La Jicarita News - Community Advocacy for Northern New Mexico

The folks at the Dixon Cooperative Market aren't kidding when they say they're in business to serve the local community, both consumer and farmer. At its recent grand opening local gardener Karen Cohen came in with a bunch of turnips and co-manager Nelson Rhodes bought them on the spot.

Store managers Nelson Rhodes and Ann "Funny" Hendrie

The result of two years' planning by a local board of directors (including Linda Prim, Thea Spaeth, David Rigsby, Jeff Spicer, and Clark Case), the market opened on June 1 in the old Zeller's store that now houses the Dixon Community Center and local radio station KLDK (96.5FM) . The same board also started the Dixon Farmers' Market, which meets every Wednesday afternoon in the parking lot in front of the store. The goal of the board, according to member Spaeth, is to "feed the people of the community." By doing so, the store also provides the opportunity for local growers and producers to sell locally and contributes to a growing, land-based economy.

Inside the store we encountered a wide array of supplies: bulk foods, including nuts, beans and rice; a produce section with local lettuce, leeks, rhubarb, and both conventional and organic garlic; a frozen food section with additive free meat from Keller's and pre-packaged pasta dishes; organic and conventional milk; an herb supply; chips, dips and sodas (including both Coca-cola and Hansen's); a small hardware supply of nails, bolts, and nuts; paper goods; school supplies; and a wide array of packaged goods including beans, ketchup, fruit, cooking oil, and noodles. The store is supplied by both GDI and the Tucson Cooperative Warehouse, which specializes in organic food.

Ann "Funny" Hendrie, longtime Ojo Sarco resident, is co-manager along with Rhodes, a freelance animation cartoonist for 25 years. She told La Jicarita News: "We hashed it out in board meetings that we didn't want to dictate people's needs by making the store only organic or refusing to carry certain products. We wanted the store to serve everyone in the community." Rhodes added, "I used to never see anybody. But because the store offers so many different things I get to see everyone."

The staff tries to respond to all supply requests from the community. "Sometimes customers feel guilty when they see we actually ordered some obscure item they requested and think they have to buy it up," Funny laughed. "As we get going we'll increase our stock and diversity of items. Right now the trickiest part is figuring out how much to order, particularly of perishable goods like bread, which we have delivered fresh daily."

According to Spaeth, prices at the store are competitive with specialty stores like Wild Oats or Whole Foods, but the big selling point is the fact that people don't have to drive to Taos, Española, or Santa Fe to get many of the items they need. While some folks use the store as they would a convenience store, to pick up a half gallon of milk or a loaf of bread (what convenience store carries Sage Bakery bread?), according to Spaeth, an increasing number of customers are buying their weekly grocery supply or splitting their shopping needs at the Cooperative Market and a conventional store in town.

The market is open to everyone, of course, but as a cooperative sells memberships, which are growing every day. A regular annual membership is $25; a senior membership is $20; and a charter membership, to help support the store, is $200. The board recently received a donation from a local grower to support a low income membership of $5. When we spoke with Spaeth membership was 175 people and growing. The board has also received a USDA grant and smaller local grants, along with donated equipment (they're awaiting an ice machine) and is looking for volunteers for cashiering and store maintenance.

For now, store hours are Wednesday through Friday, 11 am to 7 pm, and Saturday and Sunday, 11 am to 5 pm. But the managers and board are expecting to increase hours during the day and eventually be open seven days a week. "Our hours are shifting as we learn and grow," Spaeth said. The store accepts cash, checks, and credit cards, and will soon take debit and ETB cards. For more information, you can call 579-9625.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

• The First Annual Conference of the National Association of Latino/Hispanic Farmers & Ranchers is scheduled for August 25-27, 2005 at the Ramada Palms de Las Cruces Hotel in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The conference is the culmination of many years of hard work by Latino farmers groups throughout the United States who felt the need to organize and set an agenda for themselves. Members are from all over the United States, mostly small scale Chicano and Latino immigrant farmers with anywhere between 5-50 acres who are struggling to make a living off the land. For more information contact Jennifer Carter at 202-725-5912 or by e-mail, sanghacafe@starpower.net; the Association office at 202-628-8833; or Rudy Arredondo at 301-366-8200.

