Climate battery greenhouse

 See previous post here.

Building the climate battery greenhouse.

Progress as of this weekend.

Compost

Old leaves, kitchen waste, goat manure, straw, and (because we're building a house) a bag of sawdust. Keep it moist, fluffy, and full of oxygen, and in another month or so, it will be an excellent soil amendment. Don't forget a chimney to get oxygen down into the middle of the pile.

 

This spring's irrigation project

Looking south on a north-facing slope

I’ve been considering what I want to do with my ten acres now that our house is nearing completion at the top of the ridge. The house itself has always been a key part of my overall plan, as its hard surfaces will collect snowmelt and whatever rainfall we get during the year and transport it to nearby growing areas. It would have been nice if the gated pipe had been operational early on, bringing water up to the top of the hill, but between leaks in the system and the unreliability of the pump, that has not been a viable option. Besides, I’d rather not use gasoline just to move water — just doesn’t sit right with me.

Instead, at this point, I want to deal with the water I can access by gravity — i.e., water that will seek its level. As calculated from Google Earth, that level would be the box at my neighbor's place on a nearby ridge, before it travels downhill to our junction, and that sits at 5855 feet above sea level.

On my property, that corresponds to marker (B) T1 (upper right hand corner in this picture), approximately 490 feet uphill from my northern property line. It’s on the pink contour line.

The buried irrigation pipe (the vertical red line on the right) jointly owned by me and my neighbor to the west runs up the gully, and there’s a valve that can send water further up to the gated pipe on the central ridge, close to the power pole (PP 5864 ft). However, the pump is required to push the water to that height, so that’s off the table for the time being as well.

The last time I tried to use the gated pipe and pump, there was a leak from damage about three-quarters of the way up the gully, a leak that got repaired with a valve I could open to flood irrigate a swale I’d dug there. That worked fine, but again it required the pump to get the water up to that height.

What I’d like to do this spring is install a similar valve on that main line lower down (5845 feet above sea level, 350 feet from the north boundary) and run a swale (the white line) on contour over to the other side of the property, directing the flow into a pond.

There would be a small collection/settling pool where the water enters the swale on the west, and a much larger dam and pond on the east. The dam would have a level sill on the east to act as an outlet for the pond. From there, if the pond should happen to overflow, the water would travel downhill along the east boundary of both my and my downhill neighbor's properties and eventually empty into the Smith Ditch. I do not anticipate this happening often, but the water needs to have a place to go and a mechanism for getting it there. All of these areas would need to be armored with rocks to prevent erosion.

The object here is to use my shares of the irrigation water to hydrate the soils along this swale and pond in order to plant trees. In theory, those root systems should hold onto much of that water and stabilize the soil there, and I can plant in the shade provided by their canopy once those trees are established. No trees would be planted in front of or on the dam itself to ensure its integrity, only at the back of the pond and along and slightly downhill from the swale itself.

There may also be an opportunity to use a similar technique on the gully area at the northwest corner of my property. By installing a similar valve approximately 140 feet up from the northern property line (tapping into the pipe at 5825 feet above sea level), I could run water through a series of swales slightly off-contour, and plant a small orchard in that section, letting the water subsequently leave the property and enter into my neighbor's small pond. From there on, it would be additional water for my neighbor's landscape.

Obviously this will require coordination and cooperation, as he is downhill from me — and the water needs to be put to beneficial use on both our parts. If it works as it should, it would also benefit my neighbor to the west, should he choose to participate, as the contours could also be continued across his property as well. 

Place

My grandparents, both sets of them, were born, grew up, married, reproduced themselves, grew old, died, and were buried, all within an area of about a thirty mile radius in northeast Ohio. The same could be said for my parents, although my father and his brother fought in World War II which took them far afield — respectively, to India and to Northern Africa and Italy for brief portions of their young adulthoods. 

This was the early half of the twentieth century, and by the time I came along in mid-century, the pattern was starting to alter. Awash in media images of distant lands and exotic but accessible foreign territories (even, by way of science fiction, of other planets or the prospects of exciting unrealized futures), I and many other members of my generation were drawn away if not actually seduced, Pied Piper-like, from territories circumscribed by that radius. Place as a thing that mattered was an insubstantial construct, easily modified, unable to take root when confronted with the charms of elsewhere. 

Some of us were, in fact, still being shipped out to fight in foreign campaigns, but many of us, as we grew into our teens and twenties in the 1960s and 70s within a protective bubble of affluence, began to absorb the tenets of a counterculture that had commenced to grow and nurture generations, that celebrated the virtue of rejecting the place you were from, for reasons that had little to do with what other waves of immigrants had experienced in the past. It was, more than anything else, a kind of cultural diaspora more than a flight from intolerable or desperate conditions. 

