?  Teleportation?  Flying Navajo rugs?  For certain, many trails still remain to be hiked while watching wildlife, listening to the wind, and mulling ideas at Nature’s original pace.

Sources:

“Uncle Dick” Wootton—Alta Ann West, Colorado Historical Society, Google;

JL personally recorded interviews with Harry Myers, Paul Horgan, Fred Friedman, and Mike Taylor, all of which reside in the Loeffler Aural History Archive

The St. Augustin aquifer stands to be sold off to the highest bidder and pumped dry unless immediate action is taken.

By Jack Loeffler

© 2010

The Plains of San Augustin—a vast graben that spans the Continental Divide, a grassland surrounded by pine-forested mountains, was once a great lake whose waters disappeared at the end of the Pleistocene, the last ice age that ended around 12,000 years ago when mammoths, dire wolves, and even horses that had roamed the Southwest for millennia were slowly chased into extinction by climate change and early human hunters.

Within today’s ephemeral geopolitical context, the Plains of San Augustin are contained within western Socorro and eastern Catron Counties of southwestern New Mexico.  Near the south end of this enormous dry lake bed, the surface of which extends to nearly a mile and a half above sea-level, is Bat Cave, a site of early human habitation whose middens revealed corn cobs of different sizes and periods that give some idea as to just how deep into antiquity maize was harvested and consumed in southwestern North America. Bat Cave is thought to have been inhabited by humans of the Cochise culture at least five thousand years ago, and possibly earlier.  These hunter-gatherers left remnants of their passage around the area in other sites as well, especially in nearby mountains about twenty-five miles due west of Bat Cave.

Thirty years ago, I camped at Bat Cave with my old pal, Michael Harner who had been an undergraduate in 1948 when he was a member of the archaeological team headed by Herbert Dick who excavated the site, and found the corn-cobs that chronologically placed southwestern maize within time’s continuum.  Those young archaeologist-anthropologists missed an arrowhead that I found that now lies before me as I write, a treasured artifact that connects me, somehow to a fellow human who preceded me by a hundred generations, someone who worked very hard to survive, and whose consciousness was still wild, unencumbered by the technofantasy that dominates today’s western culture.

Sitting at dawn in the entrance to Bat Cave, I looked out over the Plains of San Augustin, a beautiful habitat that I have loved for nearly fifty years, since before the arrival of the Very Large Array (VLA) of radio telescopes constructed by the National Observatory to use the heart of this enormous natural parabola as the place from which to observe cosmological phenomena in the firmament. This VLA is one of humankind’s highest technical applications of modern scientific consciousness—listening to the cosmos, finding echoes of the Big Bang that ushered our universe into being over thirteen billion years ago.

Scattered around the Plains of Saint Augustine are cattle ranches run by a curious breed of true individuals who prefer to govern their lives as they see fit through hard work and John Wayne-ian true grit.  They prefer to be left alone in this enormous span of grassland that elicits fits of agoraphobia in visiting urbanites who happen to be driving from Magdalena to Datil.  This is indeed a habitat perfectly suited to itself, a biotic community contained within a geophysical cradle sculpted by volcanic activity with an ancient tectonic nudge that resulted in an exquisitely defined watershed that apparently drains to either side of the Continental Divide.  Both the Río Grande to the east and the Gila River to the west are fed by waters from the San Augustin aquifer.

*****

Today, a family of speculators is seeking legal right to drill thirty-seven wells deep into the San Augustin aquifer and pump 54,000 acre feet of water per year for 300 years, or until the aquifer runs dry, for undetermined purposes other than to sell this water to the highest bidder.              Or, put another way, a family of modern-day carpetbaggers wants to pump the lifeblood of a living bioregion, create a water hemorrhage with no thought of tourniquet, despoil a vibrant habitat, rape the Earth—for money, lots of money to satisfy the insidious greed that has come to dominate so much of the darkening consciousness of western culture.  The privatization of common waters for profit is absolutely unethical.

The local population is aghast at the evil frivolity being visited upon them by a neighbor who acquired a ranch two decades past, for the sole purpose of reaping vast profit at the expense of habitat, of common waters, of a watershed held in common by the human population as well as the rest of the inhabiting biotic community—a watershed that contributes to both the already over-allocated Río Grande and Gila River, the lifeblood of the O’odham Nation and various riverine communities that it nurtures in both New Mexico and Arizona before it empties into the Colorado River in Yuma hundreds of miles west of its headwaters near Silver City.

Bruce Frederick, an attorney with the  New Mexico Environmental Law Center in Santa Fe who also holds a Masters degree in hydrology from New Mexico Tech in Socorro, is representing the inhabitants of the Plains of San Augustin with the intention of thwarting this debacle.  I conducted a recorded interview that is included in its entirety that portrays the nature of water law in the West.

“From a western water law perspective, where the Prior Appropriation Doctrine grew up around miners, the  ‘ ‘forty-niners’ really, the practice they had was to divert water from a stream and use it for their mining practices, and they could take as much they needed for their particular mining practices, and they would leave the rest in the river for the next person to use.  Obviously, if the first person who arrived dammed up the entire river, and sold it to everybody else, he obviously would have been lynched.  So for the last 150 years, essentially, that’s been the law.  The law of prior appropriation in all western states, is written into their constitutions, is the beneficial use– the basis, the measure, and the limit of the right to use water.

“Before the state engineer was invented in 1907, essentially, you established a water right by actually taking water out of the stream, diverting it out of the stream and applying it to beneficial use.  So everyone around you could see how you were using the water. The state engineer started the application process in 1907, but the concept is still the same– the basis, the measure, and the limit of the right to use water.  But now you file an application first and then the state engineer determines whether there is any water– called un-appropriated water– available, and whether your new use is going to impair existing water rights.  He should also look at your application– and this is clear in other states that are well-developed, particularly in Colorado—to see if your intended use is speculative.  It’s one thing if you intend to use the water yourself on your land, say for irrigation or domestic purposes.  That’s very easily quantified.  So we can tie what you want to use the water for with how much you’re applying for, and put the two together to see if they are reasonable. So historically what an applicant does is, say they have a particular use in mind at a particular place, they ask for a particular amount of water, then the state engineer can assess the amount of water they’re asking for, and measure that against the water needed for their anticipated use.

“The San Augustin application turns that whole concept on its head.  Instead of looking at a particular use, what they’re doing is looking at a basin, an enormous basin with potentially lots of water, and they’re saying, ‘We think there is enough there to take 54,000 acre feet of water per year for 300 years until we drain it dry, and we want it all.  We don’t want it for our own use.  We want to sell it to third parties.’  And there are people they haven’t identified…. the highest bidder.  They want to sell it to the state if the state has trouble complying with its Compact.  Well the state has protested the application.

