September 2017 Green Fire Times by Sun Publishing

News & Views

from the

Sustainable Southwest

RESTORING RELATIONSHIP

CREATIVITY IN THE AGE OF CLIMATE CHANGE

•CREATIVE MUSCLES FOR CREATIVE LEADERSHIP •A TEWA WOMAN’S REFLECTION ON URGENCY

September 2017

•BIOMIMICRY: EMULATING NATURE’S GENIUS •FIREROCK: PASS THE SPARK •DANCING EARTH

Northern New Mexico’s Largest Distribution Newspaper

Vol. 9 No. 9

2017– 2018 EVENTS

READINGS & CONVERSATIONS

brings to Santa Fe a wide range of writers from the literary world of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry to read from and discuss their work.

In Pursuit of Cultural Freedom is a lecture series on political, economic, environmental, and human rights issues featuring social justice activists, writers, journalists, and scholars discussing critical topics of our day.

27 SEPTEMBER GLENN GREENWALD WITH TOM ENGELHARDT 11 OCTOBER ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ WITH NICK ESTES 1 NOVEMBER ÓSCAR MARTÍNEZ WITH ALFREDO CORCHADO 29 NOVEMBER VALERIA LUISELLI WITH SONIA NAZARIO 24 JANUARY NOMI PRINS WITH JULIET SCHOR 31 JANUARY COLUM McCANN WITH GABRIEL BYRNE 28 FEBRUARY ALEKSANDAR HEMON WITH JOHN FREEMAN 14 MARCH ROXANE GAY WITH TRESSIE McMILLAN COTTOM 11 APRIL DIANE RAVITCH WITH JESSE HAGOPIAN 18 APRIL RACHEL KUSHNER WITH MICHAEL SILVERBLATT 2 MAY CLIVE HAMILTON WITH LISA SIDERIS 9 MAY COLSON WHITEHEAD WITH KEVIN YOUNG

Lensic Performing Arts Center 211 West San Francisco Street, Santa Fe, NM Tel. 505.988.1234 www.lensic.org Tickets for each event go on sale the first SATURDAY of the month prior to the event. General admission $8; students and seniors with ID $5 Ticket prices include a $3 Lensic Preservation Fund fee

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Green Fire Times • September 2017

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Green Fire Times • September 2017

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Vol. 9, No. 9 • September 2017 Issue No. 101 PUBLISHER

Green Fire Publishing, LLC Skip Whitson ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER

Barbara E. Brown

News & Views

from the

Sustainable Southwest

Winner of the Sustainable Santa Fe Award for Outstanding Educational Project

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Seth Roffman

GUEST ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Molly Sturges DESIGN

Green Fire Production Department COPY EDITOR

CONTENTS Restoring Relationship: Creativity in the Age of Climate Change — Molly Sturges . . .. 7

Stephen Klinger

OP-ED: A Tewa Woman’s Reflection on Urgency — Beata Tsosie–Peña . . .. . .. . .. . 8

WEBMASTER

Only Story Will Save Us — Michelle Otero. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . ..11

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Hakim Bellamy, Elizabeth Bradfield, Camile Dungy, Joel Glanzberg, Catherine Page Harris, Alison HawthorneDeming, Toby Herzlich, Adelma Aurora Hnasko, Annie Haven McDonnell, Chrissie Orr, Ruben Olguin, Michelle Otero, Seth Roffman, Derek Sheffield, James Aronhiota Stevens, Molly Sturges, Beata Tsosie-Peña, Joe Wilkins

Why Poetry? Why Now? — Anne Haven McDonnell . . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. 12

Karen Shepherd

CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS Leland Chapin, Talavi Denipah-Cook, Erin O’Neil, Chrissie Orr, pauloTphotography, Luis Peña, Seth Roffman, Kate Russell, Molly Sturges, Uqualla, Bob Wick PUBLISHER’S ASSISTANTS Cisco Whitson-Brown, Steve Jinks, Gay Rathman ADVERTISING SALES Call: 505-471-5177 Email: Info@GreenFireTimes.com

Lead Like a Leaf — Joel Glanzberg . . . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . 15 Biomimicry: The Practice of Emulating Nature’s Genus — Toby Herzlich . . .. . .. . ..17 Firerock: Pass the Spark — Molly Sturges and The Firerock Team. . .. . .. . .. . .. . 10 Creative Muscles for Creative Leadership — Molly Sturges and Chrissie Orr . . .. . .. 23 The Jémez Principles Applied to Climate Justice. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . 25 Teaching Students to Think by Creating — Catherine Page Harris. . .. . .. . .. . .. . 27

John M. Nye 505.699.3492 John@GreenFireTimes.com

Seed Broadcast: Presenting Voices . . . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . 29

Skip Whitson 505.471.5177 Skip@GreenFireTimes.com

Dance of the Bees — Adelma Aurora Hnasko . . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .31

Anna C. Hansen 505.982.0155 DakiniDesign@newmexico.com

Dancing Earth Explores Renewable Energy. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . 32

Steve Jinks 505-303-0501 SteveJ@GreenFireTimes.com

Poem: Sol Not Coal — Hakim Bellamy. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. 35

DISTRIBUTION

Linda Ballard, Barbara Brown, Co-op Dist. Services, Nick García, Scot Jones, Andy Otterstrom (Creative Couriers), PMI, Daniel Rapatz, Tony Rapatz, Wuilmer Rivera, Denise Tessier, Skip Whitson, John Woodie

Newsbites . . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . 37 What’s Going On. . .. . .. . .. . . . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . 38

CIRCULATION: 30,000 copies Printed locally with 100% soy ink on 100% recycled, chlorine-free paper

GREEN FIRE TIMES

c/o The Sun Companies P.O. Box 5588, SF, NM 87502-5588 505.471.5177 • info@greenfiretimes.com © 2017 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 northcentral 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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ON THE COVER

Dancing Earth artistic director/ choreographer Rulan Tangen. (See page 32) © pauloTphotography

Green Fire Times • September 2017

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RESTORING RELATIONSHIP: CREATIVITY in the AGE of CLIMATE CHANGE

Molly Sturges

o talk about creativity and climate is to talk about restoring and strengthening relationships. Climate is a highly abstract concept. Having worked with hundreds of people around the globe on arts, social and environmental healing projects, I can honestly say I believe we are first and foremost beings that grow, learn and expand through many kinds of relationships. Some relationships are much more comfortable or familiar for us to engage with than others. Again and again, I have seen that we find and make ourselves in relationship to ourselves, each other, our living natural world and the larger mystery.

Creative vitality is fundamental to our individual and collective survival and flourishing.

In my work with individuals and communities I find that creative vitality is not negotiable in order to live full and healthy lives. It is creativity that allows us to challenge unhealthy and destructive constructs, beliefs, systems and habits and to create, discover and evolve new possibilities. Creative vitality is fundamental to our individual and collective survival and flourishing. We so often feel overwhelmed in our lives, and meaningful expression is necessary to offset and transform the impacts of all that we are facing and internalizing. Central to this is creating collective spaces where individual and community voices and expressions that are actively suppressed or repressed find

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Illustration by Ronnie García and David Gray

lift, respectful support and honor. We are all truly connected, and when one suffers we all suffer. If there is one thing a life in art has helped me with, it is the experience of coming into intimacy with the world around me in times when I have lost my way. Humans have been doing this forever. If we don’t have meaningful relationships, we will be unlikely to able to protect, care for and appropriately sacrifice for them. We will lose track of what is truly sacred. I respect the spectrum of creative responses and initiations in this era of climate change. In this issue of Green Fire Times we have hoped to present a small sampling of the many who are working deeply on the frontlines of creativity and climate. From the writer who listens closely to bees for inspiration, to the communities dancing the world into being season after season, to the permaculturalist who studies and educates about how nature innovates—I am strengthened and heartened by these efforts. I hold support and respect for the

artist-activist who convenes spaces for our evolution as we learn to feel and express from the fundamentally interconnected realms of justice, ecology and peace and those who earnestly live open-ended questions day after day in their unique ways.

feed destructive systems and that we take on the hard work to know what this truly means and how to do it—for real. This is the time to lay it down for universal access to clean air, water, food and the opportunities for each being to express what needs and wants to come forward. For through these actions, the wisdom, resources, solutions and the capacities we most need will, without question, arise to lead us forward. ■

As the founder of a multiple-year national arts and climate project, Firerock: Pass The Spark, I have encountered a plethora of deeply committed efforts and expressions across this country that all play an important role in the collective response to create a world that is in accordance with our best selves. As an artistic director who convenes circles of expression, reflection, communion and learning, I put Quinn Jonas cultivating a relationship with place immense faith in the power of our collective imagination and collective intuition. I honor Molly Sturges, the cultural workers everywhere who are a r t i s t i c d i r e c to r / working with heart and commitment to composer/facilitator, make spaces where our direct knowing and has been creating and empowered creativity can emerge at this time leading participatory despite fierce challenges. Our region is filled creative projects for with these bold and courageous efforts, many over 30 years. She is not seen by public eyes. United States Artist Fellow in Music, This is not a time to hold back. It is a time to recipient of many show up, challenge ourselves and stand for commissions, and a national creativity and express beauty and love in all its diverse consultant and mindfulness teacher. She forms. It is a time to get uncomfortable, provides consulting for individuals and identify our values, reflect earnestly, walk groups focusing on integrative well-being our talk, learn to work well with others, through applied spiritual, creative, somatic and help each other up when we fall. It is and contemplative practices. She is also the a time to welcome and embody our most founding artistic director of Littleglobe, beautiful selves and radiate that beauty Lifesongs and Firerock: Pass The Spark. Visit: without apology, doubt or shame. Your voice mollysturges.com, clearskyguidance.com and and your uniqueness matter greatly. And firerockmusical.com to do this it is imperative that we refuse to

Green Fire Times • September 2017

OP-ED: BEATA TSOSIE-PEÑA

n my ancestral homelands of northern New Mexico there resides knowledge that is held within Tewa deserts and forested landscapes, where mountains are elders, and our rivers are alive with a spirit that has sustained us since time immemorial with traditional knowledge that continues to guide us to be caretakers of this place. Countless prayers of First Nations are recorded here within shared memory of all that exists, and so is an act of violence so great that it will forever be recorded in sacred time. For in the western region of our Tewa world, in our beloved Jemez Plateau, site of a dormant supervolcano, and home to numerous ancestral, cultural sites, is where man first birthed the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL).

Other indigenous and land-based peoples

The first nuclear device was detonated on July 16, 1945 in southern New Mexico, and the subsequent fallout poisoned generations of more than 30,000 land-

based peoples who lived adjacent to the Trinity test site, and this plume would also cross state lines. “The National Cancer Institute (NCI) is carrying out a study to quantitatively estimate the range of possible radiation-related cancer cases in New Mexico that may be related to the nuclear test.”1 This will be the first attempt at a public health study about cancer some 75 years after the Trinity Test. Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety reports that “The people who lived adjacent to this bombing site have cancer rates four to eight times the national average.”2 The people of New Mexico and those downwind and downriver from Los Alamos deserve sincere acknowledgement and repentance from the U.S. government, access to healthcare and speedy inclusion in the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. It will take a national and global outcry for this atonement to be enacted.

Beata Tsosie-Peña at Poh Songeh (Río Grande) near Black Mesa in Santa Clara Pueblo

Green Fire Times • September 2017

were also irreparabl y harmed by environmental releases during production at LANL leading up to this first explosion, which w a s f o l l owe d by t h e countless deaths of those on the receiving end of these a-bomb-inations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This first assault of the nuclear age began with a rapid declaration of war on Mother Earth and her peoples, in which there were 2,053 nuclear weapons “tested” above and below ground, and in our oceans. We now have “naturally occurring” levels of background radiation as a result of these tests, and it is estimated that about 40 percent of the population will develop cancer.3 In my Tewa homelands in north-central New Mexico, it is difficult to reconcile how we existed in reciprocity in a rural, land-based agricultural existence as farmers, ranchers and seed savers, isolated from the industrial age, only to be thrust into the nuclear age when the “land was seized under a set of values that separated the peoples from the land.”4 This forcible act imposed a culture of violence on our soils, seeds, air, waters, future generations and spiritual existence that continues to enact harm to this day. Soil samples collected by soil chemist Morgan Drewniany with the indigenous women’s nonprofit Tewa Women United in the Río Arriba Valley of New Mexico in 2015 offers a preliminary study on soil contamination by LANL: “Over 100 samples were tested for arsenic, perchlorate, RDX and hexavalent chromium using quantitative or semiquantitative colorimetric methods. All four contaminants were found to be elevated, with levels above or closely approaching established health-protecting quality limits. It is clear that with levels this high, the health of those exposed is threatened, as are the surrounding waterways.”5 I know that nuclear energy is a false solution to our current energy crisis, if only because of the teachings held in our shared

A TEWA WOMAN’S REFLECTION on URGENCY

Rainbow over Puye cliff dwellings near the Pueblo of Santa Clara in New Mexico

stories as peoples impacted by the nuclear age. This is knowledge that has gone around the world, and now needs to be reburied and held as sacred, never to be forgotten in our oral her-story.

We cannot wait for science to validate the harm we know is happening.