That wasn’t always the pattern, of course. My parents had come of age during the period of the stock market crash and the Great Depression, an era that must have seemed like a door being slammed shut, the closing off of economic opportunities, an expanding horizon suddenly shrinking down again to that thirty mile radius. I can feel their ambition for a better life, if not for themselves then for their children. 

Our family has a record of a distant relative who traveled by sail from his home in Scotland in the 1700s to Baltimore, a voyage paid for with indentured servitude. We do not know under what sort of conditions he felt compelled to make such a journey — whether it was a certain bleakness in future prospects for finding a partner, for succeeding in business, for establishing a home and family — or the allure and attraction of a comparatively unknown land, glimpsed through a scrim of wishful thinking. We do know that he was able within a few years to settle on farmland near the current capital of Pennsylvania, that he married, that he and his sons fought in the Revolutionary War, that he continued to farm in the new United States of America free from British rule and raise his family within the confines of an area similar to the one that constrained my grandparents. 

And we know that some of his family eventually moved on, westward. Some of them fought in the Civil War, and at least one of them, my great grandfather, traveled far enough west to enjoy a brief career as a cowboy. He eventually returned to the family occupations of farming and coal mining, neither of which was on my menu of career choices when I graduated from college in 1971. Somehow I had been, in the space of twenty or so years, converted into the ranks of the cultural hunter/gatherers who would roam about, selecting a little of this, a little of that, sampling what was offered wherever we went and transporting it on to the next destination, or leaving it abandoned on the side of the road. I had been taught to reject the conventional pattern and apply a different set of cultural values, less a victim of a targeted advertising campaign than a willing accomplice to a process I gratefully embraced.

I realize, as my parents and their parents could not, that I have lived through a time of great material abundance, engineered with warfare, powered by fossil fuels — a period in which I was encouraged to ignore limits, to take another helping, to buy yet another product — to grow, to travel, to move beyond the imagined boundaries, even the boundaries of the planet itself. The place I have settled at last is over a thousand miles from where I was born and from where my parents and their parents and other members of our family are or will someday be buried. Late to the game, I am trying to lay claim to a place where I can grow old, and where quite possibly I can still set down patterns of living I did not devote myself to during my lifetime, that may offer some support to my offspring in an unknown but likely quite dangerous future. My wandering has brought me here, without knowing who or what exactly acted as my guide. 

It may very well be the case that I have rather been afloat in the movement of a great cultural wave that has deposited me on this distant shore — that lifted me up, pushed me forward and abandoned me here, not at a place but simply at the end of a process. 

Hempcrete House

Heading for the Winter Solstice

Prosocial

Back in the early 2000s, I was very much caught up in the frenzy of concern about Peak Oil, the constellation of ideas around the concept of Hubbert's Peak, the inevitable decline of worldwide petroleum extraction and all that might entail. Looking back, I don't regret it, since it set me on the path of discovery that eventually led me to Permaculture and, beyond that, to this particular piece of land and this particular community. 

Climate Change or Global Warming had not yet achieved its ascendancy in the hierarchy of doom (at least on the Internet) and sites like The Oil Drum (http://theoildrum.com/) were a daily warning that civilization was about to collapse due to shortages of its primary fuel. Writer James Howard Kunstler called the impending period of resource wars and financial chaos "The Long Emergency," and that framing seemed to stick. (For my own quasi-hysteric take on the topic, see https://www.youtube.com/)

One of the principal arguments underlying the Peak Oil theory was the idea of the Tragedy of the Commons, the brainchild of academic ecologist and sometime proponent of eugenics Garrett Hardin. It was so central to Peak Oil commentary that it was regarded as a given, as if it had been delivered from heaven on stone tablets authored by the Lord Himself. 

While Peak Oil no longer occupies its place among topics of overwhelming interest to the Internet, it's still out there, lurking in the background, ready to work its magic on our pro-growth Business As Usual road to ruin - and, frankly, given the melting of the Arctic, rampant and unchecked deforestation, loss of topsoil, rising sea levels, droughts, flooding, and the ongoing sixth mass extinction - we've got bigger fish to fry than trying to locate where we're at along Hubbert's Curve.

