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News & Views
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A T r ibu t e t o R i n a S w e n t z e ll T e w a P u e b l o H o u s e s and S pa c e s The Gift of Local Food December 2015
Northern New Mexico’s Largest Distribution Newspaper
Vol. 7 No. 12
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Green Fire Times • December 2015
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Green Fire Times • December 2015
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Green Fire Times • December 2015
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Vol. 7, No. 12 • December 2015 Issue No. 80 Publisher Green Fire Publishing, LLC
News & Views
Skip Whitson
Editor-in-chief
Seth Roffman
Art Director
Anna C. Hansen, Dakini Design Copy Editors Stephen Klinger, Susan Clair Webmaster: Karen Shepherd Contributing Writers
Christian E. Casillas, Tom Guthrie, Sen. Martin Heinrich, Jack Loeffler, Alejandro López, Alex Paramo, Seth Roffman, Celerah HewesRutledge, Porter Swentzell, Rina Swentzell, Beata Tsosie-Peña, Chris Wilson
Contributing Photographers Anna C. Hansen, Jack Loeffler, Alejandro López, Seth Roffman, Bill Steen, Anson Stevens-Bollen, Chris Wilson
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Skip Whitson 505.471.5177 skip@greenfiretimes.com Anna C. Hansen 505.982.0155 dakinidesign@newmexico.com Robyn Montoya 505.692.4477 robyn.greenfiretimes@gmail.com
Sustainable Southwest
Winner of the Sustainable Santa Fe Award for Outstanding Educational Project
Associate Publisher
Barbara E. Brown
from the
Contents
Compact of Mayors Signing . . ... . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . 7 Modernizing America’s Grid. . ... . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . 7 Educating for our Electricity Future. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . . 9 Creating Local Community Resilience to Avoid Climate Catastrophe . . .. . .. . .10 Book Profile: The Evolution of Ivanpah Solar . . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. 13 A Tribute to Rina Swentzell. . .. . . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. 15 Heritage, Adobe Architecture and Grief: Learning from Rina Swentzell . . .. . .. 17 Remembering Tewa Pueblo Houses and Spaces . . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . 18 A Quiet, Fierce Intelligence. . .. . . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. 19 Oh Thou Incomparable Cielos!. .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. 20 Tewa Women United Receives EPA Grant for Healing Foods Oasis Garden. . .. 23 The Rail Yards Market – Barelas, Albuquerque . . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. 24 Española Opens the Food Venture Commercial Kitchen. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . 25 Delicious New Mexico: The Gift of Local Food . . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . ..27 Maurice Dixon Jr. Recovers the Artistic Legacy of Higinio V. Gonzales. . .. . .. 31 Newsbites . . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. 37 What’s Going On . . .. . .. . ... . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. 38
Lisa Powers, 505.629.2655 Lisa@greenfiretimes.com Niki Nicholson 505.490.6265 Niki@GreenFireTimes.com
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Green Fire Times
c/o The Sun Companies P.O. Box 5588, SF, NM 87502-5588 505.471.5177 • info@greenfiretimes.com © 2015 Green Fire Publishing, LLC Green Fire Times provides useful information for community members, business people, students and visitors—anyone interested in discovering the wealth of opportunities and resources in the Southwest. In support of a more sustainable planet, topics covered range from green businesses, jobs, products, services, entrepreneurship, investing, design, building and energy—to native perspectives on history, arts & culture, ecotourism, education, sustainable agriculture, regional cuisine, water issues and the healing arts. To our publisher, a more sustainable planet also means maximizing environmental as well as personal health by minimizing consumption of meat and alcohol. Green Fire Times is widely distributed throughout north-central New Mexico as well as to a growing number of New Mexico cities, towns, pueblos and villages. Feedback, announcements, event listings, advertising and article submissions to be considered for publication are welcome.
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Green Fire Times 80 months
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t is hard to believe that this is the 80th monthly edition of Green Fire Times. The print edition is currently available at more than 300 locations. We are gratified by the many people and organizations that have contributed articles and by the feedback we frequently receive. People often tell us that GFT means a lot to them, that there is nothing quite like it out there and that they save the copies. Green Fire Times set out to inform and inspire by spotlighting enterprises and initiatives that are transforming New Mexico into a diverse and sustainable economy. By weaving together the interrelated aspects of community, culture, the environment and the regional economy, and by providing multicultural Premiere issue, May 2009 perspectives, GFT has sought to provide a valuable, needed voice for our bioregion. By linking education with jobs and highlighting the creation of a workforce with skills that are increasingly in demand, GFT has helped nurture cultures and livelihoods, including for people in rural communities. The publication is used as an educational resource in schools and universities. With a small staff, supplemented by many eager writers (mostly from New Mexico), it is not easy pulling together a coherent, quality edition each month. GFT has been totally supported by advertising but has been operating without adequate funding. We are exploring a transition to a nonprofit structure that will attract and allow additional forms of funding, so that we can increase our readership and distribution, and upgrade GFT online. If you are inspired by and appreciate GFT, please consider advertising or providing underwriting to help make possible GFT’s evolution.
COVER:
Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, Zía, 1890 Painting by Douglas Johnson, gouache on matboard, 7 x 9 inches, 1997 the albrecht collection • www.obsidianmountain.net Green Fire Times • December 2015
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Climate and Energy
“Compact of Mayors” Signing Seth Roffman
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n anticipation of the United Nations Climate Conference in Paris, community, organizational and environmental leaders, including Santa Fe Mayor Javier Gonzales and former Mayor David Coss, came together on Oct. 29 to witness Gonzales signing onto the Compact of Mayors, the world’s largest cooperative effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. L a u n c h e d a t t h e 2 0 1 4 U. N . Climate S ummit, the compact (compactofmayors.org) represents a worldwide coalition of city leaders dedicated to preparing for impacts of climate change and taking action to prevent the worst consequences of climate disruption at the local level. This includes encouraging increased energy efficiency, converting facilities to renewable energy, advocating for community solar and improving public
Sustainable Santa Fe Commission Chair Beth Beloff, Santa Fe Mayor Javier Gonzales and City Councilor-Mayor Pro Tem Peter Ives (seated) with former Mayor David Coss (center, backrow), community and environmental leaders. Mayor Gonzales has called climate change “the single most important challenge we will ever face.”
transit, along with increasing public transparency. By signing on, Mayor Gonzales committed to conduct an inventory of current impacts and initiatives and establish an action plan with reduction targets and benchmark
measurements toward the goal of a carbon-neutral future. The compact aligns with efforts already underway, built on the foundation of Mayor Coss’s accomplishments. These include establishment of the Sustainable Santa Fe Commission and the Climate
Action Task Force, record levels of water conservation, the introduction of Energy Performance Contracting to increase efficiency, the introduction of electric vehicles into the city fleet, green bike lanes, an expanded curbside recycling program and a sustainable food plan i.
Modernizing America’s Grid
U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.)
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My father’s days as a utility worker represent the grid that George Westinghouse conceived of in the late 1800s, with its one-way distribution system of power delivered directly to consumers. It began at central generation facilities, usually a hydroelectric facility or coal-fired power plant, and traveled from there on high-voltage transmission lines that still tower over America’s landscape. From transmission lines, the power then branched into smaller distribution lines, from which homes and businesses received 100 percent of the power that they used.
Competitive prices from clean sources of energy and the rapidly declining cost of energy storage are quickly changing the game. Fast-forward to today, and our grid is beginning to behave very differently. Customers are becoming generators—myself included—and new technologies have made transmission a two-way street.The competitive prices from clean sources of energy—from large wind farms and solar fields to rooftop solar—and the rapidly declining cost of energy storage are quickly changing the game. Low carbon has become low cost. President Obama announced the final version of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan in August. The new rules set achievable targets for states to reduce carbon pollution. The incentives for renewable-energy development will speed up the grid’s shift to clean power. But many electric utilities have been resistant to change. Most operate as monopolies and are regulated at the state level by sympathetic public commissions. To maintain consistent profits, they often rely on what has worked in
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ne of my earliest memories is visiting my father in the hospital after a high-voltage accident caused him to fall from an electrical transmission pole. That fall never dampened his enthusiasm for his work as a utility lineman, climbing up power poles in the middle of lightning storms to restore electricity after outages.
Senator Heinrich speaks at the Santa Fe Energy Summit, August 2015
the past. In the current landscape, however, they have both new opportunities and new responsibilities to adapt and provide flexibility for consumers who want to reduce their carbon footprints and save money on their electric bills. Innovative private-sector companies are already producing the technologies that will drive the grid’s transition. The American solar-energy industry expanded rapidly in just the last five years. The cost of residential rooftop solar dropped by 45 percent from 2010 to 2015. Solar businesses created 174,000 jobs and are completing a new project on a home or business every two-and-a-half minutes. Tesla was in the spotlight in May when it unveiled its Powerwall, a home battery pack that can store rooftop solar or provide emergency backup power. While Tesla has attracted media attention, numerous new technologies are driving down storage costs while dramatically increasing our ability to manage grid supply and demand. This will help provide backup power during emergencies. It will allow utilities to cut costs by reducing the need to build new power plants. Most important, it will allow continued on page 8
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us to time-shift power from intermittent renewable sources from peak producing hours—noontime solar and nighttime wind—to the hours of peak demand. The sun alone delivers more than twice as much energy each year to the Earth’s surface as we have ever gotten from fossil fuels. SolarCity, the nation’s leading provider of rooftop solar, estimates that it is mounting an array on a new house every three minutes. To date, the company has helped more than 200,000 households in 18 states install panels. As generation and storage technologies improve and become less expensive in the coming years—think of how fast computers and smartphones have advanced in the last decade—economics will drive new electrical generation consistently in the direction of clean, pollution-free power. When we push toward a clean-energy future, we will reach our carbon-reduction goals together far more quickly than we can by acting individually. That is the inherent power of the grid as an amplifier of individual efforts. Businesses and households will generate and store clean power alongside traditional utilities. Utilities will provide services and not just power. Electric cars will become another power customer and offer up critical storage to buffer the grid during peak use. With generation points and backup power decentralized, our power system will become cheaper, cleaner and more reliable. Given the impacts we are seeing from climate change—from longer droughts and bigger wildfires to extreme weather
and rising sea levels—the federal government must help make this transition as rapid, smooth and economically beneficial as possible. It is with these goals in mind that we need to support these legislative policies that bring our grid into the 21st century: 1. C ontinued support of renewables through the solar investment tax credit and the renewable-energy production tax credit or the removal of subsidies for carbon-based fuels. 2. The development and implementation of grid-based storage both in front of and behind the meter. 3. Freedom to connect power and storage to the grid with a fair methodology for accounting and distributing the costs and benefits of power and grid use. 4. A fair way to site regional transmission that is sensitive to community and environmental concerns without giving individual political subdivisions veto authority to prevent any progress. 5. Broad energy-efficiency legislation designed to make sure we use our remaining fossil fuels conservatively. We have a moral obligation to meet the challenges of climate change head on. Smart policies offer a road map to doing this in a way that creates jobs and economic activity. We have the resources. We have the technology. We have the human capital. The question is, do we have the will? i
U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich
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Modernizing continued from page 7
Educating for our Electricity Future
Christian E. Casillas
magine walking into your home, which has a rooftop covered with grid-connected solar panels and battery storage in your garage. Now, imagine that during different times of the day, you receive messages from your smart electric meter, alerting you to the purchase of some of your stored energy or warning you to delay using your dishwasher until later at night, when electricity prices will be cheaper. We need to look only as far as the community of Los Alamos, New Mexico, to see similar energymanagement models in action. Los Alamos, which has a municipally owned utility, has been participating in a joint project between the United States and Japan, to explore advances in smart-grid and microgrid-technology and energy-management practices. About 1,600 households currently have smart meters, and some subset of them receive discounts for deferring their heavy electricity usage to off-peak times.
SFCC’s Smart-Grid and Microgrid Education Program will be the first in the state. The evolution of sophisticated yet affordable monitoring and control technology may be the biggest enabler for increased utilization of renewable energy, more efficient delivery and use of electricity and increased reliability. The goal of a smarter grid is to reduce the operational costs and increase efficiency and reliability by introducing devices that improve the flow of information, allowing more informed and faster decisions. At customer nodes, programmable domestic appliances that respond to price signals are already on the market. Similar to the program at Los Alamos, it is estimated that close to 40 percent of residential electricity customers in the United States will be connected to smart meters by the end of 2015, allowing for two-way communication and real-time pricing information. The continued evolution of a smarter grid in the United States will parallel
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and complement the development of microgrids, which are small-scale versions of the centralized electric grid, typically having their own generation, distribution networks and energy storage. Microgrids are especially attractive for increasing reliability of electricity service, being able to quickly disconnect from the grid and continue operating in the face of grid instabilities catalyzed by weather, operation error, or sabotage. Understanding the advanced technology and a need to analyze and manage large information streams will require new skill sets for employees working in energy industries. Analyses of a changing workforce emphasize a need for new employees to have basic understandings of power systems, database management, cyber security, environmental regulations and changing business models. The demand for diverse skill sets will be magnified in the microgrid sector, where employees will be exposed to many more aspects of an electricity system than in a large utility. Twenty years ago, an electrical engineer would need a specific set of power-engineering skills, while in a microgrid system a handful of employees may be involved with aspects of technical, economic, security and environmental management tasks. Santa Fe Community College (SFCC), in collaboration with the Microgrid Systems Laboratory and with financial support f rom Santa Fe County’s Economic Development Division, is currently developing curriculum for a Smart-Grid and Microgrid Education Program, which will be the first in the state. The goal is to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of our existing electricity system, drivers causing its transformation, and critical knowledge needed for the design and management of technologically advanced power systems. What is most exciting about the program is that it will be evolving in parallel with supportive “smart” infrastructure on campus. SFCC’s goal is to quickly evolve its main campus to function as an advanced microgrid, with aspects of generation, monitoring and control designed to facilitate student interaction and learning.
SFCC’s 1.5 MW PV solar array can meet 40 percent of the main campus’s electrical needs. Real-time weather, electricity production and carbon savings from the array can be viewed on touch-screen displays in several campus buildings.
A class in Green Technologies will be taught this spring, and smart-grid and microgrid concentrations will be offered in three Associate of Applied Science (AAS) degrees in the fall of 2016. For example, a student planning to get an AAS in computer and information technology or solar technologies will be able to do so while gaining additional skills with a concentration in smart grids and microgrids. Classes that will be part of the concentrations will include Power Generation, Distribution, and Transmission, Smart Energy Management Systems, Electronic Fundamentals, Computer and Security Fundamentals, and Instrumentation and Control Lab.
As the program evolves, SFCC will work to connect graduates with employment opportunities in the city, county and region that will allow them to contribute to an advancing, greener electricity sector. For more information about the program, contact School of Trades, Technology, Sustainability and Professional Studies. Steve Gómez, chairperson, can be reached at stephen. gomez@sfcc.edu i Christian E. Casillas, Ph.D., is a Santa Fe native who has been leading the curriculum development for the Smart Grid and Microgrid program. Casillas also serves on the city’s Sustainable Santa Fe Commission and on a working group for the mayor’s Climate Action Task Force.