In reflecting on our traditional, pueblo life-ways and unique worldview that has endured three waves of colonization and the constant environmental violence and racism of corporate and military institutions, I look to our elders. Our sacred mountains have borne witness and continue to hold teachings of sustainable living and abundance. In our ancestral homes, now ruins at Puyé cliff dwellings, is a prime example of some of the first solar-powered architecture. My elder, Kathy Sánchez, likes to say, “The only safe nuclear energy is 92.96 million miles away, found in our sun.” This we can tap into with the full blessing of the first peoples of this land. Solar and wind energy are nothing new when looking at pre-history and what we can learn from the indigenous peoples. I am from the Winter People and I am Badger clan. At Puyé, you can see where the

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The spirit of these elements is not being honored or respected in such a way that is in line with “taking only what we need.” Minerals and fossil fuels are being unearthed at such an accelerated rate that the prehistoric time held within them is being released too rapidly, and as a result we can all feel the reality of this fast-paced society we have created. It is a model that cannot sustain human life in the epochs of time that is held within stones and mountains. True time is held in cycles of cosmic spirals rather than in the linear, binary existence that came with the colonizers’ mindset. The impacts of our dependence on dirty energy are being felt globally in indigenous communities. There is a direct connection to environmental violence perpetuated against Mother Earth and the violence enacted upon women, girls and other genders. Women and girls are the first to feel the impacts of climate change when it comes to the devastation of super storms and relocation due to sea level rise. In my region we are impacted by longterm drought that has made our forests extremely susceptible to wildfires. In 2011, my Pueblo of Santa Clara lost 80 percent of our lands and watershed to the devastating Las Conchas wildfire. Now we are working to remediate the dangers of flooding due to forest loss and earthen mountainsides that burned so hot they became like hardened glass. We are working to regrow our cathedral forest. My children will never know it as it once was. It is estimated that it will take over 300 years to regenerate. We remain hopeful and strong as a people working toward healing. What is painful is that the fire was diverted north towards our homelands in order to protect LANL facilities and the nuclear waste dump there known as Area G, where more than 30,000 barrels of mixed radioactive waste lie above and below ground in unlined dirt pits. This was the third time these labs housing plutonium were threatened by wildfires, and

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I can’t help but think that nature is trying to cleanse herself. It is also a site riddled with seismic fault zones, and it is located above our sole-source aquifer, which means that more than half the population of New Mexico depends on that water for survival. I can tell you stories for hours of hundreds of contaminated sites that pose further threats to our water and health. Indigenous women are also the most vulnerable when it comes to negative impacts on the well-being of our bodies. Women’s bodies are more susceptible to contamination, and exposure to toxicity is only increasing. There are many studies of toxicity found in breast milk and the implications for future generations. Mohawk midwife Katsi Cook teaches us about “women as the first environment.” It is known amongst Native populations that our health and wellness are very dependent on the health and wholeness of our surroundings. One cannot be separated from the other. When I was pregnant with my daughters, all of their ova (eggs) were developing within them with the potential for reproduction. In my pregnant state, three generations were being held all at once. This it true for all diverse cultures and is another reason why we must protect those most vulnerable in our communities. As a Native woman living adjacent to a nuclear weapons facility, I can tell you that I am not protected by current environmental radiation exposure regulations. My children are not protected. Do you know who is? Known as “reference man,” the International Commission on Radiological Protection defines him as a 154-pound adult white male of western European descent and custom, being 5’7” in height, and between 20–30 years in age.”6 According to Dr. Mahkijani, women are 52 percent more likely to get cancer from the same dose as a man, and infants when exposed to radioactive iodine are 75 percent more likely. Some of the toxins from nuclear sites can cross placental boundaries. This is an example of how environmental justice intersects with reproductive justice. This environmental racism also does not consider the lifestyle of Native and landbased people, who are outdoors for longer periods of time, still grow their own food, harvest rainwater and use natural springs and bodies of water in our ceremonies, hunt, fish, gather wild plants, gather natural clays and dyes, etc. This puts us at risk for multiple and cumulative exposure to toxins over long periods of time, a factor that is also not considered when determining “allowable” levels of contamination into our environment and when determining water quality standards. We cannot wait for science to validate the harm we know is happening. We must be counted as experts that can help heal this place we are a part

old ones built their winter adobe homes on the southern side of a tall cliffside, where they would be heated by full sun. In the summer, they moved to a village on the top of the mesa where basins built into the rock harvested rainwater, and they could live in the relative coolness and life lessons that the forest offered. This is an example of how the Tewa summer and winter clans came to be, living in balance of seasonal time, with shared roles and responsibilities that was accepting of their place and a watershed that was all too precious and deeply respected. Their energy system consisted of values in which nothing was wasted, everything was recycled, you only took and harvested what you needed, water was regarded as life and medicine, and people were taught to love, respect and take care of one another.

Beata Tsosie–Peña speaks at a 2016 rally in support of renewable energy. Tewa Women United co-founder, Kathy Sanchez (r), from San Ildefonso Pueblo, also spoke.

of. The process of health studies, while needed, is costly and takes long periods of time. We must not be required to give up our ancestral ways of knowing to protect ourselves from environmental violence. It is time for-profit industries are held accountable, and that we are no longer classified as collateral damage for the war machine or fossil fuels industry. First Nations Peoples are an indicator species of the continued colonization and violence enacted on this continent. All the diverse people who call this planet home would do well to ensure that indigenous peoples are healthy and thriving, as their survival is now entwined. The water in our bodies comes from the same source as all other water on our planet. First and foremost, we are water beings, born from water, and cannot live without water’s life-giving gifts, a covenant that we share with all other life here on Mother Earth. We also share our life and resiliency with our corn mothers and all our seeds, which evolved with us so that we could thrive in mind, body and spirit. It is important that they are adapted to the changes that are happening, that they are protected from genetic contamination; for our true sovereignty is held in them. We lose it all when we lose our ability to feed ourselves. It is profound how growing corn teaches us to be in a good way with ourselves, each other and with the Earth. 1 “Study to Estimate Radiation Doses and Cancer Risks Resulting from Radioactive Fallout from Trinity Nuclear Test,” NIH: National Cancer Institute. https://dceg.cancer.gov/research/ how-we-study/exposure-assessment/trinity 2 “Commemoration events of Trinity Bomb Test and Church Rock Uranium Tailings Spill Set for Saturday, July 16 in Tularosa and Church Rock, NM,” Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, July 20, 2016. http://nuclearactive.org/commemoration-events-oftrinity-atomic-bomb-test-and-church-rock-uranium-tailings-spillset-for-saturday-july-16-in-tularosa-and-church-rock-new-mexico 3 “National Cancer Institute, Cancer Statistics,” 2016. https://

To do this, we must work to ensure the health of our lands, air and waters, so that this memory held within the cells of our seeds and genetic memory can continue to inform our journey as spiritual human beings. This journey is awakening us to a time of healing, a time that will right the wrongs that are so apparent. To do nothing is sealing our destructive end and is no longer an option. We must at least try. Our spiritual evolution awaits our higher selves, and we can be nurtured alongside our reclamation of meaningful relationships to all of creation. To all my relations reading this, I urge you to listen deeply to the struggle and voices of global indigenous communities who are currently putting their lives on the line to protect what they hold sacred. I urge that you open yourselves in mind, heart and spirit to the healing that happens when we love and respect water as the source of all life, how it will ultimately lead to loving and respecting ourselves and each other, and that it will give you the strength to take actions as a fellow “protector,” one in harmony with all life and creation. ■ Beata Tsosie-Peña is of mixed ancestry from Santa Clara Pueblo and El Rito, NM. She is a poet, farmer, early childhood specialist and program coordinator of Tewa Women United’s Environmental Justice Program. http:// tewawomenunited.org www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/understanding/statistics 4 “Community Summary of CDC’s Los Alamos Historical Document Retrieval and Assessment (LAHDRA) Project,” 2010. http//www.lahdra.org/pubs/Final%20LAHDRA%20 Community%20Summary_December%2002%202010.pdf 5 Morgan Drewniany, Red Dust (2015),1. 6 Arjun Mahkijani, “The Use of Reference Man in Radiation Protection Standards and Guidance with Recommendations for Change,” Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (April, 2009).

Green Fire Times • September 2017

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ONLY STORY WILL SAVE US

Michelle Otero

I shoveled until my mom’s voice shot across the yard. “Michelle, what are you doing?” She stood in the front doorway, one hand holding open the screen, the other on her hip. “Digging,”I answered, not looking up from the caliche dusting the metal. “For what?” I think I said, “Until it gets really hot” or something about hell without actually saying hell (per Sister Rosalie’s quiz). I didn’t want to see the place. I just wanted to get close enough to feel it and know the devil I was supposed to avoid. “Get inside,” my mom said. I’d like to think that if one of my children were digging her way to the dark underworld, we’d have a talk about her beliefs. I would tell her about the hole and how it was the first step in a long journey toward understanding that hell is not a physical place, but a state of being; that hell, for me, is separation from God. And just like communion with the Divine, the

hell of separation can exist in this realm, on Earth. 2016 was Earth’s warmest year since record keeping began in the 1880s and the third year in a row to hold that distinction. The monsoons in New Mexico came late this year and without the rhythm or the force I remember from childhood. The Río Grande evaporates in patches, revealing sandy peninsulas. Across the river, on the West Mesa, a black plume of smoke rises. I see climate change as the ultimate expression of our separation from the Divine — hell on Earth, if you will. I’ve experienced connection and communion walking through the cottonwood bosque along the middle Río Grande. I have felt the presence of spirit when a character detail or an opening line whispers to me as the sun is rising and the house is asleep. As a teenager, my best friend and I watched lightning storms haunt the Mimbres Valley from the safety of my ’76 Buick Skylark (the year was 1989) parked at Rockhound State Park. The Divine was in the loving hands that hid Easter eggs in the nichos of Stonehenge-like formations at City of Rocks, in the murmur of grown-ups telling stories around Grandma China’s kitchen table while my cousins and I played hideand-go-seek under a lean-to of stars.

glinting in a landfill. I imagine the courtyard of my adobe house is the landfill, labels yellowing then browning in the sun. Through the bottles I can see the sliding glass door to their rooms where she lies on the bed in broad daylight, communing with the world inside their iPhones. My best friend in high school tossed paper napkins and PopTart wrappers to the ground as we walked to class each morning. I’d follow behind her, retrieving them, scolding, “One day you’re gonna be walking knee-deep in all the litter you’ve thrown.”

Story builds, connects. It re-members, puts us back together.

Rain evaporates before it hits the ground.

The thing is, it’s not just her walking knee deep in the crap. It’s all of us.

The Río Grande is a puzzle of blue and brown. Across the river, on the west mesa, a black plume of smoke rises.

I’d pick up my friend’s trash. I don’t buy bottled water. As soon as my mother-in-law steps away from the sink, I shut the valve. I turn off lights when I leave the room. I unplug devices once they are charged. We subscribe to a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program. Most of the vegetables are grown within three miles of our house. But then, big trucks deliver pineapples to our neighborhood grocery store, even in January. Bottled water still exists. I am not the EPA. I am not Paris.

I sometimes feel helpless. My mother-in-law opens the hot water valve on the kitchen sink and lets it run and run while she wipes counters, loads the dishwasher, takes a phone call. My stepkids have a taste for bottled water. I imagine truckloads of plastic bottles © Bob Wick

hen I was seven I dug a hole in our front yard. My plan was to dig until I could hear the screams of hell, until flames knocked against the shovel. A week earlier, Sister Rosalie had separated our catechism class into lambs and goats. She kept a tally on the chalkboard as she fired questions at us: Do you say bad words? Do you disobey your parents? Do you go to mass every Sunday? The wrong answer, or even hesitation, cast us into the fiery pit. In the end, all but three of us were condemned as goats, sentenced to an afterlife of eternal suffering—at least until our next confession.

If separation is our illness, then how do we heal? Story. And who are our healers?

Río Grande del Norte

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Artists, the kind we find all over New Mexico,

Lyla June Johnston told a story to women assembled for the 1 Billion Rising rally on Santa Fe’s plaza earlier this year.

who commune with this place, who seem molded from the very earth beneath our feet, who couldn’t write or paint or sculpt or dance without being in relationship with the bosque, the lightning, the rocks, the stars, or the people. The people, those in my house, on my street, along this river we share, all of us squinting under the sun, waiting for rain, knowing it’s too hot for this time of year. Story builds, connects. It re-members, puts us back together. The artists I love best help set the table where story can happen. I am not the EPA. I am not Paris. But I am a writer. I am from this place. In my home, in my neighborhood, in my town, I have helped set a table, a poem on the menu, watercolor paper for a placemat, a paintbrush in place of a knife. Tell me your story. And in story, in place, we can see the Divine. ■ Michelle Otero is the author of Malinche’s Daughter, an essay collection based on her w ork with w omen survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault in Oaxaca, México, as a Fulbright Fellow. Her work has appeared in New Mexico Magazine, Brevity, Puerto del Sol and Palabra. She is a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop and a founding member of the TIASO Artist Cooperative. As a community-engaged artist, she utilizes creative expression and storytelling as the basis for community healing, positive social change and organizational development. A 10th-generation New Mexican, she holds a B.A. in History from Harvard University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College.

