Thinking Like a Watershed: Voices from the West

Preface

xi < Preface Thinking Like a Watershed is an uncommon book, perhaps a unique book. It is an anthology of points of view expressed by people of distinct cultural backgrounds, all of whom are profoundly imbued with the spirit of place that dominates the American Southwest. The Southwest is the most aridregionofNorthAmericawhereinwateristherarestofthefourelements. This diverse landscape has nurtured many cultures for many millennia, each culture having evolved within the context of its respective homeland. Indeed, the environment has had an enormous influence on the shaping of every culture. It is thought that humans have inhabited this landscape for at least twelve thousand years when megafauna including wooly mammoths, dire wolves, and even horses hunted and foraged through the last Ice Age that waned into eternity ten or so millennia past. The landscape has a long memory that is revealed in striations uncovered by water coursing through canyons , or by tectonic nudges that cause mountains to rise and rifts to sunder the land, by fossils to signal the presence of the long dead, and by artifacts and rock art to indicate the skill and imagination of ancient humans whose minds were aligned with the wild. Trees that have stood for a century mark the passage of the years in incremental rings that span cross-sections of tree trunks that indicate wet years and dry years, and that are able to be cross-referenced with other tree trunks extending hundreds of years into the past. Our species has the consciousness to interpret the land’s memories and, one hopes, the collective conscience to work with the land in balance and harmony. Several major cultural points of view are expressed in the pages that follow . In a way, each point of view is a window into the memory of the land. These points of view are expressed by members of Tewa, Tohono O’odham, Hopi, Navajo, Hispano, and Anglo cultures. Most of the authors were born Preface xii < in the American Southwest, and all of the authors have spent a great deal of time meandering through the landscape observing what takes place, ruminating on interconnectedness, and celebrating the spirit of place. As the great cultural anthropologist Edward T. “Ned” Hall pointed out, cultural and cognitive diversity are among humanity’s greatest assets and provide myriad means of perceiving solutions to multiple problems—such as we face in the coming decades. Six of the essays herein were written specifically for this anthology. The remaining five appear as excerpted interviews recorded and edited by Jack Loeffler and Celestia Loeffler. These “spoken essays” remain true to the manners of speech of the interviewees and reveal great depth of respective cultural perspective. The watersheds of this arid and exquisitely beautiful span of landscape are each distinct living bioregions whose myriad denizens live in a state of symbiosis with homeland. The writers and speakers represented in this anthology provide a compelling glimpse into the role of cognitive diversity as we proceed into an uncertain future. Some of the inspiration for Thinking Like a Watershed came from the thinking of John Wesley Powell who forwarded the notion that the arid lands west of the 100th meridian should be seen as a mosaic of watershed commonwealths governed largely from within. The spirit of Aldo Leopold, who recognized the need for a land ethic guided largely by conscience, wends through parts of this book. However, the spirit of the mythic landscape of the American Southwest as revealed in the pages that follow is the true inspiration for this book. ...