• The Española Ranger District is proposing the Hyde Park Wildland Urban Interface Thinning and Prescribed Fire Project located east of Hyde Park Estates near Hyde Park Memorial State Park and adjacent to Black Canyon Campground. The purpose of the project is to reduce the risk of catastrophic crown fire by thinning trees (predominantly ponderosa pine with some mixed confer and piñon/juniper) on approximately 825 acres on areas with less than 40% slope. Final tree densities would range from 5 to 120 tress per acre with an average of 40 to 60 trees per acre. Openings from 1-5 acres in size, occupying no more than 10% of the project area would be created. The District is accepting written comments until August 5: Española Ranger District, P.O. Box 3307, Fairview Station, 87533. The contact officer is John C. Phillips, 638-5526.

EcoVersity offerings for the fall:

• Les Crowder will be teaching Fall Beekeeping at EcoVersity on August 27, 10 am-4 pm. Learn how to evaluate a hive's condition and prepare it for winter.

• PRACTICAL BUSINESS SKILLS FOR THE EARTH BASED VOCATION with Donal Kinney, tax-accountant for a diverse cross-section of Santa Fe's earth-conscious businesses. The seven-week course takes students through the step-by-step process of developing and implementing a business plan. Class meets Tuesdays 6-8 pm, August 30-October 11. Visit Donal's website at www.beanplanter.com.

• EARTH BASED VOCATIONS program begins August 26 with a two-week PERMACULTURE DESIGN CERTIFICATE COURSE. The Permaculture Design Course will be taught by Scott Pittman and is open to non-Vocations students. The twenty-week Earth Based Vocations program includes ten weeks on the EcoVersity campus with the core faculty, including Scott Pittman, Joel Glanzburg, Chrissie Orr, Alfred von Bachmayr and Arvo Thomson. For more information please call the office or visit http://www.ecoversity.org/ebv.html.

• State Historian Estevan Rael-Galvez announced the launching of the New Mexico History Website Project on Thursday, July 21. The New Mexico History Web Project is an interactive and multimedia website that also will provide information on contemporary events across the state and nation that focus on New Mexico history. For additional information call (505) 476-7955.

• The San Luis-based Land Rights Council, which was instrumental in the 2002 victory to gain access rights to the former Sangre de Cristo Land Grant (referred to as the Taylor Ranch), sponsored a Colorado-New Mexico conference to discuss strategies for asserting historic legal right to Spanish and Mexican land grants. Held on July 29 at the Centennial High School in San Luis, the morning session focused on Colorado issues and the afternoon session on New Mexican issues. The conference featured: a panel discussion with lawyers who participated in the 25-year legal struggle for Costilla County residents to win access to former grant lands; a presentation by Arnold Valdez, land use planner for the council, on grazing and resource issues; and testimony from Costilla County landowners who haven taken their livestock onto the ranch.

Meanwhile, more than 500 people may get keys to the gate on the Taylor Ranch at a July 26 hearing. There is an ongoing process to determine which landowners are eligible for use rights; so far 100 people are now allowed to pasture their livestock and collect wood on the ranch. For more information call the Land Rights Council at 719-672-1019.

Editorial: Ranchettes or Inhabited Wilderness?

By Kay Matthews

Twenty years ago Susan and Albert Wells, board members of the Abelard family foundation, bought a small ranch near Bozeman, Montana that they named Windcall. The only structure on the property was a listing barn, and the only inhabitant, other than elk and deer, was Mama cat. For two weeks in June I stayed on the ranch: every year the Wells offer Windcall as a retreat for social activists of all kinds who need a break from the rigors of union organizing, fair housing advocacy, or immigrant rights work. Housed in a comfortable resident house, provided with separate study and recreation facilities, residents ride the impeccably trained ranch horses, hike the neighboring mountain trails, swim in the cold, spring-fed pond, or just lie back and listen to the birds singing in the pines. Mama cat still lives in the barn (she may be headed for a slot in the Guinness Book of World Records).

Who’s Reading La Jicarita News?

