Getting gone for a while does a body good. For two months I’ve been visiting old haunts in Santa Fe and checking in with half forgotten trails, old coffee houses, burrito joints, and the compounds of dear friends. Throw in some opera, Lannan lectures, SITE Santa Fe and some cheap wine at galleries and you have a Santa Fe vacation. But it wasn’t all sweet sunsets and appetizers. There were some shocking discoveries that brought the big picture back to my own front door.
It started out as a trip to Bandelier National Monument. What we soon discovered was that you couldn’t just drive there anymore; you had to take a bus from White Rock. Between the old Dome Fire and the more recent Conchas Fire, the ruins are surrounded by… ruins. You can still back country through the wasteland to the Stone Lions and the Painted Cave, but the thrill is the same as wandering the smoldering landscape of Mordor. Our picnic stayed in the car.
Instead, we drove on through the Jemez Mountains to trails we haven’t seen in 16 years. At least that was the plan. Reality interceded.
Between the Conchas Fire and the bark beetle (scolytinae curculionidae), over 18% of the Jemez is now a bleak, burned, brown and withering disaster. The seemingly bottomless canyons north of the Frijoles Canyons in the park zone are now lined with twigless black spikes. And to make matters worse, a Park Ranger I saw interviewed on television declared the top ten inches of soil on the ridgelines to be officially inert, dead ten inches down, roasted so hot from the Conchas blaze that it will take not decades but centuries to recover if ever. Between the lack of annual rainfall and the arc of global climate change, the forests of New Mexico (the Carson, the Jemez, the Sangres, the Manzanos, the Gila) are all drying up and dying. I think the term I’m looking for is desertification. The future lay at our feet on the familiar trails we were too saddened to hike.
Most everyone taking the time to read this is already well aware of the damage we, truly, have done by our sheer existence. We are all guilty just as we are all innocent. We’ve made good choices, we’ve made bad choices, we have learned and we have forgotten, just like all those souls we replaced for millennia. But now we are at a significant crossroads. We designed economies and monetary systems to facilitate trade, make a life a little easier, and to keep from carrying around fancy rocks to swap with. The system works, but with some significant caveats. We designed political systems to replace conflict. It partially works. We created systems of discovery we named science to enable us to discover truths in the world beyond superstition and fear. Judging by Curiosity, that works pretty good, too. But we have arrived at a point where science and truth telling and politics are undermined, obfuscated, denigrated, and abused in the name of myth, distortion, fear mongering, personal gain, and ignorance. It is a battle in which neither side wins, at this point, but every day’s delay means a steeper climb to any possible solution.
A radio journalist friend of mine interviewed some of the farmers at Santa Fe’s farmer’s market. With the lack of rainfall as the culprit (but in reality, only a symptom of a greater climactic change), many commented on the fact that areas of the Espanola Valley and other nearby regions that have been farmed for hundreds of years are now threatened by aridity and falling production. “Only the big farming corporations are going to make it”, was the lament. “They have deeper pockets and deeper wells”. Which is true, but I’ll take it a step further. Just because the farming corporations survive doesn’t mean that they will in their current form. Neither will we, perhaps. But the larger point is that with the local farm and the corporate farm, maybe we all can survive together by influencing, hopefully in beneficial ways, our mutual strategies.
I think that the lesson for me of the last few years is that all are indispensible. I would be the first to admit that there are many I feel that are the opposite of contributive, but that criticism could just as well be aimed at me. In the fever of the political moment, where arguments of support of Green candidates vs. Democratic candidates, Republicans vs. Anyone With Sense, seem to overwhelm us to the point of inactivity and surrender, I have to sit back and take a deep breath and listen to history. Shit happens. It has happened before, it will happen again. But what, at this moment in time, is the best, most impactive place upon which to apply the shiatsu of world healing? I don’t have an answer for anyone else, but I know for me that local, democratic, thoughtful, realistic, grounded, and evolutionary steps are what work for the greater good. I am not disillusioned when I don’t get my way anymore. I know that policies and politicians come and go and that long battles such as civil rights and environmental quality are generational, not seasonal. And I know that hate, as a driving principle, is doomed to failure.
So when I make a choice to be politically engaged, it isn’t a judgment as much as a disappointment, when I hear that others deem my efforts to be juvenile, uninformed, or ill-advised. I have seen the forests of the future today. I have witnessed the withering crops of Nostradamus predictions in villages in our north country. I have worked with politicians, decent and good, stupid and corrupt, and I know that they are simply a reflection of who we are. I opt for realistic participation in the game of now. I play the ball where it lands. I choose love and struggle, with discovery and hope revealed in the process.
I choose to work for Barack Hussein Obama.
R.Earnheart
Silver City