In this historic conference we will hear from a wide variety of new farm, ranch and conservation leaders and their innovative, hands-on ideas and practices that are changing the way we look at the land, our water and ourselves.

New Agrarian Conference speakers will feature well-known authors, experts, and practitioners, with 80% being diverse, young agrarian leaders working hard to successfully meet the challenges of the 21st century. Come be inspired and take their knowledge and excitement home with you!

Some of the speakers will include: author and environmentalist, Bill McKibben; author and conservationist, Dr. William deBuys; chef and author, Debora Maddison, and many others!
Start Date: 2011-11-08
Start Time: 08:30
End Date: 2011-11-10
End Time: 17:00

Visit www.thatcampnewmexico.org for more information.

Eight fellowships are available through the THATCamp mothership organization at thatcamp.org/fellowships, but they are only open to people who have an academic affiliation, not museum or library professionals.

Come and enjoy the fun!
Date: 2011-11-02

Preliminary conference programs are in the mail to current NMAM members and a copy of the program is available online at: http://www.nmmuseums.org/conference/2011-annual-meeting.html . Please note, the early bird deadline for registration is September 30. You may register online and pay by credit through Paypal, or mail your completed registration form with check payment to:

NMAM Registration
c/o Roswell Museum and Art Center
100 West 11th Street
Roswell, NM 88201

If you have any registration questions or would like to request a program be mailed to you, please contact Stacie Petersen at petersen@roswellmuseum.org or 575-624-6744 x13. Scholarships are available and the application deadline is September 19. To apply, send a cover letter to Selena Connealy at selena.connealy@comcast.net.
Start Date: 2011-11-02
End Date: 2011-11-05

Estevan Arellano

Los Acequieros Resources contributed to Lore of the Land website

• 20 hours of digitized interviews with mayordomos in the Taos area from 1990
• 1,000 articles dealing with irrigation and traditional agriculture
• 5 to 10 scanned historical documents from Spain about acequias
• Thousands of digitized historic black and white and color photos

Lyle Balenquah

Interviews conducted through the Lore of the Land Aural History Program

• Ms. Enei Begaye (Navajo/Tohono O’odham), Co-Director, Black Mesa Water Coalition
• Ms. Candice Lomahaftewa (Hopi, Snow Clan, Shungopavi Village, Second Mesa), Entrepreneur, Co-Founder Black Mesa Water Coalition
• Mr. Bob Lomadopkie (Hopi, Coyote Clan, Hotevilla Village, Third Mesa), Owner-Isvaki Art Gallery
• Mr. William Talashoma (Hopi, Walpi Village, First Mesa), Flutist/Carver
• Mr. Lyle Balenquah (Hopi, Greasewood Clan, Bacavi Village, Third Mesa), Archaeological Consultant
• Various Hopi Traditional Songs
• Various Natural sounds (water, bird songs, etc.)

William deBuys

Over 20 hours of audio interviews recorded in 2008 for a project called “The Great Aridness” which was funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship. Mr. deBuys interviewed experts from different fields to create a collective account of global climate change in the Southwestern region of North America.

1. Ed L. Fredrickson (1st)

July 2, 2008

Research Rangeland Scientist

Jornada Experimental Range

Las Cruces, New Mexico

2. Craig D. Allen

July 13, 2008

Research Ecologist

USGS Jemez Mountain Field Station

Los Alamos, New Mexico

3. Brian Hurd

Sept. 10, 2008

Professor

Dept. of Agricultural Economics

New Mexico State University

Las Cruces, New Mexico

4. Ed L. Fredrickson (2nd)

Sept. 10, 2008

5. Ricky Lightfoot

Sept. 23, 2008

President and CEO

Crow Canyon Archeological Center

Cortez, Colorado

6. Mark Varien

Sept. 24, 2008

Vice President of Programs

Crow Canyon Archeological Center

Cortez, Colorado

7. Julio Betancourt

Oct. 7, 2008

Senior Scientist

National Research Program

US Geological Survey

Tucson, Arizona

8. Jeffrey Dean

Oct. 8, 2008

Professor (Archaeology)

Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research

University of Arizona

Tucson, Arizona

9. Dave Breshears

Oct. 8, 2008

Professor

School of Natural Resources

University of Arizona

Tucson, Arizona

10. Peter Warshall

Oct. 9, 2008

Conservation Biologist

Tucson, Arizona

11. Tom Swetnam

Oct. 9, 2008

Director

Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research

University of Arizona

Tucson, Arizona

12. Jonathan Overpeck

Oct. 10,2008

Director

Institute for the Study of Planet Earth

University of Arizona

Tucson, Arizona

13. Kathy Jacobs

Oct. 10, 2008

Executive Director

Arizona Water Institute

Tucson

14. Connie Woodhouse

Oct. 10, 2008

Associate Professor

Department of Geography and Regional Development

University of Arizona

Tucson, Arizona

15. Richard Seager

Nov. 4, 2008

Doherty Senior Research Scientist

Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory

Columbia University

Palisades, New York

16. Chris Milly

Nov. 10, 2008

Hydrologist and Project Chief

Continental Water, Climate, and Earth-System Dynamics Project

US Geological Survey

Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory

Princeton, New Jersey

17. Mark Muro

Nov. 24, 2008

Senior Fellow and Policy Director

Metropolitan Policy Program

The Brookings Institution

Washington, DC

18. Eric Blinman

Feb. 16, 2009

Director

Office of Archaeological Studies

Museum of New Mexico

Santa Fe, NM

19. Dinah Bear

April 28, 2009

Former General Counsel

Council on Environmental Quality

Washington, DC

Roy Kady

29 interviews with Navajo about raising sheep, agriculture, and other traditional Navajo ways of life.

Roy Kady Tape 1

Location:  Pinon Chapter House, AZ

Date Recorded: 3/20/2004

Performers: Pinon Spin off, Interview with Slow Foods

Roy Kady Tape 2

Location: Navajo Nation

Date Recorded: 12/30/2003

Performers: Daisy Ute, Mary K. Clah, et al.

Roy Kady Tape 3

Date Digitized: 8/26/05

Location: Navajo Nation

Performers: various

Roy Kady Tape 4

7/18/2004

Location: Kady Sheep Camp

Performers: Mr. Kady, et. al.

Roy Kady Tape 5

3/28/2004 and 3/29/2004

Location: Bluff, Utah

Performers: Daisy Ute, Mary K. Clan, E. Black

Roy Kady Tape 6

4/29/2004

Location: Teec Nos Pos, AZ

Performers: Navajo Earth Cake-including Hannah Howard, Ella Begay, Virginia Joe, Faye Tso, Robert Tso Jr., Mary K. Clan, Jerry Lansing, Sara Adakai, Imojene MacDonald, Marlene and Christian Adakai, Roy Kady

Roy Kady Tape 7

3/20/2004

Location: Pinon, AZ

Performers: Piñon Spin off, Johnny Jack, Jim Keyes NCS reg. workshop

Roy Kady Tape 8

07/2004

Location: Carrizo Mtn., Teec Nos Pos, AZ

Performers: Interviews with Tyra, Jay, and Robert

Roy Kady Tape 9

7/25/2004

Location: Carrizo Mtn., Teec Nos Pos, AZ

Performers: Sheep butchering, interview with kids, blessing of meal

Roy Kady Tape 10

7/22/2004 and 7/25/2004

Location: Carrizo Mtn. Teec Nos Pos, AZ

Performers: Unknown

Additional individual interviews on Diné Sheep Culture and Navajo-Churro Sheep:

11. Tahnibaa Naataanii                                                39:52

12. Arnold Clifford                                                            68:12

13. Evelyn White Poyer                                                36:20

14. Anderson Hoskie                                                            43:44

15. Anderson Hoskie                                                            34:27

16. Kenneth Nabahe                                                            70:27

17. Trent Teegerstrom, presenter 12/3/06                        38:10

18. Stella Mae Black                                                            14:14

19. Colleen Biakeddy 6/16/07                                                8:08

20. Sam Cummingham & Peggy Miller                        8:10

21. Cindy Dvergsten 12/13/06                                    38:40

22. Jay Begay, Jr.                                                            24:39

23. Shearing, clipping sounds                                                  1:54

24. Dr. Ruby, Fertility test, blood test                                    14:01

25. Judy Chism registering Navajo Churro sheep              2:56

26. TNP Chapter House livestock ranch workshop            10:53

27. Cindy Dvergsten 12/13/06                                    58:04

28. Jay Begay, Presenter, grazing                                    8:35

29. Roy Kady Radio Program for Lore of the Land

Featuring Arnold Clifford                                                28:50

Enrique Lamadrid

Selected text, illustrations, and documents from the following books:

