Thinking Like a Watershed: Voices from the West

Thinking Like a Watershed: Introduction

1 < Jack Loeffler Jack Loeffler, Lore of the Land board member, is a bioregional aural historian, radio producer, writer, sound collage artist, and former musician. Since 1964, he has conducted field recordings west of the 100th meridian, founding the Peregrine Arts Sound Archive in 1967 to be the repository for his professional work, which he has donated to the New Mexico History Museum Library. His archive now holds thousands of hours of recordings of interviews, natural habitat, and over three thousand songs of indigenous and traditional peoples. His primary concern is restoration and preservation of habitat focusing on the relationships of indigenous cultures to respective habitats and the role of cultural diversity in attempting to solve the dilemmas now facing humankind. Loeffler has produced hundreds of documentary radio programs, as well as scores of soundtracks, albums of diverse musical genres, films, videos, folk music festivals, museum sound collages, and books. Selected radio series include La Musica de los Viejitos, Southwest Sound Collage, Moving Waters—The Colorado River and the West, The Lore of the Land, and Watersheds as Commons, produced with Celestia Loeffler. He has authored several books, including Headed Upstream: Interviews with Iconoclasts; La Musica de los Viejitos, Jack Loeffler, photo by Katherine Loeffler Jack Loeffler 2 < including a three-CD set of Hispano folk music, with Katherine Loeffler and Enrique Lamadrid; Adventures with Ed: A Portrait of Abbey; Survival Along the Continental Divide: An Anthology of Interviews; and Healing the West: Voices of Culture and Habitat. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including a New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, an Edgar Lee Hewett Award from the New Mexico Historical Society, an Archie Green Public Folklore Advocacy Award from the American Folklore Society, and a Stewart L. Udall Award for Conservation from the Santa Fe Conservation Trust. In the introduction to this volume he refers to many ways of looking at homeland within the context of watersheds and advocates for grassroots governance from within home watershed. Thinking Like a Watershed Introduction “We give thanks to Evañu, the spirit of the river, for sustaining us,” said the Tewa elder. “Those Indians, when it comes to really understanding Nature, they know a hell of a lot more about that than the rest of us,” said the old gringo. “They pray to it, and sing to it, and dance to it, and they’ve been here for a long time. Us, we just use it up.” “The acequias were our commons,” said the Hispano elder. “Everybody got to share the water so we could irrigate our crops. During the growing season, everybody had their own fields. But after the harvest, everybody’s cattle and sheep could graze in anyone’s fields. Nobody privatized water till the Anglos came, and they made up their own laws. How can you sell water rights? The water belongs to everyone. It belongs to itself.” To many, if not most of us in America, water comes from the spigot or the showerhead or the commode behind the toilet just as electricity comes out of sockets in the wall. We are plumbed and wired within our immediate environments with little or no thought to Earth’s sustaining grace. For five generations, most urban Americans and many rural folks have luxuriated in instant water and instant electricity with but a vague notion of the < < Thinking Like a Watershed 3 < true source. Fortunately, cultural consciousness is beginning to register that problems may well lie ahead, and to solve these problems we may have to shed biases that have been with our ancestors for centuries. As but one example, our species may be so genetically wired to “go forth and fructify” that we’ve absorbed that urge into our deepest cultural tenets to the extent that to many, birth control is a sin. From the point of view of the rational thinker, considering that the human population of the planet nearly quadrupled during the twentieth century while hundreds of other species of biota went irrevocably extinct and natural resources dwindled in direct proportion to human population growth, it is obvious that we as a species are fructifying out of control and that unless we lessen our numbers, we’ll crash, perhaps to follow the dodo into oblivion. To fail to heed this realization is not only irrational, it’s tragic. To think that a species blessed with our level of capacity for consciousness continues to dance blithely ever closer to the edge of the abyss, driven by an array of archaic tenets spiced with obsolete paradigms, is absurd. Yet such seems the case. Some scientists now recognize that societies can respond as a single “superorganism”toselectivepressures.Apparently,respondingtorationality alone is insufficient to sway world society into balance. We must tap deeper into the collective human psyche to uncover regions to nurture. Compassion and conscience hopefully exist in virtually every human and increase the breadth and depth of individual and collective purview. Compassion and conscience are fundamental to any system of ethics that can be truly heartfelt , individually or within a human culture. Compassion and conscience may well waver in the face of desperation to survive, and indeed much of the human population of the world is now dangerously desperate. But we have to start somewhere, so let’s start in the American Southwest, where aridity is the main characteristic, and human communities, albeit growing too rapidly and excessively, still exist in relative proportion to carrying capacity of respective habitats and watersheds. At the same time, we should identify at least part of the array of collective human conduct modes through which we threaten not only ourselves, and societies everywhere, but also our fellow biota and even geophysical characteristics that have made our tenure as the keystone species possible. In 1968, human ecologist Garrett Hardin wrote his evocative essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” wherein he illustrated by historic example in Britain that when the carrying capacity of the commons grows << Jack Loeffler 4 < too great, “the whole thing is destroyed.”1 Hardin had hearkened to the common sense reflected in “An Essay on the Principle of Population”2 by the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus published 170 years earlier. In 1972, a groupofscientistsatMassachusettsInstituteofTechnologypublishedabook entitled Limits to Growth, wherein they provided models of the effect of a rapidly growing human population in a world of finite resources. They have updated their book twice, and many reviewers have taken great umbrage at their depressing audacity. Yet their presentations are honest reflections of their interpretations of the exponential increase of five major elements— population, food production, industrialization, pollution, and consumption of nonrenewable resources—and their interactions. “Extrapolation of present trends is a time-honored way of looking into the future, especially the very near future, and especially if the quantity being considered is not much influenced by other trends that are occurring elsewhere in the system. Of course, none of the five factors we are examining here is independent . . . Each interacts constantly with all the others. Population cannot grow without food, food production is increased by growth of capital, more capital requires more resources, discarded resources become pollution, pollution interferes with the growth of both population and food.”3 Notably, other factors such as pandemics, world war, and global warming could be, but as yet have not been, included in this model. In part, the point of the drill is to conceive all of the factors simultaneously and in constant motion. This requires a sophisticated form of nonlinear thinking that may only be possible for most of us with a computer. However, it’s not that hard to memorize the five factors and then imagine them interrelating on different levels. Again, they are the following: population food production industrialization pollution consumption of nonrenewable resources This is a handy sphere of reference as we wander into the American Southwest, enchanted by the relatively clear light and sense of vast space, quietude, and peace. << Thinking Like a Watershed 5 < Cultures blossom and wither with the passage of millennia. Six hundred years ago, nearly a century before European cultures were scheming on empire building in the new world, desert people of the Hopi village of Oraibi hunted, gathered, and practiced a form of agriculture as they already had for centuries. Today, they continue to participate in an annual cycle of ceremonials wherein they collaborate with spirit beings in the practice of survival, high-desert style. Six centuries ago, the Hopis were not alone in what is now regarded as the American Southwest. Other pueblos existed along the Río Grande; the pueblo known as Zuni thrived in the high country on the western aspect of the Continental Divide; nomadic Athabascan peoples—Apaches and Navajos—roamed the region, sometimes raiding Puebloans and other cultures; Ute Indians lived in proximity to the San Juan River; and far to the south, O’odham cultures eked out existence in what is now called the Sonoran Desert, where earlier cultures are known to have preceded the O’odham by more than ten thousand years. All of these culturally integrated humans were equipped with generations of lore, both practical and mythic, that recounted states of mind and empirical methods of practice appropriate for their respective homelands. Many of their descendants continue to regard fellow biota as kindred, and it is that refined sense of empathy for all life within this sacred landscape that defines their role in an otherwise frenetic techno-economic global culture. Over four centuries ago, Spanish colonists questing for gold and human souls to convert to Christianity trailed along the Río Grande and began to settle the northern reaches of what is now New Mexico. Their first century was marked in great measure by mutual antagonism between themselves and their Native neighbors. The colonists brought with them missionaries representing a transcendental Christian god that would try without success to subsume the local deities, although the Christian mantle would come to share space with the katchinas. The colonists were violently expelled by Native peoples of different cultural persuasions in 1680 in a remarkably well-coordinated revolution, now recalled as the Pueblo Revolt, led by a Puebloan of extraordinary character named Popé. A dozen years passed, and the colonists returned and over time learned to live with their Native neighbors in a state of mutual cooperation and intercultural exchange of both custom and blood known as the mestizaje, or mixture. The colonists tapped deep roots into the high-desert country and gradually established their own sense of indigeneity, much of their history recorded in narrative ballads and folk dramas that serve as Jack Loeffler 6 < mnemonic means of cultural recollection. They created great systems of acequias, or irrigation canals, a custom shared with neighboring Puebloans who themselves had created stone constructions to capture water, returning some to the aquifers, and otherwise expanding riparian habitat, fully aware of the water cycle that included clouds that stored rain, hail, and snow. Across the span of the Great Plains to the east, Anglo culture, spawned ancestrally in Western Europe, was celebrating newly won liberation from the British Empire. Between 1804 and 1806, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led an expedition to the coast of the Pacific Northwest, taking measure of the recent Louisiana Purchase. Their return heralded recognition of the immanence of westward expansion sparked by the youthful exuberance of a new nation, the United States of America. In 1822, an adventurous entrepreneur, William Becknell, followed trails west from Missouri to Santa Fe, a community founded in the first decade of the seventeenth century and capital of the northern reaches of the new Republic of Mexico. Becknell established the Santa Fe Trail as an important nineteenth-century trade route that saw transport of the highly prized fruits of the Industrial Revolution from the east in return for silver coins, woven goods, and raw materials from the west. Much of this occurred to the dismay of Plains Indians mounted on horses acquired from Hispanos, Native Americans who rightly reckoned that their cultural days were numbered as technologically superior Anglos infiltrated their hunting grounds, ultimately committing buffalocide on bison that roamed the plains as an integral part of the biotic community, animals that were traditionally hunted by Indians of many cultures for food, clothing, bone tools, and immense spiritual well-being. As the eminent author Paul Horgan pointed out, “Of course, the very first motive was commercial, the coming of the Anglos. And though not a wholly ignoble motive, it certainly was a selfish one. Therefore, something of that emotional commitment to a purpose had an enduring effect on all relationships between the occupants—namely, the Indians, and the Hispanos and the incoming Yankees, Anglos. I know that superior judgements were rendered upon the inhabitants by those who came.”4 Horgan also provided insight into the vast cultural differences that existed between the Indians and the Hispanos and Anglos and that abiding sense of alienness that greatly colors perspectives of all cultures in collision. Journalist Jonathon O’Sullivan expressed Yankee exuberance when he coined the term Manifest Destiny, as he wrote that it is “by the right of our [America’s] manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the Thinking Like a Watershed 7 < continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.”5 At the time, America was involved in a boundary dispute with Great Britain in the Oregon Country. O’Sullivan had earlier used the term regarding U.S.annexationof Texas.ThusheinsinuatedthenotionthatitwasAmerica’s God-given right to take over the land. The term caught on and ostensibly influenced President James Knox Polk and thus contributed to the kindling of the Mexican-American War that ended in 1848. The war’s end resulted in the United States winning the New Mexico Territory away from Mexico, to whom the United States paid $15 million plus a bit of change to settle some old scores to purchase moral righteousness along with the deed to a swath of land that extended through the American Southwest all the way to the Pacific Ocean. The war officially ended with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In 1853, the United States considerably expanded the newly won landscape with the Gadsden Purchase that included nearly thirty thousand square miles extending from La Mesilla, New Mexico, to Yuma, Arizona. The United States of America was now an empire that spanned the continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. Westward expansion fired cultural consciousness. After the Civil War ended in 1865, a steady stream of homesteaders, entrepreneurs of every ilk, lawless bands of gunslingers, and the U.S. Army invaded the West, displacing Native Americans, especially Apaches and Navajos who bravely defended their homelands, many to the death. Some have regarded New Mexico Territory to have been the most outlaw-ridden, violent region in America during the latter half of the nineteenth century. It was into this milieu that a one-armed adventurer, explorer, scientist, and endlessly curious seeker of knowledge—John Wesley Powell—began his explorations of the American West. In 1869, he and his small coterie descended the Green and Colorado rivers in wooden dories, being the first, as far as is known, to have ever attempted such an adventure. Born in 1834 in New York State, his family gradually settling in Boone County, Illinois, Powell ran part of the Mississippi River alone as a youngster, his vigorous curiosity regarding natural history his dominant characteristic. He lost most of his right arm to a minié ball wound at the battle of Shiloh