© Seth Roffman
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Creating Local Community Resilience to Avoid Climate Catastrophe
Robert Christie, Ph.D.
n some ways, northern New Mexico is ahead of other regions in building local community resilience under increasingly difficult environmental conditions. Drought is a familiar circumstance. The city of Santa Fe has one of the lowest per-capita water-use rates in the nation. But much more than water conservation is involved in local resilience. Overdependence on the national economy infusing cash into the local economy through tourism, art sales, and ancillary commerce may be a risky business emphasis as climate disruption intensifies. [1] As with agricultural monoculture, overreliance on one product line always carries risk. Not much high-end art-market and tourism money trickles down to support communities outside the old Santa Fe city center. The service-labor sector supporting these businesses is generally low-wage, even though Santa Fe’s minimum wage is higher than most. Affordable housing is in very short supply, and there is no significant high-wage industry in the area.
Global Crisis, Local Action
Looking forward, under conditions of increasing climate disturbances, all economic activities must be examined through the lens of local energy flows among humans and their environments to foster ecological sustainability. Northern New Mexico communities need resilient living economies enhanced by the region’s cultural traditions and integrated with the regional ecosystems. Sustainable local economies must minimize dependence upon outside economic systems and forces such as heavily carbonemitting, international trade-based economies. Part of the larger problem of mitigating climate destabilization is that local resilience will be increasingly difficult to achieve and maintain. Massive reductions in total planetary carbon emissions, which in turn depend on transforming national and international industrial systems worldwide, are necessary. Adaptation without mitigation is collective suicide, not resilience. By turning away f rom excessive consumption
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of high-emissions production, local communities can help reduce total emissions. To say that local economies must increasingly rely on local production and consumption to be sustainable has almost become a cliché among many environmentalists. Clichés are often overstated truths not necessarily acted upon. As the converging global crises of climate, economy and energy intensify, national and global economies grow increasingly less stable. These instabilities will directly affect local communities. To face this reality, we must build largely independent, resilient communities and regions. That must extend to mitigating the destructive effects of profligate extraction-productionconsumption-waste. How can such deep resilience be accomplished? So far, symbolic imagery and gestures, as well as a lot of commercial “greenwashing,” merely feel good to the inattentive. But they also distract from the hard policy choices facing humanity. Tim DeChristopher and Naomi Klein have both illuminated the failure of Big Green organizations to achieve
NASA’s Earth Observatory/NOAA/DOD
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NARCCAP precipitation and temperature difference, June–September, 2041–2069 relative to simulated historical means 1971–1999. The degree of change is indicated by the color, whereas the degree of agreement among the nine RCMs is indicated by the intensity of the color. For precipitation (left), the color intensity shows the agreement among the RCMs on the direction of change (i.e., positive or negative percent change in future precipitation); for temperature (right), the color intensity shows agreement among the RCMs on areas where future temperature is projected to be at least 2°C (3.6°F) higher than the 1971–1999 average. Source: Mearns et al. (2009).
“greening” of ever-growing energy use, consumption and waste. This assumption is a major impediment to realistic climate policy, both nationally and locally. Cultural dominance of the growth ideology via corporate media control sustains the illusion that climate action can be contained within the growth economy. The deeper illusion is that the collapsing global politicaleconomic system can somehow be repaired without disturbing “my
New Mexico communities need resilient living economies enhanced by cultural traditions and integrated with the regional ecosystems. significant environmental goals by trading cosmetic corporate changes for generous donations.[2] Invoking a cosmetic language of sustainability is counterproductive; it trades in illusion. We know deep down that we must reorganize our lives in exceptionally challenging ways for our communities to become truly resilient. That reorganization will be a venture into new territory, barely now begun, which is why I think of it as the Next Great Transformation. [3] Critics of climate action and the sustainability movement, even some big environmental groups, still imagine a “green” prosperity driven by international trade and perpetual economic growth. This is an illusory
Green Fire Times • December 2015
lifestyle.” Illusory technological fixes via “market solutions”—the disaster that is “carbon trading” or the hubris-laden “geo-engineering” fantasy—contribute to the deeper denial of today’s climate crisis. These business-as-usual illusions implicitly deny the hard facts of a destabilizing earth-systems complex while aiming at patching fragments of the destabilization, as if it were enough. Most New Mexicans, like other Americans, retain change-denying consumer fantasies. An obvious example is the many overpowered pickup trucks driving at excessive highway speeds, spewing carbon across the high desert into our still blue skies. Parking lots of big-box stores remain crowded. How much of the stuff manufactured on the
other side of the planet do we really need, compared to what we actually buy? The new Walmart Superstore at the south end of Santa Fe ominously promotes corporate consumerism and drives out local retailers. Importantly, the Slow Food, Slow Money, and public banking movements are taking root, but they remain much too small. Far more development of these and other cooperative movements is desperately needed.
From Corporate Dependency to Community Resilience
A burgeoning local, organic farming industry in northern New Mexico struggles to mature in the sparse highdesert valleys. The Santa Fe Farmers’ Market is quite popular among residents for whom price is not so important. Yet Santa Fe’s only serious attempt at urban agriculture, Gaia Gardens, has been unable, according to its operators, to survive burdensome zoning rules and neighbor complaints. City support for urban agriculture has not yet been implemented. Urban farming is growing rapidly in both size and popularity in Detroit, Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere. How accurate are pretensions to sustainability in northern New Mexico? Much of New Mexican agriculture, especially in the southern parts of the state, remains oriented to national markets, not diverse local-regional continued on page 12
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Local Community Resilience needs. Local communities still mostly depend on energy-intensive national and international food distribution. Meanwhile, California’s ongoing drought damages production by the nation’s main suppliers of vegetables, fruits and nuts. The United States depends on California’s factory farms for over 90 percent of many staple food crops. Yet powerful agricultural businesses continue old, wasteful, water-usage practices, amplifying the risks of depending on agribusiness for our food supply. Water allocations continue to be made on contractual seniority rather than conservation and need; farmers are being asked to conserve far less than much smaller users in cities. As industrial agriculture begins to falter, New Mexicans, like most Americans, continue buying food produced far away. Long-distance transportation is a significant source of carbon emissions that threatens community resiliency around the world.
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asked nor answered in public. The question of carrying capacity has not been adequately developed for human populations as it has by ecologists for other species in nonhuman-influenced, relatively isolated ecosystems. No mere industrial technology can save us from drought conditions that may become far worse than those that defeated the much smaller populations of ancestral Puebloans. Modern organic farming is as productive as it gets. On the other hand, new scientific applications and modifications of diverse older and existing less energyintensive technologies can realistically adapt to severe climate conditions. Remember E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful? It still is. Also, many mostly forgotten technologies from the dawn of the industrial revolution do not rely on fossil-fuel energy but rather on skilled human work. Many of these could be resurrected and given modern refinements.
As industrial agriculture begins to falter, New Mexicans, like most Americans, continue buying food produced far away. The vast majority of U.S. grain and feed crops are produced by giant Midwestern factor y farms. The sustainability of large-scale industrial agriculture is increasingly tenuous as soils are depleted, water tables subside, and oil and gas fracking threaten major aquifers. Systems science confirms that large complex systems are inherently vulnerable to catastrophic breakdowns when disturbed by the introduction of new conditions. Unlike airline and aerospace mission-critical systems, our increasingly complex fossil-fueldependent food-production systems provide no fail-safe redundancy. Yet, with evermore plastic packaging, fossil-fuel intensity and long-distance transportation, they contribute to their own destabilization. Continued dependency of industrial nations on energ y-intensive, agricultural megasystems puts us all at high risk. But could northern New Mexico lands actually support their current population as national factory-food supplies falter? That urgent scientific question is neither
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Real estate developers continue to press for new residential and commercial projects, adding pressure to dwindling water sources. Santa Fe County’s Sustainable Growth Management Plan retains “growth” as a core value despite the high probability that growth itself is not sustainable beyond the very shortterm. The Plan and the Sustainable Land Development Code are riddled with references to “sustainability,” but neither addresses the natural limits to growth in northern New Mexico. The fundamental ecological concept of carrying capacity never enters the vocabulary of land development—it’s a developer’s world. Local political cultures hold to the faltering international corporate ideology of extractive capital and endless economic growth. Local peoples’ response to climate change must reinvent the political culture if resilience in the face of climate disruption is to be achieved. Many new energy-efficient building designs have been developed in recent years, some approaching 100 percent
Green Fire Times • December 2015
energy efficiency; a few are actually being implemented. However, new construction is a tiny fraction of the approximately 40 percent of total emissions attributable to the “built environment.” A massive program of insulation and weather stripping would do far more to reduce carbon emissions than is possible from new designs for new construction. Priorities must be set. Local political focus on minor factors would be deadly. Climate forecasters predict that nearterm total precipitation may not be extremely low in northern New Mexico. But with rising temperatures, m o d e r a t e s n ow p ac k a n d e a r l y snowmelt, premature runoff results in less usable water. In the hotter climate, evaporation causes huge amounts of water loss. The delicate balance of use between groundwater and surface water will be increasingly difficult to maintain. Extreme storms with sudden downpours result in flash floods, not greater reservoir reserves. This year’s spring and summer rains produced extra fuel for wildfires but added little to usable water supplies. Climate disruption we now experience was caused by carbon emissions the industrial nations have produced since the dawn of the Industrial Age two centuries ago. It is cumulative and accelerating. Worse yet, its effects lag behind its causes, making the nastiest effects seem far off as they rapidly approach. That, combined with the pervasive corporate ideology of growth,
breeds complacency. The climate crisis is already here. The only viable mitigating response is to drastically reduce further emissions to stave off far worse climate catastrophe than is already in the pipeline. Attempting to merely adapt to climate disruption would be suicidal. Almost everywhere, increasingly extreme measures will have to be taken to give relatively stable communities a chance. The science is solid but lagging. In each successive report, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecasts have consistently underestimated actual climate disruption. IPCC reports synthesize the work of hundreds of scientists with diverse specialties f rom all over the world, making deniers’ conspiracy theories laughable. The reports have been extremely valuable. Yet the economic and social implications of their specific findings are politically resisted. Clearly, we cannot rely on rationality among national or international politicians. Neither can we wait for them to take the drastic measures necessary to avert the catastrophic convergence of climate disruption, poverty and violence around the world. [4] Unfortunately, political incentives and lobbyists point politicians in exactly the wrong direction. We have far better chances to initiate economic, political and social climate action to maximize resilience of local communities as climate disturbances continue. continued on page 34
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The Evolution of Ivanpah Solar By Jamey Stillings; Foreword by Robert Redford Published by Steidl, 2015; 154 pages, 60 photographs Internationally renowned, Santa Fe-based photographer Jamey Stillings’ new book The Evolution of Ivanpah Solar synthesizes Stillings’ fascination for the intersections of nature and human activity. In October 2010, before construction commenced, Stillings began a three-and-a-half-year aerial exploration over what has become the world’s largest concentrated solar power (CSP) plant, stretching over about five square miles in the Mojave Desert of California.
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The solar farm’s patterns and geometric relationships are heightened by specific times of day the photos were taken. Stillings often had only 15 to 30 minutes to work with the optimal sunlight he needed in the early morning or late afternoon for the long shadows that help delineate the mirrors and highlight the earth’s natural erosion lines and vegetation. Like Margaret Bourke-White’s industrial photography of the 1930s, some of the photos include workers, who provide a sense of the structure’s scale.
Dynamic intersections of nature and human-made environments Paradoxically, Ivanpah Solar has raised questions concerning land and resource use, which sparked clashes between clean-energy buffs and conservationists who don’t want to see pristine landscapes blanketed by thousands of solar panels or heliostats (mirrors). To mitigate one issue, Ivanpah’s owners have spent millions of dollars to study and relocate the desert tortoise population. A second problem has been the impact of solar flux in the area immediately adjacent to the three 460-foot towers. Birds flying near the top of the towers during power generation can be injured or killed by the intense heat, a problem that currently impacts a few to several hundred birds each year. However, as Robert Redford notes, “Context and perspective are everything. A recent study estimates that bird deaths per gigawatt hour of electricity are seventeen times higher for fossil fuels, than for wind power, and while comprehensive statistics are not yet available for concentrated solar, initial data is closer to wind.” Stillings has considered these contradictions within the environmental movement, local communities, the energ y industr y and the general public—issues that are applicable globally. Each set of circumstances is unique, but he is convinced that, on the whole, public gain outweighs the objections. The Evolution of Ivanpah S o l a r inf or ms the current discussion on climate change, imparts a historical perspective, and, says Stillings, “…is symbolic of the promise and challenge we face in building a sustainable civilization.” This book is the first of Stillings’ Changing Perspectives series, a project over the next few years that will document important new installations while seeking to inspire questions and transform viewers’ understanding about the nature and potential of renewable energy.
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Rina Swentzell
A Tribute to Rina Swentzell
By Porter Swentzell
focused on the architectural history of Santa Clara Pueblo. She continued her education at the University of New Mexico, in American Studies, and earned a Ph.D. in 1982. Her dissertation compared European/ American educational philosophies
Her great-grandmother, Lupita Sisneros, or Jiya Khun, was influential in shaping Rina’s views as a child and also helped to raise her and her siblings. Part of her youth was spent at Taos Pueblo, where her father, Michael Naranjo, had built a Baptist mission. Her father’s Baptist activities were influential in Rina’s educational journey, which initially led her to a Christian college before she transferred to Highlands University, where she met her future husband, Ralph Swentzell. Rina received her B.A. from Highlands University in 1972 and her M.A. in architecture from the University of New Mexico in 1976. Her thesis
with traditional Pueblo world views. She was among the first Pueblo women to receive a Ph.D., and she laid the foundation for others to travel the same path. Rina used her education to contest narratives of the Pueblo past and present.
© Jack Loeffler
R
ina Swentzell, a noted scholar f rom S anta Clar a P ueblo, passed away on Oct. 30, 2015. She was a mother, grandmother, greatgrandmother and member of the large, well-known Naranjo family of artists and scholars from Santa Clara Pueblo.
As one of her grandchildren, I remember traveling with her to places like Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, Colorado. I was a child, but I remember her vigorously attacking (verbally) an archaeologist she disagreed with. I felt afraid for him. My grandma liked to be thought of as an introspective thinker, but she also couldn’t help herself when an opportunity to be belligerent presented itself. This quality stayed with her to the end. Her impact on scholars of Pueblo people was anything but understated. R i n a’s l e g ac y c on t i n u e s on i n her four children, Cleo Naranjo, Athena Steen, Roxanne Swentzell and Poem Swentzell, as well as in her 11 grandchildren and six greatgrandchildren. i Porter Swentzell, Rina Swentzell’s grandson, is among the core faculty at the Institute of American Indian Arts. He formerly taught courses as an adjunct faculty member at Northern New Mexico College.
