Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Climate Change and Environmental Issues Earth Day tomorrow

Anybody doing something interesting to celebrate living on this amazing island in the universe?

I’ll be co-hosting an open house at our community sustainability research and demonstration farm, showing folks the greenhouse/aquaculture/hydroponics setup I’ve been building. It has an integrated system that uses a biochar making heat unit for winter and shoulder season warmth - the produced biochar is then used to filter the shrimp tank water after it has passed through an elevated lined bed that has a growing media in it made from a Churro sheep wool “blanket” (carded and felted wool an inch and a half thick).

After the biochar filter is saturated it goes into a compost production operation co-located at the farm to be made into a variety of premium soil amendments - the compost ingredients are a mix of liability biomass (from forest restoration residuals), food waste from local schools (it’s a great way to teach kids about sustainability and green entrepreneurship), Churro sheep manure, and a host of of other “wastes” mindlessly created by humans.

After a crop has been harvested from the hydroponic part of the system, the wool blanket is then used as a mulching product for newly planted trees and various watershed restoration projects.

All of the electricity requirements for running the operation (it’s minimal) are provided by a modest solar PV array that also serves as a shade structure for growing cool weather crops during the summer.

It will be a fun-filled day full of positivity and promise!

Honorable Commissioners…..friends,

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on behalf of the Upper Gila Watershed Alliance. UGWA, as we call ourselves, is now twenty-eight years old, and is thriving still as a locally-based 501c3 not-for-profit conservation organization focused on the health and well being of the entire land community comprising the upper Gila watershed, including its soils, air, water, people, plants, and animals. On behalf of UGWA’s membership, I wish to welcome the New Mexico Game Commission to Silver City, the greater Gila bioregion, the headwaters of the Gila River, and the ancestral home of the Chiricahua Apache.

That the Game Commission is meeting here today is appropriate, I think. We are in the birthplace of wilderness… and we are celebrating it this year. It was one-hundred years ago that the father of conservation biology and modern game management, Aldo Leopold, managed to bring the Gila Wilderness into existence as the first legally designated wilderness both in the country and the world. Yet, here in Grant County, as we get ready to celebrate that very significant ecological and cultural milestone, the members of UGWA are increasingly uneasy. For UGWAns, this year’s centennial celebration is bittersweet; one hundred years is quite an achievement, yes, but the next hundred years is casting a mighty dark shadow over this year’s festivities.

Commissioners, friends, we are in the grip of a climate and ecological emergency. There is no way to sugarcoat that unpalatable fact. Globally, we are about to rocket past a 1.5 degree Celsius rise in global average surface temperature, the point where the planet enters the high risk zone for irreversible global-scale change. At two degrees Celsius, a point we will likely reach in just a few decades without rapid and massive cultural shifts, we will enter the very high risk zone for irreversible, planetary-scale change, risking things like tipping point cascades, the loss of human agency, and an uncontrollable slide into a much less habitable, hothouse earth.

Sadly, a two degrees Celsius temperature rise is not just a global threshold either, it is also the physiological limit for the American southwest’s needle-leaf evergreen ecosystems. Spruce-fir, mixed conifer, ponderosa pine, even pinon-juniper suffer mass mortality at a two degree temperature rise. At two degrees, if they haven’t already perished from fire, pests, and disease, our coniferous forest and woodlands will succumb to hydraulic failure. At a two degree rise, the atmosphere will demand so much moisture from our forests - moisture our trees will not have to give - that they will just close their stomata and shut down. Our current trajectory puts us at a 2.7 degree Celsius rise by the end of the current century. Policy makers don’t even discuss 2.7 anymore; 2.7 is catastrophic…for farmers, ranchers, trees, wolves, cows, children, environmentalists, and all future generations.

Commissioners, we are living in an extraordinary moment. We are living in a moment of rapid and accelerating ecological change. We are living at a moment when agency goals for ecological and economic sustainability are losing their meaning…a moment without an ecological baseline…a moment fraught with peril…a moment of extinction…a moment of tragic loss.

For many UGWAn’s, this year’s celebration of wilderness carries with it both the sorrow and absurdity characteristic of this uniquely difficult moment. But, as we continue to accelerate full steam ahead into a global-scale mass extinction event, it will remain Aldo Leopold’s land ethic that so many UGWAns will hold onto as a touchstone. The Land Ethic - Leopold’s philosophical foundation for wilderness - will be the focus of our celebration this year. Recognizing ourselves as plain members and citizens of the larger land community, we UGWAn’s will continue to celebrate Leopold’s great teaching of restraint and responsibility. His message of meaning and hope, given to him, not far from here, from the eyes of a dying wolf.

When Aldo Leopold watched that green fire fade, something remarkable happened. Something so rare as to be almost miraculous these days: Aldo Leopold changed his mind; he actually changed his mind. He came to understand that the mountain was a system, when systems theory was just emerging. He came to understand land as a complex symbiosis. He finally gave into the truth that wildness was a form of intelligence; and that a keystone species, like a wolf, was so complex and so critical to the correct functioning of the ecosystem that any serious prescription for land health demanded its continued presence.

Commissioners, our climate and ecological emergencies demand your attention. We understand, with compassion, that you do not know what to do. Nobody does. The Anthropocene is unknown territory. But what we need now, especially from leaders like you, is courage; Leopoldian courage. Mind changing courage. We need leaders that understand that we are in an uphill battle. That sustainability now lies on the uphill side of restoration. That, indeed, this has to be the age of restoration. The age of restoration, resilience, and recovery.

When Henry David Thoreau wrote, “In wildness is the preservation of the world”, even he would have been astonished by how rapidly his cryptic phrase has become a sobering, literal truth. Wildness, it turns out, is essential; in our guts, in our soils, and in the grasslands, deserts, and forests that define New Mexico. And although we know scientifically that it is the wild diversity of life which provides our land communities with the productivity and stability that we so cherish, almost everywhere, wildness continues to be lost, tragically, horrifically, and at great cost to our children and future generations.

Honorable Commissioners, agencies like the New Mexico Game and Fish department pride themselves on adaptive management; the ability to change course when new information presents itself. Well, new information is presenting itself now like a firehose. The sirens are screeching and the red lights are blinking. The controversy here, today, isn’t whether you should support the release of family groups into the wild - of course you should - because more pups will survive and the overall chance of species recovery will increase. Rather, the controversy here is whether you understand this moment in time. Whether you have the Leopold-like courage to set aside hubris and allow the power and intelligence of wild nature to heal this troubled and fragile earth.

Thank you

Michael Fugagli

Below is a presentation that my close friend and colleague Mike Fugagli just gave in person to the New Mexico Game Commission regarding the release of more genetically diverse Mexican Grey Wolves into the Gila Wilderness.

Here is a photo of a Navajo Churro sheep mobile manure manufacturing plant...

http://www.navajo-churrosheep.com

Maybe you need to get out more?