where he served the Union forces as an officer. He felt pain at the end of the stump of his arm for the rest of his life but never allowed himself to be daunted. << Jack Loeffler 8 < He rode through much of the American West unarmed, befriending Native Americans as he went, even learning as much as he could of their languages and customs. He became the first director of the Bureau of American Ethnology, a position he held until his death in 1902. He was also the second director of the U.S. Geographical Survey from 1881 until 1894. It was during this period that he wrote about the American West that he perceived with far greater clarity than many if not all of his peers. He saw that the lands west of the 100th meridian were arid lands that received far less annual precipitation than lands in the verdant East. The Rocky Mountains separated the Great Plains from the Intermountain West, that expanse home to the Columbia Plateau, the Colorado Plateau, and the Basin and Range Province and bounded on the west by the Sierra-Cascade mountain ranges. The Intermountain West is drained to the sea by only three river systems : the Columbia-Snake Watershed that drains to the Pacific; the Colorado River Watershed that drains to the Sea of Cortez; and the Río Grande Watershed that drains to the Gulf of Mexico. The Continental Divide runs roughly north to south along the Rockies, separating drainage systems east from west. The Basin and Range Province is home to the four deserts of North America: the Great Basin Desert of Nevada and part of Utah; the Mohave Desert of southern California; the Sonoran Desert, the most luxuriant , of southern Arizona and northwestern Mexico; and the largest, the Chihuahuan Desert of New Mexico, Texas, and part of northern Mexico. The Colorado Plateau contains the most intricate system of canyons in the world. The sun shines in New Mexico for more than three hundred days a year, illuminating the land of clear light. Powell reasoned that easterners venturing westward were destined for hard times due to aridity. Farming would have to rely on irrigation rather than rainfall. And settlers would have to rely on farming and ranching to subsist. Gradually, Powell envisioned that the arid West be perceived as a mosaic of watersheds and that as westward expansion proceeded, each watershed would be settled, its waters to be shared for agriculture within the watershed, its timber and pastures to provide bounty for the settlers. This was admittedly an anthropocentric approach, part of the heritage of Manifest Destiny. Yet had Powell’s dream of watersheds as commonwealths governed largely from within rather than without been approved by Congress, human cultural geography could well have been more deeply imbued with the realization of the flow of Nature with much less emphasis on economics. Thinking Like a Watershed 9 < On Saturday, March 15, 1890, Major John Wesley Powell addressed the Select Committee on Irrigation of the U.S. House of Representatives. Let the General Government organize the arid region, including all of the lands to be irrigated by perennial streams, into irrigation districts by hydrographic basins in such a manner that each district shall embrace all of the irrigable lands of a catchment basin and all of a catchment basin belonging to these lands, and determine the amount of water which each catchment shall afford, and then select sufficient irrigable lands for that water to serve, and declare that the waters of the catchment area belong to the designated lands and no other, and prohibit the irrigation of any other lands. In order to maintain existing rights, declare all lands irrigated at the present time to be irrigable lands. This will divide the water among the lands and prevent conflict, and rights will not grow up where they can not be maintained. Then let the people of each irrigation district organize as a body and control the waters on the declared irrigable lands in any manner which they may devise. Then declare that the pasturage and timber lands be permanently reserved for the purposes for which they are adapted, and give to the people the right to protect and use the forests and the grasses. Let the Government retain the ownership of the reservoir sites, canal sites, and headwork sites; but allow the people of each district to use them, as a body, so as to prevent speculation in such sites which would ultimately be a tax on agriculture. My theory is to organize in the United States another unit of government for specific purposes, for agriculture by irrigation, for the protection of the forests which are being destroyed by fire, and for the utilization of the pasturage which can only be utilized in large bodies; that is, to create a great body of commonwealths. In the main, these commonwealths would be like county communities in the states . . . I would have the Government declare the boundary of an irrigation district for this purpose, and then say to the people of these districts, Control these interests for yourselves. Let Congress do something more; let it say within each district, There is a body of land which is irrigable, and you can use all the water in that district on that body of land and nowhere else. Then say to Jack Loeffler 10 < the people, You can settle that district which is declared irrigable. You can settle that by homesteads, and that pasturage and that timber we turn over to you on this condition, that the States will agree that the people who live in any district which is divided by a State line may themselves organize their own government and use the water belonging to them as a district . . . if they allow the people to make their own laws and govern themselves in the distribution of that water, then the Government will turn over to the people of such a district the use of the timber and the use of the pasturage.6 In a word, the people of the districts (watersheds) would be the stewards . Powell had enormous faith in people who worked the land. He believed that they could develop a much deeper understanding of how their home watershed worked and should be accorded governance of that watershed. He himself was caught in the cultural sway of westward expansion. He was coming from an agrarian point of view but well understood that corporate industry was what fashioned “money kings,” thus replacing monarchy by hereditary right. The Civil War had been over for twenty-five years in 1890 when Powell made his presentation before the House Committee on Irrigation. The human population of the United States was still less than 75 million, and the empty West was like a honeycomb ripe for plunder. Some of us had grandparents who were alive in 1890, myself included. I spent many childhood hours listening to my grandfathers speak of their own youth, and in retrospect, I can piece together much of the spirit of the American cultural milieu of the 1890s. American enthusiasm ran high. Rural life still predominated. American White Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture was the greatest culture yet visited upon the planet. The Union forces rightfully won the Civil War. American Indians had stood in the way of westward expansion, but they were history by the 1930s. America was abundant with natural resources. Growth was an eternal characteristic of the future of America. Mark Twain and Charles Dickens lined the bookshelves. Dinner came at midday, supper in the evening. An uncle fell through the hole in the outhouse. I met a few Civil War veterans and a Negro former slave. Hillbilly music and hymns prevailed. Old ladies quilted and cooked for church socials. Men wore straw hats, chewed stogies, and spun yarns. When John Wesley Powell died in 1902, the planet’s human population was about 1.75 billion. Today, the world population is at least 7 billion. Thinking Like a Watershed 11 < In those days, a doctor’s house call was $2 or two chickens or less, and he arrived in a horse-drawn buggy. Coffee was a nickel. Coca-Cola was still powered by cocaine. Locomotives were coal fired. Rural populations and urban populations were about the same. America was the world’s melting pot, although