“They (applicants) want to offset diversions, for example Río Rancho hundreds of miles upstream– the idea is that if Río Rancho pumps ground water, eventually that’s going to deplete flows into the Río Grande because the ground water’s connected to the surface water.  And because the Río Grande is fully appropriated, Río Rancho can’t do that unless they either buy up surface rights, or find some source and dump that into the river.  That’s the role that San Augustin says they might want to play.

“Of course there’s a big disconnect between where Río Rancho’s depletions occur, hundreds of miles upstream, and where San Augustin will pipe water into the river from groundwater.  It’s also somewhat absurd because the San Augustin Basin, pumping that much water will eventually deplete the Río Grande, because it’s connected to the Río Grande via the Alamosa Creek, which is spring-fed creek which drains into the Río Grande, and those springs are fed by the San Agustin aquifer, we think.  The San Augustin aquifer also drains into the Gila Basin and eventually ends up as surface flows in the Gila.  So pumping that much water out of the Augustin (Basin) will eventually deplete flows in the Gila River and deplete flows into the Río Grande.

“Those are issues of fact.  We’re going to contest this application on the anti-speculation doctrine.  Our position is that this application is invalid on its face, because neither the state engineer, nor the people with existing water rights…can tell when this water will be taken out of the aquifer, where it’s going to be used, how much return flow there might be, or anything else.  We’re saying that the application is invalid on its face for that reason.

“The Augustin Plains Ranch, or APR as it’s sometimes referred to, is a New Mexico corporation owned by foreign investors, as far as we can tell.  One in particular is an Italian speculator—somewhat mysterious—named Bruno Modena.  His son might be involved in this as well.  His name is Vito. Bruno may be a holocaust survivor.  He’s Italian.  …  He’s apparently a wealthy person. …He’s proposing a lot of speculative things, and nobody knows for sure who he is and what he wants to do.

“Anyway, APR has owned thousands of acres of land out there in the San Augustin Plains for about 20 years.  Whether they bought this land purely for its own value, or whether they had this intention all along, we don’t know.  The ranch is an active ranch, apparently.  There’s no irrigation on that ranch as far as I know.  Now, after 20 years, they’re saying that they want to irrigate 4000 acres of high desert land.  We don’t know if they really have plans to do that or not.

“It’s about 20 miles east of Datil.  The Very Large Array (VLA) is close to it.  They are protesters in the case.  Pueblos have protested it, federal agencies have protested it, state agencies have protested it, numerous individuals have protested it. The Middle Río Grande Conservancy District has protested it.  The original application and the amended application together drew about a thousand protests…  As far as I know, it’s the most protested application in the history of the state engineer’s office.

“It would be unconstitutional, I think, because one of the fundamental tenets in prior appropriation doctrine is that you put water to beneficial use after you apply, and there’s no way to determine when, if ever, this water would be put to beneficial use.  It’s entirely speculative.  We can assume that in a hundred years, we’ll be more desperate for water than we are now.  We can assume that an individual, or a group of investors would like to corner the market on water. And that’s what they’re trying to do essentially, to corner the market on water in this particular area.  It’s unethical, and in this case it’s unconstitutional. You can’t use water in the west for speculative purposes like that.  It’s for use, not for speculation.”

*****

Carol and Ray Pittman are residents of Catron County.  In an interview, Mrs. Pittman told of how several residents happened to read legal notices in late 2007 that mentioned the application to pump 54,000 acre feet per year from the Plains of San Augustin Aquifer.  A meeting was held that drew over 400 residents. They formed the San Augustin Water Coalition.  An excerpt from the Coalition overview published in February, 2009 reveals: “At a public meeting in December, 2007, hundreds of residents met to consider the threat.  The overwhelming consensus was that local people should decide appropriate use of local ground water, not predatory and far-removed speculators whose sole aim is to profit financially at the expense of local residents.”

Shades of John Wesley Powell!!  Appearing before the House Committee on Irrigation in 1890, Powell vigorously advocated for local governance from within individual watersheds claiming that local residents were the most appropriate to determine how water and other natural resources should be used, and that indeed each watershed of the arid west should be regarded as a commonwealth.  He also advocated that there should be no inter-basin transfers of water, that each watershed should be self-sustaining.

Carol Pittman and her fellow residents are working indefatigably to forestall this theft.  They work closely with Bruce Frederick from the New Mexico Environmental Law Center and are determined to thwart the application placed before the state engineer by the Augustin Plains Ranch.  They formalized their Coalition and applied for a 501(c) 3 status to provide for tax-deductible donations to help defray expenses.  She said, “All of the people of this area, some in Socorro, some in Reserve and some even as far south as Glenwood, everyone came together to oppose this application.  I think some people are mostly afraid about what will happen to them and their water rights and their way of life.  It’s a very bad idea.  It’s a precedent-setting thing…We’re not going to let it happen…It’s been apparent from the start that this application moved forward because somebody somewhere in the system wants it to move forward.  Bruce (Frederick) told us that this is a speculative application and it should have been thrown out on the simple face of it.  That makes us all very suspicious.”

She went on to say, “We need Bruce very much, but we also need the entire state to look at this and say ‘this is not the right way to go.’  And if this happens, the way that I look at it anyway, there will be new policies, a new vision, a new way of looking at things.  It’s very difficult for the state engineer, because he has to deal with all these little political entities who are constantly approving more and more development, and what does he do about that? The way I envision the state engineer is that he’s constantly scrambling with the applications with this day-to-day stuff. How does he ever have time to think about what really should be done, what changes should be made?…I think this case might really bring that kind of thing to a head so that people all over the state concerned about water will think in terms of a new vision.”

It’s high time for another kind of speculation here—philosophical speculation, or perhaps a query into ethical considerations about transfusing water, the life-blood from this vibrant, evolving habitat known to humans as the Plains of San Augustin into another as yet undisclosed over-burdened oasis. First, what are the moral implications of privatizing this finite common waters into vast sums of money for carpetbaggers whose collective mindset precludes any known intuitive understanding of what a miracle the integrated biotic community of the Plains of San Augustin really is.  Second, to transfuse its waters into the Río Grande, or elsewhere to satisfy legal requirements rendered three-quarters of a century ago before we, as a culture began to perceive that “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell”, as Edward Abbey so blatantly articulated, is but a failing bulwark that exacerbates rather than relieves the water disaster that is already imminent for the over-abundant human population of New Mexico– to say nothing of the rest of this extraordinarily diverse biotic community.  Thus we are about to trip over yet another stop-gap measure.  It’s as though we’re concurrently siphoning off our wisdom pool, our common sense as we pander to a failing economic paradigm.