Honoring Rina
By Jack Loeffler
I
© Seth Roffman
t was in April 1939 by current reckoning that Hendrine Naranjo was born into the family of Rose and Michael Naranjo in the Santa Clara Pueblo, along the western bank of the Río Grande, the Great River known in the Tewa language as P’osonghe. She came to be called Rina and was one of several siblings. Young Rina gradually absorbed the spirit of the Tewa World into her own consciousness to the extent that she became one with place, kindred to all she beheld. She became intimate with hidden crannies of Santa Clara Canyon that score the piedmont of the eastern aspect of the Jémez Mountains and drain into the Río Grande. She watched the clouds. She breathed in the swirling air. She drank from the waters that nurtured both her body and soul. She developed an exquisitely refined consciousness that she maintained throughout the course of her life. In 1959, she gave birth to her son, Cleo Naranjo, who is presently employed at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Then, in 1960, she met and married Ralph Swentzell, who was to become a highly regarded t u t o r a t S t . J o h n’s College, in Santa Fe. With Ralph, she gave birth to three daughters: Athena, Roxanne and Poem. During the 1960s, Jack Loeffler with Rina Swentzell and Estévan Arellano at an when the shockwave of October 2012 book signing for Thinking Like a Watershed; counterculture rippled Voices from the West (UNM Press)
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through much of world culture, the burgeoning Swentzell family spent much of their time living in the backcountry of northern New Mexico, camping in their VW bus. Rina and Ralph attended New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas, where Rina earned her bachelor’s degree in education. She later attended the University of New Mexico, where she received her master’s degree in architecture in 1976, and was awarded her doctorate in American studies in 1982. Thereafter, she became widely recognized as an author, lecturer, potter and historian. She remained ever rooted in the Tewa World.
Rina developed an exquisitely refined consciousness. She epitomized what bioregionalism attempts to encompass. I am honored to have known Rina as a dear friend. Our conversations have deeply influenced my own thinking. Rina epitomized what bioregionalism attempts to encompass. Rather than trying to describe who Rina was, it seems far more appropriate to present a partial composite of her perspective in her own words. Over the decades, I had the privilege of recording a few of our many conversations. I’m including excerpts from a conversation we had in the Swentzell home in Santa Fe, in 1996.
In the words of Rina Swentzell:
“We have gotten to the point of too small a definition of community. I go back to the Pueblo thinking because their community was not just the human community. It included the place within which we lived. The mountains were part of community. The water was part of community. Trees, water, rocks, plants. You know, you couldn’t have moved through any day in that old world, even when I was growing up, without knowing that you were part of that whole community of continued on page 16
Green Fire Times • December 2015
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Honoring Rina
continued from page
15
“Trees are living beings. Rocks are living beings. Water. The spirit moves through the water. An incredible word that we have for the source of life is something that we talk about as the P’owaha. The water-wind-breath. It is there in the water and in the wind that we can see the spirit, that we can see life moving, there where the life force is visible. As well as in the clouds, of course. We don’t take the life force and put it in a super-human being, as Christians do with God. That already begins to show us the focus on humans and human beings. When you put the life force in a super-human creature, God is in super-human form. But we [Puebloans] keep it within the trees, within the water, within the wind, within the clouds. And we are to move through that context, with the water, the wind, and breathe the same breath. To say ‘we are breathing the same breath that the rocks do, that the wind does’ gives you a totally different feeling. This is it. There is no other reality. We don’t go to heaven. We don’t leave this dirty world to go to a golden clean heaven. We are here. This is it. This is the world. It doesn’t get any better than this. And if we don’t honor it in the sense that this is the best, the most beautiful as it is ever going to be, then we can’t take care of it, if we think that it is a place to be shunned and that we have better things to look forward to. Then we can’t walk respectfully, where we are at this moment, and take care of things and touch things with honor. And breathe each breath. That is what that ‘water-wind-breath’ is about. Because, I mean, my goodness, here it is. And every second I can breathe it in and become a part of this world and know in uncertain terms I am a part of this world that I live in every second—I believe it every second.
© Jack Loeffler
trees, rocks, people. Today, what we do is just talk about human community. It gets to be such a small thing within the larger scope of things. I think that that is part of the demise of our modern lives today. We keep making the world smaller and smaller until it is nothing but us. Just human beings out of our natural context. Out of our cosmological context. We have become so small in our view of the world, our world is simply us—human beings. And that is a crucial thing that we need to get beyond and move back again to seeing ourselves within context.
“You were talking about the marriage between the Earth and Sky.That is exactly what they were talking about. But it was not in terms so much of male and female as it was father and mother, which is a very different concept. Male and female then become included within father and mother. And that is a very different meaning than saying the male Sky and the female Earth, which brings in an explicit sexuality, which the Pueblo people weren’t so much interested in, as in the parental nature within which creation happens. Because it is only when the male and female come together as father and mother, and children are produced, that creation really happens. So this is the creation right now because those two have come around us. And in that sense, then, Pueblo people talk about community as having mothers and fathers and children. The oldest people are usually talked about as ‘father’ and ‘mother’ in that community whether they are your mothers or not. But then everybody else are children, and those people are also children. There’s flexibility of roles in that way. The notion of having people who are responsible and nurturing and caring about the entire context that one lives in. It is that kind of model that was taken from the way they saw the cosmos as being structured, as the way the cosmos was ordered. That is what is in that context.”
“We don’t go to heaven. We don’t leave this dirty world to go to a golden clean heaven. We are here. This is it. This is the world. It doesn’t get any better than this.”
“When we see on that scale of seeing in the way of the old Pueblo people, they were trying to make sense – Rina Swentzell of what was around them. You know, here, especially ◆◆◆ in the Southwest, you look around you, and you see that 360-degree horizon around you. And then you see that blue with the clouds going over you. And the sense they “The old ancestral people moved through this region for thousands of years, and the made of it— you are the center. At any point that you stand in the Southwest, you are intimacy that they developed with the land is what I think has kept them going for in containment. That is you at the center. The Pueblo people really picked up on that so long, in such a place. Even today, I think that that is what has helped our people and said, ‘Look, we live within the earth bowl. This is where we dwell. And wherever survive for so long—that intimacy we have with the land, with the place, with the we are, we are at the center.’ Which is literally true. That is what we experience in a rocks, the mountains. Part of that intimacy, of course, especially in this region, is very central way every day. And being at the center, seeing that far horizon with the to know where the water areas are. The water is seen as being absolutely important mountains that contain us in this earth bowl, and all of the symbolic kiva bowls that for life. Without it, creation doesn’t happen. It is the semen of the father that keeps the Pueblo make, with the mountains along the rim, that is all about that. And then creation going, the water snaking through this region, the Río Grande. And, of the Earth is covered by the sky basket. course, throughout all of Pueblo mythology, the lakes are very important. All water places are extremely important. Because without water, we don’t survive here. And it is so sparse that they do have to become very special places. But they are also places where the energy of the world is very strong because they are also places to go into the underworlds—other levels of existence. They are openings into the other world. “The Río Grande is a place that is also frightening to the Pueblo people. It is frightening because it comes with incredible power. And that is why I think that we talk about the ‘water-wind-breath’ because the power of all of creation is there. It can be in the wind, and it is certainly in the water. And especially in that strong flowing water. In Tewa, the word for Río Grande is P’osongeh, the large water place. It is seen as a place where the water goes. It is actually seen as a place, which always interests me. It is not just there. It is a place.” © Seth Roffman
◆◆◆
Puye cliff dwellings, ancestral home of the Pueblo of Santa Clara
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“I think that tradition and community go hand-in-hand. You really can’t have one without the other because tradition is really about rootedness. It is about a group of people having been alive within a place for a long period of time, and having set up certain ways of behaving, certain ways of doing things. continued on page 22
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Heritage, Adobe Architecture and Grief Learning from Rina Swentzell Tom Guthrie
R
ina Swentzell was one of the most amazing people I have ever known. Her life story is fascinating, her family remarkable. I first met Rina in 2003, and over the years she became my teacher and my friend. I am grateful that, this past summer, Rina, my wife and I were able to go on a hike at Tsankawi. We found shade and ate a picnic lunch under a juniper, near the edge of the mesa. Together, we marveled at the landscape. Rina was an accomplished scholar and writer, and I first encountered her through her writing. She opened my imagination and made it possible for me to radically rethink the research I was doing on heritage preservation in northern New Mexico. I had always been ambivalent about preservation. On the one hand, I was committed to the work of arresting culture loss among colonized peoples. I celebrated the efforts of Hispanics and Native Americans in maintaining their cultural distinctiveness. On the other hand, preservation seemed too static. I worried that preservation was just another way of killing culture, turning it into a fossil.
Rina emphasized relationships, compassion and integrity.
Rina helped me think through this ambivalence. She told me that cultural preservation made her sad. When people have to work so hard at learning the language or maintaining their traditions, when their efforts are so deliberate and self-conscious, their culture has been reduced to something intellectual, she said. She valued a more intuitive, less self-conscious way of moving through life. She was not particularly concerned about culture or our relationship to the past. Rather, she emphasized the value of creativity and an orientation to the present.
I discuss her ideas. She thanked me for taking her thoughts seriously but wrote, “I don’t think that you understand the incredible philosophy of the Pueblos, as I understand it. I think that you hear my words but do not really know what they mean.” My first reaction was typically defensive: But I do! Then, I began to realize how much I had missed the point. In my book, I emphasize the relationship between heritage-preservation projects and political power. Rina objected to this approach: “I do not believe that our most fundamental problems are about power— or even inequality, which comes from a sense of insecurity.” This perspective, she suggested, was Eurocentric.“My issue with the West is its mindset—its philosophical stance—characterized exactly by what you are proposing—to be mainly concerned with power and inequality in the human world. I believe that the more fundamental issue is our spiritual space—which is a universal concern.” She reasoned that the violence in our world today stems from materialism and fights over who owns what, “…which, from what I read in your paper, is what the whole heritage discussion is about.” Rina’s comments helped me to see the irony of my suggestion that we need to focus more on power in order to unravel the pernicious effects of colonialism. I was trying to critique Euro-American domination,but in the process I reproduced a fundamental preoccupation of Western culture. I have since become more aware of the limits of my own understanding of the world, more humble. This is an important—and hard—lesson for white men to learn.
Imagine if New Mexicans today stopped focusing so much on culture or heritage. How would their communities change?
Instead of cultural heritage or power, Rina emphasized relationships, compassion and integrity. She wrote to me: “Pueblo thinking, from my point of view, is about relationships, assumed equalness and the cycles of life.” Our lives are rooted in our relationship to the natural environment, which then influences our relationships with other beings.
I have become a more self-aware white person and a better anthropologist thanks to Rina.Well-meaning white people often don’t realize how ignorant and blind we are. I sent Rina a draft of the conclusion of my book, Recognizing Heritage, in which
In 2003, I asked her what she would like Santa Clara Pueblo to be like in 25 years. “I would like to see a community that is really concerned about basic relationships, about the world and themselves. I would like to see a loving, caring community…I’d
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like to see dances that would just make the people happy and feel like they…are taking care of each other and taking care of the place…I don’t care what the dances look like, I don’t care what the language sounds like. Those are all expressions of who we really are inside. When I hear that sound, I like to just feel I’m a part of this place, I’m a part of this group, isn’t this wonderful. I’m in a safe, secure place.”
She helped me see the importance of rebalancing our dominant culture in terms of gender. More and more, I’m convinced that Rina was right: What’s most important is not some thing called culture or heritage but relationships. For this reason, I’m no longer very interested in either culture or heritage, and, in fact, I find them stumbling blocks or distractions in the vital work that awaits us as human beings in the 21st century: nurturing loving, respectful, compassionate relationships with other human beings and with the nonhuman world. Rina was also one of several women in my life who have helped me see the importance of rebalancing our dominant culture in terms of gender, of nurturing more feminine values. A few years ago, I had breakfast with Rina at the Roadrunner Café, in Pojoaque Pueblo. I asked her about the Poeh Center across the road. She liked it, especially the adobe buildings with their soft, sculptural angles. “But they’re too big,” she said, evidence of the rise of masculine thinking among the Pueblos. In architecture and in human relationships, Rina valued softness and humility and gentleness. More than that, she embodied these values. She was one of the most serene people I’ve ever known; she instantly made me feel calm. She was quiet and kind. I have paid more attention to gentleness since meeting Rina. I have tried to become a gentler man, and I know our world would be a better place if we all experienced more gentleness. When I heard that Rina had died, I cried. I still grieve her passing, and I miss her. I’m sad that I won’t have the opportunity to talk to her again. And, still, I’m learning
from her. I continue to find comfort and wisdom in Rina’s ideas, even in my grief. I remember her love of adobe. In Remembering Tewa Pueblo Houses and Spaces, Rina noted that the Tewa words for “us” and “earth” or “dirt” were the same, “so are we made of the same stuff as our houses.” When she was a child in Santa Clara, adobe houses were physically and symbolically connected to one another, to the earth, the sky and the mountains. Houses were blessed, healed, fed, tasted and otherwise treated as organic beings. They were even allowed to die. Rina recalled watching a crack grow in one particular house over several weeks. Her great-grandmother told her that the house had had a good life and that it was time for it go back into the earth. In due time, the rubble of the old house was used to build a new one. Adobe reminds us that life and death are part of the same ongoing cycle. I cherish memories of talking with Rina in her beautiful adobe home. And I know that there comes a time for going back to the earth. Rina helped me come to appreciate movement and impermanence in the natural world. Whenever I notice the clouds drifting across the sky, I am grateful for their beauty and their motion. I know that clouds and the sky and the moving earth are sacred. I also think of Rina and how she revered flow. I thank God for clouds, for motion, and for the life and death of my friend Rina Swentzell. i
Tom Guthrie is a cultural anthropologist and author of Recognizing Heritage: The Politics of Multiculturalism in New Mexico (University of Nebraska Press, 2013). tguthrie@guilford.edu
Green Fire Times • December 2015
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Remembering Tewa Pueblo Houses and Spaces
Excerpt from The Multicultural Southwest: A Reader (1990), University of Arizona Press Rina Swentzell
S
anta Clara Pueblo was a wonderful place to grow up. I was a child there in the 1940s and remember the incredible sense of well-being and containment—both socially and physically. From the plaza or bupingeh (literally, the middle-heart place) of the pueblo, we could see far mountains encircle our lives—the growing of clouds and the bringing of that movement and water was initiated. We continually watched those mountains to see the clouds form out of them and to know on which of the valleys or summits the sun would rise or set. Those mountains, or world boundaries, were far away and were the province of the men and boys who went to visit the shrines there, and who would bring back the spirit and energies of the deer, bear, ram and evergreen plants to blend with ours in the dances and ceremonies of the middle-heart place.
