Springtime, the Good Life, Climate Change and the Hope of an Alternative Future

Everything is greening up in the Middle Rio Grade Valley. Springtime is blessing us again with the urge to make good soil, to plant, to tend and care for the green and growing edge of life. Everything is new and clean, and we face the months ahead with thoughts once more of trying to live “the good life” and what that might actually mean.

For many New Mexicans, in this largely rural state with its farm and ranching life intact, the good life has much to do with what urban folks might romanticize as being one with the land. But romantic or not, in the semi-rural North Valley, that urge is profound and full of hope despite what we know to be the looming threats of prolonged drought and withering heat.

The renewal of springtime also signals the renewal of helpful thinking, particularly now as we struggle with the practical realities of climate change and what individuals in urban New Mexico might do, in some small way, to help neutralize or reverse its dire energies.

Lately my thoughts have turned to spending time and energy lobbying for what I’m calling the New Mexico Small Farm and Garden Act, inspired by the history of victory gardens in World War I and World War II, the idea of a “small farm future,” and the back-to-the-earth movement of the fifties and sixties, but more of that later in the column. The question remains, how can we, as individuals, play some useful role in breaking through the dead-end thinking about climate change, now that a new science-driven momentum is picking up speed in Democratic Washington D.C. and at the Roundhouse in New Mexico?

We all know that over the last 50 years or so, the world has been given an increasingly dire diagnosis about overheating, drought and the paradoxical turbulence from heat that creates flooding, catastrophic hurricanes and rising seas. And the prognosis for beating the odds that we actually can do something about it gets slimmer and slimmer every year. This isn’t a collective cancer, but we’ve treated it like it is. It’s caused a reaction in people common to many horrible diseases — a disbelief that turns into denial, which in turn morphs into a momentary defiance and then into a defeatist and fatalistic paralysis that leads to an inability to see any alternatives to getting worse.

Sometimes doing small things leads to bigger thinking and more spacious possibilities. The “small things” that are always on my mind at this time of year are the vicissitudes, mysteries and deep pleasures of trying to grow food on my plot of land and how that reconnects me to the realities of the life cycle and how the weather and climate work, which, in itself, reactivates and recharges my sense of political purpose.

This year I’ve had the good fortune of receiving from Lynn Montgomery of the Middle Rio Grande Water Advocates an account of a book published last year by farmer Chris Smaje called “A Small Farm Future: Making a Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity, and a Shared Earth.” Smaje writes in opposition to fossil fuel industrial agriculture that contributes heavily to what so many of us see as the “existential crisis” of the future, advocating for a new “agrarianism” that trades Big Ag for small local farms that are, as one reviewer wrote, “ecologically regenerative” and that counteract desertification of the soil, a catastrophe in the making and one of climate change’s lesser-known consequences.

The Union of Concerned Scientists predicts that “at current rates, U.S. farmers could lose a half-inch of topsoil by 2035 — more than eight times the amount of topsoil lost during the Dust Bowl. They could lose nearly three inches by 2100. Given that it takes a century or more for an inch of soil to form naturally, the United States will lose the equivalent of at least 300 years’ worth of soil by 2100 if today’s trends prevail.” That’s based off a study produced by the group of roughly 250 scientists, analysts, policy and communication experts working for a sustainable future.

Montgomery wrote that New Mexico already has “some small farm future things among us. Our water culture is very advanced, having been dealing with each other over this scarce resource for centuries. … Our tribes and acequias have continued their traditional agriculture by conscious preservation of their cultures” and are already practicing small farming culture.

At first glance, it might seem like a stretch to imagine that small farms could become a realistic alternative to industrial agriculture. But history says otherwise.

In World War II, not only did the United States transform its entire economy from creating and serving a consumer culture, it became the greatest wartime industrial force on the planet. We also put in place a strikingly bold and productive small farm system known as “victory gardens.” By 1942, in the middle of the war, some 15 million American families had planted victory gardens; two years later, about 20 million victory gardens grew some 8 million tons of food, or roughly 40% of all food consumed in the United States. And that was under wartime conditions.

By the time my late wife and I had a little chunk of land in the North Valley some 25 years later, we found ourselves part of a huge back-to-the-earth movement, counter-cultural in sentiment and radicalized politically. We grew enough food to feed ourselves largely from the garden through the summer and fall for more than 30 years. Our production dropped with our aging and with the steady heating of the atmosphere and deepening long-term drought.

Today there’s a resurgence of small business “urban farming,” neighborhood “community farming” and household food gardening that’s picking up steam across the country. Families and agrarian entrepreneurs are laying the foundation perhaps for when climate depredations require the American people to go on a “wartime footing” and mobilize a new vision of the victory garden/small-farm movement to supplement industrial agriculture struggling with drought, heat and the legal warfare brought about by the general diminishment of surface water in the West.

As a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences warned recently, “One of the most pressing challenges of the 21^st century will be to feed a projected global population of nine billion people while reducing humanity’s agricultural footprint at the same time.” One way to decrease the impact of industrial agriculture on biodiversity and greenhouse gas emissions is to turn to urban agriculture, “growing crops within cities for human consumption.”

After decades of very small farming in the North Valley, it is clear to me that a growing victory garden/small-farm movement needs intensive support from state government based on the educational model of the World War I and World War II victory garden pamphleteering and county extension service tutoring and mentoring. That’s where a New Mexico Small Farm and Gardening Act comes in.

Early versions of such an act would be largely geared to providing an instructional framework for building a small-farm future. The curriculum would include plant and seed selection, methods of germination and soil amendment, strategic and conservation-conscious watering and mulching, organic pest control, direct sun abatement, harvesting and preserving advice, tried and true agrarian business practices and other subtleties of small farming and victory gardening. At some point, as the movement grows, crop and water subsidies may also be required.

The future projected by climate change experts is coming true. To prevail against it, we will be required to evolve an alternative future from our present collective conscience and state of awareness, as dissonant and fractured as it is. It’s a long shot to be sure, but if 20 million American families could be mobilized to plant victory gardens without the distribution and information mechanisms of the internet, then there’s realistic hope for us too, on many levels, not only small agriculture.

Granted we are not in a war (or are we?). The mobilizing urgency still seems down the road, but it’s sure to come. If the Colorado River continues to dry up and there’s not enough water to sustain the massive system of industrial agriculture that dominates the Central Valley of California, where most of the nation’s winter crops are grown, we may have to start trying to provide for ourselves sooner than we think.

If it comes to that, we’ll need an enlightened state government and a good small farm law to have our backs and see to it that we get the educational resources to have a chance to prevail against the heat, the bugs and the increasingly dry conditions of the future.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it