Green Fire Times • September 2017

WHY POETRY? WHY NOW? A nne H aven McDonnell

s we spin and hurl in an age of ecological collapse, staggering injustice and political mendacity and absurdity, why turn to poetry? Even as I write this, I see the training of my mind to categorize and justify, to argue one thing at the expense of another. But poetry, to me, is about blowing open this kind of thinking to experience, to a different kind of knowing, and to penetrate to a kind of feeling and experience that resists this kind of categorization. We are trained to value what is “measurable,” and yet the most important experiences of our lives—love, death, grief, wonder—are beyond measure and explanation. How do we measure moments of encounter: hearing a humpack’s scraping exhale reverberate over the water, seeing the graceful, fluid trot of a coyote up a city sidewalk. How do we “measure” such things?

witness and understand and resist a system that is killing what we love. Poetry elevates and penetrates experience in associative, intuitive and emotional ways. For me, poetry is a practice of paying attention to the world and my own responses to it, inviting a language that both surprises me and leads me to deepen my own attention. The attention that poetry asks and embodies, both as a reader or a writer of poems, is slow and careful and intimate. In our frenzied and addicted-to-distraction times, this slowing down of attention is, in itself, a political and a sacred act.

Poetry is language that can evoke these ways of knowing like no other.

The contradictions and paradoxes that poetry can embody, the stirrings of the body that poetry can illicit, the cracks in the heart, the whoosh of recognition and insight, the leaps of strangeness and intuition, are ways of knowing that are marginalized and endangered in much of capitalist and industrial culture. I believe poetry is language that can evoke these ways of knowing like no other. We need rational thought, now more than ever, to address climate change and move toward a decarbonized future. But we also need a more elemental, mysterious and penetrating language, one that speaks to our grief and our love of the world, as we

As a faculty member at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), I’ve learned about the ways that oral, Indigenous languages grow out of the land and link cultural ways of knowing to a specific place. For me, poetry might be a language in English, in writing and in sound and song that brings us back in conversation with the land and the more-than-human world. In thinking about writing this article, I realized how hungry I am to be in dialogue with other poets about poetry and climate change. So I asked some poets I admire to write some brief thoughts on the following questions, and here are their responses:

Questions: Why and how is poetry important or necessary in this time of climate change, climate injustice and ecological collapse? How and why do you turn to the language of poetry in this time?

Green Fire Times • September 2017

Elizabeth Bradfield: Poetry, more than other art forms, is for me a questioning art. There is so much didacticism, so much information and proscription in the news and in social media. Poetry does something stranger and deeper—it demonstrates the act of a singular voice asking why things matter and how they connect. It opens possibilities and, in doing so, emboldens me to see new ways of considering the world and its rich connections. I think we need to find new ways to consider and honor the world and our place in it so that we feel joy in action, not the passive quicksand of despair. I always turn to poetry. In times of joy, sorrow, confusion, rage, wonderment. It is a language and, even more, a way of thinking that seeks surprise and connection—that seeks, even more, the surprise of connection, of what can be connected. Between self and world, mind and heart, sound and sense, us and them, now and then. It is an expression that forges things, builds paths, makes clear new possibilities. I need that heart-opening engagement to keep tearing down the protective walls that are so tempting to build and ultimately so destructively isolating. Elizabeth Bradfield runs Broadsided Press, works as a naturalist, and teaches at Brandeis University. Her most recent poetry collection is Once Removed (Persea, 2015). Joe Wilkins: We know some things. We know (it is not about belief ) what we are doing to the planet will result in grievous harm—first, to those most vulnerable; then, eventually, to all of us. Though poetry may seem beside the point, I would argue it is, right now—when too many obfuscate or hide

behind convenient dishonesties—precisely the point. Donald Revell says, “Poetry is about trying to put a stop to people lying to themselves.” When we lie, we lie with language. Poetry makes language sharper, more exactly what it means. In this time of devastation, I turn to poetry to sharpen the blade of language. To wield that blade on the page. And in life. Joe Wilkins is the author of The Mountains and the Fathers and When We Were Birds, winner of the Stafford/Hall Prize in Poetry from the Oregon Book Awards. Derek Sheffield: It is clear that conventional ways of knowing have been unable to adequately penetrate the media-dominated psyche of our culture. In spite of all the science and numbers, climate change remains nebulous and our response anemic. We can’t grasp the threat for the same reason we haven’t answered it: a massive failure of the collective imagination. About stories, one Apache elder said that they “go to work on you like arrows” and “make you live right” and “make you replace yourself.” Right now, we need nothing less than a sky shot full of poems and stories falling straight toward us. Derek Sheff ield, whose book of poems is Through the Second Skin (Orchises, 2013), teaches poetry and ecological writing in Washington State. Alison Hawthorne-Deming: Poetry is the soulful record of how our inner lives are impacted by our moment in history. It is our witness, our song of praise and grief, our litany of gratitude and loss, our ritual in language of connection and empathy.

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We live in a time of radical loss—loss of places and species and privacy and now of the aspirational ideals of what it could mean to be American, despite our shortcomings. I turn to poetry-reading and writing it—to bear witness. And it’s important that the witnessing sees not only injustice and loss, but also the richness that remains of the natural world and stories of personal and cultural resilience. If we are living in a more biologically diverse time than those who follow us, then we are the record of this richness, diminishing though it may be. If we are living in a more culturally diverse time than those who preceded us, then we are the record of the difficulty and beauty of rising to that. And poetry’s capacity to cultivate radical empathy may be the most important tool we have now in a culture that is hardening into hatred, ridicule and mendacity. Poetry speaks truth to power and to powerlessness. Alison Hawthorne Deming’s most recent poetry book is Stairway to Heaven (Penguin 2016). She is Regents’ Professor and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in Environment & Social Justice at the University of Arizona. Camille Dungy: The poetry that matters most to me is poetry that manifests empathy. Reading poetry, and writing it also, I have learned to move outside the confines of my body into other bodies, other minds. This sort of expansive view of experience is one that leads to compassionate relationships. Good poetry doesn’t limit its empathic reach to the human world. The observations and connections made in good poetry remind us why the world beyond us is what matters. We need poetry that exercises such empathy. We need expansive compassionate imaginations in this moment of crisis and global destruction. Camille Dungy is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascades. Her debut essay collection is Guidebook to Relative Strangers. She is also editor of anthologies including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African Nature Poetry. James Aronhiota Stevens: I feel poetry is necessary at this time because poetry is the succinct language of nature. The natural world does not pontificate or expostulate. It relies on the succinct note— the short warning bark of the prairie dog, the ticking chirp of the hummingbird, and the staccato drip of rain on leaves. Listening from my porch on an August night, it may sound like a continuous song, but listening carefully and separating each sound, it is each element’s brief message overlaid on other brief messages—the apricot tree’s leaves occasionally speak in the wind, the crickets and their love of repetition, an occasional yip from a coyote.

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“EMERGING VIEW” written on the for sale signs scattered and spreading up county road 8. Fall in the conifers, a rusty glow sinks then tags the mind, a thing forgotten, the tug of unraveling. The forest gives itself up, a luminous smear of exit – aspens quilt a dizzy yellow, and now this blanket of dead lodgepole pine. We can almost hear the strange rhythm that brings those beetles, thrums with weak music, the fungus that follows their footsteps, their marbled blue trails polished like a map on her kitchen floor. Still, an old woman can rest here, orchids in the boggy meadow, chanterelles on the fire road, a pine marten on the bird feeder watches her watch him through the window. Hungry moose furrow deep trenches through snow banks on the creek, which roars into spring’s swarm. We look through dead pine, the snowy teeth of James peak now visible, mountains rise like the grieving that rolls into this strange season, wheeling towards us, nameless on our animal tongues. — Anne McDonnell

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This poem was originally published in Terrain.org and was also included in Nature and Environmental Writing: A Craft Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Press: Nov. 2016).

I believe that time is of the essence in getting the message out there. Poetry speaks briefly but quickly. It gets to the point. In this day and age of immediate Google answers to our wonderment and all things at our fingertips, it is unlikely that most readers will spend much time with lengthy articles about the shrinking forests and whitening coral reefs, yet the speedy imagery of poetry can move readers to action in a quick and emotional manner. James Thomas Stevens (Akwesasne Mohawk) is the author of eight books of poetry and is an Associate Professor at the IAIA. ■ Anne Haven McDonnell is an associate professor in English and Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and is currently enrolled in a low-residency MFA program at the University of Alaska. Her poetry can be found or is forthcoming in Orion Magazine, Nimrod Journal, Dark Mountain, Terrain. org, and other journals, as well as Nature and Environmental Writing: A Craft Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Press: Nov. 2016).

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LEAD LIKE a LEAF

Joel Glanzberg

ife is by nature creative. Unlike mechanical systems, this is how she di-solves her problems. She moves to new levels or worlds where the problems are no longer problems. This is at the core of leadership in living systems. There is no farseeing operator driving. Every member plays its unique role in moving the whole forward.

are all structured before they run. Like my son’s body—all of our bodies for that matter—all living structures are built by doing what they have been created to do. His body was made by metabolizing nutrients, water and oxygen and moving around, just as it is today. The river was not dug and then filled with water. The river running made

Anyone who has ever played a team sport or in a band knows how this works. There is a unifying vision of what you are trying to do, where you are trying to go, and a clear sense of each player’s essential roles within it. We carefully watch one another, looking for opportunities to set up or back up or capitalize upon our con-spiritors. We take our clues from one another, from our context in the working and playing of the whole, and from our own inner compass. It is not co-operation like the parts of a machine. The best bands and teams are driven by internal tensions and dynamics that drive each player beyond his or her known abilities to create something far greater than the sum of the parts. Holding my baby son one night as he slept, I thought about how I would make his body. Having built things all my life, this seemed simple. I would begin by framing him up, joining his bones together using his muscles, tendons and ligaments. Then I’d run his arteries and veins, his nervous system, install all of his organs, sheath him is skin, fill him with blood, a bit of food and water and start him up, maybe with a spark from jumper cables. Of course he was made nothing like this, but this Frankensteinian thought experiment revealed my own mind’s mechanicalness and the difference between how we think about and make things and how the living world creates. Everything we make is conceived and constructed before it begins to carry out the processes for which it was designed. Our cars, homes, businesses, schools, programs

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“Cells rely heavily on the code of DNA for development, but they also need a sense of place to do their work. Indeed, the code is utterly worthless without the cell’s ability to determine its place in the overall organism, a feat that is accomplished by the elegant strategy of paying attention to one’s neighbors. As [Matt] Ridley writes, ‘the great beauty of embryo development, the bit that human beings find so hard to grasp, is that it is a totally decentralized process.’” (from Emergence by Steven Johnson)

Spiral plant tendril on baby’s hand

Mexico and Arizona as a young man. He tells a story of riding with a friend one day when they saw a large animal swimming across a stream. At first they mistook her for a deer until, climbing up the other bank, they saw a she-wolf being eagerly greeted by her yearling pups. Being hunters, they had been taught the simple equation that “fewer predators would mean more game, and no predators would mean a hunter’s paradise. So pulling their rifles from their scabbards they shot all of the wolves. Arriving on the other side Leopold saw something in the dying wolf ’s eyes that changed his life—a “wild green fire” that taught him that every mountain lives in mortal terror of its deer herd and how to “Think Like a Mountain.” Without the wolves chasing and eating the deer, the mountain would be eaten to the nub, the soils washed away, the rivers flooded and then parched by drought. All would starve, including the deer and the hunters.

the river. The branching scaffold of the tree was not built before it carried water and nutrients up into the sky and sugars back down into the roots. The tree built its body by adding layer after layer of carbon taken from the sky through photosynthesizing, from the moment it put out leaves into the air and roots into the earth. Manufacturing may need an overseer. Growing does not. To see, think about and work well with this living creation we are blessed to be members of, it is essential that we think not like an engineer and lead like a lieutenant, but think like a mountain and lead like a leaf. Aldo Leopold, the father of restoration ecology and the National Wilderness System, worked as a cowboy in New

We are so confounded by thinking about the living world in the terms of force, mass and velocity that even our prayers are confused. If the lion lies down with the lamb, it will not mean peace but the end of us all. Unless the lion plays his role, the sheep, like the untended deer, will starve us all. Our ecological problems are not caused by humans being bad or not belonging, but because we are confused about our role and how we fit within the living of the whole. We are so accustomed to machines and the mechanical world of Newtonian Physics that we can barely think about how to address the problems of a living world. We try to fix them as we would our old truck: We identify the bad part that is to blame for the problem and repair, replace, or remove it. This is our general

approach to everything from medicine to foreign policy and justice. We try to get tumors, dictators and other “bad guys” to reform or we replace them or simply take them out. We are continually surprised when new tumors, symptoms, or bad guys promptly arise to take their place. Changing the manifestation of living systems without shifting the underlying causal patterns will always be an uphill battle and often takes us in the wrong direction, like super-gluing the cracks in a hatching eggshell.

If the lion lies down with the lamb, it will not mean peace but the end of us all.