some flavors were more welcome than others. America was truly a comfortable place to be, fired by the enthusiasm of youthful nationalism . Them was the good old days. What Powell envisioned was a brilliant approach to settling the West, a landscape with which he had long been intimate. He knew what watersheds were, drainage systems that started at higher elevations, be they mountain peaks or hilltops, and contained within geophysical cradles, separated by ridgelines, mountain ranges, or even high spots between arroyos, where water drained ever seaward and where biotic communities flourished or withered depending on the foibles of weather or the blessed yield of springs. He understood that easterners accustomed to limitless rivers, runs, and creeks would be flabbergasted at the barrenness of the arid West. He foresaw that in order to successfully irrigate, dams and canals would have to be constructed, irrigation ditches dug, and water rights determined where widely spaced waterholes had been defended to the death by cowboys and ranchers. And although the term Manifest Destiny had fallen out of favor, the seeds that it had planted a half century before had taken deep root in the cultural psyche of America. Powell stood before a congressional House committee in the late winter and spring of 1890, doing his level best to establish well-thought-out legal guidelines to prepare for the continued westward expansion that he keenly foresaw. But he was too late, and ever eager entrepreneurs were descending in waves to the extent that future legislation would result in a hodgepodge of complexity that is now both baffling and erroneous. One of Powell’s greatest fears was that interwatershed, or interbasin, transfers of water would come to prevail. Could he have possibly imagined that water would be passed from the San Juan River Watershed beneath the Continental Divide to the greater Río Grande Watershed through a twentythree -mile-long tunnel? Or that water would be pumped from the Colorado River to coastal cities to the west and the central valleys of Arizona to the east? Powell’s dream of an irrigated agrarian culture in the arid West is rapidly turning into a 3-D urban phantasmagoria wherein virtual reality seductively rearranges America’s perceptions and practices. << Jack Loeffler 12 < Powell didn’t expect North American Indians to survive, those peoples whose cultures had been shaped in large measure by their homelands . Thus he documented as best he could the mores and languages and artifacts of the cultures he visited, where he created enduring friendships with peoples whose minds encompassed points of view that seemed utterly alien to the sons and daughters of Europe. His own watershed perspective may well have been shaped in part by Hispano culture of northern New Mexico where irrigation was sculpted into acequia systems that expanded irrigable lands and set community political systems. Spanish land grants and watersheds were not privatized but, rather, held in common, each family garden or field allotted its fair share of water as stipulated by the elected mayordomo, who rostered the times when a headgate could be opened so that water could course into cultivated land. Through the centuries, countless boys of twelve years of age climbed out of warm beds in the mid of night to open headgates so that the fields of their fathers could drink, their corn, beans, squash, pumpkins, chiles, garlic, onions, and orchards absorbing life-sustaining water. Then the headgates were closed so that other headgates could be opened for their allotted times. Until after harvest, the fields were the domains of their respective family households. After harvest , anyone’s cattle and sheep could wander through grazing on what was left and fertilizing the soil with their own by-products. In the arid landscape of northern New Mexico, Hispano culture survived through hard work, mutual cooperation, and faith in the benign presence of San Ysidro and other santos in the Christian pantheon that provided spiritual nurture. In the neighboring pueblos, the Indians had long tilled their fields and devised sophisticated means of gathering sacred waters to nourish their own crops and even recharge the aquifers beneath the surface of the sacred Earth. They performed their cycles of ceremonials and danced in reverence for the local deities who presided over the weather patterns and seasonal changes, and they ever remained in awe of the mighty river whose banks their pueblos lined like gardens of humanity filled with promise of consciousness. And in spite of westward expansion spawned east of the 100th meridian , the native cultures of the arid West continue to endure, inevitably reshaped in great measure by the dominance of the more newly arrived but still dancing to the heartbeat of the Earthmother whose song may ever be heard by those with the refined sensibilities, finely honed attention spans, and deep intuition that characterize traditional Native Americans of every cultural persuasion. This is part of their great collective contribution to Thinking Like a Watershed 13 < human consciousness and is at least as important as science and technology . Without their wave of influence, we are indeed a world out of balance. According to Webster, mores are “folkways that are considered conducive to the welfare of society and so, through general observance, develop the force of law, often becoming part of the formal legal code.”7 Although already complex, a far simpler system of mores dominated American culture at the dawn of the twentieth century than at century’s end. Considering watersheds as commons could have become a major factor in our cultural mores had Powell been successful or had eastern Americans been more patient in the settling of the West. But by 1900, the capitalist system of unbridled private enterprise had already spread like a wildfire through drought-ridden grassland before heavy winds. The system of ethics that was embedded in Powell’s watershed master plan would not be redefined for another half century when the great conservationist Aldo Leopold included his profound essay “The Land Ethic” in A Sand County Almanac. Therein Leopold wrote, “Quit thinking about decent land-use as solely an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”8 Imagine that Leopold used the word watershed rather than question so that it would have read, “Examine each watershed in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient.” In other words, the watershed is itself a commons for the biotic community that it cradles and sustains. What would it take to reintegrate the acceptance of watersheds as commons into the mores of global monoculture? Remember the popular apothegm, “Think globally. Act locally.” Understanding watersheds as commons is a mighty leap in a culture where water law in the American West is cast in slickrock, where certain legislation is revealed to be at loggerheads with natural law, where selected cultural mores were molded into law as an economic expedient rather than following the path to refinement of ethical standards. Imagine integrating the best thoughts and practices of John Wesley Powell and Aldo Leopold into a “Leopowellian” masterpiece of bioregional endeavor. This could indeed work in many watersheds that appear in Powell’s great map, although the Colorado River greater watershed is now subject << Jack Loeffler 14 < to an overwhelming array of factors and serves a human population that has now exceeded the carrying capacity of the Lower Basin of the Colorado River. Consider that Powell died when Leopold was fifteen years old and the population of California was but one-thirtieth its current size. Consider that the human population served in the Lower Basin of the Colorado River is now greater than 25 million with more on the way on a daily basis. Consider that the plumbing of this incredibly complex miasma of cities and agricultural districts occurs by interbasin transfers of water that Powell had hoped to thwart so that each of the watersheds of the West could retain its respective integrity. Consider that instead of being governed from