But just as people failed to adequately predict the ramifications of increased oil extraction in the second decade of the 21st century (the so-called Shale Revolution), they also failed to grasp the fact that the "Commons" Hardin was supposedly describing wasn't really a commons at all, because a true commons isn't some dog-eat-dog unregulated arena of perpetual competition. In fact, that's a pretty good definition of exactly what a true commons isn't. Regulation (good or bad) is key to how a commons functions, and more importantly, the dynamic interactions of groups attempting to divvy up this or that resource are precisely what determines their success or failure.

Happily, someone was actually studying those group dynamics, and her work on the topic founded a discipline that goes by the name "Prosocial". Her name was Elinor Ostrom, and her work garnered her a Nobel Prize in 2009.

At a recent workshop in which we were introduced to the core design principles of functioning groups, we were asked to consider the characteristics of groups we had participated in, whether or not they'd succeeded or failed, and to try to make a determination as to whether or not they'd aligned with these practices.

For myself, I thought back to the days in which I'd worked with a small group of Peak Oil-aware folks in Los Angeles who had dedicated themselves to follow the pattern of the Transition Town movement, a Permaculture-based endeavor to "power down" in advance of the Peak Oil decline and re-localize basic community services and the production of goods. We didn't so much crash and burn as we just slowly came apart, gliding down into inactivity after an initial burst of energy and enthusiasm. The principles listed below seemed to describe (by implication, in a kind of backhanded way) what we'd tried to do and failed. It was not so much the Tragedy of the Commons as it was the Melodrama of Malfunction. Did I mention that this happened in Los Angeles?

I think as I continue to read through the book (pictured above), I'll probably have more to say about our own local process of trying to establish, activate, and govern a volunteer organization dedicated to redefining our watershed (the North Fork of the Gunnison River) as a bioregion in relation to other watersheds, the stated purpose of the workshop. But for the moment, pinning the principles here will simply serve as a reminder, a handy checklist.     

Prosocial core design principles

1. Strong group identity and understanding of purpose.
2. Fair distribution of costs and benefits.
3. Fair and inclusive decision-making.
4. Monitoring agreed-upon behaviors.
5. Graduated sanctions for misbehaviors.
6. Fast and fair conflict resolution.
7. Authority to self-govern.
8. Appropriate relations with other groups.

 

  

Rainwater Catchment

 

According to my weather station, we not only have just gotten two-tenths of an inch of rain from our overnight stormfront, we've had almost an inch in the past week and a total to date of thirty inches for the year, which is considerably more than our annual average of fifteen. Maybe someone's adding in snowmelt equivalent? 

In advance of the storm, I emptied out both of my government-allowed 55 gallon rain barrels because a frost and freeze warning had been issued, and winter ice had pretty much destroyed a previous filled container. Well, there wasn't that much ice to speak of, and the barrels had, during the night, basically been refilled, which is remarkable to me. I mean, two tenths of an inch fills a 55 gallon barrel?

It got me wondering what the actual catchment capability might be of the new place we're building up the hill. Seems a little late to be doing this kind of calculation, but the idea of the house being located where it is was in part based on a fundamental principle of catching and storing water up at the top of the slope. So this is certainly a guess based on a formula, but here's what the roof looks like in the plan:

And all of that translates into roughly 4000 sq. ft. of catchment surface. If the actual annual rainfall is in fact closer to 15" than thirty, that amount alone might produce 35,380 gallons! It won't all be going into barrels - in fact, most of it will run through pipes buried peripherally around the foundation and directed either towards the garden topsoil or a pond. Given that this area is drying out at an accelerating rate, it would be truly remarkable to be able to hydrate at least this small portion of the field and kickstart a small water cycling process.

Wait & Watch

The mountains are a reminder that the main requirement is patience. And then, you also need . . .   patience.  And then, of course, some more . . . patience.

Observation is probably the most basic permaculture principle. It's difficult to know exactly how or where to start if your goal is to use permaculture design to remake, redesign, or regenerate a landscape. Your first impulse -- to do something, anything -- may be a great idea, but it could just as easily lock you into some terrible foundational errors which you will need to spend a lot of time and energy correcting. Course correction itself isn't a bad thing; the companion piece to "observe" is "interact," that is, try out a few ideas as they occur to you and observe the consequences, but on a manageable scale. When in doubt, sit back and wait it out.

And, if you're really observing and paying attention, the ideas will occur to you. Up here on the mesas of the North Fork Valley, the snows will show you how the land reacts to winter; the trees, shrubs, and grasses will slowly reveal their strategy for dealing with a frozen landscape; and the prairie dogs will pop up in January to check out what the world was up to while they were hibernating. The prairie dogs, by the way, have been observing and interacting with the landscape for a long time, and they seem to have it figured out. Wait and watch.

 

Where It Starts

 

Earthworks Workshop with Warren Brush near Pismo Beach in early December of 2017.