Our failures within this living world are always failures of imagination. Life is by nature creative. She never goes back but only forward. Repair or restoration may work for antique chairs but not ecosystems, eggs or countries. They will never be what they once were, any more than you will ever be a teenager or Humpty Dumpty will be put together again. Living systems, whether organisms or organizations, ecosystems or economic systems, resolve their problems not by “fixing” them but by outgrowing them. The maturing chick running out of food and space in her egg does not add on or send for take-out. She does not fix her cracking shell but uses this breakdown to break through and emerge into another world, one of air and light where her parents feed her. When the chick and her siblings outgrow the nest and their parents’ ability to feed them, they fledge and fly into the wider world where they can feed themselves and migrate to CONTINUED ON PAGE 16

Green Fire Times • September 2017

Lead Like a Leaf continued from page 15

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The failure of the shell is no disaster. It marks the successful transit of a stage, a step, a layer. In her remarkable book Tending the Wild, ethnobotanist Kat Anderson shows how Native people of California provided for their food, fiber, shelter and energy in ways that increased the species diversity and productivity of their homelands. Unlike the story we are familiar with where humans destroy the land to live, they co-evolved richer a n d m o re c om p l e x ecosystems. It turns out this was true all over the planet and that this is the role of human beings in living systems. Our tendency to disturb living systems is our gift, not our curse. We simply have not been focusing on it or using it well. Throughout the world, humans have used ecological disturbance to evolve ecosystems. We have used fire, flooding, cutting, digging, gathering. The key is when, where and how much. Indigenous peoples in what is now known as the Northeastern U.S. used periodic burning to clear the forest floor of sticks and brush, encourage the straight young shoots that could be used for basket and arrows, take out the ticks and other insects, as well as kill the thin-barked beech and maple trees while encouraging the growth of nut trees like chestnut, oak, hickory, butternut and pecan. This fed not only them but also the deer, bear and turkey. The ash buffered the acidic pH of the soils as well as of the waters, helping the vast beds of shellfish in the bays to easily build their shells. The same thing happens in the ecosystems of our minds. Disturbance opens cracks that allow sunlight into the forest floor where new worlds can emerge. Think of the Copernican Revolution, how seeing that the Earth was not the center of the universe led to the Renaissance, and the ending of the iron-fisted rule of the Roman Catholic Church and feudalism. This is why these forces fought so hard to patch these cracks that let the light in—they were the openings to a new world where they were not in charge. Living systems regenerate themselves by transforming. A caterpillar does not get surgery to repair damaged skin or regain his youthful figure but pupates. His

Green Fire Times • September 2017

structure literally dissolves and a new one grows from imaginal cells to emerge as an unrecognizable creature. It is just like the way a plant moves from growing leaves to colorful flowers, moving from one stage of life to another not trying to reprise earlier highlights.

more favorable climes as the seasons change.

Rock formation near Moab, Utah

The genius of our ancestors was in seeing the potential in problems. Instead of ultrapasteurizing, packaging and refrigerating milk to prevent it from going bad they helped it transform into creamy Camembert. Spoiling grain became bread and beer. Frozen corn crops became chicos. The worst cut of the hog became bacon. Freezing water, where rolling into it would mean death led to the kayak, where the paddler could roll out as fast as he or she rolled in. All of our inventions, other than machines, solved problems by seeing them as opportunities for transformation, as doorways to new worlds. Climate change could be the best thing that has ever happened to us—if we can see it as an opportunity for transformation. We know that if we solve this symptom of our worldview without changing that worldview we will simply create another world-killing symptom. May this be the fire, the wild green fire that transforms our worldview, the crack that opens for us to emerge into another world where we humans can see and know how to lead and live as essential members of this living community. ■ Joel Glanzberg is an a p p l i e d n a t u ra l i s t working to help people r elear n ho w to see with nature’s mind. Glanzberg is well known for his decades of work in Permaculture, tracking, and Regenerative Design and Development. He lives in Pojoaque, N.M. with his wife and three children. Visit patternmind.com or regenesisgroup.com

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BIOMIMICRY: THE PRACTICE of EMULATING NATURE’S GENIUS Toby Herzlich

ife creates conditions conducive to life. From the first single cell that split into two, life has been expressing itself as a creative force—constantly wriggling, pulsing, joining, dividing, breathing, dying, decaying and morphing into new and ongoing expressions of matter and energy. This vitality happens in a context and through co-evolving relationships in the practice of taking care of the place that will take care of the next generation. Nature builds soil, opens new niches, coaxes mutually beneficial relationships, adapts toward emergent new possibilities. Success for an organism is not so much about how large it grows or how much power it has in its ecosystem, but how long it can last, measured in generations over time. Imagine if we too were guided by the commitment to create conditions conducive to life —emulating this first principle of the natural world in every product we invent, every policy we negotiate, all of our city planning, every solution we craft to address the call of climate change. What if every act of our leadership were guided by this practice? How might it shift the way we live together?

Applying creative solutions based on time-tested intelligence

Biomimicry—the practice of emulating nature’s genius—is based on the simple recognition that life has been adapting, evolving, resiliently regenerating and flourishing as a complex interconnected web of relationships for 3.8 billion years. Since the publication of Janine Benyus’ 1997 seminal book, Biomimicry – Innovation Inspired by Nature, designers, architects, engineers and leaders of all kinds have been turning to nature as mentor for our own sustainability challenges. Much has been sorted out in life’s eons of trial and error, including things we are desperately trying to understand now. As a young species, only 300,000 years old, we humans can learn from nature about getting through our climate crisis and applying creative solutions based on timetested intelligence. It starts by asking, “How does nature do it?” How does nature create clean energy? By studying the way trees capture sunlight

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LIFE’S PRINCIPLES and create sugars that feed the whole forest, might we find inspiration to design collective solar energy systems that can support our city or region? How does nature conserve water? By looking at how high-desert dwellers like our piñón tree and prickly pear cactus make the most of a scarce resource, might we come up with new conservation practices that store water and then use it well? How does nature bounce back after disturbance? By examining what happens in a fire-dependent ecosystem, we can learn

from our local aspen stands about the creative process of regeneration and succession. How does nature build equitable economies? By investigating creatures that have co-evolved in mutually beneficial relationships, we can learn from partners like the raven and the wolf, which assist each other’s hunt and share the spoils. I n h e r n e w b o o k , Teeming: Ho w Superorganisms Work to Build Infinite Wealth in a Finite World, Tamsin Wooley-Barker says “Nature’s four-billion-year-old R&D lab inspires us with a bottomless treasure-

trove of energy-efficient, low-toxic, and time-tested innovations. All around us, the Age of Information gives way to the Age of Biology, as radically disruptive ideas emerge from simple observation of the living world— transformative, surprising, yet somehow obvious.” Biomimicry has been informing inventors, architects and engineers for many years now as an emerging design discipline that is both streamlining and accelerating innovation. It’s time to bring nature’s intelligence into our social systems. As CONTINUED ON PAGE 19

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Biomimicry

continued from page

we are trying to figure out how to live sustainably together on this planet, why not turn to the planet itself for guidance? Why not study healthy, thriving ecosystems as model, measure and mentor for how we live together in regenerative ways? Biomimicry for Social Innovation was birthed with that aim. Partnering with Biomimicry 3.8, the global thought leaders advancing the field of Biomimicry, we are translating nature’s principles into guidelines for leaders to apply in their creative efforts. Life’s operating principles such as using feedback loops, cultivating cooperative relationships, self-organizing, incorporating diversity, and integrating the unexpected become leadership practices employed as we evolve our society. We are currently working with Canopy, an international rainforest protection NGO, helping them adopt life’s lessons for fostering creative partnerships— patterns gleaned from examining 180 different examples of mutually beneficial relationships in the natural world. They will use these insights as creative seeds in their game-changing work with paper and textile corporations, shifting them from forest-consuming destroyers into champions for conservation.

Biomimicry can be applied to sustainable product designs. Solar Ivy is an energy system, created by Sustainably Minded Interactive Technology, that mimics the natural growth of ivy on buildings and in nature. www.solarivy.com

aspirational goal to meet or exceed the ecological performance of the wild lands next door would guide our decisionmaking. What if each new development project was designed to sip water, create a surplus of energy, absorb CO2 and cool the air—replicating the strategies of our neighboring organisms as a pathway for addressing climate change and coevolving with our own landscape. David Orr, author, professor and environmental visionary talks about the reality that we have the necessary technologies to overcome climate change and ensure healthy planetary systems. The question he poses is around human will—how we create a culture that yearns for sustainability. With a charge to us as leaders that “hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up,” Orr says that to foster real intelligence in society, “We can attempt to teach the things that we imagine the earth would teach us: silence, humility, holiness, connectedness, courtesy, beauty, celebration, giving, restoration, obligation and wildness.”

It’s time to bring nature’s intelligence into our social systems.

In the S outhwest, there are many opportunities to learn from nature’s strategies about how to live in a waterscarce, sunlight-rich, species-diverse environment. How might our cities work more like the healthy ecosystem of which we are a part—conserving water, capturing sunlight, sequestering carbon, cooling and warming the environment as needed through the days and seasons? Imagine what might happen if we made the collective commitment that our cities became places where our buildings, infrastructure and policy choices actually regenerate and improve our environment, like the richly productive ecosystems that we find all around us in nature. The

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In this time when the health of the planet itself is our most important mission, let’s look for all the ways that our leadership can create conditions conducive to life. ■ Toby Herzlich, an internationally r e c o g n i z e d facilitator, trainer, and organizational consultant, is the founder of Biomimicry for Social Innovation, through which she provides training for leaders to use nature’s intelligence as guidance and inspiration. toby@nets.com, www.bio-sis.net

Economics of Happiness Conference “We are facing an environmental crisis, an economic crisis, and a crisis of the human spirit.” — Helena Norberg-Hodge Film Director of The Economics of Happiness

• Inspiring Speakers • Cutting-Edge Thinkers • Thought Provoking Conversations

October 12-14, 2017 James A. Little Theater at the New Mexico School for the Deaf 1060 Cerrillos Road, Santa Fe learn more at: www.localfutures.org, www.reconnect-today.org

Green Fire Times • September 2017

FIREROCK: PASS the SPARK

Inspiring Change Heart to Heart Molly Sturges and The Firerock Team

Illustration by Ronnie García and David Gray

irerock is a project that catalyzes community engagement with climate change through the ancient practices of song and story. At its core it is a mythical, warm-hearted, family-friendly musical production that illuminates humankind’s disconnection from the destructive social, spiritual and economic impacts of extractive energy. Performances are integrated with engagement activities to build community, create spaces for dialogue and foster sustained collective action. U ltimatel y, Firerock focuses on what we can do to adapt to combat the worst impacts of climate change and join together with dignit y and c are to create a truly just and compassionate world.

at the Adobe Rose Theater in Santa Fe. In partnership with the advocacy/ educational groups New Energ y Economy, Earth Care and others, the Firerock team will support and amplify ongoing efforts for a just transition in the Southwest. At the same time, three DIY versions of different scales that anyone can produce, a Firerockers Unite social networking platform, and a comprehensive toolkit including support videos, educational materials, activities and more, will be released to assist host groups around the globe.

Collaboration and learning at the front lines of creativity and climate change

In early January 2018, Firerock: Pass The Spark launches with a premiere

The overall project design and artistic core of Firerock has taken many years of collaboration and learning at the front lines of creativity and climate change. The production is motivated by a heartfelt prayer for connection, engaged

Work-in-progress reading at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe

Green Fire Times • September 2017

reciprocity and the need to identify and honor that which is sacred. Firerock has literally been created by a committed team of artists, activists and cultural workers from around the country, and by hundreds of people in residencies and workshops with students, directly impacted communities, faith groups, climate advisors, activists and native communities. Firerock is designed so that any individual, group or organization can bring the production to life in its community. Firerock c an be staged in sc h ools, places of worship, universities, cultural centers, community theatres, around dinner tables, etc. Firerock is intended to evolve and create a network of cross-community learning and regionally appropriate solutions. The central story of Firerock goes like this: A coveted vein of Firerock, a symbol for fossil fuels, has spent 365 million years underneath the W ildwood, a magical forest outside the mining town of Hopewell Junction. The ancient and wise Firerock yearns to stay in the earth, but her cries are ignored. Years of burning firerock have produced the Snooze, a numbing slumber that disconnects Hopewell’s inhabitants from the natural world. One family grapples with whether to sell the beloved Wildwood, a move that could help a young student and provide for the struggling community in the short-term but bring devastation for generations to come. Their decision is complicated by the arrival of an ambitious

young man from a mining company. With everyone’s future at stake, Firerock and a bumbling otter must awaken the spark of connection in Hopewell residents before their world is lost forever. Climate disruption is one of the greatest challenges humanity has ever faced.