within by people familiar with the workings of their respective watersheds, the Lower Basin of the Colorado River has as its mayordomo the personage of the secretary of the interior, the moderator of a riverine empire so populated by humans that the rest of the biotic community has fallen out of sight, a river system so overallocated that scarcely a drop reaches its natural destination—the Sea of Cortez, itself a magnificent ecosystem that nourishes countless fellow species and delights the souls of all who have played in its waters, camped on its islands, and hung out with and recorded geomythic mapping songs of its indigenees. When one looks at the map of the Arid Lands of the West provided by Powell for the U.S. Geological Survey’s Eleventh Annual Report, one see about 150 different watersheds represented in different shades of color and subtly different hues. In the American Southwest, which for our purposes includes New Mexico, Arizona, southern Colorado, southern Utah, southern Nevada, and southern California, the major watersheds include the Arkansas-Canadian, the Río Pecos, the Río Grande, the Gila, the San Juan, the Colorado, and the Great Basin (closed). The Arkansas and Canadian rivers’ headwaters are in Colorado, and their land base includes parts of Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas, Texas, and Oklahoma, where they conjoin to form the main stem of the Arkansas River that flows into the Mississippi River in Arkansas. They gain momentum as they flow eastward, but they are modest in their flows closer to their respective sources, where they pass through lightly populated country until they approach the 100th meridian. Southwest of the Arkansas-Canadian River Watershed is the Río Pecos Watershed that begins in northern New Mexico and finally drains into the Río Grande near Langtry, Texas. In New Mexico, the Río Pecos passes << Thinking Like a Watershed 15 < through Pecos, Santa Rosa, Fort Sumner, Roswell, Artesia, and Carlsbad before crossing into Texas and passing through the communities of Pecos and Langtry, where during the nineteenth century, Judge Roy Bean proclaimed himself “the law west of the Pecos” and where he held trials in his saloon. Farther west is the watershed of the Río Grande, whose headwaters spring forth in the San Juan Mountains, head south through the San Luís Valley of southern Colorado, and then bisect New Mexico east from west before entering Texas at El Paso where the river becomes the international border between Texas and Mexico until it empties into the Gulf of Mexico. The Río Grande is 1,896 miles long and drains an area of 182,200 square miles. The northern Río Grande drainage area extends from its headwaters near Creede, Colorado, south to Fort Quitman, Texas. The western boundary of the Río Grande Watershed is the Continental Divide, east of which all waters eventually drain into the Atlantic and west of which they either drain into closed basins such as the Great Basin Desert of Nevada and Utah or the Pacific Ocean and Sea of Cortez. The Colorado River Watershed includes the Green, San Juan, Animas, Escalante, Virgin, Paria, and Bill Williams rivers that drain 244,000 square miles in parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, and 2,000 square miles of Mexico. The headwaters of the Gila River Watershed occur on the western slopes of the Continental Divide in southwestern New Mexico. The river flows east to west through southern Arizona until it drains into the Colorado River at Yuma, Arizona. With the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, the 650-mile-long Gila River marked the boundary between Mexico and the United States. After the Gadsden Purchase of 1853, a wide swath of landscape south of the Gila became the last land acquisition within the area of the lower forty-eight states. These five watersheds span the American Southwest. All of the waters that pass through the rivers and streams in these five watersheds amount to but a small fraction of the yield of the Columbia River in the Northwest. The Southwest is the driest part of America and remains the emptiest in human terms, although its urban centers are among the fastest growing in the United States. At the same time, produce grown and irrigated in the Imperial Valley and other areas in the Lower Basin of the Colorado River feeds millions of Americans and is a major source of revenue. At least 80 percent of New Mexico’s water is slated for irrigation. It is obvious to all that agricultural and urban areas now vie for the modest waters of the Jack Loeffler 16 < American Southwest. Water laws that were passed in the early twentieth century cannot accommodate the complexity of present and future demands. In 1922, representatives of seven western states gathered at Bishop’s Lodge just north of Santa Fe to address apportionment of the waters of the Colorado River Watershed. The meeting was presided over by Herbert Hoover, then secretary of commerce. In previous years, the Colorado River had been running high, and subsequently folks erroneously thought that it wassafetoassumethattherivercouldbecountedontodeliver17to18million acre-feetperyear.Thusrepresentativesfromthesevenstatesgenerallyagreed that the watershed would be divided into two basins, the Upper and Lower Basins, the dividing line occurring at Lee’s Ferry between Glen Canyon and Marble Canyon in Arizona. Each basin was to be allocated 7.5 million acrefeet annually. The Upper Basin states include Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico (and a slice of Arizona); the Lower Basin states include Arizona, California, and Nevada. The Upper Basin states were agreeable to apportioning the waters between themselves. The Lower Basin was considerably more complicated because California wanted to claim the lion’s share of the water even though it contributed virtually no tributarial flow. Arizona took great umbrage at this, and Nevada was all but the odd state out. It was determined that California would receive 4.6 million acre-feet per year, Arizona 2.3 million acre-feet, and Nevada but 300,000 acre-feet per year. In 1922, there was very little happening around Las Vegas, although the Las Vegas of today is immense and looking for water. Arizona did not agree to the Colorado River Compact, thus it took four decades and a U.S. Supreme Court decision to determine that Arizona would be allocated 2.8 million acre-feet from the Colorado River and all of its instate tributarial waters. Arizona remains junior to California so that if the river runs low, California gets its water first. Neither Indians nor Mexicans were invited to Bishop’s Lodge, and it wasn’t until 1944 that the United States entered into a treaty with Mexico guaranteeing Mexico 1.5 million acre-feet a year. Between the Upper and Lower Basins and Mexico, that brought the total acre-feet to be apportioned up to 16.5 million. In the meantime, it was revealed that the average rate of flow was much closer to between 13.5 and 15 million acre-feet, not the 17 million that was previously thought. California initiated a massive water storage project that resulted in construction of the Hoover (originally Boulder) Dam that was dedicated << Thinking Like a Watershed 17 < by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in September 1935. Lake Mead has the capacity to store 28.5 million acre-feet and is located about thirty miles downstream from Las Vegas, Nevada. However, since 2000, it has been dropping, and by the time of this writing in 2010, it had reached a record low and holds less than 40 percent of its capacity. Downstream from Hoover Dam is the Imperial Dam that diverts water from the Colorado River into the Imperial Valley of southern California and to several cities. Parker Dam is situated between the Hoover and Imperial dams and impounds Colorado River water into Lake Havasu, which is the source of the Colorado River Aqueduct that provides much of southern California’s drinking water. As the twentieth century unfolded, it was apparent that the Colorado River might have 25-million-acre-foot years and 6-million-acre-foot years. By virtue of the 1922 Colorado River