The process of building and the interaction with the buildings and the materials that we used were very much an extension of our worldview as Pueblo people. The spaces between those mountains and the pueblo were shared by everyone (men and women, boys and girls). They included the low hills and small canyons where coyotes, rabbits and squirrels lived and where roots, herbs and other ground plants were found. There also were the fields and the large flowing water (the P’osongeh or Río Grande), which snaked along the base of the Black Mesa. The Black Mesa included the cave that went down into the center of the earth and was the home of the Tsavejo, or the masked whippers.There were dark areas, such as the cave, and light areas, such as the top of the low hills, from which we could see the far mountains of the four directions and a large part of the north-south valley within which lay the P’osongeh and the pueblo. As the pueblo, or human space, was encircled by high mountains, low hills and flat fields, the center point (nansipu), from which the people emerged out of the underworld, was also girdled by different spaces within the pueblo. The nansipu, marked by an inconspicuous stone, was located within the middle-heart place, or the plaza. The plaza
Santa Clara Pueblo, 1910s, possibly by Jesse Nusbaum. Taken from the roof of the house where Rina Swentzell grew up. (Palace of the Governors Photo Archives # 4128)
was bounded by house structures, which in turn were encircled by the corrals or places where horses, pigs and chickens lived. Beyond that, or sometimes overlapping, were the trash mounds. The trash mounds flowed into fields, and from there the energy moved into the hills and mountains where it entered those far shrines, moved through the underworld levels or existences and re-emerged through the nansipu. The stories of the old people told us that we came to live on this fourth level of existence with the help of plants, birds and other animals. Once we emerged out of the underworld, we continued to need those other living beings. In order to find the center point, or the nansipu, the water spider and the rainbow were consulted. Water Spider spread its legs to the north, west, south and east and determined the middle of this world. Then, to make sure that Water Spider was right, Rainbow spread its arch of many colors to the north, west, south and east and confirmed Water Spider’s center point. There, the people placed a stone, and around that stone was defined the middle-heart place. Next, the living and sleeping structures were built in terraced forms, like mountains, with stepped tiers that enclosed and protected the plaza, or the valley of the human place. The house and kiva structure also emulated the low hills and mountains in their connectedness to the earth. The adobe structures flowed out of the earth, and it was often difficult to see where the ground stopped and where the structures began. The house structures were, moreover, connected to each other, enclosing an outdoor space from which we could directly connect with the sky and focus on moving clouds. Connectedness was primary. The symbolic flowed into the physical world as at the nansipu, where the po-wa-ha (the breath of the cosmos) flowed out of the underworld into this world. The kiva structure was totally symbolic. Its rooftop was like the pueblo plaza space from where we could connect with the sky, while the rooftop opening took us into the kiva structure, which was like going back into the earth via the nansipu in the plaza. Within the feminine dark interior, the plaza space configuration was repeated with the human activity area around the nansipu, the earth floor under the woven basket roof above, representing the sky. The connecting ladder made of tall spruce or pine trees stood in the middle near the nansipu. Everything was organized to remind us constantly of the primary connections with the earth, sky, other life forms and the cosmic movement. These primary connections were continually reiterated.
Earth Bowl and Sky Basket create a containing sphere perceived at various scales in the Pueblo landscape. (Jeremy Iowa and Rina Swentzell)
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The materials used for construction were also symbolically important. In the Río Grande area, most of the building was adobe mud mixed with either ashes or dried plant material. In the Tewa language, the word for “us” is nung, and the word for “earth” or “dirt” is also nung. As we are synonymous with and born of the earth, so are we made of the same stuff as our houses. continued on page 28
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A Quiet, Fierce Intelligence
Chris Wilson
Rina Swentzell grew up speaking Tewa in her grandmother’s house on the Santa Clara plaza in the 1940s. People looked forward in those days to spring when they could again sleep on the rooftops. From there they also viewed the ceremonial dances. And there, in the fall, they gathered corn, squash and chiles to dry. A photo from the 1910s shows produce covering her grandmother’s roof and clustered on other houses around the plaza—each cluster indicating the home of a Gia, the nurturing “mother” of an extended family. The short walk north, across Santa Clara Creek to the cement-stuccoed, hipped-roofed BIA school, set on a raised foundation inside a barbed-wire fence, initiated her to Euro-American culture. After completing a bachelor’s degree from Highlands University and after her four children had grown sufficiently, she continued her education at the University of New Mexico, completing a master’s degree in architecture and then a Ph.D. in American studies.
Starting in her 1977 architecture master’s thesis, through a series of scattered, poetic and perceptive essays, she described a Pueblo world encompassed by an earth bowl and a sky basket. People perceive this encompassing sphere at various scales in the landscape, from the surrounding four sacred mountains at the edge of the earth bowl, to intermediate sacred mesas, to the earthen buildings of the pueblo and, finally, to the kiva. The symmetry of the earth bowl is perhaps clearest at the Tewa villages of the Española Valley, centered as they are along the Río Grande and contained by the Sangre de Cristo and Jémez mountains to the east and west.
The house Rina designed and built reconciles Pueblo architecture with Modernism and passive-solar design
Rina translated a few key concepts from Tewa into English in each essay. Po-waha, for instance, is the life force, literally, the water-wind-breath, while nan-si-pu is a sacred center, or earth-belly-root. These earth navels occur especially where the underworld of the earth basket connects through the ground to the sky bowl at springs, caves, mountaintops and within plazas and kivas. The po-wa-ha breathes in and out of each nan-si-pu, just as it does
© Chris Wilson
Like her Española High School classmate, Ohkay Owingeh–born anthropologist Alfonso Ortiz, Rina became an important interpreter of the interrelation of Pueblo world view with architecture and landscape. In such essays
as “Remembering Tewa Houses and Spaces”—reproduced in this issue—she made a Tewa view of the sacred balance within nature accessible, believable and potentially useful to all of us who love, feel grounded in, and seek to conserve this arid land.
The Swentzell house in Santa Fe was built in the 1970s.
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© Bill Steen
W
hen Rina Swentzell spoke to a large audience, her voice was often so soft that you had to lean forward to hear. And as everyone did, she enthralled us with her quiet, fierce vision. Through her eloquent essays, books, lectures and media appearances, she brought a Tewa Pueblo world view to life for a wider audience and, thereby, made an invaluable contribution to the deepening of American cultural pluralism.
through each of our mouths. And when the afternoon thunderclouds of July and August form, seemingly off the tops of the Sangres and the Jémez and roll across the valley, they manifest the living weave of the sky basket. Her master’s thesis and later writings likewise contrast this seamless unification of the human and natural world with the aloof, compartmentalized Euro-American world that she first encountered in the BIA school. Her equally penetrating analysis of EuroAmerican cultural assumptions made her a pioneer in elaborating on the mismatch between federal government policies and the contrasting values of Native peoples. In this, she influenced succeeding generations of intellectuals and activists—Native and non-Native alike—working in education, architecture and tribal sovereignty. When Rina and anthropologist Jerry Brody began writing To Touch the Past: the Painted Pottery of the Mimbres People, they struggled to find a common interpretation. But once they decided to alternate passages, each addressing topics in turn ( Jerry in regular type, Rina in italics), they set up a vibrant, illuminating contrast between Pueblo and EuroAmerican world views—a resolution that pleased her. As a person raised in the Tewa world, who had also acquired the tools of a Western analytical education, Rina embodied this cultural contrast within herself. She chose to reflect this when she again employed a dual-narrative strategy in her recent essay in the book, The Plazas of New Mexico, alternating visionary dreams and childhood memories of the Santa
Rina Swentzell plastering with adobe
Clara plaza, set in italics, with her more scholarly interpretation.
In the late 1970s, Rina designed and built a house with her family, a little downriver from Santa Fe. It reconciles the contrasting vision of Pueblo architecture with the Modernism and passive-solar design she learned in architecture school. On the Pueblo side, it is built of adobe and terraced into a south-facing hillside for passive solar gain. Its earthen floors provide a direct grounding in the land. Its outdoor terraces are as important as the interior living spaces. On the Modernist side are its open, flowing interior spaces and glass curtain walls that provide a direct visual connection from inside out to the terraces. The flat roof and walls form Modernist compositional planes, although the curves of the walls express the organic nature of the adobe. The southern orientation, thermal mass of the earthen floors and walls, glass curtain walls and clerestory windows above the north rooms make it a classic solar-adobe home, one of the finest designs of that important regional movement. Rina Swentzell contained, expressed, mediated between and, on occasion, reconciled Pueblo and Euro-American worlds. Her death is a profound loss for all of us whose minds she touched with her quiet, fierce eloquence. i Chris Wilson is the J. B. Jackson Chair of Cultural Landscape Studies at the UNM School of Architecture and Planning, author of The Myth of Santa Fe and Facing Southwest and editor of The Plazas of New Mexico and the just-released Drawn to Landscape: The Pioneering Work of J. B. Jackson.
Green Fire Times • December 2015
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Oh Thou Incomparable Cielos! Dedicated to the Memory of Rina Swentzell Article and photos by Alejandro López
W
hen, through lack of vigilance, I allow modern life’s challenges and vicissitudes to ruffle my feathers, I quickly reach for my time-honored medicina. For nada will bring me back to center so effectively as a walk or run through the nearby montes and arroyos behind my home. At the end of the trail, the act of saying a few words of thanksgiving for our spectacular living planeta tierra and its continuous outpouring of gifts always deepens my experience of this self-prescribed ritual.
of our galaxy and beyond. These have delivered back to us awesome images of celestial phenomena as well as an appreciation for the vastness of space and the minuteness of our planet in the grand scheme of things.
It also helps reawaken in me a profound recognition of the miraculous nature and incomparably grand scale of the place that we inhabit at both the microand macrocosmic levels. In speaking of the scarcely three-mile-thick layer of breathable atmosphere which envelops our planetary home, we routinely refer to it as “sky,” but rarely do we consciously and collectively sing its praises or honor it through ritual, ceremony or song, as many other culturas have done. True, modern astronomy, coupled with space missions equipped with highly sophisticated research tools, have been able to probe distant points
Given the great natural beauty and order through which I have the privilege of traversing on these forays into the land, I am unable to refrain from directing some form of gratitude to a nameless energy, force or inteligencia to help remind me of the many blessings that come with life in Nuevo México. Uppermost among them is our ability to roam freely along fantastically sculpted, natural amphitheaters of foothills, mesas and mountains. It is against these ancient geologic formations that the most spectacular rain and snowstorms occur, as well as the most formidable
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Our skies are among the most precious of the intangible gifts we enjoy.
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displays of light throughout the day, but especially en la madrugada y la tardecita. From the highest points of our graduated landscape, the starry night sky comes alive in untold splendor and complexity, revealing an endless array of gleaming constellations such as Orion’s Belt or the Pleiades. It also reveals brilliant planets and stars such as Venus and Mars, as well as the forever on-the-go luna, in all of its subtle and sublime phases of waxing and waning. As magnificent as these celestial bodies are, none can compare with the visual impact produced by the long swath of millions of dust-like specks, which we know to be the estrellas that comprise the Via Lactea, the galaxy to which our solar system belongs. The original Pueblo peoples, devoted observers of celestial phenomena and especially the errant rain-bearing clouds, utilized every tier of this landscape as the premier celestial observatory that it is. For them, it was also a landscape consisting of sacred lugares where they left offerings of cornmeal and prayer sticks to honor
the great Misterio. The tops of hills and mesas afforded them grand vistas of distant horizons and cloud formations passing overhead, sometimes in the shape of giant creatures or plumes, billowing mountains of algodón, blankets of somber gray or, if the gods should be looking favorably upon the people, curtains of precious rain. It was the ambulatory curtains of poeh that made them the happiest, especially when copious streams of transparent life-giving liquid dropped upon their thirsty fields. From these plots, the people gleaned, at times, abundant harvests of grains, fruits and vegetables. As much a gift of the sky as of the Earth, they shared these juicy foodstuffs with one another in the quiet recesses of their pueblos, multistoried configurations that mimicked the stepup formations of their beloved land. The moon, stars and clouds are not the only protagonists of the luminous and dramatic cielos Nuevo Mexicanos. Given our region’s preponderance of clear sunny skies—as many as 300 per year— the hot burning sol del verano and the
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subdued solecito del invierno, in addition to receiving our ardent alabanzas, are frequently the object of our vehement protests. A friend from upstate New York recently told me that, when she moved to Nuevo México, she discovered for the first time in her life the powerful fiery sun. Before then, it had been but a faint disk in the sky, hiding behind the canyonesque streets of her bustling city or the dense, deciduous forests of the Northeast. Here, it was everything. The rich mantle of royal blue that is our clear skies’ hallmark is also, for many, the object of intense wonderment. While our skies are among the most precious of the intangible gifts we enjoy, it is also clear that, with the passage of time and the accumulation of technological wizardry, we tend to progressively ignore and even debase them. Comfortably encapsulated in our automobiles moving north along busy Cerrillos Road in Santa Fe, we can scarcely pay attention to the sublime cosmic scene unfolding before our eyes of the snow-capped mountains and low hanging clouds of winter that progress from a rich, ruby red to violet
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at day’s end. We peer out of a corner of office windows to catch a glimpse of a rainbow.
Especially in urban areas, we eliminate all awareness of the workings of the heavens. Far f rom stirring a deep sense of wonder in our souls, increasingly, los cielos, are merely seen as convenient freeways for our fast-moving jets which leave behind signature contrails. The sky has also been relegated to serve as a reservoir for toxic emissions and greenhouse gases, much to our peril, as well as a dumping ground for space trash that sometimes makes its way back to Earth. Architecturally, we rarely do anything to enhance our appreciation for this source of light, beauty and inspiration as the Chacoans or the builders of Stonehenge had. Too often, we block our vecinos’ views of the mountains and skies with cell towers or big unremarkable structures.
Especially in urban areas, we eliminate all awareness of the workings of the heavens above by illuminating the night sky with our own artificial luz. How is it that la humanidad, so engrossed with the toys of its own making, including countless missiles, bombs and machinery of every kind, can fail to pay atención to the grand cathedral of the sky, for some, the long-awaited eternal abode of our souls and the home to ancient gods and goddesses? How do we in these early years of the 21st century, when we are staring over the edge of a precipice, regain a sense of awe and reverence for the heavens—or for anything? For us puny humanos, can the knowledge that the sky may be both the gateway to the entire cosmos and the source of the energies that first ignited the flicker of life on this fragile planeta convince us of its importance and of the imperative that it remain as pristine as possible?
more polluted, then perhaps it may yet remain a powerful and unrivaled source, not only of sustainable weather patterns but also of deep spiritual inspiration and of a regenerative visión cósmica well into the distant futuro. i Alejandro López’s writing frequently combines his experience of growing up in r u g g e d , r u ra l , Spanish and Tewa-speaking n o r t h e r n Ne w Mexico with an appreciation for the canons of English and American literature. His articles, at times, reflect the multicultural reality of this part of the world, shuttling back and forth between languages, as many native New Mexicans often do. López’s photography is part of the permanent collection of the Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos, The National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque and the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe.
If the cielo is allowed to express itself in such grand ways as it does to this day in Nuevo México, without getting much
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Honoring Rina
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All of that is tradition. And that takes time. It takes a long time for people to feel comfortable with being in a certain place. I have to wake up every single morning, be aware of where the Sun comes up over those mountains and be careful about watching. ‘Oh now, it’s this time. It should be coming up right over that peak right there.’ And what does that mean? It means a whole lot for me because, every morning, I am in connection with that Sun out there, in the sense that here is my world right here. And depending on where that Sun comes up this morning, I know whether I am going to have to build a fire or not. If you see a direct connection to you in that way, then I don’t know what else it’s about. It’s not about much more than just really seeing those elements come to create a place for you, within which you feel comfortable and safe. What if that Sun doesn’t come out where it is supposed to come out? I mean the place would fall apart. Literally. There would be no more place. If those rhythms that we just take for granted, those traditional rhythms or whatever they are—if I don’t know that my grandmother is not going to be there and have a pot of beans going, as a child, then it does start falling apart. And there are rhythms. Having a grandmother is as natural a rhythm as having the Sun come up every day. “You know, the linear way of doing things, getting up, going to school every day, is a continual process of being pulled away from natural patterns and natural rhythms. How can we even relate to the natural things around us? The mountains and the trees? We are continuously being pulled out of them, out of relationship with them, and not feeling the rhythms that come with them.”