Visiting Windcall residents Pam Baldwin of the Interfaith Alliance of Idaho; Rev. Carrie Bolton, pastor of the Alston Chapel United Holy Church of North Carolina; and Ann Twomey, President of Health Professional and Allied Employees/American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO

Tucked up against the Bridger Mountain range, Windcall is a Shangrila surrounded by open farm land of wheat and hay. Windcall is also a working ranch, however: the manager runs over a hundred head of Mexican Corriente cattle using a holistic range management system of pasture rotation. He buys five tons of hay a year from neighboring farms to feed the cattle and horse herd in the winter.

But Windcall is part of a Montana landscape that has been changing rapidly since the early 1990s. For example, the ranch that borders it to the west was bought by a Palo Alton who paid millions of dollars for the 2,000 acres he visits twice a year. The property (with a million dollar guest house and indoor riding arena) is probably now worth twenty times what he paid for it. What that means, of course, is that while a few obscenely wealthy individuals (like Ted Turner) can afford to buy up large ranches and hire local managers to take care of them, developers are buying up the rest of the land so they can divide it up into more affordable "ranchettes" and subdivisions.

Over the long haul the western United States has been populated, plowed and plundered as Manifest Destiny forged its way from the Altantic to the Pacific. Our romantic desire to "save" it or "restore" it begs the question Dan Flores, a professor at the University of Montana, asked in his article "The West that was and the West that can be" for High Country News in 1997: which West is it that "we're trying to replicate. . . . The Pre-Contact West? The Post Contact West? A pieced together Pleistocene West? Or the Best West we can imagine?" In the article he also challenges the simplistic notion that designating more wilderness will save the West from the damaging hand of man: "Wilderness is certainly the wrong word for what early America was. It's the wrong word because it's Eurocentric and it obscures more than it reveals. What is obscured is that the garden doesn't have to be free of the human touch to still be a garden."

This analysis, or the concept of "inhabited wilderness", has been fundamental in the defense of land-based communities and economies in northern New Mexico. Unfortunately, the hand that is now "touching the garden" in Montana (and in New Mexico, to a lesser extent) belongs to individuals of private means who are buying the ranchettes&emdash;10, 20, 50 or 100-acre plots&emdash;into the middle of which they plop a 10,000 square-foot home that they live in during the summer or visit, like the Windcall neighbor, a few times a year. Some folks are fulltime residents, and in a subsequent article in High Country News Flores defended the notion that these ranchettes are perhaps one of the only ways land in Montana isn't going to be further divided and fenced and put off limits to wildlife. He argued that when people own a piece of land and become familiar with its plants and animals they become better stewards of the land.

This is all well and good in theory&emdash;when ranchette owners are conscientious stewards like Flores&emdash;but in practice, as several ranch managers explained to me while I was in Montana, the parttime ranchette owners vastly outnumber the fulltime owners (who wants to spend a winter in Montana when they can spend a second summer in Palo Alto?) and there is no connection to the land when all you do is build a monster house. I also learned that these new owners usually buy a few horses&emdash;you have to have horses to be a rancher, right?&emdash;on their 20 or 50 acres, which they keep for a few years until they realize they hardly ever ride them and their upkeep is costing them a lot of money, so they sell them and former pasture land turns to weed; the invasive ones migrate to the pastures of the few folks who are still out there on the land trying to keep it productive.

The key word here is productive, which goes back to the notion of "inhabited wilderness," or the human touch that maintains both people and the land. One day the Windcall manager took several of us out on horseback for a tour of the ranch. Many fences provided many pastures for ecologically sound range management. While the cattle grazed in two separate pastures (in a year of good rain the pastures provide two seasonal grazings) the resident elk herd picked out its own pasture for the day. Deer crossed in front of the horses numerous times along the tour. Two juvenile sandhill cranes&emdash;their long necks just visible above the waist-high grass&emdash;watched us from near one of the water tanks. The manager periodically dismounted to pluck oxeye daisies up by the roots&emdash;"If I don't pick them now they'll take over the whole field"&emdash;and pointed out the huckleberry, thimbleberry, and raspberry bushes that would produce fruit at the end of the summer. When we passed the neighbor's million dollar guest house that was built right next to the Windcall boundary, he said, "You know, to my knowledge, no one's ever even stayed there." And he just shook his head.