The Plains of San Augustin is a beautiful living organism unto its own.  Metaphorically, because of the VLA, it is a sensory apparatus from whence we “listen” to the cosmos for information about radio galaxies, remnants of supernova, gamma ray bursts, radio-emitting stars, our solar system, black holes, and other phenomena.  It will also serve as a model for how we comport ourselves through the coming decades as we face very real global warming and climate instability. Human over-population in a high desert habitat where common waters are already strained does not bode at all well for our children, and especially their children.  We wash our cars and irrigate golf courses with the drinking water of our grandchildren.  We must not only thwart the madness of the water heist in the plains of San Augustin, but also triumph over our prevailing lack of commons sense, and use our preservation of this fragile, beautiful habitat as a banner leading us to ethical recovery in this time of desperation when all too often human intent and law violate natural law.

To register your opinion, contact:

Office of the State Engineer:

130 South Capitol Street

Concha Ortiz y Pino Building

P.O. Box 25102

Santa Fe, NM   87504-5102

Phone:   (505) 827-6091

Fax: (505) 827-3806

© 2010

Stewart Udall lived for ninety years and forty-eight days, and passed from this world during the first few minutes of Spring, 2010.  He was a prominent American regarded by many as the greatest of our Secretaries of the Interior, a powerful voice for conservation, a staunch advocate for cultural diversity and preservation.

I first met Stewart during his final months as Secretary of the Interior.  His wife, Lee introduced us in their home in MacLean, Virginia.  He was clad in shorts, no shirt, no shoes.  He was balanced on his knees atop a kitchen counter trying to screw a hinge back onto a cupboard door.  I went over and held the door while he replaced the hinge.  Only then did we shake hands and look each other in the eye.

“Any friend of Lee’s is welcome,” he said.  Lee, as director for The Center for Arts of Indian America, was then my employer as we worked together on a Navajo history project.  Subsequently, I was introduced to the six Udall offspring: Tom, Scott, Lynn, Lori, Denis and Jay.  Gradually, the Udall family became very dear to me.

Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to record Stewart on many occasions.  He was born into a Mormon family in St. Johns, Arizona just eight years after both New Mexico and Arizona were admitted to statehood.  He was nine years old when the Great Depression swept across America like a cloud of despair. However, Stewart contended that rural America fared better than urban America.

“St. Johns was a farming town, a ranching town.  The main economic impacts came from raising cattle…St Johns had irrigation farming.  My father said to me, ‘Son, irrigation is a science.’   Our community had what in New Mexico is called an acequia system, and you had your turn for the water, and you had a water-master, and he’d give you a little slip of paper that said, ‘You take the water at 2:30 in the morning.’ Well, if you were a kid ten, eleven or twelve, and you were the oldest boy, you were the one that went to the head-gate… and you took down the head-gate and watered the garden you’d helped plant.  The children had the responsibility to take care of the garden, to milk the cows. You took care of the pigs and the chickens.  You were providing a substantial amount of the foodstuffs from either your animals, your garden, or when you slaughtered pigs and cattle.”

The Udalls lived and worked through the Depression in relative ease.  Stewart’s father became a judge in 1931 and was paid $4000 a year.  He remained in St. Johns until he won a seat on the Arizona Supreme Court in 1946.  By then Stewart had survived combat during World War II serving in the Army Air Corps as a waist-gunner and nose-gunner on bomber raids against oil refineries in Ploesti and Eastern Germany.

“If you were attacked by German fighter planes it was usually in a pack.  The mission where [our plane was] providing some leadership was against the Hermann Goering Tank Works in Linz, Austria on the Danube River. We were hit by a pack of fighters very abruptly.  I had switched out of the waist- to the nose-gunner’s position.  The nose-gunner didn’t fly. The volunteer who took my position [as waist-gunner] was killed. A twenty-millimeter fighter bullet hit him right in the face.  Our plane was riddled.  So that was a close call.”

After the War, Stewart sought a law degree at the University of Arizona and courted Erma Lee Webb, a young beauty from Mesa, Arizona who was two years younger than he.

“I had sixteen or seventeen hundred dollars at the end of the war… I bought my first car in 1947.  It was a little Ford.  I think it cost twelve hundred dollars.  I had to buy a car so my wife [Lee]  and I could go on our honeymoon.

“I was an idealist.  I wrote something called ‘Testament at the Completion of the War’… I belonged to the NAACP.  I got involved in veterans’ organizations.  I got involved in politics.  I helped manage my father’s campaign when he ran for office to win a seat on the Arizona Supreme Court.  Then later when I got ambitious and ran for Congress, I was standing on his shoulders… So I got into politics in 1954.  I was, what, thirty-four.

“I later stuck my neck out for Senator John F. Kennedy, and he invited me to be on the cabinet.  So all that happened from the end of the war in 1945 till 1960.  I moved up and have had a very exciting life.”

The 1950s and1960s were a critical time within what Stewart regarded as the ever-evolving political/cultural continuum.  Environmental concerns emerged as America’s post-war golden age began to wane, and serious thinkers challenged the notion of growth for the sake of growth, the fundament of the dominant economic paradigm.  Stewart’s visionary book, “The Quiet Crisis” was published in 1963 with deft literary guidance quietly provided by Wallace Stegner and Alvin Josephy.  Stewart remained devoted to the memory of Rachel Carson, author of “The Silent Spring” to the end of his life.

In 1983, he reflected on the nature of the post-war political continuum.  “I think that we made a series of spectacular miscalculations back in the 1950s and 1960s.  I think that we felt that there was no energy problem.  The energy problems had been solved by science and technology.  Optimism about atomic power was at the center of things in that period.  We had also made some very bad misjudgments about how much oil and gas we had in this country.  We almost treated them as if they weren’t finite, nonrenewable resources, but that we would go on and find more and more, and that we had another hundred years, two hundred years of oil.  The whole atmosphere of the 1950s, 1960s was not to worry, there were no problems, we were so clever, we were masters of science and technology that shortages had been eliminated for all time.”

Stewart Udall’s perspective had been greatly shaped by his rural upbringing and by the “Teddy Roosevelt School” of conservation.  He loved the wild country of his southwestern homeland, and had enormous respect for both the myriad Native American cultures that survived the nineteenth century “Indian wars”, and for Hispano culture that evolved from Spanish colonization in the northern Río Grande.  During his tenure as Secretary of the Interior, the Institute for American Indian Arts flourished in Santa Fe, and hundreds of young Indians from every corner of America passed through its curriculum, many gaining great prominence.  In the 1980s, he wrote “To the Inland Empire: Coronado and Our Spanish Legacy” that celebrated the extraordinary will of those sixteenth century Spanish explorers and colonists who established indigeneity on southwestern soil twenty generations ago.  As is befitting a man of his stature, Stewart’s own point of view ever evolved, never crystallized.