This is where it started for me, where vague theory transformed into actual practice. "It" being what I wanted to do with the 10 acre property I'd purchased in Western Colorado. I'd been involved with a permaculture makeover on a small suburban property in Los Angeles, but scaling up my thinking was a new process for me, and one I wasn't quite sure I was ready to tackle in practical terms.

Filmmaker Kellen Keene and his partner had purchased an old farm a few miles inland from the ocean, just south of San Luis Obispo, degraded farmland where there was already a legacy dam for water storage - but it was empty and dry here at the end of the season. And frankly, the dam was just sitting on a slope where, if it was actually put to use, the water would have no place to go. Below it, a relatively flat field intermittently flooded with irrigation or stormwater runoff from a farm next door - but again, it wasn't being put to any productive use. Kellen and his partner lived in a farmhouse slightly upslope, but wanted to downsize into a yurt elsewhere on the property, and they had plans to turn their residence into some sort of permaculture teaching center. I have no idea whether or not those plans were ultimately realized.

Warren and his design team (website here) had already mapped the property and assembled materials and the machinery, but they were also lecturing on the design principles that they'd employed to conjure up a flow of water, in and out of storage and across the property.

 

Warren Brush checking out soil horizons.

During the four days we were on the property, an amazing amount of work was done: the land was surveyed and contours plotted with a self-leveling laser. Trenches were dug and urbanite spillways were constructed, emptying into vetiver grass plantings. A major swale was created to harvest potential rainwater from a nearby roadway and run it across the property to the pond. Most of the slopes on the property were converted in some way to take advantage of whatever rainfall was available.

Broken concrete armors the spillway from a potential pond, slowing the overflow and delivering it into a winding vetiver grass buffer zone.

There's a great deal to be learned from attending one of these workshops, and you are, of course, paying for it both in terms of a registration fee and the labor you're donating to somebody else's project. But there really is no substitute for what you gain both in camaraderie and in inspiration, in seeing a plan develop into a practical application. It's an experience stateside of what Warren and other permaculture designer/developers are doing internationally with the tools and resources at hand.

The trusty old Yeoman's plow. The field was ripped on contour to ensure water infiltration and topsoil development.

Climate Battery Design

 

South-facing off the back of the garage, for use during the shoulder seasons. Wondering how it might work? So am I, but this is my best thinking so far. And progress . . .

Drying Out the Watershed

I need to make something clear from the start. I am not a trained hydrologist, and certainly not a water expert. The little I might contribute to the arguments around regional water issues is what I learned living in large cities – in particular, in Los Angeles which has had in the past what one might call a “troubled relationship” with the topic.

Los Angeles probably should not exist at its current level of demand and development, and certainly wouldn't exist, given its size, if it had only to depend on local aquifers and water sources to quench its enormous thirst. Instead, it dangles at the ends of long systems of water transport: gravity-fed pipelines, fossil fuel-powered pumping stations, and reservoirs and tunnels and aqueducts that twist their way across evaporative deserts from sources hundreds of miles away, from the north and east.

At the same time, the city's enormous hardscape of roofs and roads rushes what small intermittent amounts of freshwater precipitation it does receive, mostly in the winter months, into its flood control system of channeled rivers and buried streams, down through its basins and rapidly out to sea, leaving little to percolate into and recharge its aquifers. In other words, Los Angeles works hard to dry out its landscape, then spends the rest of the year sucking water out of distant regions to balance its account.

It can manage these supplies at this scale because its Metropolitan Water District, a collection of twenty-six collaborating water agencies spread along the length and breadth of coastal Southern California from Oxnard down to San Diego, is the five hundred pound gorilla in the room, and it can demand its “fair share” based in large part on its participation in the Colorado River Compact.

So that's Los Angeles, not exactly a model of intelligent systems design but able to allocate the water it has access to, allowing supply to stay within shouting distance of the demands of a growing population by concentrating, to a degree, on conservation and ensuring deliveries from distant sources. By some measures, it's not doing badly in that regard, but, like everyone else, it's being impacted by a warming climate and the constraints of prior agreements and legacy infrastructure. Rapidly shifting contemporary conditions – such as, for example, the growing threat of wildfires – do not allow much room for considered adaptation at a leisurely pace.