Molly Sturges and Charles Gamble rehearse the song Reciprocity in workshop

Confronting it requires that we find emotional connection and pathways to meaningful participation in climate change efforts. It also requires true sacrifice, long-term commitments, fundamental rewiring towards honoring that which is sacred, and effective actions to ensure universal access to clean air, water, food for all humans and the species with whom we share the Earth. As a musician and artist, I have deep faith in the power of story, song and dance. They are time-tested. They move hearts and minds. We are creatures of belief, feeling and story. We need myths, and we need good ones to help us navigate these times. There is no clearly defined

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The focus of Firerock’s 2018 launch ( January 11–14 and 18–20) is to premiere the full-scale musical with a focus on documentation to assist DIY host sites in staging their own versions of Firerock. With the introduction of the online DIY Toolkit, the Firerock team will support communities in mounting the production and catalyzing climate engagement around the world. Firerock Audience engagement after a rehearsal of will be offering participatory workshops Firerock and family-friendly activities from October 2017 to January 2018 that will enable schools, community members, faith communities, family and friend groups, workplaces and others to participate. To learn more, hear songs and see videos, or to sign up to become a host, email info@firerockmusical.com or visit www.firerockmusical.com path forward, and inspiration is necessary for our vital presence and engagement. The Firerock team has worked hard to accomplish this. Directed by Acushla Bastible, Kristin Rothballer, Kavita Krishna and myself, and supported by an incredible team of many others, the project has been carefully shaped after years of learning from many forms of feedback. I have heard it said that strong art has to change its maker. F irerock has done just that.

of us to take our place as part of the story, to welcome in the shadow and the challenges, to truly celebrate our uniqueness and to protect, respect and care for each other and our world. It is not about quitting when it is convenient or when it does not feel good. At the very least, may we learn to give as much as we take and get very real with what that means in daily life. Personally, I struggle with this every day, but I am comforted to know I am not alone; we are an evolving work-inprogress, and each day is truly a miracle worthy of immense gratitude.

At its core it is a mythical, warm-hearted, family-friendly musical production.

Making long-term commitments to a r t p r o j e c t s w a s n’t something that was my first idea as a professional composer and artistic director. For me it evolved from seeing how participatory creativity actually has the power to change lives. As the founding artistic director of the artist collective Littleglobe, an arts and hospice and aging program (Lifesongs), and other initiatives, I learned through onthe-ground experiences filled with hard challenges and blessings. Addressing the era of climate change asks each

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Firerock engages heart, hope and imagination at this time of great urgency. It is one of the many threads of a great tapestry of expressions and efforts that helps build the relationships and resources needed to meet this time with dignity, care, clarity, precision and love. ■ Join us for all things Firerock. Visit www.f irerockmusical.com to hear songs and see videos.

ART BECOMES THE OXYGEN: AN ARTIST RESPONSE GUIDE

A Guide for Artists, Emergency Management Agencies, Funders, Policy-Makers and Communities Responding to Natural and Civil Emergencies The U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (not a government agency), an action network of artists and allies dedicated to cultural democracy, recently released Art Became the Oxygen: An Artist Response Guide, a free, downloadable 74-page guide to arts-based work responding to disaster or other community-wide emergencies, from Katrina to Ferguson, Sandy to Standing Rock. Most of the work featured in the USDAC’s Guide was created in collaboration with community members directly affected by crisis. Most of it pursues one or more of three main objectives: offering comfort, care, or connection in the immediate wake of a crisis; creating powerful images and experiences that amplify and focus protest, penetrating the media and public awareness; and engaging those most affected by a crisis in creative practices over time that help them reframe and integrate their experience, building resilience and strengthening social fabric. Visit Usdac.us/artisticresponse, #ArtResponds

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Green Fire Times • September 2017

James H. Auerbach, MD and Staff support Green Fire Times in its efforts to bring about a better world by focusing on the people, enterprises and initiatives that are transforming New Mexico into a diverse and sustainable economy. SoMe oF THe TopicS GreeN Fire TiMeS SHowcASeS: Green: Building, products, Services, entrepreneurship, investing and Jobs; renewable energy, Sustainable Agriculture, regional cuisine, ecotourism, climate Adaptation, Natural resource Stewardship, Arts & culture, Health & wellness, regional History, community Development, educational opportunities James H. Auerbach, MD provides dermatology services in Santa Fe, NM (Sorry, we are no longer accepting new clients.)

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CREATIVE MUSCLES for CREATIVE LEADERSHIP Molly Sturges and Chrissie Orr

Combined, Molly Sturges and Chrissie Orr have developed and executed creative participatory projects around the world for over 80 years. They have collaborated on many arts and social and environmental healing projects. They love to stir things up enough to shake off the old junk that makes everyone unhappy. They like to welcome in expressions that provide inspiration and vitality. Here are some “creative muscles” they focus upon in their projects: collaborators? There is nothing easy or guaranteed in our collaborative efforts. To the contrary, collaboration requires us to show up as ourselves, get down and dirty, and let go of our preconceived notions. When we are open to new possibilities we can delve into a deeper process. Additionally, all too often, players in collaborative efforts do not have an equal say in the collaboration. Inquiry: Who am I as a collaborator, and how do I create healthy collaborative relationships and environments?

Experimenting: Why Not? Fundamental to creativity is the willingness to try something out. Yes, it may not work out. Yes, it may feel like a “failure.” Without experimenting we cannot catch and cultivate what will become solutions and pathways forward. Inquiry: Where do you let yourself experiment and when?

Connecting The Dots Creative engagement allows us to openly connect dots and make new expressions between those connections. In climate work, the relationship between jobs, justice, environment and spirituality are fundamental, and yet often these connections are overlooked or ignored. Creativity allows us to challenge constructs, beliefs, systems and habits and create new possibilities. Inquiry: What integrations do I feel that I want to express and how might I do that?

Listening: Dancing Belly to Belly With The Mystery Listening is fundamental to coming into relationship with ourselves, each other, the living world and the greater mystery. What we listen to and how we listen is at the heart of creativity and its expression. Many of us are not taught to listen deeply, and yet the simple act of listening with our full selves is often deeply satisfying and healing. Inquiry: How do you listen and what do you listen to?

Embracing The Shadow: Learning to Be Uncomfortable Creativity asks us to open up in real ways. Wanting to be comfortable is a natural impulse, but only through welcoming that which makes us uncomfortable, going to the edge, will we grow and evolve. Our challenges are also our great teachers. Avoiding difficulty, conflict and pain will simply deny us the harvest of our innate capacities and wisdoms. Inquiry: What are you uncomfortable with personally and socially, and how can you open to fuller engagement? Collaborating: Making Stuff Up Together Direct experience allows us to have a much fuller and healthier experience of life. Collaboration is at the heart of creating, yet when and where do we learn to be good

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Saying Yes When You Want To Say No We open, we close, we open, we close. We do this in many ways in a day, a month and a lifetime in millions of ways. Starting to cultivate the habit of saying yes to possibility is not always easy, but it is essential for creativity to blossom. It requires trust and the willingness to take risks. Learning to welcome, watch and not give power to our doubt and self-criticism is essential if we are to evolve. Inquiry: What do you say yes to on a regular basis and what do you say no to? In these times we are all asked to step into unique forms of creative leadership. May each and every one of us cause some kind of beautiful trouble. ■

Green Fire Times • September 2017

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THE JEMEZ PRINCIPLES APPLIED to CLIMATE JUSTICE

wenty years ago, 40 people at a meeting on globalization and trade agreed on a set of six principles for democratic organizing. The group was a combination of environmental justice and environmental health advocates that included many people of color and community organizers. Their intent was to help people coming from different cultures, politics, and organizations build a movement together. W hat they came up with are now known as the Jémez Principles, after the small pueblo in New Mexico where the meeting was held. Addressing climate from any angle requires us to support communities at risk of racism, gender violence, toxicity, climate instability, xenophobia and more. The Jémez Principles are powerful guides to help create safe and healthy communities for everyone. Be Inclusive If we hope to achieve just societies that include all people in decision-making and assure that all people have an equitable share of the wealth and the work of this world, we must work to build that kind of inclusiveness into our own movement in order to develop alternative policies under neo-liberalism. This requires more than tokenism; it cannot be achieved without diversity at the planning table, in staffing and in coordination. It may delay achievement of other important goals; it will require discussion, hard work, patience and advance planning. It may invol ve

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conflict, but through this conflict, we can learn better ways of working together. It’s about building alternative institutions, movement building, and not compromising out in order to be accepted into the anti-globalization club. Emphasis on Bottom-Up Organizing To succeed, it is important to reach out into new constituencies and to reach within all levels of leadership and membership base of the organizations that are already involved in our networks. We must be continually building and strengthening a base which provides our credibility, our strategies, mobilizations, leadership development and the energy for the work we must do daily. Let People Speak for Themselves We must be sure that relevant voices of

people directly affected are heard. Ways must be provided for spokespersons to represent and be responsible to the affected communities. It is important for organizations to clarify their roles, and whom they represent, and to assure accountability within our structures. Work together in Solidarity and Mutuality Groups working on similar issues with compatible visions should consciously act in solidarity and mutuality and suppor t each other ’s work. In the long run, a more significant step is to incorporate the goals and values of other groups with your own work, in order to build strong relationships. For instance, in the long run, it is more important that labor unions and community economic development projects include the issue of environmental sustainabilit y in their own strategies, rather than just

lending support to the environmental organizations. So communications, strategies and resource sharing are critical to help us see our connections and build on these. Build Just Relationships Among Ourselves We need to treat each other with justice and respect, both on individual and organizational levels, in this country and across borders. Defining and developing “just relationships” will be a process that won’t happen overnight. It must include clarity about decisionmaking, sharing strategies and resource distribution. There are clearly many skills necessar y to succeed, and we need to determine ways for those with different skills to coordinate and be accountable to one another. Commitment to Self-Transformation As we c hange societies, we must change from operating on the mode of individualism to communitycenteredness. We must “walk our talk.” We must be the values that we say we’re struggling for, and we must be justice, be peace, be community. This and other environmental justice documents can be downloaded from www.ejnet.org/ej/ ■

Top: Jémez Pueblo landscape © Seth Roffman

Left: Climate action marches and rallies have taken place around the world.

Green Fire Times • September 2017

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TEACHING STUDENTS to THINK by CREATING

Climate Change as a Challenge Calling for Action Catherine Page H arris

enjoin students to begin the process of learning by making. I usually mention the analogy of Athena springing fully formed from the head of Zeus and the observation that if you aren’t an Olympian god, likely you aren’t going to be able to pull off that kind of (pro) creation. I think we all share a basic fear of having to see our mistakes. Yet, those mistakes and sketches and half-baked ideas are the stuff that moves us forward. Sometimes, I will sit down and try to offer the internal dialog that goes with my own process of making and designing. It’s just an example of how I can’t see the intersections or the curves, or the topography until I draw them. Once drawn, they are part of my information. Not drawn, not modeled, not sculpted, not rendered in the computer, I have no way to decide if any of these decisions are good or bad. We tend to want to be able to abstractly say whether something is worth effort or not. This summer, a student asked me to judge his abstract idea about proportion before any drawings had been made. But I really have no idea how something is going to work out unless it is drawn or modeled. And we resist time, effort and the pain of mistake-making.

community participation in design and construction which can create...

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Cycle of Sustainability a long term social economic and envirometnally sustainable center which would...

physical manifestation. Our work is not to know immediately what is right, it is to identify processes and tools that can help lead us to what fits. What does this have to do with climate change and off-the-grid sustainable communities? Or academia and Native design? Climate change calls for multiple scales of human behavior change. As a designer and artist, I have become a believer in changing actions by offering infrastructures. Scale of participation is often about ease. My

The corollary to the above is, “If you look at your work and you don’t like it, you can always change it.” There is always a moment when what you are making is the worst thing you have ever made in your life and your work is to improve it. This goes for any drawing, any design, any

Diné Tł’oh and Future Generations

Ultimately the sustainability of this project depends on the community itself, but by engaging youth, adults and elders the community center can become truly sustainable.

Community members, students and volunteers came together to build a community center, learn about sustainable technologies and strawbale construction, and create a sense of ownership and self-determination for the town of Navajo, Red Lake Chapter, NM.

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students learn to prototype, model and design through physical engagement with analog and digital technologies. This fall I am leading an off-thegrid sustainable community studio in Landscape Architecture with Dr. Mark Stone from Civil Engineering in collaboration with the Indigenous Design and Planning Institute at UNM led by Dr. Ted Jojola and Mic haela Shirley. The Landscape Architecture students are graduate students in their third semester of the Masters of Landscape Architecture program. The studio focuses on regional context and systems—in particular complex adaptive systems.

from the tribe’s current housing. Another tailings pile is currently without an owner and thus has just had some surface erosion treatment. It is not likely to be removed. The community has some reparation money and hopes to move to a mesa area that historically was a summer grazing ground. There are no longer sheep grazing among the community due to poor health and lack of reproduction of the sheep, which the community blames on radiation from the tailings. They hope to regain the culture and economic engine of grazing by moving to the mesa. The mesa itself has no electricity and no water infrastructure. Students will split into four groups to research and design an off-the-grid settlement. Potential technologies include rainwater har vesting, solar col lection, wind generation, alternative sewage treatment, passive solar placement, density and construction of buildings. We will be creating energ y and water budgets to understand how much rainwater collection can do for them, how much renewable energy can be generated and what kinds of living conditions would be possible in an off-the-grid situation. We will also be creating beautiful designs working with Navajo design principles.

Our work is to identify processes and tools that can help lead us to what fits.

The project is to propose a sustainable community design for a group of about 20-25 families who currently live in an area heavily contaminated by uranium tailings. The EPA endeavors to remediate the site, though the remediation is largely just scraping the ground and piling the tailings slightly farther from the existing houses. They are also planning to move one tailings pile to a site down-watershed

The studio will produce a book for the Red Water Pond Community of design solutions. We also will create a physical model they can share with visitors and a virtual model that can be shared across the world. The process of making informs this work and this work is the daily incremental shifts that will resist the narrative of bigger is better, which has led us to the irreversible effects of climate change. ■ Catherine Page Harris, MLA, MFA, is assistant professor of Landscape Architecture and Art and Ecology at the University of New Mexico.