For many years, a glass-enclosed coffee table adorned the Udall living room, a coffee table filled with the pens of congressmen and President Lyndon B. Johnson that had been used to sign the Wilderness Bill in September 1964. Stewart had long championed the passage of this bill that had its genesis in Albuquerque in the 1920s some years after the great conservationist Aldo Leopold had arrived in the Southwest, and who was responsible for the Gila Wilderness in southwestern New Mexico becoming America’s first protected wilderness area in 1924. Stewart recalled that “Clinton Anderson was an insurance man in the 1920s and he and Aldo Leopold had become friends.  Leopold convinced Anderson that the Wilderness Bill was a good idea and there should be a law protecting wilderness.  Anderson became a senator in 1948, and became chairman of the committee [on Interior and Insular Affairs] in 1960 right after Kennedy was elected.  He went to the White House and told Kennedy to sponsor a wilderness bill, and he handed him a copy of his bill, Senate Bill 5, and he said, ‘Call for the enactment of a wilderness bill.’  Kennedy agreed, and put it in his conservation message.  That became the wilderness bill that became law in 1964.”  The passage of this bill occurred on the watch of Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall.

In the early 1970s, Stewart and Lee Udall purchased ten acres on the edge of Santa Fe.  It was there that they built their home.  Stewart founded the Navajo Uranium Miners and Widows Fund and was intent on gaining recompense for families of Navajo uranium miners who had suffered or perished from lung cancer and other illnesses.  Money, as ever, was in short supply.  The Udalls were never a wealthy family, but were ever fired by a level of determination that can only be inspired by the practice of idealism.

In 1980, a benefit was held at the Soleri amphitheater at the Santa Fe Indian School on Cerrillos Road that featured Pete Seeger, Edward Abbey and Eliza Gilkyson.  It was a total success and raised enough funding for Stewart to proceed on behalf of the Native uranium miners.  Stewart and members of his family continued to provide legal representation the miners and their families until after the turn of the millennium.

On December 23, 2001, Stewart was widowered when Lee, his wife of over half a century, was carried away by cancer.  During their many years in Santa Fe, Stewart and Lee hosted beautiful commemorative events at their home, became actively engaged in local conservation and cultural issues, and attended many concerts performed by Santa Fe Pro Musica.  The last concert they attended together featured clarinet works by Mozart performed in the Lensic Performing Arts Center in October, 2001, less than three months before Lee’s death.  Stewart and Lee were given recordings of that concert that were played almost daily in the Udall home for the rest of Stewart’s life.

The legacy of Stewart Udall is of incalculable magnitude.  Future historians will find his mark woven throughout the diverse and complex mosaic of America’s cultural continuum.  His was a questing intellect tempered by compassion.  He loved history and poetry.  He loved great music. He loved the wild country and its indigenous peoples. He continued to write into his ninetieth year, and his mind remained keen and facile.

Stewart Udall comprehended the potential for presumptuousness that attends privilege.  He well understood the plight of Native Americans and felt great empathy for them, recognizing that their systems of values are spiritually rich and contain enormous insight.  “The Native peoples in 1961 were not only down, they were out, in a sense, because the policy under President Truman had been to re-locate.  Get them off these miserable reservations.  The policy under the Eisenhower administration was termination, that the whole Indian reservation system was a mistake.

“It wasn’t a mistake.  It wasn’t made with any great insight, but the idea of letting them have part of the land that they had had– their lives, their culture, their religion were attached to the land.  Their land was the essence of their life.  One of the Alaskan native leaders made a statement many years ago that became the title of a book—‘Take my land– take my life.’”

