Sustainability in the Desert: Looking to the Ancestors

The German philosopher Paul K. Feyerabend, who was very interested in non-Western approaches to science, wrote in his book Against Method:

People survived millennia before Western science arose; to do this they had to know their surroundings . . . Several thousand Cuahuila Indians never exhausted the resources of a desert region in Southern California, in which today only a handful of white families continue to subsist.  They lived in a land of plenty, for in this apparently barren territory, they were familiar with no less than sixty kinds of edible plants and twenty-eight others with narcotic, stimulant or medical properties. (Paul K. Feyerabend, Against Method, New York, 1988, p. 3).

     In the same way, groups of people lived in our area (the Chihuahuan Desert) for many thousands of years, and before Europeans arrived they lived primarily off the resources available to them locally.  The native peoples of this region had contact with other peoples throughout the Americas, especially those of Mexico and Central America, but those contacts primarily consisted of sharing ideas, beliefs, and luxury goods such as shells, bird feathers, copper bells, and pottery.  Because the people of the Americas never developed the wheel or draft animals for transportation, the sharing of goods along trade routes was primarily carried out by pochtecas, traders who only brought what they could carry, typically small items.  This meant that subsistence goods like food, cotton clothing, or building materials were not transported over long distances by traders.  People depended on their local environment for what was necessary for the basics of life.

     The environment surrounding us here is considered harsh; that is what “desert” means.  The words used to describe it: barren, dry, rocky, are all ways of saying that we live in a land seemingly without abundance.  My neighbors and I are able to live in this land because we have access to goods produced elsewhere--the food we eat, the electricity we use, the clothes we wear, are all made somewhere else.  Even if we use local solar energy, the panels that allow us to do so are made elsewhere, with coal from Pennsylvania, perhaps, silica from Canada, and rare earth minerals from China.  The car we drive, or bike we pedal, comes from elsewhere.  The medicines we take come from far away.  It is almost impossible to imagine what would happen if tomorrow El Paso was suddenly cut off from the rest of the world.

     I’m not a primitivist.  I don’t think we can or want to cut ourselves off from the rest of the world and try and live solely off the local environment.  But I don’t think it’s a bad thing to realize that people of this desert once did just that, and to look at some of the ways they survived by working with the local environment instead of against it.

     It is well-known that native peoples often have a profound respect for the land. The Lakota saying, Mitakuye Oyasin, “We are all related,” sums up the idea that people and the natural world are bound together.  In her novel Ceremony, the Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko depicts a scene where an old medicine man, Ku’oosh, tells the returning war veteran Tayo:

     “But you know, Grandson, this world is fragile.”

     The narrator goes on to say:

     The word he chose to express “fragile” was filled with the intricacies of a continuing process, and with a strength inherent in spider webs woven across paths through sand hills where the early morning sun becomes entangled in each filament of web . . . That was the responsibility that went with being human, old Ku’oosh said.  (Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony, New York, 1977). 

     This idea of respect, relationship, an understanding of how fragile the fabric of unity really is, and of the need to guard against destroying what we depend on, was self-evident to the people living here before us.  And even then, the balance was sometimes broken.  But, in a very fundamental way, their way of life was based on a deep awareness that one must live in harmony with nature’s rules if one wishes to survive.

     The first peoples to live in this area were the so-called Paleo-Indians, hunters and gatherers who lived as nomads in caves and other natural shelters and who hunted large game that have since disappeared from this region, megafauna that included bison, giant sloths, camels, and mastodons.  The environment was cool, lush, and wet.  As the last ice age ended and the glaciers receded, this area became much as it is today.  Only remnants of that earlier landscape now remain, as “relict” forests in the high mountains.  The people who followed, referred to as the Archaic peoples, also depended on hunting and gathering, and hunted bighorn sheep, deer, rabbits, pronghorn, and rodents.  We know from the rock art they left behind that they had a deep understanding of the animals they hunted, and a profound, almost supernatural, respect for them.  They also gathered wild foods such as mesquite beans, cactus and yucca fruits, tubers, and seeds.

     Then, around 600 AD, although some put the date earlier, people settled down in permanent villages and began growing corn and other crops.  The abundance of food caused the population to increase, and large settlements developed.  The relative abundance of food meant more leisure time, and artistic output, religion, and ritual all thrived.  Other kinds of material production increased in complexity and skill.  Trade also expanded, and corn and other crops were exchanged for meat and hides with peoples of the great plains.  These Ancestral Pueblo people, who in our region are called by archeologists the Jornada Mogollon, also had a many-sided and respectful understanding of the natural world.  They incorporated complex astronomical calculations and observations into their rituals, at least in part to help them compute the best time to plant crops.  They understood that it was only by living in harmony with the seasons that they could be successful agriculturalists.

     Although agriculture gave them more food security than hunting and gathering alone, which they continued to do in a more limited way, they still knew that they were living in a dry, hot, and relatively sparse environment.  They needed to use the limitations of their environment to their advantage.  Water for agriculture was a constant concern, since irrigation was not practiced in this area and would not have been practical with the unpredictability of the Rio Grande, which frequently overflowed its banks and caused flooding.  Surprisingly, given the scarcity of precipitation, the Jornada Mogollon depended on rainfall for their agriculture.  We know that there might have been more rainfall 500 years ago than there is now, but not a lot more. (Today, the average annual precipitation is 9.71 inches a year.)  How did the  Ancestral Pueblo people do this?  How did they successfully cultivate crops with so little moisture readily available?  We know of a number of “sustainable” strategies that they used, some of which are still used by Pueblo peoples like the Hopi today.  They developed, through selective breeding, drought-hardy varieties of corn, beans, cotton, squash, pumpkins, sunflowers, and other vegetables and grains.  And they planted seeds very deep, sometimes planting grains of corn to a depth of a foot or more to take advantage of moisture found below the drier surface layers of soil that were baked by the sun. They practiced ak-chin (arroyo-mouth) farming, which consisted of planting their crops at the base of ravines coming down off cliffs and hills, where alluvial fans formed, and that received the most concentrated runoff from rainstorms.  In this way, they used the water that was available in the most efficient manner. 

     When we think of the ancient villages of the pueblo peoples, we might think of the great cities of Chaco Canyon or Mesa Verde, tall stone apartment buildings that have survived centuries.  But the Jornada Mogollon of our area lived in pit houses; homes built mostly underground.  These pit houses had the advantage of having walls that were dug into the earth, where it was cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter, the earth itself being a great natural insulator.  No need for air conditioning here!

     Other needs were met using local materials such as cotton and animal skins, which were used for clothing. Local stones were used for grinding corn, and pottery was made from local clay, like the giant storage ollas known as “El Paso ware” (although smaller pots were sometimes acquired through trade), baskets and shoes were made from local yucca fiber, arrows and spears from reeds or sticks, with local chert (a flint-like material) utilized in the making of projectile points. Scrapers, knives, and axes were made of local stone or bone.  Paint for artistic or ceremonial uses came from ground minerals like hematite and limonite (local iron ores), plant juices and seeds, and ground semiprecious stones like turquoise and malachite.  Soap was made from the roots of the yucca, and the agave supplied fiber for rope, needles, and food in a pinch.  The Native peoples knew a whole pharmacopeia of natural medicines obtained from both wild and cultivated plants.

     Today, we continue to live in a desert.  This calls for wise use of the resources available to us, including the development of technologies that work with the environment and help us to preserve it.  The traditional native values of simplicity and respect for nature, of low impact living and seeing all the world as being related to us, can help guide us on our path to a more sustainable lifestyle.