◆◆◆ “You know, one of the amazing things is that the basic Pueblo beliefs aren’t language specific. The Hopis and Zunis, for instance, speak totally different languages from us. And, yet, the major ideals of what we call the Pueblo World are the same in spite of very different languages. So it really makes me feel that that relationship to land, to place, which all of us experience together—we all have that basic relationship. And we talk about it in essentially the same way. Father Sky, Mother Earth, children—the
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need for connecting relationship. But, yet, the languages are very, very different. They are not even related languages like with the Hopi. And, yet, the ideas that grew out of the land are very much the same. “It was the land that dictated what we were to believe and how we were to behave. And, you know, language now is being made a big thing because it is the one thing that people can hold on to. They say, ‘That will take us back into our traditions.’ Yes, it is an avenue. It is a way to do it. But the more basic thing is thought. What is the relationship to place? That is what brought up the traditions in the first place, and that is what brought up the language anyway. And the language expresses it. But it is not a dependency on language. It is something more basic. I think that [it is] the universal human need that the Pueblo people were responding to. And I think that that is what we need to return to. It is a need that you have as an Anglo person and I have as an Indian person. And I can speak Tewa, but I have no doubt that you have your need to feel connected and be a careful, considerate person in community. It is a need, something that I can recognize in myself as well.”
◆◆◆ “I think that one thing that education does is to make people feel more confident in dealing with that large monoculture, call it Western culture—whatever it is— that thing that we all live in. The ocean that we swim around in. If you are dealing with an unknown—and I think that that is what has happened with Indian people before—we didn’t know what that world was about. And it is a very intimidating world. It is such a fast-moving, aggressive kind of world, and you can get very, very intimidated by it. “You know that Western culture really does feel like swimming in an ocean. It is everywhere. It is sleeping in every corner. It is sleeping in every crack there is. It’s coming in. And there is no way to make that ocean around us go away. Look continued on page 28
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Tewa Women United Receives EPA Grant For Healing Foods Oasis Garden
Beata Tsosie-Peña
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he New Mexico–based nonprofit, Tewa Women United (TWU), located in Española,has received a $30,000 Environmental Justice grant from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in support of a demonstration garden project that will be planted in Valdez Park, on a hillside behind Española City Hall. The hillside is currently a barren slope with erosion problems. The Healing Foods Oasis, a partnership between TWU and the city of Española, will be accessible to Española residents, as well as to the surrounding tricultural communities of the northern Río Grande Valley. In addition to growing food, it will provide opportunities to learn about environmental, public health and climatechange issues. It will demonstrate how traditional, dry-land farming techniques can be combined with contemporary methods to improve water-use efficiency and adaptability.
The project will build community capacity by building collaborative relationships and partnerships. The impacts northern New Mexico needs to prepare for and address center around seasonal water availability and conservation, long-term drought, regeneration of forests from wildfires, threat of more wildfires, storm water and flood events, vulnerability to crop pests and erratic or sudden changes in agricultural growing and weather patterns.
Participants will be able to learn strategies such as rainwater harvesting. The region’s Native peoples have remnants of ancient gardens and examples of how to slow the flow of water at the top of watersheds, minimizing erosion and evaporation through mulching and creation of berms constructed on contour lines. In the modern case of the Valdez Park hillside, water flow off buildings and a parking lot can be defined as a watershed,providing an opportunity to collect enough to establish a self-sustaining garden. Soil sampling will determine any remediation that may be necessary, a reality when adapting to growing in urban environments. Resilience can be built through the nurturing of healthy soils, species diversity and symbiotic systems. Progressive modern applications like subsurface irrigation systems that minimize water evaporation can establish a garden that, over time, will not rely solely on drip irrigation. Planting practices need to be able to draw on both modern and traditional knowledge. The garden is being designed as an outdoor classroom to support native food traditions and languages. Participation in the design, construction and caretaking of an edible, herbal, medicinal landscape can, for some, become a bridge to healing. The garden is also intended to orient people to healthy, natural foods, a preventative approach to reclaim health and wellness. For many area residents, growing their own food without access to irrigation is not an option. Educational opportunities will also include earthwork construction of berms and swales, companion planting, identification of traditional foods, herbs and their uses, and language preservation through labeling plants in Tewa, Spanish and English.
The integration of traditional, cultural values and beliefs into the learning process and in forming relationships L-R: Terrius Harris, Scott Davis and Beata Tsosie-Peña of reflects TWU’s mission, Tewa Women United; Mark Trujillo, city of Española; Christie Green of Radicle; and Martin García of Anchor Engineering which is to Provide safe spaces for Indigenous after a planning meeting for the Healing Foods Oasis
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women to uncover the power, strengths and skills they possess to become positive forces for social change in their families and communities. Many community members do not have access to land and natural spaces for growing and traditional lear ning. The project will help address that disparity and help people remember and relearn what it means to be a steward of the land. Taking pride in our cultural heritage and celebrating our connection to land are inseparable from our healthy, respectful relationship to plants, water, air, animals and each other. Studies have shown that active development and involvement with spaces such as the Healing Foods Oasis can decrease crime and model caring behaviors. In addition to the EPA grant, $20,000 for completion of the first phase of the project has come from organizations and community members. Organizations, clubs, businesses and individuals are being sought to help make the project possible through tax-deductible sponsorships and donations of materials. A limited number of sponsorships are being offered for memorialized, living “guilds,” that is, interrelated earthwork systems. Volunteers and in-kind workers are also welcome.The goal is to have the irrigation system, grading and earthworks complete in preparation for planting through the 2016 season. Española officials who have helped make the project possible include Mayor Alice Lucero, Parks and Recreation Director Mark Trujillo, City Manager Kelly Durán and the City Council, as well as some city employees. The Healing Foods Oasis demonstration garden seeks to build community capacity by building collaborative relationships
with local organizations and entities and by forming community partnerships. Initial collaborators include Christie Green, of Radicle, Inc.; Anchor Engineering; Four Bridges Traveling Permaculture Institute; Traditional Native American Farmers Association (TNAFA); Sostenga Center for Sustainable Food, Agriculture and the Environment; Santa Fe Indian School Agricultural Program; New Mexico Acequia Association’s Sembrando Semillas program; Honor Our Pueblo Existence; Flowering Tree Permaculture Institute; and the CARE Coalition, which includes New Mexico Breastfeeding Taskforce, Las Cumbres Community Services, TWU Doula Program, First Born, DOH-WIC, and Breath of My Heart Birthplace. Please join us in this journey of linking tradition with technology, and help empower our communities to take proactive steps in addressing issues that we must come together on to ensure the well being of future and current generations. i Beata TsosiePeña is a poet, teacher, farmer, activist and mother f rom S a n t a C l a ra Pueblo and El Rito, New Mexico. She works in Tewa Women United’s Environmental Health and Justice program. She can be reached at beata@tewawomenunited.org
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The Rail Yards Market
Alex Paramo
Barelas, Albuquerque
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ocated in Barelas, a historic Hispanic neighborhood in the South Valley, the Rail Yards Market (RYM) is among the must-experience venues in and around Albuquerque, although not easily classifiable. This community-run, volunteer-powered organization is as much of a meeting place as a market. Every Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., the site is a vortex of sights, sounds, aromas and tastes. Patrons can shop from local growers, listen to local musicians, partake in guided stretching exercises, learn from dedicated educators and be exposed to cutting-edge art of all sorts. The idea of repurposing this unique, abandoned rail yard structure was the brainchild of community members who organized an all-volunteer crew made up of folks from all walks of life. The physical space is now a melange of steel, wood and stained glass. Upon entering, visitors follow old railroad tracks that used to bring in disabled railcars for repairs. Owned and operated by the city of Albuquerque, the facility has been used for movie and music-video production and occasional other events. In May 2014, the blacksmith shop became the home of the RYM. More than 8,000 folks visited on opening day. The RYM emphasizes education as well as entertainment, and every week there are four Educational Zones programmed with community partners: • Children’s Zone – provides entertaining and educational activities. •S team Zone – combines elements of a pop-up, live arts gallery; artists from the community display and demonstrate their art, and topics such as sustainability through upcycling and recycling are exhibited and discussed. • Traditional Zone – offers the public exposure to traditional regional methods and ways of living. •M ain Stage – located at the rear of the building, has featured flamenco dancers, aerialists, poets and bands.
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The RYM runs from May through October. The market recently completed its second season. On Dec. 13th, 11 am-4 pm, the RYM is partnering with the Downtown Growers Market for the 2nd Annual Holiday Market, which last year attracted over 6,000 visitors.This year’s Holiday Market will feature more than 100 vendors and community groups, both inside and outside. A wide variety of local artisans and growers will be there, along with a variety of musical performances and kids’ activities. The Holiday Market is also hosting a food and book drive. (www.railyardsmarkets.org) At its core, the RYM is focused on building a resilient and sustainable local economy, where community members can work, play, shop and learn. i Alex Paramo is an author and cofounder of Community Publishing, which brings local artists together in creative collaborations and for distribution as multimedia eBooks.
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Española Opens the Food Venture Commercial Kitchen
Alejandro López
commercial kitchen and build a food hub. Various state legislators voted for this measure, including Sen. Richard Martínez, Rep. Nick Salazar, Rep. Debbie Rodella, Rep. Stephanie García Richard and Rep. Carl Trujillo. Another partner in the project, Delicious New Mexico (DNM), is a nonprofit that supports the starting-up and scaling-up of value-added food businesses statewide. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) granted the organization $100,000 in 2014 to work with Siete
The Northern New Mexico Food Hub is being developed as a centralized aggregating, processing and distribution center for the Española Valley. In her speech, the governor highlighted that intensive agriculture together with small businesses that turn agriproducts into delectable foodstuffs represent an area of the state’s economy that is swiftly growing. The reopening of this kitchen after a hiatus of several years, under the auspices of Siete del Norte and, specifically, under the supervision of Steve Vigil, is evidence of a trend reflecting growing interest and viability of regional food production. Other collaborating entities responsible for this initiative are the city of Española, Río Arriba County and Northern New Mexico College. Siete del Norte, a northern New Mexico economic-development corporation, leveraged federal funding to establish and maintain the Northern New Mexico Food Hub as a centralized aggregating,processing and distribution center for produce from the Española Valley.The food hub’s core mission is to unite government agencies, for-profit businesses and nonprofit enterprises in a regional collaboration designed to provide low-income families with the tools and resources they need to capitalize on smallfarming and food-entrepreneurial activities. Over the last two years, a total of $730,000 in state funding was secured to start the
del Norte, specifically to help the Food Venture Center attract clients such as small food businesses in Española to help them become established or grow while using the commercial kitchen. DNM’s team of food-business promoters and mothers attended Valley Entrepreneurial Network ( VEN) meetings to become familiar with the Española community and hold monthly Idea Lab workshops to provide new food businesses an overview of local resources. They also sponsored a workshop with Santa Fe lawyer Gretchen Elsner, who reviewed legal aspects of food businesses and answered specific questions from up-and-coming entrepreneurs.
© Seth Roffman
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throng of people awaited the arrival of Governor Susana Martínez outside of the Food Venture Center commercial kitchen in Española for a ribbon-cutting ceremony. The festive mood resembled an old-time community celebration. The people gathered on this sunny October day mingled and shared stories centered on how this workingclass community of 10,000 had succeeded through a process of collaboration to reopen this important community resource as part of the emerging Northern New Mexico Food Hub.
L-R: Roger González of Siete del Norte; Kathy Keith, director of LANL community programs office; Río Arriba County Commissioner Barney Trujillo; Gov. Susana Martínez; Española Mayor Alice Lucero; Siete del Norte director Todd López, kitchen manager Steve Vigil
Business Development Center has provided the space for the workshops, as well as for additional business mentoring with Ida Carillo. The commercial kitchen is a muchneeded and welcome resource for the
local agriculture community in the valley, as well as a potential catalyst for the development of many startup food businesses. It is located at the Johnson Control Building, on the Northern New Mexico College Campus, just off Railroad Avenue. i
In 2016, DNM will continue to offer workshops to assist Food Venture Center clients in growing their businesses and accessing new markets. Many of these workshops are bilingual, and Ross Griego, the translator and business consultant, has introduced many participants and potential kitchen clients through his Empezando classes, a 12-week program designed to support new businesses. Not all are food businesses, so the DNM’s workshops are a natural evolution for the course’s graduates. Española’s Small
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Delicious New Mexico The Gift of Local Food
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Celerah Hewes-Rutledge
his holiday season, many of us have two things on our mind: shopping and food. While we are continually subjected to pleas from national retailers to spend money with them, take advantage of sales and get holiday shopping done earlier and earlier in the year, I would like to suggest that you stop! Take a deep breath, and think about food. We spend much of the holiday season sitting around the table with loved ones, shopping for ingredients, whipping up traditional family foods in the kitchen and, of course, eating. Why not consider how you can extend that warm, full feeling you get this time of year as you shop for gifts? Take another step, and think about how you can give the gift of food while supporting local businesses. If you aren’t making it in your kitchen, isn’t the next best thing having it made right down the street? New Mexico has had a vibrant local food economy for centuries. Our roots are deep in a tradition of agriculture, livestock and food production. We are proud of our many local restaurants and are starting to have an increased awareness of where the products they use come from. In recent years, we have seen a boom in local, value-added food businesses owing to increased demand for local products in stores. Whether it is the local food co-op or a chain grocery store, you are now much
more likely to find local products on the shelves than you were even a few years ago, and the selection has greatly increased. In addition to our many local salsas, you can now find a variety of sauces, baked goods, vegetable and meat products, cheeses and many other products that were made right here in New Mexico.
Delectable gifts that support local food entrepreneurship A great idea for a food product begins long before the product makes it to the shelf or into your home. It starts with family and friends eating many versions until it is just right, and it moves forward with the encouragement of a community to get the food to the public. Only then does it make its way into a production kitchen and onto a store shelf. Some of these local food businesses get off the ground by taking advantage of the few commercial kitchens in the state intended for new food entrepreneurs. These kitchens allow people attempting to start new food businesses to make their products in a top-of-the-line commercial facility while they grow their business at a fraction of the cost it would take to start a kitchen of their own. In addition, they are able to comply with FDA regulations and receive support from peer networks and partner organizations to get their product out to the public.
© Anson Stevens-Bollen
Some of your favorite local products may have started in a commercial kitchen like The Mixing Bowl, in Albuquerque’s South Valley, headed by the dedicated Ernie Rivera. Products like Heidi’s Raspberry Jam, Tío Frank’s Chile Sauce, Villa Myriam Coffee, Celina’s Biscochitos and others. Because of the successes of products like these, we are seeing more aspiring entrepreneurs looking for commercial kitchens. In 2015, the newest of these kitchens opened in Española, allowing more rural and local food producers access to a commercial kitchen.