John Wesley Powell - geological survey map

By Jack Loeffler

Several years ago, my friend author William deBuys was writing his fine book, Seeing Things Whole: The Essential John Wesley Powell. He had selected several illustrations for the book including a map of the drainage areas of the arid West rendered by John Wesley Powell. This map appears in the Eleventh Annual Report of the United States Geographical Survey, 1889-90. Powell had wandered throughout the American West during the late 19th century, and recognizing that aridity was the West’s primary characteristic, had organized this map of the West watershed by watershed. When Bill showed me this map, a wave of clarity re-arranged my mental coordinates, and it became obvious to me that watershed thinking is key to human survival in the 21st century. The map is a work of art in its deepest sense. I commandeered Powell’s map for the cover of my own book, Survival Along the Continental Divide: An Anthology of Interviews.  Thanks to another friend, Craig Newbill, Director of the New Mexico Humanities Council, that map is now a beautiful poster published by the Council.
Powell’s map is part of my daily consciousness.  Powell had an evolved mind and is regarded by Bill deBuys, as well as writer, tree farmer, and environmental thinker Gary Snyder, and myself, to have been the original bioregional thinker. In 1985, I recorded Snyder as he articulated what remains to me the best definition of bioregionalism: “Bioregionalism goes beyond simple geography or biology by its cultural concern, its human concern. It is to know not only the plants and animals of a place, but also the cultural information of how people live there-the ones who know how to do it.  Knowing the deeper, mythic, spiritual, archetypal implications of a fir, or a coyote, or a bluejay might be to know from both inside and outside what the total implications of a place are. So it becomes a study not only of place, but a study of psyche in place. That’s what makes it so interesting. In a way, it seems to me, that it’s the first truly concrete step that has been taken since Kropotkin in stating how we decentralize ourselves after the 20th century.”
If we look at Powell’s map bearing in mind Gary Snyder’s definition of bioregionalism, it becomes abundantly clear that there is no better way for society to organize itself than within the context of home watershed. Powell recognized that watershed boundaries make a lot more sense than our current ephemeral geo-political boundaries. Watershed boundaries are natural boundaries that cradle bio-geographical drainage systems that are inhabited by many species of biota including the human species.
Human consciousness finds deep meaning in homeland, be that meaning scientific, mythic, or eminently practical-or all of the above. Human spiritual relationship to homeland may be rooted in the territorial imperative, but that root may blossom with a consciousness so profound that it can barely be articulated. It’s as though homeland, heartland and mind-land become a single entity, that a single span of human consciousness, or lifetime, is part of a whole, a whole that includes the mosaic of watersheds and seas that surround our planet, that indeed we are part of the consciousness of the planet.
Every morning at sunrise, I face east, and while watching the grasses sway in the breeze, speak four words: Sun, Earth, Life, Consciousness.  I am grateful for the span of consciousness that is my lifetime on this planet Earth warmed by the Sun.  My four-word mantra carries me through each day, and I frequently gaze west out over that portion of the Río Grande watershed, my home watershed, to a distant peak, Mount Taylor, that is the sacred mountain to the south for the Navajo Indians; or to the northwest to the peak of the Jemez Mountain, an enormous volcano whose eastern aspect is sacred to the Tewa Indians who live in pueblos that line the banks of the Río Grande. To the North, I look into the looming reaches of the Sangre de Cristos, those Southern Rockies that form the northeastern rim of the Río Grande Watershed, and the eastern horizon of the Tewa World. All of this is visible from where I live, from where I look out over ten thousand square miles of arid, beautiful landscape that is both named and nameless, whose presence is sculpted by the passage of great epochs, and rumblings from deep within the Earth that have resulted in a mighty rift second in size only to an even greater rift in Africa. Some may regard this as a hostile environment, but to me, it is my greatest friend and has taught me about life. To smell the aridity while headed into the wind listening to the thin, wintry whistle of a Townsend Solitaire is as good as it gets.
This northern Río Grande Watershed was rendered in green by Powell, its shape vaguely resembling the profile of a seahorse as seen from the left-a seahorse dancing westward about to hop over the Continental Divide to join its sibling, the Colorado River Watershed. These two great watersheds are but modest in their yields of water. However, they contain the American Southwest, and are themselves comprised of myriad smaller watersheds, each unique with its own story, its own history, its own character.
The landscape of the American Southwest and northwestern Mexico is the most arid patch of the North American Continent.  This is desert country broken by mountain ranges. The higher plateaus are frequently regarded as piñon-juniper grassland by virtue of the scattering of a few more drops of moisture than are presently received by neighboring lowland deserts. The sense of space is vast. Biota exist relative to the amount of water. Biodiversity abounds. As does cultural diversity. Aridity defines the way we biota comport ourselves. We do not belong to the verdant east. We belong to the arid West. Some of us are exotic, even within our respective species, having blown in from without and somehow affixed ourselves to this land, and have selected to re-establish our sense of indigeneity. Others of us boast ancestors whose footprints were trod into this soil, then erased by the winds of antiquity.
While thinking like a mountain implies a sense of inertia, thinking like a watershed evokes a sense of constant movement, fluidity, change. The mountain contains the headwaters of the watershed and cradles biotic communities, those “sky islands” perched precariously at the top defying the possibility of extinction. Below the piedmont, the watershed fans out, expands, the water joining the main stem, thence to flow into the seas that interact with the atmosphere and begin the cyclic process anew. The interactive factors seem infinite, the metaphor too complex to be understood by a single, or even collective mind. Still, to dance about within the metaphor is comforting. Human consciousness has yet to evolve sufficiently to perceive the raw truth. It never will, because consciousness evolves as the universe evolves. Consciousness is a miraculously growing dimension that responds to the ever-changing environment of the universe. Part of the trick is to differentiate between metaphor and reality, and to recognize that complete understanding is beyond the purview of the human mind.
Speaking of metaphors, how about “sky islands?”  The Madrean Archipelago of the American Southwest is comprised of a series of mountain ranges in Arizona and New Mexico whose peaks contain biotic communities that are separated by seas of desert. These biotic communities have migrated up mountains over a period of millennia that separates our present point in the Holocene epoch from the Pleistocene that ended over 10,000 years ago. Selected species have evolved within these communities whose characteristics are distinct from their cousins in other sky island environments by virtue of the contiguous biotic community of yore having been sundered by the need to seek a cooler environment in which to flourish as the warming trends of the Holocene made the lower elevations uninhabitable for species accustomed to the climate of the Pleistocene.  The time span has resulted in some species seeking genetic expression unique to their tiny mountaintop habitats. Their foothold is precarious. If warming trends continue, their respective biotic communities will falter by virtue of inability to migrate up into thin air.
Metaphorically, the human species is poised atop the pinnacle of a dilemma of our own making. We may not go extinct, but the environment that we’ve “cooked up” is burning away myriad species at a rate that parallels spasms of extinction of species that have occurred only five times throughout the previous 540 million years.
Earth’s wondrous mosaic of watersheds is constantly shifting, endlessly changing.  Our species, the human species has come to predominate, even if temporarily. Our longevity within this mosaic will be determined by our degree of wisdom and our future practices. Our wisdom must meld many components including that which may be learned only by swimming heartily within the flow of Nature. Much of wisdom comes from observation and practice, from aesthetics, from trial and error, from lingering along the edges of existence rather than from a centrist position. To be able to extrapolate well involves a rarified level of consciousness. One must encompass and digest a mighty array of factors, realize that oneself is but a single tiny factor within that mighty array, then plan and react accordingly. An appropriate metaphor for that state of mind is to think like a watershed-and then proceed from the grassroots in behalf of the greatest good for the watershed within the greater mosaic of watersheds-our planet Earth.

I first arrived in North Beach in the autumn of 1958 after having been discharged from the U.S. Army where I had served as an army bandsman. Most of my military time had been spent in the Mojave Desert at Camp Irwin, and part of my time at the Nevada Proving Grounds at Desert Rock. I was a young jazz musician ever more steeped in the prime-time jazz that emanated from that era. Part of my Army gig was to play stirring refrains from “The Stars and Stripes Forever” while peers of Dr. Strangelove fired off atomic bombs seven miles from where we bandsmen stood in the pre-dawn desert. One day, back at Camp Irwin, which is located about 35 miles from Barstow, Danny the barber and dealer fell by the barracks and said, “You’ve got to read this! Now!” He handed me the tiny pocketbook entitled Howl And Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg. I devoured the book and ruminated deeply about life in the milieu into which I had been born to which I was commanded to contribute music to celebrate the detonation of atomic bombs. And thus I came to realize that I wasn’t the one who was insane.
Footloose at last, I wandered up and down the West Coast from the Lighthouse at Hermosa Beach to the Co-Existence Bagel Shop in North Beach. I played my horn for modest coin of the realm, slept for three weeks in a discarded but roomy wooden fish box in Chinatown, read in the City Lights Bookstore, watched sunset from the Golden Gate, ate my daily five course Italian meal for $1.25 that included a half-carafe of wine, visited galleries, one of which displayed the strange collage, “Tribute to Caryl Chessman” that I believe was crafted by Bruce Conner who would later produce a film that showed one atomic bomb explosion after the other.
Part of the time, I hung out in Big Sur and spent one wonderful evening in the presence of Henry Miller as we all drank wine at Nepenthe. In Sausalito’s Gate Five, I befriended the Greek artist, Jean Varda, who many years later died as he exited an airplane in Mexico City. It is said that his final words were, “Ah. Instant metaphysics.”
During that period of the late 1950s, I hitch-hiked across America, and passed through New Mexico, to me the most beautiful state-of-mind on Earth. I knew it was my homeland at last discovered, yet it would be five years before I would begin the rest of my life there.