Green Fire Times • September 2017

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SEEDBROADCAST

PRESENTING VOICES

eedbroadcast is an artist collective that has been operating since 2011. It was started by Jeanette Hart-Mann and Chrissie Orr and expanded with additional member Ruben Olguín. Their mission is to present voices of agriculture—from industrial farms to urban gardens. Seedbroadcast records people who work with seeds and plants and those who nurture communities. The project disseminates knowledge gleaned from those people’s experiences to the communities they impact and beyond. Hart-Mann, Orr and Olguín talk about culture through regional, personal and socioeconomic contexts. Over the last two years, they have been working among indigenous and rural communities that are trying to rebuild their seed varieties, traditions and community relationships at a time of industrialization and globalization—when industrial giants have a stranglehold on food policy and potential climate change solutions. Something as simple as trying to grow indigenous cotton (grown in some communities for hundreds of years) can infringe on corporate seed ownership and dissemination. As the world’s population explodes, responsibilities have shifted. Many food varieties are dwindling, and heirloom varieties are being lost to drought, flooding and other environmental conditions made worse by human neglect. Seedbroadcast operates primarily in the Southwest, working with communities from southern Colorado to southern Arizona and all the bioregions in between. If you have a story about seeds, it can be posted on the project’s website (www.seedbroadcast.org) to share information and inspire others. Seedbroadcast’s Mobile Seed Story Broadcasting Station also shares seeds and relevant information to go with them.

Courtesy Seedbroadcast

Hart-Mann and Orr see art as community and culture and stress the relationships one gains in raising an heirloom variety to pass on to one’s children. They see their artistic interventions as small steps with lasting effects, knowing that cultural shifts do not start in government but in homes, hearts and with the Earth. ■

The Seedbroadcast van in downtown Albuquerque

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Jeanette Hart-Mann (labeling envelope) at a seed exchange in Abiquiú, New Mexico. April, 2016

Green Fire Times • September 2017

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DANCE of the BEES A delma Aurora Hnasko

ach spring when the snows melt and the ground thaws, I carry a chair out to the orchard and position it close to the entrances of my honeybee hives. With cup of tea, I sit quietly, waiting for sunrays to crest the mountain and hit the metal roofs of the hives. In this moment of warmth, bees crowd the doorways of their homes and begin, one by one, to fly out into the morning glow in search of nectar and pollen.

Yet while so resilient, honeybees are also fragile beyond measure. Honeybees are our barometer: environmentally, biologically and socially. My hives have suffered colony collapse and queen deaths, bear lootings and pesticide poisonings. My hives have frozen with unexpected late spring cold-spells; they have waned with nectar droughts. The honeybees are our contemporary canaries in the coal mines: so sensitive to adverse and shifting conditions, they clearly indicate where we are out of balance in our ecosystem. When we listen to the bees and apply our concentration to the natural world, these sophisticated insects provide us with instructions for how to tend gently and cultivate creatively.

The bees are nimble when they exit: Thousands dart out in straight vectors on their foraging journeys. When they return, they are full of nectar from reaching their tongues inside dozens of flowers. They are now carrying more than half their weight in pollen, packed into the baskets on their hind legs. They then descend slowly back to their hive, where hundreds of other worker bees help them unload and store their caches. Before they leave on their next flights, the honeybees perform a “waggle dance,” vibrating their bodies across the hive’s honeycomb to signal the precise location of nearby flowers.Through this communication, conducted in a figure-eight pattern, the bees relay direction, angle and length coordinates to other bees. And so it is that at any time in the summer months, I will find hundreds of bees working together in a particular area of the watershed—as far as six miles away from their hives—collectively kissing the centers of whatever plant is most vibrantly in flower. I began backyard beekeeping eight years ago in an effort to do my small part to support honeybees in an age of colonycollapse, heavy pesticide use and climactic shifts. I had no idea then that this practice would introduce me to the most altruistic, socially minded community I’ve ever encountered. Nor did I know then that I’d fall completely in love with these ancient, brilliant creatures and their highly sophisticated organizational systems. The presence of 100,000 honeybees in our orchard has had a profound impact on my own life—both during their busy season when the queens are laying upwards of 1,500 eggs a day and the worker bees are foraging from thousands of flowers— and also in the winter when the bees significantly decrease the size of their colony, insulate the hive with propolis, and slow down all metabolic and social systems to conserve energy to increase longevity through the cold months. The hives invite me to remain aware of them,

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Adelma Aurora Hnasko: inspired by bees

and, by spillover, of all the land around me. The bees encourage me to notice. The bees tell the story of each season through its blossoms. In late May, they congregate on the wild honeysuckle bushes along the river, bringing home pollen of the very lightest shade of yellow. In early June the bees buzz en masse on the delicate flowers of the box elder trees, before they move on to the lavender, the catalpa trees and the raspberries. My favorite foraging moment comes midsummer when the giant red poppies open, revealing purple pollen. The bees brush their legs on the poppy corolla and antlers, emerging with purple pollen packs on their back legs

and a light dusting of purple covering their bodies. In September, the bees’ leg baskets are weighed down by dark-yellow, pungent chamisa pollen, and with it an increased vigor to harvest, as these brilliant creatures know the warm season soon will come to an end. Honeybees are highly evolved, having existed for more than 100 million years. A single honeybee displays more than 60 separate behaviors, including counting, reading symbols and solving multiphase problems. The colony, as community,exercises democratic decisionmaking, cooperation and shared work through a range of tasks—only one of which is the magical and magnificent production of honey.

The gifts of the beehive are many. Twice a year I open the hives to check on the queens and their colonies (and, if lucky in the spring, to harvest a bit of excess honey). Visiting the hive is like being underwater, or in another universe altogether: thousands of worker bees each at a different stage in her life, hundreds of drones, brood cells, pollen, nectar and capped honey cells of comb. The buzz is mighty, the hum of work infectious. Outside of the hive, I know that every foraging bee I encounter is making dozens of flights a day, visiting hundreds of flowers to bring their sweetness back to her colony. The intimacy of this connection to the micro-level bee workings highlights the importance of our own work in community. Every little bit matters. Beekeeping has ignited in me a wideawake gratitude for my local landscape. The bees remind me how the Earth endures, yet also how she needs our help to heal. They encourage me to slow down and to observe. If this magnificent universe of inner-workings exists within my hives, what other worlds of possibility lay hidden beneath the leaves of the plants I encounter, or deep in the soils where I plant? Where, next, can I nestle my chair, quietly observe, and stay present to the wonders and to wisdom of our natural world? ■ Adelma Aurora Hnasko spent her first years of life near Coyote, New Mexico, where she now tends two family ranches and is a parciante of the Arroyo de Agua acequia. A graduate of Stanford University, Hnasko has been involved in numerous community arts learning projects. She lives with her husband and two boys in Santa Fe.

Green Fire Times • September 2017

DANCING EARTH EXPLORES RENEWABLE ENERGY

ancing Earth—an intertribal dance ensemble based in Santa Fe and San Francisco—continues to reflect vital contemporary expressions from the heart of indigenous cultures related to climate change. After a decade of creating dance theater work that interpreted themes of water, seeds and Native foods from indigenous perspectives, the troupe has begun a multi-year project to explore the concept of renewable energy from cultural, spiritual and practical perspectives. With indigenous people on front lines of climate change everywhere, the topic is particularly relevant.

Starting with a gathering in June of intertribal elders and culture carriers, Dancing Earth, led by Rulan Tangen, continued to develop its current production at the ensemble’s 6th Summer Institute, which included cultural artist ambassadors of First Nations heritage from California, Oklahoma, Samoa, New Zealand, Canada, México, Nicaragua and Colombia, S.A. The troupe also worked in the U.S. Southwest, with appropriate cultural gift giving, consultation and permission from the Pesatas of Jicarilla Apache, Roxanne Swentzell of Santa Clara Pueblo, former Pojoaque Pueblo Gov. George Rivera and other Pueblo representatives. Rehearsals were also held in New Mexico at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiú and in Santa Fe at the Academy for the Love of Learning. The dancers kept sustainable energy in mind while assembling meals, harvesting vegetables, carrying their own water bottles, utensils and bowls, and in making costumes and props from recycled, repurposed and organic fabrics. They made huaraches (Mexican-style sandals using recycled tires), learned drum songs and skills in archery, tracking and fire making. Learn more about Dancing Earth and artistic director Rulan Tangen at www.dancingearth. org or on Facebook. ■

Rehearsing at Ghost Ranch, Abiquiú, NM

Dancing Earth performers near Ghost Ranch in Abiquiú, NM Dancing Earth’s artistic director/ choreographer Rulan Tangen

Green Fire Times • September 2017

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• Canine/feline expert on hand to answer your questions • Libations by Santa Fe Bar and Grill • Treats for the 2-legged by Cheesemongers • Teca Tu Doggie Beer and treats for the 4-legged • 10% of sales during event donated to a different animal rescue organization each month

Photos from Dancing Earth’s 2017 Summer Institute at the Academy for the Love of Learning

Former tribal chief and medicine carrier of the Havasupai Nation, Uqualla has turned his focus to performance ritual as a conduit for global transformation.

QUOTES FROM SOME of DANCING EARTH’S COLLABORATORS and ASSOCIATES:

“Dancing within a community and outdoors with the land has renewed me spiritually, mentally, emotionally and physically. I feel energized through using dance to activate the space.” — Sandra Lamouche (Cree Nation, Canada) “The window of opportunity to decarbonize our energy systems is closing. If you listen, you can hear the cries of the generations yet born pleading for us to act.” — David Michael Karabelnikoff (Aleut) “It’s not about going off-grid as an individual; it’s about taking over the grid as a collective. We’re working to convey that message as well as partner with our communities to implement practical solutions.” — Christina Leyva (Cuban/Scottish ecological dance art-ivist) “Renewable energy starts with appreciating life cycles of the living and the so-called lifeless. Every space and every object has a bloodline back to its origin, an enduring presence, but then must return or transform in order to complete its life cycle” — Zoe Klein As we continue to dedicate our performing art-making practice to the Earth, we are open to ancient and innovative technologies. Next year our Summer Institute will begin in tipis on Jicarilla land, and we hope to create a bike-powered sound system, a dance floor that creates energy for a whole building, and other lifeways that honor the continuance of the sacredness of life. — Rulan Tangen

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Green Fire Times • September 2017

Santa Fe Workshop Schedule September/November, 2017

SFBI – 3900 Paseo Del Sol, Santa Fe September – WESST/SFBI 9 Beginning Excel/SOLD OUT 14 Negotiating for Women 6-8 21 Start-up Rules and Regs 6-8 23 Intermediate Excel /SOLD OUT 28 Social Media/Small Biz 9:30-12 30 Financials/Small Biz 9 -12 October – WESST/SFBI 5 Basic Website Dev 9:30-12 12 Marketing Basics 6-8 13 Life Savings 9-12 17 Nat’l Women’s Biz Week 9-11 19 Pricing for Profit 6-8 26 Creating Perfect Pitch 5:30-8 November – WESST/SFBI 4 Legal Clinic 10-2 7 Perfect Pitch for Women 9-12 9 Evaluating Show Submissions 10-2 30 Budgeting for the New Year 9-12 SFCCCG–201 Marcy Street, Santa Fe 10/20 Financials for Artists 10-2 10/27 Cash Flow for Artists 10-2 11/10 Advanced Etsy 10-4 11/17 Advanced Etsy 10-4 To Register/Details Contact:

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Sol Not Coal The biggest trick your utility company has ever pulled was getting you to believe that the sun didn’t exist. Reduced it to a forecast instead of fuel. Sold you a 20 gallon top down road trip … Instead of Energy Independence Day and a straight line from your electric car straight to the source. What if you could plug your whole entire house into the sun? What if we let sleeping coal lie? What if we let the fossils bury their dead? What if PNM got its head out of the ground, and led? What if New Mexico stopped looking back and looked up? Realized that while they are mining our pockets dry, money is literally falling from the sky and we can mop it up with solar panels and wind turbines. All the miracles we’ve been praying for have been right in front of our eyes, while these snake oil salesmen have been circulating this collection plate of lies. Make no mistake about it,

they are not giving us “power,” they are bleeding us dry. All the rain we prayed for was wasted on a coal-fire plant, the kind of plant that doesn’t grow when you water it. The kind of power we want doesn’t have to be laundered because it is already clean. Unlike money, it’s the kind that comes from a million marching in the street. A different shade of green. It’s only bottom line consideration is that people breathe… even while they’re watching their television I.V. electricity. Mother Earth is desperately in need of rehab, at the very least a clean energy exchange. The day she quits these smokestacks they will stand like an eyesore, halo-less, as they should be, on the horizon as a monument of what once stood between us and the future. That time when profiteers took to impersonating scientists and split atoms into hairs while our icecaps went bald.

Before we learned that there is no Rogaine for nuclear winter. No half-life for meltdown survivors or victims, it’s always all or none. Because there is no future, there is only now. There is no future, unless we “now.” So you can tell Mama Earth that we gon’ stick those windmills on them hillsides like it’s her birthday, and she gonna blow ‘em out like lights.