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As you think about gifts this season, think about local food products as items that were made by your neighbors, community leaders and f riends. They are not only gifts that are delectable, they also give back to the New Mexico e c o n o m y. S t u d i e s have shown that local businesses give back to the community by donating their goods and services 350 percent more than national chains do. They also are more involved in local activities and causes, helping to create a more diverse and vibrant region. If you would like to give the gift of local food but do not want to hunt down local food products, there are lots of other ways to make that possible. You don’t need to buy a gift card to the chain restaurant; local restaurants offer gift certificates too, and many can even be purchased online. A cookbook on local or regional cuisine makes a fantastic gift. Delicious New Mexico just released Dishing Up New Mexico, authored by Dave DeWitt, a renowned New Mexico cookbook author and founder of the annual Fiery Foods Show. Dishing Up New Mexico features profiles and recipes from many local food businesses across the state. If you have children to shop for, Cooking with Kids, in Santa Fe, offers a variety of classes. Old Windmill Dairy offers cheese-making classes at its farm, just south of Moriarty. What a great way to spend a Sunday! If you want to give the gift of local produce all summer long, consider giving a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) membership f rom a local farm. Amyo Farms, Erda Gardens, and Skarsgard Farms are a few of the options in central New Mexico. Going to someone’s house for a holiday party? Bring along a pie from New Mexico Pie Company or another local bakery. If you are looking for a gift for someone who likes to give back, consider making a donation to a food-related nonprofit organization in your area. New Mexico Agri-Cultura Network, The Mixing
Bowl, and Delicious New Mexico are just a few of the nonprofits working every day to boost local food production and build our economy. While you are budgeting for your holiday shopping, making out those last-minute lists and sitting around the table eating, the team at Delicious New Mexico hopes that you will think about the many people who make the food and products you enjoy and that you will discover that buying local food gifts is not only easy and fun but also a great way to support local food entrepreneurship in your community. Celerah Hewes-Rutledge is the executive director of Delicious New Mexico. She can be contacted at Celerah@deliciousnm.org. You can purchase Dishing Up New Mexico at deliciousnm.org
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As children, we tasted houses because of their varying textures and tastes. Not only could houses be tasted, they were also blessed, healed and fed periodically. Before the actual construction of a house, offerings were placed at its four corners. Later, during the house building, prayers would be said, and more offerings were placed within the walls and ceiling beams to bless and protect the completed whole. Thereafter, the structure was blessed and fed cornmeal during specific ceremonies. Houses were also given the ultimate respect of dying. During my childhood, when I walked back and forth between the pueblo and the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ school, which was about one-half mile away, I would meander among the pueblo structures, tasting them. One day, I noticed a crack forming in the wall of a particularly good-tasting house. I watched the crack grow over several weeks until I became concerned about the house falling. I asked my great-grandmother why the people who lived in that house were doing nothing about fixing the crack. She shook her finger at me and said that it was not my business to be concerned about whether the house fell down or not: “It has been a good house, it has been taken care of, fed, blessed and healed many times during its life, and now it is time for it to go back to the earth.” Shortly afterward, the house collapsed and, in appropriate time, the same materials were reused to build a new structure in the same place. It was not always easy to tell if walls were going up or falling apart. Not long after that house fell down, my great-grandmother and I stood and watched the house that we lived in slowly, and most elegantly, crumble into a pile. I had watched, again, a crack working its way down the wall as I washed my face in the washbowl. It was a few minutes before I had the presence of mind to grab my great-grandmother’s hand and pull her out the door before the house collapsed.
The stories of the old people told us that we came to live on this fourth level of existence with the help of plants, birds and other animals. Building for permanence was not a priority and, as a result, the structures were interactive. We built them, tasted them, talked with them, climbed on them, lived with them and watched them die. They, in turn, would either be kind and warm or torment us with “not good” energies which they might embrace. Many different kinds of energies flowed through the structures because they shared in the energies of the people who lived and died in them, or sometimes they joined the “bad winds,” which blew through them. Periodically cleansing and healing them was, therefore, very important. Also important was that everybody—men, women and children—was involved in the building process. Building was not a specialized activity to be done only by men. Women and children shared equally in all but the heaviest part of the work. Maintenance was more often the responsibility of the women and children. I remember two weeks every August before our Santa Clara feast day as an exhilarating time, because everybody would be plastering houses and outdoor ovens and generally re-creating the entire pueblo house. Being knee deep in mud, carrying buckets of it or patting the heavy, gelatinous mixture into the wooden adobe-brick forms were very ordinary activities of our daily lives. Through all the spaces that we created, our everyday lives flowed easily. The use of outdoor areas for cooking, eating and visiting was still common during my childhood years in Santa Clara. Communal activities such as husking corn, drying fruit and baking bread happened anywhere from the corral areas, where the animals were kept, to the main plaza area. The walls and structure defined those other very important outdoor community activity areas. The focus, then, was not only on what happened indoors— within structures—but also outdoors, where the community came together most often. Indoors, the rooms were multifunctional. The kitchen was used for cooking, eating and receiving people. Sleeping areas also doubled as living and storage rooms. Rooms for food storage were an important part of the structure because farming was still an integral life activity. Again, there was little specialization of indoor areas or creation of spaces for decorative or image-promoting reasons. All areas were functional. That straightforward approach applied both indoors and outdoors. Landscaping, or the beautification of outdoor spaces, was a foreign concept. The natural environment was primary, and the human structures were made to fit into the hills and around boulders or trees. In that setting, planting pretty flowers that need watering was ridiculous.
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Decoration for decoration’s s a k e w a s u n n e c e s s a r y. Sometimes, murals were painted on interior walls, but they were symbolically significant; they were explicit reminders of the meaningful connections in the world. It was not until I was well into my adult years that I began to realize that the process of building and the interaction with the buildings and the materials that we used were very much an extension of our worldview as Pueblo people. It was at that time that an insatiable urge to see the ruins of the Old Ones (the Anasazi) came upon me. I was beside myself when I “discovered” shrines in mountains far from home, openings into the earth in the bedrock at Chaco Canyon, nansipus within kivas within plazas in Sand Canyon, south-facing cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde, unbonded walls throughout the Southwest and handprints of the builders (women, men and children) on sandstone cliffs over falling walls in Hovenweep. I began also to understand the value of our lifestyle, beliefs and architecture for ourselves as well as for other people who have moved away from an intimate relationship with the land, clouds and all other life forms. I now appreciate the emphasis on the whole in that architecture. The entire community was the house, and the parts (house units) were important for their role as connectors to the other parts and to the earth. I see that the respect for the natural environment that was inherent in the style and process of building was special—and is crucial for the survival of the world. I value tremendously the unselfconsciousness and absence of aesthetic pretension, which led to doing everything straightforwardly, yet which still considered the context and the connection so that practical and symbolic function were never lost. Most important, I treasure the sense of sacredness which pervaded that old Pueblo world. All of life, including walls, rocks and people, was part of an exquisite, flowing unity. i
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at Albuquerque. And look at the Indian reservations. The only free lands that Albuquerque can’t develop now are the Indian reservations that surround it. What happens almost on a daily basis is the encroachment. Not just of physical boundaries, but encroachment of that insidious value system. Even if we were successful in keeping Albuquerque at bay with Indian reservations, what is happening internally, I feel, is wrong. I don’t think that it is possible to keep it at bay. Not just physical boundaries, but all that it means. And granted, that the land does give reprieve when we go take a walk in a beautiful place that has not been touched by development. But what do we carry to that place? I feel like the best survival for me is to take a deep breath and take care of the small world that I can take care of. And that doesn’t help anybody anywhere, but it helps me and those people close to me. “I always go back to thinking that all anyone really can do is, you know, all I can do, is look at the Sun. The shadows. And really be happy that I am here at this moment. And act accordingly. If I am thankful, then I better act accordingly.”
◆◆◆ Rina Swentzell was absorbed into the flow of Nature on the morning of Oct.30, 2015. With her words and actions, she bequeathed to us a portal into that level of consciousness so vital to our collective understanding of our place in Nature. Her voice belonged to that greater community of life that she loved. Indeed, Rina Swentzell tended a garden of consciousness as beautiful to behold as the clear night sky of winter over our Río Grande homeland. Long may she linger. Long may we heed. i Jack Loeffler is an aural historian, author and radio producer whose perspective includes bioregionalism and systems-thinking. He is just completing a 10-part documentary radio series entitled “Encounters with Consciousness.” www.loreoftheland.org
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© Jack Loeffler
Tewa Houses and Spaces
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Green Fire Times • December 2015
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Maurice Dixon, Jr. Recovers the Artistic Legacy of Higinio V. Gonzales
Alejandro López
he Artistic Odyssey of Higinio V. Gonzales, published by the University of Oklahoma Press, is an account of a 19th-century New Mexican hojalatero, poet and songwriter, written by Maurice Dixon, Jr. of Santa Fe. It is an intriguing work of scholarly research as well as a work of art in and of itself. Based on seven years of investigation, rendered in beautiful prose and profusely illustrated, the book restores a forgotten Nuevo Mexicano artist to his rightful place in New Mexico history.
In her foreword, Santa Fe writer Carmella Padilla states, “The historical record brims with larger-than-life accounts of Anglo-Americans whose explorations and achievements shaped territorial New Mexico and the greater Southwest, often with derogatory portrayals of New Mexican Hispanos. While Gonzales is not a total stranger to scholars of Southwest Hispano arts, particularly the few who have noted certain aspects of his creative contributions in scholarly publications since the 1950s, he nonetheless remains fairly obscure. Were it not for Dixon, the artist’s full story, and particularly his vast creative oeuvre, would likely never be known.” After Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, the country began allowing trade with the United States. Among the first items that found their way to Nuevo México, then México’s northernmost province, were foodstuffs sealed in large tin containers. Inhabitants of a vast territory with
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few luxuries, it did not take long for Nuevo Mexicano Mexicanos to see the value of these containers left behind by the Americanos. In the deft hands of certain individuals, they became attractive frames, niches, crosses and boxes. Cut open, refashioned, soldered and hinged, these items, many of which housed religious images, were also embossed with a variety of mostly homemade tools. Collectively, the diepunch marks created unique designs and, unintentionally, also served as a kind of artist’s signature through which, more than a century later, scholars such as Dixon would be able to scrutinize in order to ascribe these cultural items to their makers. Prior to the 1970s, as Dixon writes in his book, “Tinwork held little interest for the general public, curators and scholars—other than as a curiosity, or at most, a decorative bauble. It was inexpensive and seemingly inexhaustible. Even those collectors who appreciated the inherent beauty of the work apparently had little or no interest in the artisans who created it.” In a previous book, which Dixon, also an accomplished tinsmith, coauthored with gallery owner Lane Coulter in 1991, the pair ventured a theory that Dixon spends much time reassessing in his latest book, with a solid narrative based on his recent research. At the time that the book, New Mexican Tin Work, 1840–1940, went to press, except for a recently uncovered work that suggested otherwise, the authors were mainly convinced that the bulk of historic tin pieces to be found in family homes, parish churches and museum collections were the work of numerous workshops and individuals scattered across New Mexico. But, by comparing the unique die-punch marks and other hallmark traits of a tin nicho uncovered by Santa Fe santera Marie Romero Cash, and clearly attributable to Higinio V. Gonzales, Dixon was able to trace the origin of hundreds of tin pieces to this one prolific, highly skilled and highly imaginative individual who had resided in several widely scattered New Mexican communities.
For the last seven years, Dixon has been hot on the trail of this man, combing through museums, private art collections and churches, as well as the state archives and the archives of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe. In the process, Dixon came to the realization that, in addition to being an accomplished metal smith, Gonzales was also a published poet, songwriter and schoolteacher. All the evidence that he uncovered on the life of this renaissance man points to the fact that he was undoubtedly a powerful community voice during the tumultuous territorial period in which he lived.
Dixon was able to trace the origin of hundreds of tin pieces to one highly skilled imaginative individual.
In his book, Dixon speaks of the national political policies put into effect during the lifetime of Higinio V. Gonzales, whose goals were assimilation and uniformity. He states, “The bustle of the new century, accompanied by a concerted national effort to Americanize the nation’s non-English-speaking population step-by-step, contributed to the rapid deterioration of traditional customs throughout the United States, and its effect in New Mexico was profound.” Gonzales chronicled of much of this process. All told, Dixon came across more than 50 of his Spanish-language poems published in local newspapers throughout the region, especially in the Nuevo Mexicano of Santa Fe and La Voz del Pueblo of Las Vegas, where Gonzales served as assistant editor. His poetry runs the gamut of impassioned themes, ranging from t h e u n re s t r a i n e d adulation of women to rousing cries for support of the Ame r ic an troops fighting to liberate Cuba from Spain in
© Alejandro López
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Maurice Dixon, Jr.
1898. Somewhere in between are other poems that critique the new wave of consumerism that overtook northern New Mexican communities with the advent of the Singer sewing machine, as well as a corrido or ballad, that recounts the tragic death of the young Bianes Serna, the result of an accidental self-inflicted gunshot wound while Serna was alone in the forested high country around Mt. Taylor. In addition to producing a handsome and informative book on the totality of Gonzales’ work, including his poetry and song, Dixon has helped to cocurate an exhibit on the artist at the Albuquerque Museum. The exhibit, bearing the same name as the book, opens to the public on Dec. 19 and runs through to April 3, 2016. i Alejandro López is a student of all things New Mexican, a writer in both English and Spanish, as well as an interpreter and translator of books.
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giggle. wiggle. groove. An eclectic mix of informative and entertaining programs await you on KUNM – your passport to the worlds of news, music, community and culture. Publicly supported. Publicly responsive. KUNM is an essential part of New Mexico’s day. KUNM 89.9FM | STREAMING LIVE 24/7 AT KUNM.ORG
The Zanjeras continued from page 25
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Green Fire Times • December 2015
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Local Community Resilience Resistance, Replacement and Resilience
TM
505.216.1108 www.ccandns.com Serving Santa Fe and the surrounding areas
Mac & PC
The accelerating climate crisis requires massive mobilization of populations to take back control of our lives through resistance, replacement and resilience. Small groups of people around the world have begun to resist the pressures of the hyperconsumer culture and the damage inflicted on their lands and waters by extractive industries. Extreme fossil-fuel and materials extraction methods in risky remote Arctic and deep-sea locations disrupt human habitats and climate. Yet, large majorities fail to “just say no” to the big-box stores. More and more resisters are trying to replace corporate dependency with a “parallel lifestyle,” [5] focusing on maximizing energy efficiency and reducing waste and dependence on fossil fuels. Resisters are building their
respond to increasingly severe climate conditions and maybe even fend off extreme climate chaos. They will contribute most to minimizing further global warming and its catastrophic consequences by resisting corporate consumerism and replacing it with local production of necessary products and services. No small task. These are the first principles of the New Great Transformation that must happen in the next decade to foster human survival by recapturing the economic sovereignty of human populations. The megacorporations and financial elites control the global economy, transcending location and nation. We need just the opposite. The only power we have left is what they cannot take away: the peoples’ power to organize ourselves where we live by resisting, replacing and becoming resilient.