Throughout the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, artists, writers, and skilled artisans moved to New Mexico to fashion their own hand-crafted lifestyles. By the 1950s, the talented novelist William Eastlake had settled on his ranch near Cuba, New Mexico where he wrote his celebrated New Mexico trilogy. Malcolm Brown finely honed his eccentricities in Taos. John DePuy painted his landscapes in Taos while Georgia O’Keeffe painted her masterpieces in and around Abiquiu. Max Finstein penned poetry. Liz Walker wove god’s-eyes after the fashion of the Huichol Indians. Edward Abbey wrote his first novels and briefly earned his keep as a bartender at the Taos Inn where it has been told that of an evening, Lady Brett, the great friend of D.H. Lawrence visited the bar and requested a grasshopper. To which Ed Abbey responded, “Who the hell would drink a grasshopper? I quit!”-much to the dismay of myriad customers who imbibed freely and at little cost thanks to the deft hand of Brother Abbey.
And thus it was that in 1962, a loose-knit coterie of Bay Area post-beatniks, many of whom had read Indian Tales by Jaime de Angulo, Howl by Allen Ginsberg, Riprap by Gary Snyder, The Way of Zen by Alan Watts, Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, the I Ching, The Doors to Perception by Aldous Huxley, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, and other soul-shaping literature of the era, and who had experienced the exquisite spiritual opening to the flow of Nature by ingesting peyote, and the fascinating alteration of mental processes wrought by smoking marijuana, began to wander into the land of clear light. We too brought with us our hand-crafted lifestyles and knew well how to live simply.
Some played and sang folk music; some made sandals; others were jewelry makers; yet others earned their keep washing potshards at the Laboratory of Anthropology, or spent months in solitude on top of mountains and high mesas as fire lookouts. Rick and Sue Mallory moved to Mancos, Colorado and settled into family life raising their children. Alan and Joan Lober opened the Morningbird, a shop that specialized in Indian arts and crafts, and employed their friends. John and Marie Kimmey founded the Santa Fe Community School, an alternative school that catered to the off-spring of counter-culturalists. Jimmy Hopper ran a tiny restaurant in El Rito before heading into the Gila Wilderness to become a fire lookout atop Mogollon Baldy. Randy Allen sang songs, played the guitar and became a jeweler. Yvonne Bond pursued radical politics all the way to the island of Cuba. Recluse Jon Sanford printed a poster that advised, “Search for Truth and Honesty in American Politics.” Peter Ashwandan became widely recognized as the illustrator of John Muir’s classic, How to Fix a VW for the Complete Idiot. Chris and Cynthia West bought acreage at the top of the Pilar Hill, a pilgrim station that looks out over the magnificent landscape riven by the Río Grande Gorge. Tahiti Gervais practiced the craft of blacksmithy. Dick Brown, a native New Mexican guided many of us through the multi-cultural labyrinth that continues to prevail and evolve. Peter VanDresser had lived in New Mexico for many years and through his wisdom, became the godfather of the alternative energy movement. Max Finstein was a friend to us all.
What bound everyone was an abiding love for the flow of Nature, and the intimation that our purpose as humans is to attain the highest level of consciousness possible. And frequently on a Saturday night, a tipi would be pitched on someone’s property, and the peyote ritual would be consumated through the night till dawn, sometimes attended by Little Joe Gomez, Tellus Goodmorning, and other Indians from the Taos Pueblo and beyond.
Gradually everyone became affixed to the New Mexican landscape, endlessly enchanted, ever nurtured by the spirit of place.

The 1960s was indeed a time of flowering of consciousness. The war in Vietnam spawned national outrage. The Civil Rights Movement burst through the dike of cultural repression and spread across America. Three voices of hope-those of Jack Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy-were silenced by assassins. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were fired from Harvard University for their experiments with LSD, a psychotropic pharmaceutical that would rearrange the mental coordinates of tens of thousands or more of America’s youth. Tim coined the dictum, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Richard transformed into Baba Ram Dass and forwarded his own message in Be Here Now. Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles greatly enhanced the listen-ability of popular music. Carlos Castaneda published his doctoral dissertation, The Teachings of Don Juan, and though he failed to receive his Ph.D., he inspired a generation of young Americans to look beyond the narrow boundaries of the mono-cultural frame of reference and into a fifth dimension where shamans dance and ply their skills. An undercurrent of anarchism spread across the land. Thousands rejected the image of the man in the grey flannel suit, the drear of investing one’s lifetime at the corporate behest, the pursuit of wealth for its own sake, of having a job instead of a life. Thus, the Hippie movement was launched, directly descended from the Beat scene, itself born from the bohemian counter-cultural lineage that invigorated Greenwich Village, North Beach, Venice, the Parisian salon of Gertrude Stein, and the New Mexico high country consciousness-compound founded by Mabel Dodge Luhan.
One of the more celebrated city-sites of Hippie-ness occurred in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco. They blossomed around the United States and beyond. One of the most profound multi-faceted experiments in hippie counter-culture occurred in rural northen New Mexico where habitat is illuminated by sun, moon and blossoming stars rather than city lights. It was here that hippie communes sought foothold in the beautifully harsh environments of high desert country where for millennia, humans of myriad cultural persuasions had already tested their mettle, some flourishing, many more withering, all contributing to a human continuum shaped at least as much by habitat as by ideal.
The notion of “commune” began to evolve in medieval Europe a thousand or more years ago when people of similar persuasions and practices constructed walled communities in order to physically defend themselves against the forces of feudal lords and other bandits, and to defend their rights as human beings to practice lifestyles that were commensurate with their collective natures. Over the centuries even to the present, many types of communes have dotted the landscapes of Europe, Asia and the Americas.
The anarchists of nineteenth century Europe reacted against totalitarian governments that they rejected sometimes to the death. The short-lived Paris Commune of 1871 was the first organized uprising of the proletariat against capitalism. The participants in this social experiment became known as “communards.” Anarchism took many forms, but Peter Kropotkin’s anarchist communism resonates to this day with many communards who shared time and space in the hippie commune phase of New Mexico’s history. Kropotkin defined anarchist society as follows:

“The anarchists conceive a society in which all its members are regulated, not by laws, not by authorities, whether self-imposed or elected, but by mutual agreements between the members of that society, and by a sum of social customs and habits-not petrified by law, routine or superstition, but concordance with the ever-growing requirements of a free life, stimulated by the progress of science, invention and the steady growth of higher ideals. No ruling authorities, then. No government of man by man; no crystallization and immobility, but a continual evolution– such as we see in Nature.”