Compact, the Upper Basin had to guarantee 7.5 million acre-feet of Colorado River water each year, or 75 million acre-feet over any ten-year period. Thus the Colorado River Storage Project (CRSP) was conceived in 1956 to develop storage and irrigation facilities in the Upper Basin that resulted in construction of several dams, including the most contested dam in America, the Glen Canyon Dam, that is situated just eighteen miles upstream from Lee’s Ferry, the dividing line between the Upper and Lower Basins of the Colorado River. The Glen Canyon Dam backs water up into Glen Canyon, resulting in Lake Powell, named after John Wesley Powell. One can but wonder what Powell would have thought of this enormous reservoir with a capacity of over 24 million acre-feet. We know what author Edward Abbey thought and can read all about it in his classic novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang. In theory, Lake Powell guarantees that the Upper Basin can indeed release 8.23 million acre-feet a year through the Grand Canyon into the Lower Basin reservoir , Lake Mead. That amount includes both Lower Basin water and half of America’s commitment to Mexico by virtue of the 1944 treaty. The Glen Canyon Dam was dedicated in September 1966 by Lady Bird Johnson before a host of leading politicians. Thus, one of the most beautiful canyons in the world drowned beneath Lake Powell. As author William deBuys points out, the noted historian Samuel P. Hayes well characterized the milieu of the turn of the twentieth century and subsequent decades as a time when America was motivated by “the gospel of efficiency.”9 Hayes spoke authoritatively about the effect of the Industrial Revolution on American culture. Indeed, anthropocentrism made little room in cultural consciousness for concern for other biota or the balance Jack Loeffler 18 < of natural forces. When the Colorado River Compact of 1922 was put into effect, no thought was given to the river for its own sake. It was there for human use, period. Concern for habitat was paltry compared with the drive for endless economic growth. The Colorado and other rivers were there to be put to best use, as agriculture was then regarded. A culture religiously motivated by the right to dominate as defined in the biblical book of Genesis was appalled by the voice of Charles Darwin, who possessed one of the greatest minds of the nineteenth century. For years, Arizonans had been craving their own enormous public works project, one they named the Central Arizona Project (CAP). In the early 1900s, the Salt River Project was initiated and resulted in construction of the Roosevelt Dam at the confluence of Tonto Creek and the Salt River. Roosevelt Lake became the reservoir that would provide water for irrigation to farmers around the Phoenix area. Ultimately, the Roosevelt Dam was to also generate hydroelectric power to provide electricity for the region. At the time of its construction, Roosevelt Dam was the tallest concrete dam in the world, standing 280 feet high. It was completed in 1911. The Salt River Project was so successful that Arizonans envisioned an even greater public service project, the CAP. If more water could be sprinkled on the sands of the Sonoran Desert for agriculture, Colorado River water could be put to what was still deemed best use. The concept involved pumping waters east from Lake Havasu (on the other side of the lake from the pumps that water cities in southern California) into an aqueduct that ultimately stretched for 336 miles, all the way to Tucson. Originally, electricity to run the pumps was to have come from two “cash register dams” to be located at either end of the Grand Canyon. Martin Litton and David Brower of the Sierra Club were instrumental in stopping that project before it began. However, electricity had to come from somewhere. The largest coal deposit in Arizona lies buried in the heart of Black Mesa, a land formation sacred to both Hopi and Navajo Indians. The new plan was to strip-mine coal from Black Mesa, transport it via a specially constructed railway to the shores of Lake Powell where the Navajo Generating Station was to be constructed, thence to fire electricity through power lines supported by towering metal kachinas from Lake Powell to Lake Havasu to power the pumps to pump the water into the aqueduct to the central valleys of Arizona. As an adjunct, additional coal was to be slurried with water pumped from the Pleistocene aquifer beneath Black Mesa from the Thinking Like a Watershed 19 < mine through a 273-mile-long slurry line to the already existing Mohave Generating Station near Laughlin, Nevada, to help light up Las Vegas. While the operation was to provide jobs for Indians, the blow to Hopi traditional culture, and to many traditional Navajos, was to prove nearly lethal. Black Mesa has now been strip-mined by the Peabody Coal Company of East St. Louis for nearly four decades in spite of attempts to thwart the debacle by environmentalists who were asked to help by Hopi traditional elders. The rape of Black Mesa stands as perhaps the greatest model of complete environmental and cultural catastrophe to have ever been visited upon the American Southwest by “captains” of industry and their men in government. Indeed, it is here that the seeds of Manifest Destiny achieved a most complex incarnation. Ironically, the $5 billion price tag for the Central Arizona Project rendered the water far too expensive for farmers. Thus many farmers have sold their farms to land developers and other modern-day carpetbaggers, and Phoenix and Tucson continue to spread across the fragile Sonoran Desert. Does this signal the shift from agriculture to urban growth as the new interpretation of “best use” of water in the American Southwest? The Colorado River Compact of 1922 determined the immediate fate of the Colorado River, the lifeline of the Southwest, with what is now known as “the law of the river.” Procedurally, it set the tone and guidelines for other compacts, including the Río Grande Compact that defined the river rights of Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas. Today, most of a century later, many realize that the river compacts of the early twentieth century have led to enormous new problems based on human population growth and early lack of ecological consciousness, both problems that continue to persist. Native American water rights have yet to be decided. The notion of “use it or lose it” continues to color everyone’s thinking. Prior rights seem cast in stone. Groundwater is being pumped out of aquifers faster than it can be recharged. For example, the city of Albuquerque was thought to be situated over an aquifer the size of Lake Michigan. Then in 1982, that was revealed not to be the case; rather, the subterranean water supply was being depleted faster than it could recharge. The city would have to get water from the Río Grande that was already allocated in favor of agriculture, thus pitting farmers against the city. A deal was struck earlier on to create an interbasin << Jack Loeffler 20 < transfer of water from the San Juan River Watershed (which is part of the greater Colorado River Watershed) that would be pumped beneath the Continental Divide into Heron Lake on the Río Chama to thereafter flow into the Río Grande. It could thence be stored in a series of reservoirs culminating in Cochiti Lake, the river stoppered behind an immense earthfilled dam about thirty miles upstream from Albuquerque, and thus be made available for urban use. This is precisely what Powell had hoped to avoid, recognizing that water use should be restricted to what was available within the watershed and that interbasin transfers were wrong on all counts. Indeed, watersheds should serve no more than their own denizens. Interbasin transfers result in falsely defined watershed carrying capacities and jeopardize those who grow to rely on imported water. As attorney and author Em Hall points out, Albuquerque is now in direct competition with Los Angeles, Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas, and other cities for Colorado River water, “and who’s going to win in