Economic and social implications of the findings of hundreds of scientists from all over the world are politically resisted. local economies, producing and buying locally, reducing excess consumption, buying only low-ecological-impact products and forming co-ops and resilient community institutions. These movements are small, but they must grow rapidly. It is a race against time. Replacement of corporate dependency with sustainable-community economic interdependence in harmony with living-earth systems requires a new vision. Local communities must forge new ways, adapting some indigenous old ways to transform our relations with the Earth. We must work with— instead of against—the Earth systems upon which we ultimately depend. [6] It takes community creativity to replace corporate-driven consumerism. Resilience is not merely adapting to
climate chaos. It comes from creating viable, living local economies not dependent on the corporate global economy. Local community economies must adapt to the increasingly difficult environments. Most important, we must replace the culture of industrial products with a culture of self-sufficient community economics. The most resilient and self-sufficient local communities will be better able to
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Our greatest challenges are to recognize that our personal and cultural ways of living must change, figure out how to change them and act together, where we live. Taking back control requires resistance to corporate domination, replacement of the consumer culture of waste and creating community resilience by acting and organizing in harmony with the living Earth systems we inhabit. Only when many communities around the world take these actions can the profligate plundering of Earth’s resources and people be slowed. We must act where we live, right here in northern New Mexico. Earth-integrated localcommunity resilience must replace the corporate-consumer culture. Then, a powerful social movement will have already arisen from civil society. That global pattern of local movements will force governments around the world to transform growth economics and slow carbon emissions so human survival may persist. i Robert Christie, Ph.D., a Santa Fe, NM, resident, is professor emeritus of sociology and founding director of the Urban Community Research Center, California State University. He blogs at www. TheHopefulRealist.com
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Footnotes [1] NASA expects increasingly severe droughts in the Southwest and central Great Plains, exacerbated by continued global warming. See Mark Fischetti, “U.S. Droughts Will Be the Worst in 1000 Years: The Southwest and central Great Plains will dry out even more than previously thought.” Scientif ic American, February 12, 2015. http://www. scientificamerican.com/article/u-s-droughtswill-be-the-worst-in-1-000-years1/ [2] Tim DeChristopher, in a talk at Santa Fe’s Lensic Theater a few years ago, discussed at length the failure of Big Green organizations to achieve significant environmental goals by obtaining cosmetic changes in corporate behavior, in exchange for big donations from the corporations that co-opted them. Chapter 6 of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster 2014) details numerous examples of the environmental and political cost of what she terms the “merger of Big Business and Big Green.” [3] K ar l Polany i explained the great transformation that was the industrial revolution in his book, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time, in 1944. Many of the concerns he expressed about the trajectory of unfettered industrial capital have come to pass. Only a new great transformation can overcome the resulting destructive trends that are leading to the collapse of climate stability, along with that of economic and social systems (see note 4). [4] The “catastrophic convergence of poverty, violence and climate change” across the latitudes most vulnerable to early extreme weather events, mostly near the equator, is well under way and is thoroughly documented by Christian Parenti in Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (New York: Nation Books, 2011). The growing international struggles for control of rapidly diminishing resources, from fossil-fuel and basic-metals deposits in increasingly remote and difficult locations, such as the Arctic and ocean floors, to rare earths and other critical minerals needed for high-tech manufacturing, to arable land for food production, is documented by Michael T. Klare in The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources (New York: Picador, 2012). [5] A new website, www.aparallelworld.com, recently launched from Santa Fe, is designed to provide consumers who want to replace fossilfuel-intensive products with low-emissions, energy-efficient goods and services with information and referrals on local products and businesses consistent with a resilient lifestyle. [6] To shape a living economy in support of resilient communities, a lot of good ideas are offered by David Korten in Change the Story, Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth. (Oakland, Calif. BerrettKoehler Publishers, 2015). What we need most now is creative local strategies to implement such ideas. Santa Fean Courtney White, cofounder of the Quivira Coalition, offers 50 suggestions—particularly useful in northern New Mexico—for actions to sequester carbon using low-tech natural techniques and to restore local/regional ecosystems, in his new book, Two Percent Solutions for the Planet: 50 Low-Cost, LowTech, Nature-Based Practices for Combating Hunger, Drought, and Climate Change (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2015).
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Green Fire Times • December 2015
Green Fire Times is available at many locations in the metropolitan Albuquerque / Río Rancho area! For the location nearest you, call Nick García at 505.203.4613 www.GreenFireTimes.com
NEWSBITEs Risk to New Mexico’s Water Supplies
A peer-reviewed journal, Environmental Research Letters, has published a study that looked at more than 400 river basins in the Northern Hemisphere and how they may or may not meet future water demands. The Río Grande and Colorado River basins, which supply water to farmers, water managers and wildlife in New Mexico, were identified as among the most vulnerable as a result of the risk of decreasing snowfall and rainfall in the coming century.
Audubon’s conservation project took root in May 2015 when, funded by grants from Toyota’s TogetherGreen initiative and the Thornburg Foundation, the organization hosted a roundtable of federal, state and local agencies, experts and stakeholders to discuss ways to restore flows to help abate the declining health of the Middle Río Grande. Already, the Pueblo of Isleta has followed suit, contributing a share of its stored water for next year.
The study’s authors looked at population, how water demands are currently being met, and multiple climate models that project future warming.
New Mexico’s Largest Solar Farms Line Up Utility Customer
Two uncertainties the study didn’t take into account are natural climate variations that can sometimes mask trends scientists expect from human-influenced climate change and potential human intervention such as conservation, efficiency or other technological initiatives. However, lead author Justin Mankin, in a New Mexico In Depth article, said that cultural, social and management practices that revolve around the supply of water “take a lot of effort, foresight and planning. But there’s clear evidence, from the California drought, that we’re not optimally adapted to the climate we have presently.” Mankin pointed out that the implications for each basin will depend on local realities, the adaptive capacity of water managers and each area’s political and social systems. The study, “The Potential for Snow to Supply Human Water Demand in the Present and Future,” may be accessed online at http://iopscience.iop.org/ article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/11/114016
Judge Upholds Denial of Water Mining Application
7th District Court Judge Matthew Reynolds has ruled that his denial of an application to mine water from 18,000 acres in Catron and Socorro counties stands. Augustín Plains Ranch LLC has sought to appropriate groundwater – 54,000 acre-feet per year – for “municipal, industrial, commercial offset of surface water depletions, replacement, sale and/or leasing purposes.” The company had filed an appeal, asking Reynolds to reconsider his decision to support the state engineer’s denial of the application. The fight has been going on for years with many of the area’s residents in opposition. New Mexico Speaker of the House, 49th District Rep. Don Tripp, a member of the Water and Natural Resources Committee, said, “I’m sure there will be many more attempts to gain access to unappropriated water on the plains. We will need to be vigilant in our efforts to oppose the water grab.”
Pueblo of Sandia Donates Water for Conservation
In a first of its kind donation, the Pueblo of Sandia has volunteered to donate water to be used for the benefit of river flows and riparian habitat. The pueblo’s Tribal Council has offered 100 acre-feet of water for Audubon New Mexico’s conservation work to supplement streamflow in the Middle Río Grande. “The Río Grande is sacred to the people of Sandia Pueblo, as is the environment it provides,” said Gov. Isaac Lujan. “Sandia hopes this donation can be used as an example of what can be done for the health of the river and the community when stakeholders work together.”
Southwestern Public Service (SPS), an Excel Energy affiliate, has been given Public Regulation Commission (PRC) approval to buy the power generated by two giant yet-to-be-built solar-power facilities near Roswell. NextEra Energy Resources is building the facilities on about 1,500 acres of private grassland. That power will bring SPS’s renewable energy to 18 percent of its total supply by the end of 2016. At 3.5 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2017, the electricity will be cheaper than some of Xcel’s natural gas-fueled plants in New Mexico and Texas, which the company says will allow it to pass savings on to consumers. The new system will also help Xcel achieve an 18 percent reduction in carbon emissions in those states by 2020, compared to 2005 levels. In a news release, SPS also touts the facilities’ lack of emissions and not using fossil fuels or water. Xcel Energy is the nation’s No. 1 provider of wind energy, as ranked by the American Wind Energy Association, and is among the top-10 U.S. utilities for the amount of solar power on its systems, according to the Solar Electric Power Association.
Picuris Pueblo Dedicates First Tribal Net-Zero-Energy Fire Station
A dedication for the first fully solar-powered fire station in New Mexico Indian Country took place in October. When planning began, Picuris Pueblo’s leadership expressed that they wanted a facility that was energy-efficient and would not use electricity created by carbon fuels. And so, the net-zero-energy building’s solar panels now supply the electricity and radiant heat for the pueblo’s fire engine, power equipment and fire team offices. Following the ceremony, which ended with the Fire Department spraying the new building with a stream of water, Odes ArmijoCaster, cofounder and managing partner of Sacred Power, the p r o j e c t c o n t r a c t o r, g a v e a demonstration of the solar system. Pueblo of Picuris Governor Gary Pyne acknowledged a group of project partners that helped make the project possible. A partial list includes the Northern Pueblos Housing Authority, Weller Architects, Avanyu Construction, Native Home Capital, USDA Rural Development, HUD Office of Native American Programs and Kit Carson Electric. The governor also thanked Congressman Ben Ray Luján, Senator Martin Heinrich and Senator Tom Udall. The pueblo is also planning a 1 MW solar-power array, to be completed by the end of 2016, a lump-charcoal enterprise and a $3-million travel center.
Forbes Magazine’s Favorite Solar-Powered Gadget
Forbes has named the SunPorttm its No. 1 new “solar-powered gadget.” The Albuquerque company, PlugSolar, which conducted a successful Kickstarter campaign this summer to fund its development and marketing, created the $80 gadget. The device makes solar power accessible to people who aren’t able to install rooftop panels.
The donation by the pueblo is the first environmental use of a large volume of water not being directed by federal or state agencies. Instead, the water will be managed by Audubon and allocated to instream purposes, to assist flows needed by birds, fish and wildlife. One hundred percent of Río Grande water is allocated, and, as a result, large stretches go dry for weeks—or even months—during the summer. Putting water back into the river also supports pueblos, cities and New Mexico’s outdoor recreation and tourism economy.
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On your next business trip or vacation, or for your home or office, by plugging the SunPort into a wall outlet, you can offset some of the carbon emissions you contribute. When an appliance or device is plugged into it, the SunPort can track its energy usage. The solar equivalent of that amount of energy is created through the use of renewable-energy certificates. Each S-REC is equal to a megawatt of solar energy that is put into the grid. S-RECs can be obtained through utility companies. SunPort has partnered with the nonprofit ReChoice to purchase certificates and give users solar credits. ReChoice also matches dollars to installation of new solar panels. www.sunport.co
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What's Going On! Events / Announcements will discuss work to protect and restore dynamic flows in the Río Grande. Gourmet vegan dinner and silent auction. $35. 505.795.3006
ALBUQUERQUE
Dec. 2, 5:30-7 pm Green Drinks Hotel Andaluz, 125 Second St. NW
Network with people interested in doing business locally, clean energy alternatives and creating sustainable opportunities in our communities. Presented the first Wednesday of each month by the ABQ and Río Rancho Green Chamber. info@nmgreen chamber.com, www.greendrinks.org
Dec. 2-5 Returning the Gift 2015 Hotel Blue, IPCC and Various Locations
Native American & Indigenous Storytellers and Literary Festival. Workshops, discussions, resource sharing, book signings, films, poetry slam. Keynote speakers: LaDonna Harris, Diane Glancy. $40-$150. 505.843.7270, www.rtglitfest.org
Dec. 3, 6 pm Holiday Stroll for Climate Hope Gather at Triangle Park corner Monte Vista and Central
Stroll up Central to Carlisle and back carrying lanterns and singing Clean Climate Carols to spread the message of climate hope and clean, renewable energy. Sierra Club Río Grande Chapter. 505.715.8388, Camilla. feibelman@sierraclub.org
Dec. 4, 7 pm A. Paul Ortega Farewell Concert Indian Pueblo Cultural Center 2401 12th St. NW
The groundbreaking Apache singer/songwriter’s first major concert in 15 years. $25/$15. http://ipcc.ticketleap.com/paulortega-farewell/
Dec. 5, 3-5:30 pm Climate Change Challenges UNM School of Law 1117 Stanford NE, Rm. 3244
Forum will present alternative approaches for discussion. Results to be included in a national report. 505.690.2247, biderman429@ gmail.com. Co-sponsored by Oxfam NM and the Institute of Public Law
Dec. 9, 4-8 pm Agnes Chávez: Projecting Climate Change Explora, 1701 Mountain Rd. NW
Hands-on youth workshop offering students an opportunity to use projection and their imaginations to visualize and communicate climate change solutions. 505.224.8341, www.explora.us
Dec. 10, 6 pm WildEarth Guardians and the Río Grande Grove Café & Market, 600 Central SE
Jan Pelz, WEG’s Wild Rivers program director
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Dec. 12, 6-10 pm Peace Center Holiday Gala First Unitarian Church corner of Carlisle & Comanche
Reggae music by Native Roots and songs from the Raging Grannies. Posole, dancing, silent auction, information tables. 505.268.9557
Dec. 13, 4-7 pm Bosque Bash Tortuga Gallery, 901 Edith SE
Enjoy music, refreshments with the Bosque Action Team, which has been at work for three years protecting the bosque as a natural space within the city. Suggested donation: $10.
Dec. 13, 8 pm Voices of New Mexico Cathedral of St. John, 318 Silver SW
Music written by women for women’s voices. 11-voice ensemble will collaborate with poet Valerie Martínez. $20, students with I.D. free. 505.821.1956, polyphonyvoicesofnew mexico@gmail.com
Jan. 15, 2016, 5 pm Public Comment Deadline
The NMED is seeking public comment on the 2016 strategic plan for cleaning up the Kirkland Air Force Base fuel spill. Hard copy and electronic comments will be accepted. Send to: Dennis McQuillan, chief scientist, NMED, P.O. Box 5469, Santa Fe, NM 87502 or dennis.mcquillan@state.nm.us
Daily Our Land, Our Culture, Our Story Indian Pueblo Cultural Center 2401 12th St. NW
Historical overview of the Pueblo world and contemporary artwork and craftsmanship of each of the 19 pueblos; 866.855.7902, www.indianpueblo.org
SANTA FE
Dec. 2, 11:30 am-1 pm Green Lunch SFAHBA Offices, 1409 Luisa St.
What’s coming up at the Roundhouse? Presentation by State Reps. Brian Egolf and Matthew McQueen, who have recently proposed ethics reform legislation. $15/$20. Reservations: 505.982.1774. Presented by the SF Green Chamber of Commerce.
Dec. 2, 12 pm Leslie Poling-Kempes NM History Museum, 113 Lincoln Ave.
Lecture on the book Ladies of the Canyons: Remarkable Women of the SW. Free. 505.476.5090
Dec. 2, 2 pm Fracking in the SF Natl. Forest 465 St. Michaels Dr. (Medical-Dental Building west of hospital) Rm. 201
Discussion of opposition to the leases that have been awarded on over 20,000 acres.
Dec. 2-6 SF Film Festival Various Venues
100 films, panel discussions, awards, workshops and parties. $12 for screenings, various prices for other activities. Tickets available at the Jean Cocteau Cinema, 505.466.5528,
Green Fire Times • December 2015
www.jeancocteaucinema.com, festival.com
santafefilm
Dec. 3, 5:30-7 pm The Future of Cities Site SF, 1606 Paseo de Peralta
With Geoffrey West, former president of the SF Institute, and Mayor Gonzales. A conversation about the growth of cities worldwide, and what can be learned that would lead to a “more equitable, prosperous and sustainable Santa Fe.” By donation, $25 adv. donation guarantees a seat. Democracy.com/ santafeforward
Dec. 3, 5:30-7:30 pm SF Watershed Assn. Benefit Gala Hotel Santa Fe, 1501 Paseo de Peralta
Special guest: author William deBuys, author of A Great Aridness. Meet SFWA staff & board members and learn about the SFWA. Hor d’oeuvres, raffle. Tickets: $50, Raffle only: $30. 505.820.1696, www.santafe watershed.org
Dec. 3, 7 pm Bringing Food Home El Museo Cultural 555 Camino de la Familia
Documentary film about urban agriculture in SF. Panel discussion with the filmmakers and Gaia Gardens’ founders after the screening. Free.