• E. Lamadrid, Estevan Arellano, Amy Córdova. Juan the Bear and the Water of Life / La Acequia de Juan del Oso . Albq: UNM Press, 2008.
• E. Lamadrid, Jack Loeffler, Tomás Martínez Saldaña.  “El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro.”  English & Spanish Gallery Guides / El Camino Real International Heritage Center, Socorro, NM.  Santa Fe: NM Dept of Cultural Affairs, 2005.
• E. Lamadrid. Hermanitos Comanchitos: Rituals of Captivity, Redemption and Transculturation in the Indo-Hispano Folklore of NM.  Albuquerque: UNM Press,  2003.  Univ. of Chicago Folklore Prize 2004.  SW Book Award 2005.
• E. Lamadrid. Nuevo México Profundo: Rituals of an Indo-Hispano Homeland.  With Miguel Gandert, Ramón Gutiérrez, Lucy Lippard, and Chris Wilson.  Santa Fe: Museum of NM Press, 2000.  SW Book Award 2001.
• E. Lamadrid. La Música de los Viejitos: Hispano Folk Music of the Río Grande del Norte.  With Jack and Katherine Loeffler, recordist and illustrator. Albq: UNM Press, 1999 and 2007.
• Music and Culture on the Río Grande del Norte: the Juan B. Rael Collection of Hispano Folk Music.  Washington, D.C.: American Digital Library, Library of Congress, American Folklife Center.  (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ rghtml/rghome .html) Essays, biography, bibliography, discography, transcripts, translations,  8 hrs of sound files.

Jack Loeffler

Archives and radio series, with transcriptions of the interviews.  Programming from the Loeffler Aural History Archive is continually added to the Lore of the Land.  All of this programming is available for download free of charge under the Community Commons guidelines.

• Loeffler Ethno Digitized Archives, over 900 digitized reel-to-reel tapes

• Loeffler DAT Digitized Archives, over 400 digitized DAT tapes

• The Spirit of Place, 1996, funded by the Roth Mott Fund

13 thirty-minute programs addressing relationship of indigenous culture to respective habitat;

• Moving Waters: The Colorado River and the West, 2002, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, 6 thirty-minute programs addressing the evolution of water use in the Colorado River;

• The Lore of the Land, 2008, funded by the Ford Foundation and the New Mexico Humanities Council, 15 thirty-minute programs focusing on the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, the New Deal of the 1930s in New Mexico, and philosophical considerations concerning a path through current dilemmas in the Southwest;

• Edward Abbey: A Self Portrait, 2008, funded by the Christensen Fund and the New Mexico Humanities Council, a one-hour program based on an interview with the late  author conducted by his compañero, Jack Loeffler;

• Aldo Leopold in the Southwest, 2008, funded by the Aldo Leopold Foundation, the New Mexico Humanities Council, and the Christensen Fund;

• Humanity in Motion, a two-hour sound collage focusing on ancient and modern trails, roads and railroads in New Mexico, 2009, funded by the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs.

Books-selected text, illustrations, and documents from the following books:

• Headed Upstream: Interviews with Iconoclasts. Tucson: Harbinger House, 1989.
• La Música de los Viejitos: Hispano Folk Music of the Río Grande del Norte.  Enrique Lamadrid, with Jack and Katherine Loeffler, recordist and illustrator. Albq: UNM Press, 1999 and 2007. (including a 3-CD set)
• Adventures with Ed: A Portrait of Abbey. Albq: UNM Press, 2003.
• Survival Along the Continental Divide. Albq: UNM Press, 2008;
• Healing the West: Voices of Culture and Habitat. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2008.
• Tesoros del Espíritu: A Portrait in Sound of Hispanic New Mexico. Bilingual publication with a 3-CD sound collage. Enrique Lamadrid, with Jack Loeffler, sound collage artist, and Miguel Gandert, photographer.  Albq.: Academia del Norte, 1994.

A selection of Loeffler interviews conducted for the “Watersheds as Commons” Project:

Stewart Brand                                                Writer, biologist

Freeman House                                    Writer, watershed organizer

Gary Snyder                                                Poet, essayist, environmental philosopher

Gary Nabhan                                                Writer, ethnobiolist

William deBuys                                    Writer, historian, environmentalist

Dave Hafner                                                Bio-geographer

Dave Foreman                                                Writer, grassroots environmentalist

Estella Leopold                                    Paleo-botanist

Nina Leopold                                                Geographer

Courtney White                                    Director, Quivira Coalition

Stewart Udall                                                Former Secretary of Interior

Susan Flader                                                Watershed thinker, Aldo Leopold scholar

Estevan Arellano                                    Grassroots watershed organizer

Milford Muskett                                    Navajo professor, environmental studies