So I write – ignorantly as it may be – from the standpoint of a person now living at the other end of that chain of water delivery systems, our own North Fork Valley whose river is a tributary of the Gunnison River which is, in turn, a tributary of the mighty Colorado River, the centerpiece of a catchment basin that drains down out of the Rocky Mountains, carving its way across the desert Southwest, through the Grand Canyon, and exiting (when it's able) into the Gulf of California. In theory, our placement somewhere near the top of that watershed should ensure our spot in line and a seat at the table when the water is being shared out, but climate change is playing fast and loose with the rules we mere mortals cooked up into an agreement that was based (in 1922) on an inadequate and incorrect assessment of the size of the available supply. We do get our “share” but it is a share of a shrinking amount.

It takes some time, when you move to this state, to understand the many factors that affect the definition of a “share” of water in Colorado, especially if you move from anywhere east of the Mississippi River. Where rainfall is plentiful, the issue is how to get it where you want it to go (or keep it from going where you don't want it to go) – not worrying about whether there will be enough to go around. The idea that the state could claim ownership of every drop that falls from the sky and treat rainwater harvesting as a kind of crime – or at least a matter ripe for legal restriction and regulation – just seems preposterous.

Until, however, you arrive at the thought that the water – whether it falls from the sky or flows off of a mountaintop, down a valley and out of the state – is for the most part just passing through. Diverting, capturing and storing it, in a situation that more often than not would elsewhere pass for a drought, opens the door to commoditizing it and making it a target for market speculation.

And speculation in so basic a resource is precisely what Colorado sought to avoid by adjudicating water rights based on a “First in time, first in right” principle that basically means the rights travel over time with the deed to the property and are prioritized and enforced by contract. The two can be separated (like selling off mineral rights), but it's an unlikely scenario in rural areas. If you don't have access to a relatively predictable supply of water, you don't have a farm. Or a ranch. Or a mine. If, however, you live in a city, you don't pay that much attention to such matters. You turn on a tap and out comes the water – from somewhere. At the end of the month, you pay the utilities bill, and that's the end of the story. Let somebody else worry about where it comes from, or how clean it is.

There are a lot of people who do worry about these problems, however, and whose job it is to worry – a lot of stakeholders, especially when you consider the problem from the standpoint of all the parties to the River Compact and all of its associated treaties, federal and state laws, Supreme Court decrees and decisions made to enforce environmental regulations. The so-called “Law of the River” was never a finished and settled piece of business. It's been altered piecemeal in response to this or that demand or problem over the entire length of its existence, right down to 2019's “Drought Contingency Plan” negotiations. 

However, as the authors of a recent Center for Colorado River Studies White Paper make clear, “A gradual and incremental approach to adaptation . . . is unlikely to meet the challenges of the future.” They also note, “It is unwise to develop water-supply management plans based on unrealistic assumptions for future consumptive water use in the Upper Basin.” They offer a three-point rethinking of alternative management strategies, the first of which (“Changes in the rules of water-supply allocation and/or accounting”) is the one I'd like to address, but not in the big picture terms in which the paper necessarily frames it.

Essentially, I would like to break down the problem by defining given territories by their watershed characteristics, even though those boundaries represent land that may adjoin, contain, or be contained by larger catchment basins. County line boundaries or BLM regulation may work as governance structures for a multitude of problems (law enforcement, taxation, infrastructure, etc.), but they ignore or in some cases actively disrupt good management practices relative to specific local watershed conditions. Colorado water law helps to constrain the damage, but something more is needed – especially in a time of drought that is rapidly being augmented by climate change.

This increased warming seems to be primarily a function of increasing concentrations of CO2 and other heat-trapping gasses released into the atmosphere, the legacy condition of decades of fossil fuel combustion on a global scale. The mechanism is well understood, and measurement of CO2 is a more readily accessible gauge of the situation than other, possibly more subtle contributing causes of warming, such as disruptions to local or regional hydrological cycles (water vapor being a particularly potent greenhouse gas, uniquely sensitive to warming temperatures.)

How do we tease apart other factors such as deforestation, erosion and loss of topsoil, urban heat island effects, etc. that may illuminate a variety of heat-reduction and climate mitigation strategies? Are we just stuck with the primary task of reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, slowing the rise of greenhouse gasses, sequestering carbon and hoping we can thereby, eventually, lower the temperature?

What seems to me to be required is on-the-ground observation and data collection, and policy that is not necessarily based on historical precedent or assumptions fed into a computer model, assumptions that may, as the authors of the white paper suggest, be unrealistic. This is especially key at the top of the watershed. If the problems aren't addressed there, they tend to multiply as they move downstream. The present system may look as if it safeguards those downstream supplies, but as we move water more efficiently through the landscape, the knock-on effect is aridification.