H akim Bellamy

Like she never smoked coal a day in her life. Like photovoltaic cells on every sunglass lens in New Mexico, cause today is so bright all we see is dollar signs. Because our sol is so deep it’ll never deplete It’s the one thing we can farm without finishing. It’s like clockwork. It’s how clocks work. Sure as sunrise, it’s the one thing you can depend on. At 4.5 billion years old, it’s got a great track record of not melting down…

and when it does… we got way bigger problems than “clean up.” The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn’t exist. The second was getting us to forget that we are part sun, all soul. A walking current of synapse and stardust. Each one of us 100 watts of power at rest. ■

Hakim Bellamy, Poet Laureate of Albuquerque, NM (2012–2014), is a national and regional poetry slam champion, author and performer. He is on-air host of the New Mexico PBS show ¡COLORES!

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NEWSBITEs SFCC GRANTED $351,000 FOR BUILDING ENERGY AUTOMATION AND MICROGRID TRAINING CENTER

The U.S. Economic Development Administration has granted Santa Fe Community College $351,000 to purchase equipment for a Building Energy Automation and Microgrid Training Center (BEAMTC). Two labs will provide specialized hands-on training. The college is leveraging an additional $326,000 in state appropriations and $111,661 in donated equipment and engineering expertise from Siemens Industries and other industry partners. This investment will create a research environment to support product development, testing, workforce training and business attraction and is projected to support up to 750 jobs in the next 10 years. BEAMTC will be housed in the college’s innovative, energy-efficient Trades and Advanced Technology Center. It will serve the entire North Central New Mexico Economic Development District (Colfax, Los Alamos, Mora, Río Arriba, San Miguel, Santa Fe and Taos counties) as well as nine pueblos and tribes. Building automation systems (BAS) control heating, cooling, fresh air, lighting and security. A microgrid is a distribution network for electrical energy, from generation to transmission and storage. A microgrid offers a local energy system that can operate independently from the larger grid. Microgrids expand the reach of BAS to include integration of multiple energy systems, add resiliency in the event of power disruptions and enable advanced cyber security. The college is currently constructing a 12,000-square-foot greenhouse for advanced hydroponics and aquaponics and a second lab with an advanced microgrid controller. Both the building automation systems lab and the greenhouse nanogrid will become nodes of a campus-wide microgrid. Camilla Bustamante, Ph.D., Dean of the School of Trades, Technology, Sustainability and Professional Studies, said, “The BEAMTC will prepare a workforce that is up-todate on energy-smart building, as well as microgrid technology. Just as people want to secure and control energy costs in their homes through smart phones, the construction

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industry is looking at building smarter, more energy-efficient buildings that offer cyber security that can be controlled independently from the main power grid.” Students can begin taking classes in Engineering Technologies for a certificate or associate in applied science this fall. More classes in smart and microgrid technology will be offered as the BEAMTC becomes operational. For more information, call 505.428.1639 or camilla.bustamante@sfcc.edu

RECONNECTING TO OUR LOCAL FUTURE October 12–14, James A. Little Theater, Santa Fe The Economics of Happiness Conference will explore and explain how humans can shift direction—environmentally, economically and spiritually—from a globalized system of exploitation, inequality and environmental degradation toward local cultures and economies that support renewal, resilience and human and planetary well-being. The conference, while identifying systemic root causes of our interconnected crises, will focus primarily on identifying key strategic shifts and cultivating collaboration toward economic localization. There will be lectures and panel discussions, as well as music, art and ceremony. Educators, students, public policy makers, entrepreneurs, business leaders and activists will have opportunities to interact. The organizers hope the conference will facilitate increased collaboration in northern New Mexico toward the development of grassroots localization strategies through hands-on action and policy initiatives. A partial list of speakers includes Helena Norberg-Hodge, director of Local Futures; Winona LaDuke, executive director of Honor the Earth; Charles Eisenstein, author of Sacred Economics; Judy Wicks, founder of BALLE; George Ferguson, former mayor of Bristol, England; Craig Childs, author of Apocalyptic Planet, Dr. Larry Dossey, author of One Mind; and Chief Arvol Looking Horse, author of White Buffalo Teachings. Many speakers from New Mexico also are featured. The conference is sponsored by the nonprofits Local Futures (www.localfutures.org) and Reconnect-Today (www.reconnect-today.org). Tickets are $150 through Sept. 15 and $180 after that.

Green Fire Times • September 2017

WHAT'S GOING ON! Events / Announcements ALBUQUERQUE Sept. 7– 17 NEW MEXICO STATE FAIR Louisiana and Lomas http://statefair.exponm.com/

Sept. 9, 1–6 pm TEDXABQ Kiva Auditorium, ABQ Convention Center TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion on innovative ideas. $50/$25 students. www.tedxabq.com Sept. 9, 6–9 pm IPCC 8TH ANNUAL GALA IPCC, 2401 12th NW Indian Pueblo Cultural Center’s Season’s of Growth Gala. Art, food, dance and history. Live and silent auctions. Fundraiser supports IPCC’s library and archives. www. indianpueblo.org/gala/ Sept. 13–16 METAECHO 2017 ABQ Convention Center and Hyatt Regency Conference will bring together health policy experts, government officials, academic leaders, funders and Project ECHO’s global partners. Poster sessions, panel discussions, TED-like talks, workshops. metaechoconference@salud.unm.edu, https:// echo.unm.edu/2017-metaecho-conference/ Sept. 14, 9 am–1 pm UNM HEALTH SCIENCES CENTER JOB FAIR HSC North Campus Upper Plaza Open to physicians, family nurse practitioners, midwives, nurses, physician assistants, social workers, nutritionists, health professional students from NM educational institutions, etc. http://hscnews. unm.edu/news/releases-20170825-6631210 Sept. 18–19 THE LINK BETWEEN ANIMAL ABUSE AND HUMAN VIOLENCE NHCC, 1701 4th St. SW Biannual “Infinite Possibilities” conference hosted by Positive Links offers information and training on collaborative ways to identify, prevent and stop abuse and provide treatment for abusers. $70/$100. Thelinknm.com September 22–23 GLOBALQUERQUE NHCC, 1701 4th St. SW Annual celebration of world music & culture. 20 performances by 17 acts from 5 continents on 3 stages. Tickets: 505.724.4771, www. globalquerque.org/tickets.html, Sept. 29–Oct. 1 ABQ UKEKOPELLI FESTIVAL Event Center near ABQ Marriott NM Ukulele Festival kicks off with a concert in the style of a 1949 TV variety show. Weekend workshops for all levels of players. Sunday morning songwriting workshop for kids. Full festival pass: $115. Concert and partial weekend tickets also available. www.abqukefest.com Through September WE ARE OF THIS PLACE Indian Pueblo Cultural Center 2401 12th St. NW

The Pueblo Story. A historical overview and contemporary artworks. Oct. 7–8: American Indian Arts Festival. Native dances Fri. 2 pm; Sat. & Sun. 11 am & 2 pm. $8.40/$6.40/$5.40; 505.843.7270, indianpueblo.org Oct. 1 Early Bird Tickets deadline QUIVIRA COALITION CONFERENCE Embassy Suites “Ranching and Farming at the Radical Center.” Conference Nov. 15–17 will bring together thought leaders, agrarian innovators and land stewards. https://quiviracoalition.org Through Oct. 1 SUMMERTIME IN OLDTOWN CONCERTS ABQ Old Town, 303 Romero St. NW Fri, Sat, 7–9 pm and Sundays 1–3 pm Through Nov. 5 OUTSTANDING IN HIS FIELD: SAN YSIDRO NHCC Art Museum, 1701 4th St. SW Contemporary and traditional depictions of the patron saint of farmers & gardeners. More than 65 artists. $6/$5/16 & under free. Nationalhispaniccenter.org Nov. 10–12 INDIGENOUS COMIC CON Isleta Resort Native and indigenous creators, illustrators, writers, designers, actors and producers of comic books, graphic novels, games, sci-fi, fantasy, film & television. Indigenouscomiccon.com Through Nov. 11 CROSS-POLLINATION 516 Arts, 516 Central SW Exhibition at the intersection of art and science, featuring 21 artists from around the world, emphasizing the importance of bees and other pollinators. 505.247.1445, 516arts.org Through Nov. 11 LONG ENVIRONMENTALISM IN THE NEAR NORTH UNM Art Museum, 1 University of NM A collection of photos and writings by UNM professor Subhankar Banerjee. Closed Sundays and Mondays. Unmartmuseum.org Nov. 17–19 4TH ANNUAL PUEBLO FILM FEST IPCC, 2401 12th NW The only film fest in the country devoted to the work of Pueblo filmmakers. Screenings, presentations and discussions. 505.843-7270, http://www.indianpueblo.org/centerevent/4thannual-pueblo-film-fest/ First Sundays NM MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY 1801 Mountain Road Museum admission is free to NM residents on the first Sunday of every month. 505.841.2800 Saturdays, 1 pm WEEKLY DOCENT-LED TOURS National Hispanic Cultural Center 1701 4th St. SW Tours of different exhibits and themes in the Art Museum. $2-$3, free with museum admission. 505.246.2261, nhccnm.org ABQ 2030 DISTRICT A voluntary collaboration of commercial

Green Fire Times • September 2017

property tenants, building managers, property owners and developers; real estate, energy, and building sector professionals, lenders, utility companies; and public stakeholders such as government agencies, nonprofits, community groups and grassroots organizers. Property partners share anonymous utility data and best practices. Professional partners provide expertise and services. Public partners support the initiative as it overlaps with their own missions. Info: albuquerque@2030districts.org

SANTA FE

Sept. 1–3 EQUUS FILM FEST 35 movies, trailers and shorts about humanequine interaction, tribal traditions and the romance of the horse. 9/2: kids’ movie block. Tickets: $10/block or $75/weekend. Benefits the Horse Shelter. www.thehorseshelter.org Sept. 1–4 UNIFY FEST Chi Center, Galisteo, NM Co-create community and through art, ceremony, health, sustainability, music and unification of a global tribe. $70–$399, 12 & under free. https://www.eventbrite.com, unifyfest.com Sept. 5 RENESAN CLASSES BEGIN St. John’s United Methodist Church 1200 Old Pecos Tr. Institute for Lifelong Learning. 60+ daytime classes, lectures and trips in the arts, culture, current events, film, history, literature, music, science & technology and social sciences. 505.982.9274, www.renesan.org Sept. 6, 6–8 pm WILDLIFE TALKS Unitarian Universalist Church 107 W. Barcelona Rd. Virginia Seamster, Ph.D., and Melissa Savage, Ph.D. on protecting and restoring NM’s native wildlife and wildlands, and vital aquatic life such as the otter. Presented by the Río Grande Chapter of the Sierra Club. Sept. 6–30 HERBALISM EVENTS Milagro Herbs, 1500 5th St. 9/6–10/4: Foundations of Western Herbalism: Comprehensive class on local medicinal plants and how to make medicine from them. Includes two days in the field. $245. 9/10: Herbal First Aid in the Field: Explore first aid medicines and learn to identify plants in the mountains around SF with Stefan Link. $45. 9/30, 10 am–3 pm. Herbal Medicine Day and Product Expo: See what the current class is cooking up. 505.820.6321, www.milagroherbs.com Sept. 7, 5:30 pm SOL NOT COAL AWARD Fundraiser for New Energy Economy’s work for 100% renewables. $100. 505.989.7262, www. newenergyeconomy.org/ Sept. 8, 8 am–4 pm NM COALITION FOR LITERACY CONFERENCE La Posada de Santa Fe, 330 E. Palace Ave.