Rina Swentzell                                    Tewa Indian scholar

José Lucero                                                Tewa Indian watershed scholar

Luna Leopold                                                Ríos Colorado Y Grande hydrologist, deceased

William Swan                                                Colorado River attorney

John Echohawk                                    Director, Native American Rights Fund

Philip Tuwaletstiwa                                    Hopi geodesist, scholar

Vernon Masayesva                                    Hopi environmental activist

“Doc” Mayer                                                NM rancher, Canadian River Watershed

Wanda Hughes                                    90 year old rancher, Clayton, NM

S.A. Bennett                                                Resident Clayton, NM (Ogallalla Aquifer)

Sue Richardson                                    Journalist, Clayton, NM

Loris Taylor                                                Hopi radio producer

Roy Kady                                                Navajo lore master

Florence Shepard                                    Scientist, author

Mike Marshall                                                Archaeologist

Fran Levine                                                NM Water scholar, museum director

Herman Agoyo                                    Tewa Indian historian

Carmella Padilla                                    Writer, Hispano heritage specialist

Marc Simmons                                    Historian, writer

Joe Sanchez                                                Hispano scholar

Steven Fosberg                                    Archaeologist

Alta Begay                                                Navajo scholar

Harlyn Geronimo*                                    Apache great-grandson of himself

Drummond Hadley                                    Poet, rancher

William MacDonald                                    Rancher

Ray Turner                                                Ecologist

Warner Glenn                                                Rancher

Sarah Schlanger                                    Archaeologist

Lilian Hill                                                Hopi scholar, environmental activist

John Roney                                                Archaeologist

Camillus Lopez                                    Tohono O’odham loremaster

Roberta Blackgoat                                    Traditional Navajo, deceased

Daniel Kemmis                                    Writer, political scientist

Howie Wolk                                                Environmental activist

Jamie Pinkham                                    Nez-Perce tribal scholar

Shonto Begay                                                Navajo artist, poet

Fillman Bell                                                Hiacite O’odham lore mistress

Angelo Joaquin                                    Tohono O’odham loremaster

Danny Lopez                                                Tohono O’odham loremaster

Millie Roanhorse                                    Navajo lore mistress

Cipriano Vigil                                                Folk musician, Hispano loremaster

Melissa Savage                                    Biogeographer, Director of Four Corners Institute

Sarah & Leo Natani                                    Traditional Navajos

Al Largo                                                Navajo interpreter

Eulogio Ortega                                    New Mexico Santero, philosopher

Annie Kahn                                                Traditional Navajo storyteller, shepherdess, and fiber artist

David Brower                                                Environmental activist, deceased

Alvin Josephy                                                Writer, historian, deceased

Charles Wilkinson                                    Author, environmental attorney, professor

Dave Robertson                                    Bio-regional humanities professor

Martin Litton                                                Writer, river-runner

Bruce Babbitt                                                Former Secretary of the Interior

Floyd Dominy                                                Former chairman, Bureau of Reclamation

William E. Brown                                    Writer, retired NPS historian

John Cook                                                Retired NPS Southwestern Superintendent

Patty Limerick                                                Author, historian

Norris Hundley                                    Author, Colorado River specialist

Patricia Mulroy                                    Director, S. Nevada Water Authority

Anne Zwinger                                                Writer, naturalist, river-runner

Charles Aguilar                                    Hispano loremaster

Gwinn Vivian                                                Archaeologist

Linda Cordell                                                Archaeologist

Steve Lekson                                                Writer, archaeologist

Additional interviews conducted by Native American Aural Scholars

These interviews have been conducted between 2004 and July 2010 with funding from The Christensen Fund and other sources, and are part of Lore of the Land Archives for incorporation into radio programs and the web site.  All subject releases have been secured.

Lilian Hill, Hopi Interviews

• Robert Lamadafkie
• Loma Ishi
• Michael Kabotie

Tessie Naranjo, Tewa Interviews

• Gregorita Chavarria
• Carol Naranjo
• Albert Naranjo
• Rina Swentzell
• Tito Naranjo

Tessie Naranjo & Rina Swentzell, Puebloan Interviews

• Porter Swentzell              Santa Clara
• Louie Hena                        Tesuque
• Vickie Downey            Tesuque
• Joseph Suina                        Cochiti
• Marie Reyna                        Taos
• Albert Naranjo            Santa Clara
• Emily Martinez            San Juan

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

For more info: http://www.guildcinema.com/comingsoon/
Start Time: 19:00
Date: 2011-03-16

© 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.’”