It is doubtful that more than a handful of New Mexico’s hippies ever read these words, and many counter-culturalists would not agree with everything that Kropotkin said. For example one morning, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky were having breakfast with us in Santa Fe. Allen read Kropotkin’s definition that has long been pinned to my studio wall. He took umbrage at Kropotkin’s support of science, which led us to a lengthy discussion about the practice of science versus the mis-application of science. Personally, I strongly support scientific research, but rue many of the ways it is applied within the realm of a military-corporate-industrial-political complex committed to acquisition of power for its own sake, and to turning habitat into money in order to gain and retain that power.
Be all of that as it may, northern New Mexico of the mid-1960s was alive with an energy that was palpable, alluring, and ripe for social experimentation. Men and women of great personal energy were lured to the high desert. Some had enough money to buy large tracts of land to be held in common. Others had the vision to found communes on these commons, communes of different flavors but with a common denominator founded in self direction, mutual aid and love of the Earth. Another denominator common to many communards was the use of pot, hash, peyote, mescaline, LSD, psychedelic mushrooms and other substances, some of which had their genesis in laboratories operated by high-minded biochemists. Some of the better known of the more than two dozen New Mexico communes included New Buffalo, Morning Star, Lama, the Hog Farm, and the Reality Construction Company. Taos County became the communal proving ground where at one point the hippie population of the county came in at over fifteen per cent!
In her worthy publication, Scrapbook of a Taos Hippie published by Cincos Puntos Press, Iris Keltz provides an excellent portrait of the great hippie commune experiment of the late 1960s and early ’70s. She relies on her own recollections (and it’s NOT TRUE that if you remember the ’60s, you weren’t there!!), excerpts from oral histories that she conducted with tribal members of the counter-cultural revolution, and articles that appeared in both the Taos News and the Fountain of Light. This book is generously illustrated with photographs including some by the hippie photo-documentarian, Lisa Law.
Max Finstein turned into one of the great communard visionaries of the 1960s and ’70s. He was associated with the Beat Generation as a poet, and had been a jazz alto sax player. He loved to smoke pot and drink wine, philosophize and talk far into the night. In the early 1960s, he split with his then wife, left New Mexico and hit the road with his daughter Rachel. He met a new lady and returned to New Mexico in 1966. He hooked up with Rick Klein, a youngster from Pennsylvania who had happened into a sum of money that he was willing to spend to purchase land on which to found a commune. A one hundred-three-acre piece of land with water rights was found near Arroyo Hondo north of Taos. It was situated both near the Río Grande and a hot springs, and it was for sale for $55,000. Rick popped for the land and shortly thereafter, there was a gathering of hippies who put up a tipi, and held a peyote meeting. And thus New Buffalo was born.
Rick had this to say about the genesis of New Buffalo.

“I was going to be a literature professor and then I took LSD, and saw that there’s more to it than just this. There’s being with your friends. Culture was very exciting at that time. I had an inheritance, and I bought land in New Mexico and got involved in New Buffalo. The first thing we did was have a peyote meeting, and Max (Finstein) was the roadman. Ultimately I got very involved with Little Joe Gomez from the Taos Pueblo and his brother John, and all those old men up there. The last one just passed away last year. Frank Zamora. He was a hundred years old. Frank had this incredible psychedelic style. They were all exceptional people.”
There was no such thing as a hippie type cookie cutter that stamped out hippie after hippie from a specific hippie gene pool. Hippies emerged as individuals from every conceivable background.
Un-dam the stream of consciousness.
Everyone came from the American melting pot and had reacted to the post-Victorian lock on open sexuality that seemed like an affront to a natural biological imperative, who wanted to escape concrete canyon walls where wind blows cold and dank with smoggy humidified fumes emitted
as ghastly emanations from that aspect of the Gaseous Vertebrate
aligned with military Mammon-might reeking of corporate cigar breath
spewing forth over innocent new-born, frightening mind-blight
of the politically correct…
yaarghh!!
Turn to sunlight, dark night star blossoms, mountain-rimmed spirit-land
sweet acrid smoke mix of juniper-piñon-marijuana
wafting up my nose to settle my mind into a clear look into the known
perchance to be forgotten, to slide into
cool-hip ever present
Be Here Now-ness of
Turned On-Tuned In-Dropped Out into fanciful magic land
LOVE LOVE LOVE
That’s the thing that there’s just too little of-
Sweet Jesus! Blessed Bodhisattva mind Krishna flute song
Hanuman happiness Sufi dervish dance
tornado of tipi consciousness
spun-out along a rainbow brain-blow trail
of delight comes at dawn after staring into Morningbird firelight
all night all night all night all night long
singing peyote songs to beat of water drum, dance of feathers fanning
Road man, drummer, cedar man
Earthmother calling calling calling calling
Sacred water, tipi consciousness At One With All

Begin mud dance straw dance sun dance
Make adobes not bombs in sunlight look to mountain rim for God-dance
Clouds
work work work work
play play play play
Naked
Rosy-nippled double-breasted thrashers
Flirting with dawn crowing cocks in flowing bird dance of desire
Making babies, new flesh forms cradles of unblemished consciousness
To scatter at play in the fields of the Lord
Be rid almost of clichés, almost…

There was great work involved in building structures of adobe, gathering vigas to support roofs, gathering firewood, ever more firewood, endless gathering of firewood for cooking, heating against breath-frosting winter coldness, life-threatening winter coldness. Four hole defecation zone, communal shit-holes, no more mind-barriers to plug up biological flow of Nature’s manure. Don’t eat yellow snow. Don’t wash diapers in the hot spring.
Where does the food come from? Some hunting, gardening, learning the seasons, the cycles, hitting on strangers for bread in town, some checks from home, food stamps, can’t seem to get fully out of tentacles-reach of economic kraken that stretches into every corner of human patina-planet overlay pulsing away, fiscal metastasis creeping into soil, sucking away in return for consciousness, or so we hope…
Ever more of us dismaying indigenees-Indians, Chicanos, especially Chicanos now at home determined to defend turf, mores, many taking great umbrage at naked mud-dancers throwing away econo-tenets to which everyone else aspires to perfect; relegated since 1846 to shadow culture; forced to reject subsistence existence to attempt to survive the riptides of the American Way Of Life. Burn out the chingados, beat the mierde out of them. Launch a Chicano Revolt to rid the land of the hippies and the Feds. History repeats itself-remember 1680-Popé was the first great North American revolutionary. Now there was Tijerina-get the Feds off the land grants. Don the brown beret. Defend a lingering way of life whose soul-lore was diminished in World War Two at Bataan. ¡Tierra o muerte!
It wasn’t all bad with the Chicanos. Rick Klein recalls a time when hippies maintained some of the responsibilities normally held by Hispanos.