30th anniversary. Keynote speaker: author Jodi Thomas. Lunchtime storyteller: Mary Ellen Gonzales. Break-out workshops. Public invited. $20 includes lunch. http://events.r20. constantcontact.com/register/ Sept. 9, 5:30–10 pm FALL FIESTA SF Farmers’ Market Pavilion Celebrating local food, culture & community. 5:30–8 pm: Plated dinner: $150. 8–10 pm: Community Celebration: $35. 505.983.7726, ext. 5, alexis!santafefarmersmarketinstitute. org, www.farmersmarketeinstitute.org Sept. 9, 6 pm R. CARLOS NAKAI QUARTET SF Botanical Garden Amphitheater, 715 Cam. Lejo Jazz fusion. $60./$100. Benefits KSFR Radio. 505.471.9103 Sept. 16, 12–4 pm AMERICAN INDIAN COMMUNITY DAY Ragle Park This event, organized by the SF Indian Center, brings the SF community together to celebrate Native culture with music, dances and fun activities including art projects, food and nonprofit tables. Free. 505.660.4210, sfindiancenter@gmail.com Sept. 17, 3–6 pm BARK IN THE PARK Alto/Bicentennial Park, 1043 Alto St. Fundraiser to benefit Street Homeless Animal Project. Meet Smith Vet staff, techs and doctors. Live jazz, food truck, raffle. $25. entry. 505.501.4933, nmstreethomelessanimalproject@gmail.com, www.nmshap.org Sept. 23, 1 pm “MEDIA LITERACY IN A FAKE NEWS WORLD” SF Public Library Southside, 6599 Jaguar Drive Panel discussion with ABQ Journal North editor Mark Oswald, Taos News editor Stacy Matlock, PBS Newshour correspondent Kathleen McCleery and author James McGrath Morris. Free. Sponsored by the SF Public Library, NM Press Women, the Society of Professional Journalists (Río Grande Chapter), SF chapter of the League of Women Voters, the Foundation for Open Government and It’s the People’s Data. Info: nnmpresswomen@gmail.com Sept. 23, 5:30–8:30 pm REACHING FOR THE STARS RECEPTION Stieren Hall, SF Opera SF Great Big Jazz Band, food, auctions. $35. Supports Local Teens Dreams to Careers Program. 505.216.6049, info@ risingstarssouthwest.org Sept. 23 STUART UDALL LEGACY DINNER NPS Building, Old SF Tr. “Preserving the Spirit of Place.” Honoring Galisteo Basin conservationist Ted Harrison. $175. Benefits the SF Conservation Trust. 505.989.7019, www.sfct.org Oct. 6, 6:30 pm GUARDIANS GALA SF Farmers’ Market Pavilion WildEarth Guardians benefit dinner. 505.988.9126, ext. 0, www. wildearthguardians.org Oct. 6–8 SF YOGA FESTIVAL Tickets: $299/$199 or for individual speakers and events. www.santafeyogafestival.org

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Oct. 7, 7:30–9 pm YES MEN LIVE The Lensic The True Story of Fake News. A benefit for the NM Environmental Law Center. $35/$25/$12 students w/ID. 6pm private VIP reception: $100. 505.988.1234 Oct. 11, 6–8 pm ENERGY TALKS Unitarian Universalist Church 107 W. Barcelona Rd. Shane Woolbright and Sandrine Gaillard, Ph.D., will address the complexities of utility regulation, energy conservation and solar energy’s great potential in NM. Presented by the Río Grande Chapter of the Sierra Club. Oct. 12, morning–afternoon ESPAÑOLA BASIN TECHNICAL ADVISORY GROUP SF Convention Center Technical presentations and posters about geology, hydrogeology, geochemistry, geophysics, hydrology, water quality, etc. of the Española Basin and surrounding watersheds. $20. at the door (cash only) Registration: https://geoinfo.nmt.edu/ebtag/workshop/ registration/home.cfml Oct. 12–14 ECONOMICS OF HAPPINESS CONFERENCE James A. Little Theater, 1060 Cerrillos Rd. Reconnecting to Our Local Future – Celebrating Diversity and Community. Conference will explain how humans can shift from a globalized system of exploitation towards local cultures and economies that support renewal, resilience and planetary well-being. Presenters: Helena Norberg-Hodge, Winona LaDuke, Arvol Looking Horse, Larry Dossey, Judy Wicks, Craig Childs, Charles Eisenstein, many others. $150/adv. Some discounts available. www.localfutures.org/ Oct. 14, 5:30–9 pm HUNGRY MOUTH FESTIVAL Eldorado Hotel Some of SF’s top chefs compete for your votes. Benefits St. Elizabeth’s Shelters & Supportive Housing. $150. Tickets: 505.982.6611, ext. 104 or www.steshelter.org Oct. 18–22 SF INDEPENDENT FILM FESTIVAL Santafeindependent.com Oct. 21, 5:30 pm SF MAYOR’S BALL SF Convention Center, 201 W. Marcy St. Live auction, music by Michael Hearne & South by Southwest and Nosotros. Food by some of SF’s top chefs. Benefits Communities in Schools and the Food Depot. $150. Santafemayorsball2017.org Oct. 26–29 CLIMATE SOLUTIONS SYMPOSIUM Monte del Sol Charter School “Getting Beyond the Climate Argument: Plugging into Solutions.” Statewide conference in SF and remote locations presented by Citizens’ Climate Education–NM. 10/26, 7–9 pm: Screening of the film Tomorrow to kick-off the conference. 10/28, 9 am–4:45 pm: Renowned speakers and breakout sessions. 10/29, time and place TBD: 3-hour advocate training. johnjmcandrew@mac.com Oct. 31 Artists’ Application Deadline 2018 SF STUDIO TOUR Self-guided free studio tour with artist demonstrations takes place June 16–17 and 23–24. Reception June 8 and Community

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Gallery show June 9–27. Details and application: santafestudiotour.com Through Feb. 11, 2018 VOICES OF COUNTERCULTURE IN THE SOUTHWEST NM History Museum, SF Plaza Exhibit spans the 1960s and 70s exploring the influx of young people to NM and the collision of cultures. Archival footage, oral histories, photography, ephemera and artifacts. Curated by Jack Loeffler and Meredith Davidson. http:// nmhistorymuseum.org/calendar.php? Sundays, 10 am-4 pm RAILYARD ARTISAN MARKET Farmers’ Market Pavilion 1607 Paseo de Peralta Local artists, textiles, jewelry, ceramics, live music. 505.983.4098, Francesca@ santafefarmersmarket.com, artmarketsantafe.com Sundays, 11 am JOURNEY SANTA FE CONVERSATIONS Collected Works Books, 202 Galisteo St. 9/3: Ken Baumann on the Democratic Socialist Alliance; 9/10: Tony Anella on the Aldo Leopold Writing Program; 9/17: Doug Meiklejohn, director of the NM Environmental Law Center; 9/14: Matthew Brown, SF’s new director of Economic Development; 10/1: NM Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver; 10/8: Nate Downey and Ann Filemyr will speak about the Economics of Happiness Conference. Hosts: Alan Webber, Bill Dupuy and James Burbank. Free. www.journeysantafe.com Mon.–Sat. POEH CULTURAL CENTER & MUSEUM 78 Cities of Gold Rd., Pueblo of Pojoaque In T’owa Vi Sae’we: The People’s Pottery. Tewa Pottery from the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. Nah Poeh Meng: 1,600-sq.-ft. core installation highlighting the works of Pueblo artists and Pueblo history. Poehcenter.org Tues.–Sat. EL MUSEO CULTURAL DE SANTA FE 555 Cam. de la Familia Rotating exhibits, community programs and performances designed to preserve Hispanic culture. Elmuseocultural.org Tues., Sat., 7 am-1 pm; Weds., 3–7 pm SF FARMERS’ MARKET 1607 Paseo de Peralta (& Guadalupe) Tues., 3–6 pm: Plaza Contenta, 6009 Jaguar Dr. Northern NM farmers & ranchers offer fresh greenhouse tomatoes, greens, root veggies, cheese, teas, herbs, spices, honey, baked goods, body care products and much more. santafefarmersmarket.com Tuesdays, 12 pm OFFICE OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL STUDIES BROWN BAG TALKS Center for NM Archaeology, 7 Old Cochiti Rd. 9/5: Early Pueblo Occupation of the Dinetah Region by Eric Blinman. 9/19: Cooking Jar Technology in the Ancient Southwest by Eric Blinman. 505.476.4404, friendsofarchaeology@ gmail.org, nmarchaeology.org Weds.–Sun. SANTA FE CHILDREN’S MUSEUM 1050 Old Pecos Tr. Interactive exhibits and activities. 505.989.8359, Santafechildrensmuseum.org Sat., 8 am–4 pm RANDALL DAVEY AUDUBON CENTER 1800 Upper Canyon Rd. Striking landscapes and wildlife. Bird walks,

hikes, tours of the Randall Davey home. 505.983.4609, http://nm.audubon.org/ landingcenter-chapters/visiting-randall-daveyaudubon-center-sanctuary Daily SANTA FE BOTANICAL GARDEN 715 Cam. Lejo, Museum Hill Living museum on 14 acres. Ojos y Manos, Orchard Gardens, The Courtyard Gardens and the Arroyo Trails. Santafebotanicalgarden.org SUSTAINABLE GROWTH MANAGEMENT PLAN FOR SF COUNTY Hard copies $70, CDs $2. Contact Melissa Holmes, 505.995.2717 or msholmes@ santafecounty.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.

TAOS Sept. 9, 2 pm RTE. 66 IN NM Kit Carson Electric Co-op Boardroom 118 Cruz Alta Rd. Illustrated lecture by historian Baldwin Burr. Presented by the Taos County Historical Society. 575.779.8579, pcfl1947@yahoo.com, www.taoscountyhistoricalsociety.org Sept. 11–Dec. 8 CONSERVATION CREW Hiring young men and women 18–25 for trail maintenance and/or forestry/fuels reduction projects. Americorps members receive personal and professional development training. 575.751.1420, Youthcorps.org/apply Sept. 22–Oct. 1 TAOS FALL ARTS FESTIVAL Showcase for emerging and established artists in Taos County. Taos Open Exhibition reception/ awards ceremony 9/22, 5–8 pm. Open daily, 10 am–6 pm at Guadalupe Parish Gymnasium, 205 Don Fernando St. www.taosfallarts.com Through Oct. 27 EARTH BAG BUILDING WORKSHOP Learn to build a sustainable, affordable, off-grid solar home. 575.770.0085, earthandsunsustainablebuilders.com Sept. 27–Oct. 1 TAOS ENVIRONMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL TCA, 133 Paseo del Norte Local, national and global films. Free/donations to environmental nonprofits accepted. SOMOS: 575.758.0081, TCA: 575.758.2052, www.Taosfallarts.com Sept. 29, 6 and 8 pm WILD & SCENIC FILM FESTIVAL TCA, 133 Paseo del Norte “Where activism gets inspired.” 29 films, food, raffle. Free. 575.758.2052, taosfallarts.com Third Tues. Monthly, 5:30–8 pm TAOS ENTREPRENEURIAL NETWORK KTAOS Networking, presentations, discussion and professional services. Free. 505.776.7903, www.taosten.org

HERE & THERE

Sept. 1, 6–9 pm STORIES FROM THE EARTH Center for the Arts, Northern NM College, 921 Paseo de Oñate, Española, NM Art opening by Roger Montoya, Sabra

Moore and Roxanne Swentzell plus Holy Faith Break Dancers, Coco Daco Dance Project and Mina Fajardo Flamenco. Presented by Moving Arts Española and NNMC. Free. Sept. 2, 10 am–4 pm 5TH ANNIVERSARY OPEN HOUSE Española Community Market 312 Paseo de Oñate, Española, NM Cooking demos, food sampling. Free. Sept. 2, 2–6 pm REGENERATION FESTIVAL Española Healing Foods Oasis, Vietnam Veterans Memorial Rd., Española, NM Tree planting, solar oven. Near Valdez Park. Free. Presented by Tewa Women United. Sept. 2–3, 10 am–5 pm CLEVELAND MILLFEST Hwy. 518, mile-marker 31, Cleveland, NM 60+ artists, native foods, dance exhibitions, entertainment. 3-story water-powered historic roller mill. $3 parking plus nominal museum admission fee. 575.387.2645, clevelandrollermillmuseum.org Sept. 2–4 SANTO DOMINGO PUEBLO ARTS & CRAFTS MARKET Santo Domingo Pueblo 300 Native American artists. Traditional pottery, jewelry, baskets, sculptures, paintings, Indian food, farmers’ market, entertainment. Free admission. 505.465.0406 Sept. 4, 10 am–5 pm CHILE ROASTING AND HEIRLOOM CHILE COOK-OFF Española Farmers’ Market, 1105 N. Railroad Ave., Española, NM Farmers’ market, chile roasting, horno, key-line plow demo, sustainable agriculture information booths, music. Free. Sept. 12, 1–4 pm FOUR CORNERS PUBLIC SCIENCE FORUM ON METHANE Durango Rec Center, Durango, CO. Presented by the Four Corners Air Quality Group. www.env.nm.gov/air-quality/fcaqg/ Sept. 17, 10 am–8 pm HARVEST FESTIVAL Los Luceros, Off State Rte. 68, Alcalde, NM Demonstrations, tours of historic property, sheep shearing, food vendors, concert by NM roots music revivalists Lone Pínon (1:30 pm) Free. https://holdmyticket.com/ tickets/288201 Sept. 21–23, Oct. 6–7 HOMESCAPE SOLUTIONS CLASSES Sandoval County Ext. Office 711 Cam. del Pueblo, Bernalillo, NM Site planning, hardscapes, use of native plants, garden harmony, Feng Shui, permaculture, xeriscaping and creating outdoor rooms. $100. 505.867.2582, Sandovalmastergardeners.org Sept. 20–23, 10 am–1 pm MOTHER EARTH GATHERING: WATER IS LIFE Along riverbanks of northern NM–TBA For all cultures and ages. Sponsored by Tewa Women United, Honor Our Pueblos Existence, NM Acequia Assn. and others. 505.747.3259, info@tewawomenunited.org,

Green Fire Times • September 2017

In a disaster scenario, where would you turn for clean drinking water? In the last decade, natural disasters occurring in human populated areas have increased in both frequency and intensity. These events often incapacitate vital infrastructure, including essential potable water delivery systems and utility services. Disasters also debilitate access to critical medical care and equipment. There is an urgent need to deploy immediate, temporary relief of life saving water and services in areas affected by such disasters.

To solve this, a New Mexico startup has designed a self-sustaining portable shipping container that will house an atmospheric water-capturing device to provide emergency potable water in disaster situations. It works by pulling ambient moisture (humidity) out of the air through various filters condensing it, and saving it as clean water in storage bladders for human consumption, medical aid and other emergency relief purposes.

Learn more at:

www.GreenAndSustainable.org Green Fire Times â&#x20AC;˘ September 2017