Each resident or occupant of a watershed needs to act as an agent, steward, or manager of the system and operate according to a specific set of ethics, best management practices regulating and ensuring a sufficient supply of good clean water. The policy of top-down management – by water districts, court decrees, seniority of rights, or system monitoring – isn't currently flexible enough to even deal with year-to-year fluctuations in supply. Latest “hot topic” idea being explored: “Demand Management” – paying farmers (out of unspecified funding sources) not to irrigate. We are still meeting our contractual obligations to downstream users, but with less and less headroom and margin for error. And the yearly trend is toward increasing aridity, which may not be so much a product of the rules as it is a consequence of our behavior under those rules.

To be clear, the system was designed to countenance a certain amount of waste – not flagrant waste, but slow, incremental, nearly universal degradation of what should more accurately be termed a standard of watershed health. In the West, we are always fighting the rate of evaporation relative to precipitation, and now the evaporation – from rivers, from reservoirs, from clear-cut hillsides and over-appropriated water sources – is outpacing us. We may have been able to make up the difference in times past by pumping up groundwater (or enjoying a particularly “wet” year of abundant precipitation), but those sources too are falling victim to our lack of an accurate and trustworthy set of watershed ethics. If Colorado intends to reverse the process of aridification, it needs to craft as a goal the repair and restoration of its local hydrological cycles, in ways that may not necessarily follow the rules under which it's operated in the past.

 

Return of the prairie dogs

 

They're back. 

Here we are, just barely into the new year and a long way away from spring (this photo was taken in summer a year and half ago), and the first little sentries have emerged from their burrows to check out what's happening in the snow-covered upper world and grab a bite to take back below, to the nurseries full of new pups and proud mothers, safe from the fox and coyote that currently own the wintry Colorado landscape.

We've shared our property with several colonies of these little subway diggers for two and a half years now, and last year, which was exceedingly dry, they discovered and ravaged my behind the house vegetable garden that I imagined I'd skillfully managed to conceal. Which means: this year, fencing. There just wasn't enough for them to eat in the other two acres of the property, and what there was had dried into tasteless, barely nutritious scrub, and as the heat persisted, they ventured closer and closer to the house, eventually discovering our trove. 

These guys are considered pests by the farmers and ranchers in the area, but we've grown attached to their chattering signals, their gossip, their warning calls and seemingly hysterical laughter. And we recognize that they're a keystone species - who knows what sort of hardpan we'd be dealing with if this crew wasn't constantly engaged in aerating excavation work. We don't mind sharing the land with them, but it would be nice if they left us just a small portion of what we're able to coax out of these arid and alkaline soils.

Another Year

Ordinarily we send out cards at Christmas and a brief letter to friends and family letting them know how our little project is progressing, with best wishes for the year to come. But, of course, 2020 was no ordinary year. One year later, here's where we're at:

And so, that happened . . . 

20/20 vision is supposed to be a good thing, possibly the best kind: sharp, clear, focussed. Near and distant. Good news from your opthalmologist or optometrist!  Hindsight, it is said, is 20/20 – meaning, that as you look back on the landscape you've traveled through, things make sense – both the paths taken and the ones that were obscured from view at the time.  Ah, nowI see.  If only we'd known . . .

The new year started with a bang (remember?), a U.S. drone strike at Baghdad International Airport that killed top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard. So, another Middle East war appeared to be in the offing, this time with Iran. Oh, and the Chinese government had just let it slip that it was investigating the outbreak of some kind of respiratory illness in the city of Wuhan. But, y'know, nothing to get concerned about, because . . .

The House of Representatives decided on January 15^th to impeach the President on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.  Sent the articles right over to the Senate.  Where they soon died, after Senators voted not to hear from any actual witnesses. At the annual Davos conference of the rich and powerful, President Trump proclaimed, “We have it under control. It's going to be just fine.” He was talking, of course, about the coronavirus. China had just quarantined the entire city of Wuhan. By the end of January, Trump had banned travel from China and, as we now know, actually considered the disease much more dangerous than he was publicly letting on. He just didn't want us all to, you know . . . panic.

In February, Trump delivered his State of the Union speech, a first salvo in his re-election campaign (“Just have a look at that stock market, will you?” which later morphed into his “This election is rigged!” campaign), and Nancy Pelosi tore her copy of it in half behind his back. A day later, the Senate acquited Trump of the impeachment charges, which freed him to start punishing (i.e., firing) people who had testified against him in the House proceedings. By the end of the month, we'd had our first reported coronavirus death in the U.S., but we can honestly say we weren't paying that much attention – were you?

Because all of the top Democratic contenders for Trump's office were dropping out of the race in March – and many of them were endorsing Joe Biden. So long, Bernie. Goodbye, single payer health care – we've got other things to worry about. 