Dec. 3-Jan. 2 GLOW – A Winter Lights Event SF Botanical Garden, 715 Cam. Lejo
A Winter Lights Event in the Garden. Illuminated geodesic domes, food and more. Prices: Santafebotanicalgarden.org
Dec. 3-4 Acting Out: A Symposium on Indigenous Performing Art 12/4, 6-8 pm: The Lensic
Symposium, performances, workshops and video screenings. Presented by the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture, and the Lensic. Symposium and workshops at the museums no charge. Lensic performance: $25/$10. 505.428.5907, iaia.edu/museum/ news-events/upcoming-events
Dec. 4, 4-7 pm Poeh Museum Winter Exhibition Opening Just off Hwy. 285/84, 15 miles north of SF, 78 Cities of Gold Rd.
Poeh Arts Student/Faculty Show and Buffalo Thunder Art Collection Recent Works. Through March 19. Free. 505.455.5041
Dec. 4, 5:30-7:30 pm What Does It Take to Boost Student Graduation? SF Higher Education Center 1950 Siringo Rd.
Community forum presented by the Interfaith Coalition for Public Education and the SF Higher Education Center. www.tinyurl. com/interfaithcoalition
Dec. 4, 6 pm Somos un Pueblo Unido 20th Anniversary Gala SF Convention Center
Dinner, music by Mariachi Nuevo México, reception with U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera and annual Premio Sin Fron-
teras awards. Somos is a statewide community-based, immigrant-led organization that promotes worker and racial justice. $35/$5. (children) 505.424.7832, www.Somos UnPuebloUnido.org
Dec. 5, 9 am-4 pm Annual Arts & Crafts Holiday Fair Gonzales Community School 851 W. Alameda
Handmade Native arts & crafts, over 40 vendors, silent auction, Indian tacos, holiday treats. Free. Hosted by the SFPS Native American Student Services. 505.467.2644, hereinthesw@yahoo.com
Dec. 5, 10 am-12 pm Citizens Climate Lobby La Montañita Co-op, 913 W. Alameda
Monthly meeting to focus politically palatable and effective solutions such as a Carbon Fee and Dividend, which gives all revenue back to households. Visit the Santa Fe CCL Facebook page.
Dec. 5, 10 am NMSA Open House 275 E. Alameda St.
Learn what the NM School for the Arts has to offer in dance, music, theater and visual arts. Now accepting applications. 505.310.4194, www.nmschoolforthearts.org
Dec. 5, 10 am-3 pm SF Waldorf School Holiday Faire 26 Puesta del Sol
Family activities such as craft making, games, food and entertainment by Clan Tynker and Pojoaque Pueblo Hoop Dancers. Book sale, artisans’ market, children’s wonder shop and more. Free except some activities require $1 tickets. www.santafewaldorf.org/holiday-faire/
Dec. 5, 2-4:30 pm Storyweaving Workshop IAIA Hogan, 83 Avan Nu Po Rd.
Led by Muriel Miguel and Gloria Miguel of Spiderwoman Theater. Free public event.
Dec. 5, 6 pm U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera The Lensic
Reading and conversation held in celebration of Somos un Pueblo Unido’s 20th anniversary. $25/$20. 505.988.1234, ticketssantafe.org
Dec. 5, 6 pm Aid & Comfort Gala Eldorado Hotel 309 W. San Francisco St.
Reception, dinner, auction, performances by Juan Siddi Flamenco and Natl. Dance Institute of NM. $65. 505.216.9078, southwesterncare.org
Dec. 6, 11 am-12 pm Journey Santa Fe Collected Works Books 202 Galisteo
Presentation by Merle Lefkoff of the Center for Emergent Diplomacy: Creating New Models of Conflict Resolution & Mediation. Free. 505.988.4226, www.journeysantafe.com
Dec. 6, 1:30 and 2:30 pm Wool & Weaving in Northern NM History Museum Auditorium
“Unbroken Thread” 20-minute film produced by the Española Valley Fiber Arts
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Center. Educators will engage visitors in materials of the weaver’s trade, teach basic skills and showcase textiles. 505.476.5200, www. evfac.org, www.nmhistorymuseum.org
Dec. 6, 1:30 pm Garden III: Home St. John’s College, Great Hall, 2nd fl.
Free performance of composer Chris Jonas’ work in progress. Live performance, music, text and immersive video.
Dec. 6, 4-6 pm Squash Blossom Launch Party Iconik Coffee, 1600 Lena St.
Celebrate local foods with farmers, free samples, raffle tickets for Blossom Bags. Free admission. www.squashblossomlocalfood.com
Dec. 7, 4-6 pm The Shift to Social Entrepreneurship SF Community Foundation 501 Halona St.
A community discussion for nonprofits with the SFCF. No charge. Registration: 505.988.9715, www.santafecf.org
Dec. 8, 6:30-8 pm Setonian Evening Academy for the Love of Learning 133 Seton Village Rd.
“The Radical Natural History of Generally True Patterns” Explore topics related to Seton’s stories. Examine the importance of experiences with wildlife and wild places. Free. 505.995.1860, ALoveOfLearning.org
Dec. 10, 2-5 pm Inbound Marketing SF Community Foundation 501 Halona St.
The latest techniques to attract more donors, volunteers and others. A nonprofit technical assistance workshop with Allan Pressel and the SFCF. No charge. Registration: 505.988.9715, www.santafecf.org
Dec. 12-13, 9 am-3 pm Young Native Artists Show & Sale Palace of the Governors Courtyard, 105 W. Palace Ave.
Works by the children and grandchildren of the artists in the Palace of the Governors’ Portal Program. Free. www.nmhistory museum.org
Dec. 12, 9 am-4 pm Annual Holiday Market IAIA, 83 Avan Nu Po Rd. Academic Building
Over 50 noted and up-and-coming artists including students, faculty and staff sell their works at the Institute of American Indian Arts campus.
Dec. 12, 2-3:30 pm March for Clean Climate Solutions Meet at SF Plaza Bandstand
Short rally, then 30-minute march to Guadalupe Church and back. Sponsored by Sierra Club and other groups in solidarity with peoples marches marking closeing of the Paris talks. 505.983.2703, Camilla.feibelman@sierraclub.org
Dec. 12, 4-7 pm Kindred Spirits Christmas Celebration
Tree lighting, meditation and tour of animal sanctuary at 4:30 pm. Refreshments. 505.471.5366, kindredspirits@earthlink.net, www.kindredspiritsnm.org
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Dec. 12, 8 pm Voices of New Mexico San Miguel Mission 401 Old SF Trail
A Celebration of women’s voices. 11-voice ensemble will collaborate with Pulitzer Prize nominee poet Valerie Martínez. $20, students with I.D. free. 505.821.1956, polyph onyvoicesofnewmexico@gmail.com, www. polyphonynm.com
Dec. 13, 1-5 pm Holiday Makers Market CCA, 1050 Old Pecos Trail
Saturdays, 8 am-1 pm Santa Fe Farmers’ Market 1607 Paseo de Peralta (& Guadalupe)
Northern NM farmers & ranchers offer fresh greenhouse tomatoes, greens, root veggies, cheese, teas, herbs, spices, honey, baked goods, body-care products and much more. www.santafefarmersmarket.com
Sundays, 10 am-4 pm New Mexico Artisan Market Farmers’ Market Pavilion www.artmarketsantafe.com
Dec. 14, 6 pm Southwest Seminars Lecture Hotel SF, 1501 Paseo de Peralta
Tuesdays, 4:15-5:45 pm Design Lab for Sustainable Neighborhoods Higher Education Center 1950 Siringo Rd., Rm. 139
Dec. 17, 10 am NM Acequia Commission Meeting NM State Capitol Bldg., Rm. 317, 491 Old SF Trail
Foundation of Herbal Medicine Course Milagro School of Herbal Medicine
Handmade gifts, food, music. 505.982.1338
Dr. Richard I. Ford on The Origin of Maize Horticulture in the Northern Río Grande Valley. $12. 505.466.2775, SouthwestSeminars.org
Info: 505.603.2879, molinodelaisla@gmail. com. Agendas: 505.827.4983, www.nm acequiacommission.state.nm.us
Dec. 19, 9 am-4 pm Poeh Museum Holiday Artist Sale Just off Hwy. 285/84, 15 miles north of SF, 78 Cities of Gold Rd.
Holiday show featuring the work of instructors and students. Pueblo pottery, silverwork, sculpture, etc. 505.455.5041
Dec. 19, 2:30 pm A Celtic Christmas Scottish Rite Temple 463 Paseo de Peralta
SF Men’s Camerata, Belisama Irish Dance, fiddler Karina Wilson, Order of the Thistle Pipes & Drums, Anslover Family Band. $30/$20/$15. 505.988.1234, ticketssantafe.org
Bring your ideas, passion and perseverance and join in to design and build mixed-use Santa Fe infill. To RSVP, google Meetup Santa Fe and find the Design Lab.
Enrollment is open for 250-hour intensive focusing on regional herbs and traditions. Course starts April 5. 505.820.6321, info@ milagroherbs.com, wwwmilagroschoolof herbalmedicine.com
Santa Fe Recycling
Make 2015 the year to reduce, reuse and recycle as much as you can. City residential curbside customers can recycle at no additional cost and drop by 1142 Siler Road, Building A, to pick up free recycling bins. At least 50 percent of curbside residential customers recycle now. Let’s take that number to 100 percent. For more information, visit http://www.santafenm.gov/ trash_and_recycling or call 505.955.2200 (city); 505.992.3010 (county); 505.424.1850 (SF Solid Waste Management Agency).
HERE & THERE
Dec. 3, 3-5 pm Food Entrepreneur Workshop NNMC Small Business Development Center, 1027 Railroad Ave., Española, NM
An idea lab for individuals interested in becoming a food entrepreneur or taking your restaurant to the next level. Tour the Food Venture Center. Registration required: 505.886.2137, Sarah@deliciousnm.org
Dec. 4, 10 am Mt. Taylor Uranium Mine Hearing Cíbola County Offices 515 W. High St., Grants, NM
The NM Mining and Minerals Div. will hold a public hearing to hear input about whether Río Grande Resources can have the Mt. Taylor mine moved from “standby” to “active” status. Amigos Bravos and Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment will be among those presenting testimony on reclamation issues. If you would like to send a written comment, visit http://amigosbravos.org/take_action/letter/27
Dec. 4, 3-5 pm EPA Clean Power Plan Listening Session City Council Chambers 1700 N. Grand Ave., Las Vegas, NM
The NM Environment Dept. is seeking oral and written comments. 505.476.4356, NMENV-NMCPP@state.nm.us
Dec. 5, 10 am-4 pm 5th Annual Tamal Fiesta y Mas Bullard St. at 8th, Silver City, NM
Brining community together through tamales. Food, crafts, jewelry, live music, folklorico dance, heritage workshops, traditional games, more. 575.538.1337, www. TamalFiestaYMas.org
Sustainable Growth Management Plan for SF County
Dec. 21, 6 pm Southwest Seminars Lecture Hotel SF, 1501 Paseo de Peralta
Hard copies $20, CDs $2. Contact Melissa Holmes, 505.995.2717 or msholmes@santafe county.org. The SGMP is also available on the county website: www.santafecounty.org/ growth_management/sgmp and can be reviewed at SF Public Libraries and the County Administrative Building, 102 Grant Ave.
Dec. 5-6 Wool Shed Holiday Event Maple Winds Farm, Stanley, NM
Dec. 22, 8 am-1 pm Special Holiday Market SF Farmers’ Market
Taos
Dec. 10, 5:30-7 pm NM Solar Energy Assn. Chapter Meeting Little Toad Pub backroom, 200 N. Bullard St., Silver City, NM
Tree lighting on the plaza, electric light parade. Taos.org/art/festivals-events?/ item189/Yuletide-in-Taos
Dec. 12, 4-8 pm opening Holiday Small Works Exhibition Tarnoff Art Center, Rowe, NM
Louie Hena on Sustainable Agriculture and Permaculture at Tesuque Pueblo. $12. 505.466.2775, SouthwestSeminars.org
Purchase holiday ingredients and gifts from farmers’ market vendors. 505.983.4098, www.santafefarmersmarket.com
Dec. 30, 7 pm The Alhambra and the Scottish Rite Temple: Granada & Santa Fe Scottish Rite Temple, Paseo de Peralta
A celebration of the Scottish Rite Building and the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. Learn about their relationship and the influence of American author Washington Irving. A multimedia presentation and musical performance by cultural ambassador and scholar Fernando Barros Lirola from Granada, Spain. His group of performers includes flamenco guitarist Carlos Lomas. $20. Info/reserved seats: 505.603.0743, studyflamenco.com, nmscottishrite.org
Jan. 2-9, 2016 IAIA Writers’ Festival IAIA Campus, 83 Avan Nu Po Rd.
Public invited to free nightly readings, which include published authors and Institute of American Indian Arts students. Headliners are Sherman Alexie and Joy Harjo.
Open barn & shed. See the sheep and angora rabbits. Fiber products. No pets allowed. 505.204.6127
575.538.1337, scgreenchamber@gmail.com
Dec. 4-5 Winterfest
Dec. 5, 12, 19 Forest and Woodland Habitat Workshops 101 Des Georges, near Taos Plaza
Led by Sylvia Rains Dennis, Forest Biodiversity Specialist. Registration: 575.770.9040, www.wildlandance.net
Dec. 8, 22 Biodiversity and Restoration Talking Circles 101 Des Georges, near Taos Plaza
Led by Sylvia Rains Dennis, Forest Biodiversity Specialist/Restoration Ecologist. 12/8 topic: Land Restoration, 12/22 topic: Cultural Ecology. Registration: 575.770.9040, www.wildlandance.net
Dec. 12, 10 am-7pm Bonfires on Bent Street Taos Historic District
John Dunn shops, Bent St. reception: 4-7 pm. Farolitos, food, music and more.
Through Jan. 8. 20 miles east of Santa Fe. 505.919.8888, info@tarnoffartcenter.org, www.tarnoffartcenter.org
Dec. 12, 5-8:30 pm “Light Among the Ruins” Jémez Historic Site, Jémez Springs, NM
More than 1,400 farolitos will be lit. Free horse-drawn wagons from Jémez Springs’ plaza to the site. 575.829.3540, jemezsprings.org
Dec. 23-28 Río Grande Pueblo Winter Solstice Feasts & Dances www.indianpueblo.org/19pueblos/index.html
Río Grande Return Gifts from the River
Locally produced salsas, jams, honey, chocolates, soaps, lotions, incense and more. Supports local farmers, producers and the conservation of the Río Grande. 505.466.1767, toll free: 866.466.1767, www.riogrande return.com
Green Fire Times • December 2015
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Green Fire Times • December 2015
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