that kind of competition?”10 We have expanded beyond the parameters of human well-being with little regard for the well-being of our fellow biota here in the American Southwest. We have foregone mindfulness of the nature of home habitat. While environmental consciousness has grown in magnitude over the last forty or so years, it has not kept pace with economic growth, population growth, industrial growth, extraction of nonrenewable resources, or an increase in pollution. It’s as though we are culturally polarized to the point where we cannot thwart our growth because we cannot agree to see with the clarity necessary to turn the juggernaut of our own creation. And we have centralized political power to the extent that our political bodies are ripe to be swayed by those in economic power. At this point, they are one and the same, an aggressive entity that holds sway over cultural consciousness and otherwise controls everything, unchecked, even to the point of denying the undeniable—namely that we are soon to be brought to our knees because of seven generations of massive overindulgence at extreme expense to seven generations hence. The problem is further exacerbated in that we have allowed much of our cultural consciousness to be subsumed by “virtual reality” through addiction to the “digital mind.” This is actually a fascinating phenomenon— to watch evolved minds become and remain dominated by BlackBerries and other fruits of the digital generation, now approaching a quarter century since coming of age. What’s tragic is that so little of the digital mind is relevant, so much of it electronic persiflage. To think that we talk to a Thinking Like a Watershed 21 < BlackBerry rather than a grandfather juniper tree or a range of buffalo grass. We listen through headphones to engineered sound rather than to the call of the coyote, the song of the meadowlark, or the cry of a hawk. Most of us separate ourselves from that which sustains us—we rarely swim in the flow of Nature. So what’s next in this stream of consciousness? A lot of it has to do with common sense. Fifty years ago, I had a friend, Rick Mallory, who foresaw that at some point, tough times are a comin’. Rick’s answer was to buy a piece of countryside complete with hot spring and build a modest house adjacent to it so that the spring could provide heat as well as water. Then grow a sufficiently large garden and hunt venison, elk, antelope for meat. Jerk it, smoke it, and eat it. I had another friend, Ed Abbey, who wanted to buy enough rangeland to put a herd of bison on it and invite a few friends to set up a community— each household separated from the rest to afford privacy—enough of a community so that when the time was right, a great bonfire would be set alight, a haunch of buffalo roasted, homemade brew provided in abundance, turnips cooked, bread baked, and a great fiesta held, complete with homegrown music, poetry, and nights filled with lovemaking beneath a dark firmament filled with star-bright constellations reflecting mythic moments of yore. Brother Abbey was indeed a man of refined taste. My own youthful vision of perfect survival in days to come was to buy an inholding surrounded by national forest near a river, the forest surrounded by Indian reservations, the landscape filled with deer, elk, and the occasional bear and mountain lion, complete with ample firewood, a good well, a garden, and an orchard—the only concession to luxury being a library of fine books that never staled and plenty of time for walking and meditation and running wild rivers. Some of us had long been enthralled with life as a hunter-gatherer and even practiced it in days of youth. The great thinker Paul Shepard justified this sentiment in his compelling book, Coming Home to the Pleistocene. But these fantasies could only occur in a far less populated world. Over the last half century, I’ve been honored to befriend many Indians—Native Americans, people indigenous to their homelands, there rooted by dozens, scores of generations of forebears. From as far north as the Nez Perce people of the Clearwater Watershed, to the Mayans of Chiapas in southern Mexico, from each of the peoples in between who still retain their traditional values and points of view whom I’ve visited, recorded, even lived with for months of my life, I’ve received Jack Loeffler 22 < clear understanding that this soil we tread is sacred soil, sustaining soil to be revered. The scent of juniper smoke in the Southwest aligns our sensitivities in harmony with homeland. Their local deities are profoundly in place and celebrated in ceremonials throughout every tribal domain. Their songs bespeak mythic history that retains its presence in the moment. States of mind are available wherein one becomes aligned with other ways of plumbing the mystery of existence. Their homelands, reserved for them by virtue of treaties that must not be broken, are gardens of survival potential . They are the inheritors of a greater landscape that is now tired out by centuries of overuse by newcomers who still don’t understand what it takes to think like a watershed. Our children share this heritage. It is now up to our children of all cultures to save us from ourselves. Much that is wonderful has been given to the world by Western culture: classical music since the time of the Renaissance, the paintings and sculpture of master artists, extraordinary literature rendered in both poetry and prose, philosophical speculations that challenge conflicting absolutes, Western medicine, science in its myriad areas of discipline and application, technology in its seemingly infinite ability to remanifest itself in response to perceived human needs, digital media that present a most seductive virtual reality and a new means of participating in evolving cultures of practice. However, Western culture has been costly to the earthly habitat that spawned us humans into the keystone species. And dominant global human culture has now absorbed much of the offerings of science and technology of the West into an extraordinary multicultural complex that lies far beyond the ken of any single human mind or institution to encompass. In my mind’s eye I envision this planet, itself a living organism spinning along its ancient trail through space around the sun in a multibillion-yearlong steady state that nurtures life and its potential. I perceive much of burgeoning humanity engaged in what seems a frenetic expenditure of energy that serves no apparent purpose other than pursuit of industry within territorially defined regions marked by ever increasing wars supported by a faltering environment. I also perceive patches of survival potential in habitats that struggle to preserve their own integrity wherein clusters of humans still hold the planet in awe and reverence for its ultimate gifts of life and consciousness. Some of these clusters struggle to prevail in the American Southwest, where Indians of different cultural persuasions, who << Thinking Like a Watershed 23 < are descended through countless generations within cultures that evolve as their respective habitats evolve, sing their wisdom to the rhythm of heartbeat in homeland. Myths and legends are not simply superstition couched in creation stories and songs celebrating earth forms and fellow creatures. They are expressions of intuitive understanding of homeland, of vast kinship, of immersion within the flow of Nature. They are lore-filled accounts of generations of observation absorbed into cultural encyclopedias of oral history arranged not alphabetically but by subject as perceived within the present. They are reenactments of moments of cultural truth. They are braids of metaphor entwined within an umbilicus that adheres culture to homeland. They evoke sensibilities that plumb the entirety of human understanding in a way that intellect alone cannot. They provide clear insight into perceiving watersheds as commons—because that’s what watersheds are, habitats common to all species and geophysical forms therein. It does not require an advanced degree in physics to understand that. Rather, it takes an entire array of refined sensibilities