And then there was that Monday, early in March, when we happened to glance at the stock market chart and noticed that it had plunged 2000 points. That'll get your attention – for us, it was like spotting a tsunami on the horizon, wondering how tall the wave would be when it finally crashed ashore. A couple of days later, the World Health Organization officially declared Covid-19 a pandemic, and people started seriously talking about lockdowns. The Dow fell an additional 2300 points, and President Trump declared it (the coronavirus, not the stock market) a national emergency. Later, he decided to withdraw from the World Health Organization. During a pandemic. 

Meanwhile, in Louisville, Kentucky, the police mistakenly broke into the apartment of an unarmed black woman named Breonna Taylor, firing mutiple shots and killing her. None of the officers involved was charged with her death. The beginning of a long hot summer of Black Lives Matter protests, riots, and additional killings (Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, George Floyd in Minneapolis, and others).

Worldwide, everything was shutting down, and hospitals – especially in the big cities and in whole countries – were begging for personal protective equipment, ventilators, testing, and contact tracing which govern-ments seemed unable or unwilling to supply. By April 10^th, my 71^st birthday, the U.S. became the first country to report 2000 coronavirus deaths in a single day. It took us until June to become the first country to reach 2 million infections, by which time people were begging to be released from imposed lockdowns; and a steady Internet chatter of partisan belief swelled, under the stress of record unemployment, business closures, and a bitterly contentious election, questioning the science of pandemic spread and fueling bizarre conspiracy theories.

And so, all that happened. And more, much more – a summer and fall of catastrophic fires, floods, a record number of hurricanes – the collateral damage of a rapidly changing climate. During the heatwave here in August, everything turned crispy dry, and an army of hungry prairie dogs discovered and consumed the backyard vegetable garden. As we write this, at the beginning of December 2020, our little mountain community of Paonia, Colorado, to which we moved in the summer of 2018, is somehow managing to stagger forward, aiming at arbitrary targets – Christmas, the New Year, the start of a new presidency. In the month just passed on the national stage, sabres are still being rattled with regard to Iran; coronavirus vaccines are being prepared as the pandemic rages; and our one-term incumbent leader is still claiming that his opponents stole the election and is refusing to concede. Here in rural America, political signs have come down, but deep divisions remain as winter approaches. 

For us, personally, this long season of social distancing and isolation has slowed to a crawl our plans for building a home – and a homestead. At a time when the years remaining to us seem more precious and irreplaceable than ever, we appear to be hiking up a very long steep slope on an unmarked trail. Turning around and looking back over the landscape reveals few clues as to what may lie ahead. Is there a kind of vision where 2021 brings order to chaos, snapping into focus a shared and trusted set of values? 2020 offers no assurances – just hope and a sincere wish for reconciliation, for whatever love and connection the coming seasons may bring to you, your family, and all of our friends and neighbors.  

Courtesy of my weather station

Shouldn't come as a surprise - it's January 27th.

Traveling In Circles

Turning away, from the expanding city to flyovercountry 

        – yes, I see you up there, sky travelers! I see your winking stars signal 

           progress, east to west, west to east, toward your coastal destinations – 

           I've sat wedged into that same seat, rapt in airtight metal and plastic, 

           watched the tiny proxy plane skim graphics on the screen before me 

           while out the fogged windows, fuzzy smudges flow below, 

           fungal inflections sliding slowly behind in the darkened landscape. 

           I've looked down, too . . . somewhere below, where now I stand, 

           looking up, watching as you pass – 

yes, when you make that move, expect to hear, “What are you doing here?”

Read the pattern, connect the lines – triangulate an answer.

At the trailing end of a final arc, I uproot myself from occupation

        – inhabited over forty years – the last share in unchallenging retirement, 

           all expenses paid, base consumption and reduced usefulness – 

           radically transform the terms of my life, concluding function of an unsolved equation 

           begun – oh, decades ago, though I was unaware of calculation, off-course, 

           heading in retreat – landing here ('til the end? some other bearing?) 

The Future rushes forward to articulate my newfound position with uttered words,

in a place still strange and unknown, outer worlds beyond my window, 

beyond the country road threading this snow-covered mesa, beyond 

the ghostwhite peaks, impending – compassed constellations in the clock of the sky 

careering out of control towards . . . an avalanche, unraveling. 

         One of a certain religious disposition (which I am not) thinks of this 

         as the re-animationof ancient prophecy, or karmic reimbursement – 

                    – though I have told myself tales, in times past, 

                       of dark foreboding, I've not wandered about 

                       to slam to a sudden heart-stopping 

                       terminus. 