“Obviously it was very threatening because of the press, and words like sex and drugs, and stuff like that. The Hispanos were feeling marginalized and losing their traditions. Nobody wanted to be the mayor domo of the ditch (acequia), and for years the mayor domo of the ditch in Arroyo Hondo was from New Buffalo. They (the Hispanos) had to have some respect for us. We were working hard. People would come to my house and say, ‘This is just like my grandfather’s.’”
There was a flowering of consciousness that required extreme hippie-ness to regenerate, propagate, linger within long enough to endure before the short-lived age of Aquarius wafted into what was to become. The communes, each with its own distinct collective character, blossomed and contended as best the communards could, most, like adobe, melting back into the cultural soil of the land of clear light. By virtue of their lifestyle which included practices deemed illegal by the law of the land, they became and remained outlaws and practitioners of Walt Whitman’s now famous apothegm, “Resist much. Obey Little.”
There were hard-working men and women who poured their souls into the experiment. Others who were previously deeply damaged by circumstances from without and within were nurtured back to sanity. Some died. Others achieved extraordinary spiritual heights. There were attempts at alternative education. John Kimmey and others brought their talents and skills to bear on educating the young into a new world consciousness. Many of the children of the great experiment look back in wonder, some with rejection, some with truly expanded consciousness, no-one unaffected.
Max Finstein left New Buffalo and traveled all the way to Israel to experience life on a kibbutz where his sphere of reference was expanded yet again within a collective new Israeli point of view that required success if death were to be avoided. A more militant Max returned to New Mexico and helped establish the Reality Construction Company whose members included Chicano activists and angry Afro-Americans.
Steve and Barbara Durkee had traveled from upper New York State to found Lama, a commune that has undergone many permutations yet continues to endure. Originally founded as a patriarchal sub-culture, Lama became a spiritual center that involved many well-known and celebrated passers-through who left their mark in mysterious ways. Baba Ram Dass spent many a night on New Mexican soil charming seeds of individual consciousness into self-recognition. Stewart Brand contributed his energy to the genesis of Lama, and thereafter published the Whole Earth Catalog for which he received the National Book Award in 1972. Durkee went on to found Dar al Islam, a Muslim community situated on the other side of the Río Chama from Abiquiu.
David Pratt wended eastward from a commune in central California known as Morningstar West, and with Michael Duncan, who owned part of a mesa-top north of Taos, founded Morningstar East, a commune that was populated in large measure by your tired, your poor, your wasted who yearned to be whole and free. Morningstar East and the Reality Construction Company were neighboring communes between which peace and love were tempered with animosity and conflict. There were hard times as well as good times.
Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farmers founded yet another commune south of Peñasco known as the Hog Farm. They were a peripatetic lot who scooted about the nation in their bus (of several incarnations) preserving the peace at hippie gatherings and Be-ins that included the great event that put Woodstock on the map.
Tom Law introduced Yogi Bhajan to New Mexico and New Mexico to Yogi Bhajan who founded a Sikh community near Española that endures to this day.
Hippie culture was not restricted to the communes. Some hippies were more loner than communalist and preferred to camp out in solitude, smoke a joint and relax into the flow of Nature without necessarily being motivated to make a statement. Some few would occasionally wander into a desert hinterland, fast for a few days, and then of a dawn ingest peyote buttons after having carefully picked off as much lophophoran as possible to make for a smoother ride through the stomach. As the day unfolded, reality would be revealed in exquisite living glory, the face of rocks dancing, the molecules of existence rearranging themselves in such a way that the pilgrim was included in the beauty and wonder and glory of the Spirit of Nature, forever imbued with a sense of spiritual purpose, never again to be restricted to the linear thinking that excludes so much of the great mystery.
While many of the communes withered with the passage of the seasons, and hippies ripened into middle and late age, many found themselves ready to take their knowledge and understanding into the greater culture and to become counter-culture activists. John Nichol’s superb New Mexico trilogy conveys with great insight the inter-cultural struggles, both the light and the dark, that characterize human presence in the mythic landscape of northern New Mexico. By the early 1970s, environmental consciousness was flickering into public awareness. Many became inspired by reading Desert Solitaire, a great classic penned by Edward Abbey who melded anarchist thought with environmentalism and thus became the god-father of the radical environmental movement.
In part, hippie consciousness expanded and conjoined with intellect, and a new wave of counter-culturalists entered the fray armed with university training in biology, geography, ecology, environmental law and other disciplines required if humanity is to forestall our own folly. Hippie consciousness also entered the marketplace where organic produce, meat and poultry provide physical sustenance unburdened with additives, pesticides and preservatives. Clothing styles have become more free, exotic and comfortable. Hair comes and goes at the whim of the mind inside the head. Music has imploded and exploded carrying every message to every quarter.
There is a growing tendency to perceive from within a sphere of reference filled with clusters of associated notions, experiences, understandings, learnings, through which the active mind may extrapolate future probabilities and possibilities. In pre-hippie days, this form of “ecolate thinking” (a term coined by Garrett Hardin) was not particularly prevalent.
Poet and philosopher Gary Snyder has participated in the counter-culture movement his entire adult life. He has been a founder of the bio-regional movement that has evolved in large measure from the hippie movement of the 1960s and ’70s. One July day in 1985 as we sat in the shade of the pine forest that surrounds his home, I asked Gary to provide his sense of bioregional practice.

“Bioregionalism goes beyond simple geography or biology because of its cultural and spiritual concerns. Human concerns. We hope to know not only the flora and fauna of a place, but also the cultural information-how the long-time inhabitants lived there, the ones who know how to do it. The deeper mythic, spiritual, and archetypal implications of a fir tree, a coyote, a blue-jay might reach in unpredictable directions. It becomes a study not only of place, but a study of psyche in place. It is not a study that one can do with books though-you must learn with your working body, in a place, on the land, with an ear for the elder teachers.”
Today, cultural boundaries have been breeched and hippie-ness is revealed to have cast its hue everywhere. New Mexico remains a many-faceted counter-cultural proving ground fraught with dangerous edges for the close-minded. But for those with eyes to see, it remains the land of clear light.
By Jack Loeffler
© 2008