to discern the persistence of the sacred and to guard against secularization of homeland. In no way does this invalidate the practice of science. Rather, it provides a much wider and deeper purview from which to intellectually seek meaning in existence. The late, great cultural anthropologist Edward T. “Ned” Hall burst through the front door of our home in Santa Fe shouting, “Jack! We need to create an ethnic global jukebox!” This was in the early 1980s, well before the Internet made such a concept a potential reality. Ned was on the mark. In a recorded interview, Ned had this to say: The land and the community are associated with each other. And the reason they’re associated and linked, and the reason that people get their feeling of community from the land, is that they all share in the land. Ethnicity is looked upon normally as a liability , because people want to make everyone else like themselves. And this is something we’re going to have to learn to overcome, because ethnicity is one of the greatest resources, if not the greatest resource, that we have in the world today. What we have here are stored solutions to common human problems, and no one solution is ever going to work over a long period of time, so we need multiple solutions for these problems. So ethnicity is like << Jack Loeffler 24 < money in the bank, but in a world bank. Culture is an extension of the genetic code. In other words, we are part of Nature ourselves. And one of the rules of Nature is that in order to have a stable environment, you have to have one that is extraordinarily rich and diverse. If you get it too refined, it becomes more vulnerable. So we need diversity in order to have insurance for the future. Again, you need multiple solutions to common problems. The evolution of the species really depends on not developing our technology but developing our spirits or our souls. The fact is that Nature is so extraordinarily complex that you can look at it from multiple dimensions and come up with very different answers, and each one of them will be true. And we need all of those truths.11 Implicit in Ned’s wisdom is that the totally rational mind is blind to the scope of perception of which we as humans are capable. Yet without rationality we are bereft of the capacity to extrapolate our way through the complexity of Nature. A great truth is that rationality and applied technology alone will not see us through the coming decades. Yet without them, we will not survive. The mystery of existence, life, and consciousness is to me the most compelling and endless realm of pursuit. There are many trails to the heart of truth, many methods of pursuit. As our species evolves, our perceptions of the mystery grow more complex until it becomes obvious that there is no fixed way through which the mystery may be seen and understood in its entirety. At best, we catch glimpses through tools of science or by meditation , ceremony, prayer, observation, or even surrender to the flow of Nature, to name but some “doors to perception.” Belief in any one system to the exclusion of others is to blindside ourselves. Conflicting absolutes, such as pitting scientific method against organized religion, create a mire that only serves to impede clarity. Yet it is difficult to metaphorically reside within a crystal of many windows and perceive the myriad views simultaneously. In an earlier work, I wrote the following: Living a creative self-directed life is like running a wild river; you don’t deny the current its due, but you work your own way through the rapids, camp where you will, explore side canyons that intrigue you, and relish the danger, heeding no higher authority than the truth.12 Thinking Like a Watershed 25 < Thinking like a watershed comes naturally to me; I could easily be regarded as being devoid of focus. In my own haphazard fashion, I have pursued exposure to as many points of view as I could during this adventure of life. I haven’t restricted my adventure to the American Southwest, but it is definitely my region of deep preference. I’m at home anywhere in the rural Southwest and can happily adapt to any place west of the 100th meridian in the contiguous forty-eight states of the United States, and even the desert country of northern Mexico. I am a desert rat fascinated by waterways, including dry arroyo bottoms that afford temporary storylines scribed in the sands. I love to run rivers through the high-desert country or hike canyons, camping in caves, sharing space with Tarahumaras, looking into a grandfather juniper tree momentarily populated by a wave of mountain bluebirds passing through, stopping for a quick snack. I love to listen to, even record, the sounds of Nature, including points of view and songs of Ute, Navajo, Puebloan, Hopi, Zuni, O’odham, Apache, Yaqui, Seri, Mayan, Huichol, Basque, Hispano, Buckaroo, and other ethnic communities who have achieved indigeneity to homelands. To listen to the dawn chorus of birdsong near a spring in the Sonoran, Great Basin, Mohave, or Chihuahuan deserts is to hear an expression of consciousness that is not alien but deeply kindred. To listen closely to the hiss of a rattling diamondback gives great meaning to biosemiotics, Nature’s system of signage. To wander through the geophysical cradles of watersheds, listening to the drone of insect wings, is to experience a biophony of sound more sacred to me than a baroque oratorio. To hear the cry of a red-tailed hawk or the mellifluous song of a canyon wren is to experience a form of perfection rendered by Nature. Each watershed is populated by a biotic community that strives for collective balance with homeland. Human presence is part of almost every biotic community, and as the present keystone species on our planet, we humans must pay close heed to engaging in “communities of practice” that don’t violate natural balance or endanger it. Nature has a mind of its own that human intuition can sense only if we guard against allowing that intuition to atrophy in our quest to fulfill other human urges or otherwise succumb to self-absorption. What follows is a presentation of different human points of view from within several watersheds of the American Southwest. It is a presentation of gifted minds from different cultures that needn’t articulate watersheds as commons for respective biotic communities, because that understanding is tacitly shared. Jack Loeffler 26 < This anthology is offered with humility in the hope that it may in some small way contribute clarity to the broader spectrum of human perception. Notes 1. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, no. 3859 (December 23, 1968): 1243–48. 2. Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (London: J. Johnson, 1798). 3. Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III, Limits to Growth (New York: Universe Books, 1972). 4. Jack Loeffler, Survival Along the Continental Divide: An Anthology of Interviews (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), 25. 5. John O’ Sullivan, “Annexation,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 17, no. 1 (July–August, 1845): 5–10. 6. U.S. Geological Survey, Eleventh Annual Report (1888–1890), 256–57. 7. Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, s.v. “mores.” 8. Aldo Leopold, “The Land Ethic,” in A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), 224–25. 9. William deBuys interview by Jack Loeffler, in “Getting to Know the River,” program 1 of Moving Waters: The Colorado River and the West, a six-part radio series, 2002, produced by Jack Loeffler for the Arizona Humanities Council. 10. Em Hall interview by Jack Loeffler, in “Consciousness, Conscience, and the Commons,” program 14 of Watersheds as Commons, a fourteen-part radio series, 2011, produced by Jack Loeffler and Celestia Loeffler. 11. Edward T. Hall interview by Jack Loeffler, in “Manifest Destiny: The Coming of AnglostotheAmericanWest,”program2ofWatershedsasCommons,afourteen-part radio series, 2011, produced by Jack Loeffler and Celestia Loeffler. 12. Jack Loeffler, Adventures with Ed: A Portrait of Abbey (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002), 3. ...