          No – not on the iron rail of divination but as a sum of tributaries too numerous, 

          large and small, gravity-made, on a mountain of opened presents heaped up in the past, 

          spread out before us. Track the turning points (they fall like flakes outside my window), 

          survey the landscape, even with the biased glass of urban eyes, 

          scry the general shape and flow of the watershed, its downward trend . . .

Coming of age in earth-awareness, the globe altered – a wounded stag, 

assaulted by our gang of hungry predators, steadily wearing it down, 

weakening and bleeding it out – could we but change: modify our diets, 

mitigate our desires. We could turn away from the path of prehistoric drive.

The Old Ways fail us – but, just in time, the new will forge 

a different track: to the garden we would go and the leaping stag recover. 

         – it has fallen many times – revived to continue running, dodging like a stream, 

            seeking a course invisible before it, inevitable after – still, 

            nothing comes to its rescue, and the untiring pack pursues. 

Is it possible, I wonder, to turn the famished mob aside – invest it in some other current, 

another soil, a tract someplace we once passed by?

            Return to stolen lands and plant the seeds. Winter encircles us, springs to follow. 

            Snow melts and pools beneath the sun of a warming world, turning away.

                                                                                        – Los Angeles - Paonia

                                                                                           January 2019

Oil & Gas

An ongoing problem around here is the push to achieve what's called "energy dominance" by the current administration, applying pressure through the Interior Department to lease BLM public lands for oil and gas development -- specifically, for purposes of fracking. The North Fork Valley is right on the front lines of this fight -- just to the north of us, extraction of coal, once a cornerstone of the economy here in the valley, has left a toxic time bomb in its wake in the form of methane leaking into the atmosphere from the mines that have shut down. Ironically, it's the abundance of natural gas that has kicked the pins out from under the market for coal, resulting in the mine closures.

Colorado passed a new law last year requiring the Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Commission to put the health and safety of communities as the top priority in assessing additional development, and, possibly as a response to that regulation, COGCC has started to include flow line information to their GIS online site. Good to know if you need to start digging somewhere.

The little red cross at the center of the map (14S91W) is my location. The little brown dots seem to be existing well pads. The green circles seem to be potential drilling sites. By the way, that cluster of existing and potential well sites to the north of us, running along the 133 highway, also is one of the most geologically unstable regions in the state.

You can add to or subtract from the visible layers on the map, so I thought it might be a good idea to have a look at the surrounding watershed (below).

Rivers and streams in the neighborhood (the expanded blue areas around some streams are apparently regarded as "buffer" zones.

Where does the water come from (when it's on)?

The violet line near the top is a pipeline running from the Minnesota Ditch over there on the right side of the frame, delivering water collected up on Mount Lamborn and conveyed by gravity. The ditch, when it's running (usually sometime in April/May), is divided by a weir according to a precisely calculated placement.

The water eventually runs downhill to a pump house over on the left side of the frame, adjacent to a storage pond. The pump lives at the junction of the violet line and the yellow line on the banks of that pond and an overflow stream. There the water starts it's long journey uphill again in the yellow pipeline. Head pressure will take the water back up again to somewhere just below the lower pipe, midway in the field, but the pump is necessary to push it all the way up to the top, where it was formerly used to flood irrigate the field. As I see it, that would have sent a lot of water off to the sides of the central ridge, and off the property altogether.

I'll use the system as it stands in conjunction with the top swale to initiate the planting of trees, but I'm hoping I won't have to depend on it for long into the future. If I can infiltrate water at the top of the property, I can start to build the earthworks necessary to get it where it needs to go.

Profile(s)

So, based on the Google Earth contours and slope profile, here's a picture of where I decided to dig out a few swales by hand last year. Again the actual, on-the-ground measurements put those swales in slightly different positions. And, they don't precisely follow the contours at the edges, since I want to direct whatever water flows there in, across the valleys, towards the center ridge (or into a series of storage ponds.) The only swale that is operationally functional at this point is the one up by the house - and it's covered in snow. But eventually these contours may serve as guides for ripping the subsoil in parallel lines down (i.e., heading north) the hillside.

Profile

One probably shouldn't lean too heavily on Google Earth (certainly not for exact measurements), but it can give you a pretty good approximate visualization of what you're seeing on the ground - in this instance the central profile of the center ridge on the property. According to the stats, I'm looking at an elevation gain of almost 53 ft., north to south, with a maximum slope of 18% (climbing that center ridge) and an average of 5.7%. Here's another view:

Looking south