New Aamodt Settlement Proposal Continues to Cause Debate

By Kay Matthews

At the recent public hearing in Jacona on the new conceptual proposal to the Aamodt adjudication, the last question/answer of the session revealed the mounting frustration between members of the Pojoaque Basin Water Alliance (the Alliance) and the bureaucrats charged with negotiating a settlement:

Question from Alliance member: "What happens if the money and water to underwrite the proposed settlement never shows up? What is Plan B?"

Answer from Office of the State Engineer (OSE) Attorney: "There is no Plan B. We go to court."

Throughout the meeting there was a palpable feeling that even with the new agreements the conceptual proposal incorporates (see June/July La Jicarita News), the settlement proposal will be unfair to non-Pueblo residents and fails to address fundamental issues concerning New Mexico's water resources and future of the state.

Undemocratic Process

The negotiation sessions continue to be held behind closed doors; attorney Mark Sheridan represents the Rio Pojoaque Acequia and Well Water Association (RPAWWA) at the sessions. Community members who felt the initial proposed settlement was unacceptable (it called for mandatory hook-ups to the water delivery system among other controversial proposals), formed the Alliance to lobby their cause. A blended board of both organizations temporarily participated in negotiation sessions but ultimately failed to come to consensus. The Alliance rejected the idea, put forth by the RPAWWA and Sheridan, that the initial settlement "was the best deal they could get" to prevent a priority call by the Pueblos. The Alliance subsequently hired attorney Fred Waltz out of pocket and was later vindicated when the federal government's withdrawal of its funding commitment forced the parties back to the negotiation table and the the new, conceptual proposal addressed several of their major concerns. Many questions remain, however, and when Alliance members presented a list of 25 of them (several asking for clarification regarding the protection of acequia rights against priority calls by the pueblos) at the Jacona meeting, they were told by the OSE attorneys there wasn't time to address them. Both sides were visibly angry: Alliance members at the perceived rudeness of the bureaucrats and the bureaucrats at Alliance members whom they obviously have labeled troublemakers over the course of the numerous public meetings.

Unsustainable Growth

The conceptual proposal guarantees the Pueblos 2,500 acre feet per year (afy) of water in addition to their current water rights. The amount of water provided to non-Pueblo residents may be reduced from the 1,500 afy described in the initial proposed settlement to provide for only current water needs (750 afy). The additional 750 afy needed for future growth may or may not become available, depending upon the County of Santa Fe's ability to purchase water rights. People at the hearing questioned the fairness&emdash;and wisdom&emdash;of guaranteeing future water rights for the Pueblos to underwrite growth and development of casinos and golf courses while non-Pueblo residents may receive no additional water for growth of any kind. Judge Nelson, who presides over the negotiations, was blunt in his answer to this concern: "We're not going to sugar coat this proposal. It provides protection of your existing use, period. If you don't accept it, the Pueblos have the right to make a priority call on your water. You could lose everything."

Unfortunately, that is the crux of the problem. Until all levels of government address the fundamental inequities involved in the system of prior appropriation, adjudications will be litigated, water resources will continue to be squandered, and New Mexico will continue to see unlimited growth and development that ultimately destroys the fabric and character of its unique culture and tradition. Some questions and comments that need to be addressed are listed below.

• The conceptual proposal states that the Pueblos will agree not to make priority calls on non-Pueblo water users, in most instances, to obtain waters beyond their existing uses. What are the possible instances where they might make a priority call?

• Where is the County of Santa Fe going to find water rights to provide for Pueblo and non-Pueblo use? Top of the World water rights (588 afy) are still under protest; San Juan/Chama water rights are unreliable and earmarked for settlement of the Taos Valley adjudication. At a previous public hearing acequia parciantes questioned whether acequia rights will be pursued in the open market.

• How will the OSE determine what is a reasonable reduction in the amount of diverted well water (of those users who do not transfer their wells to the delivery system) that emphasizes conservation and is equitable to homeowners?

• Why isn't the government looking at alternatives systems, conservation measures, and water banking provisions as part of the settlement?

GAO Report on Land Grants Misses the Mark

By Mark Schiller

In an interview in the April 2005 issue of La Jicarita News Congressional Representative Tom Udall told the paper that the New Mexico "congressional delegation will look at [the] recommendations [contained in the General Accounting Office Report on Community Land Grants] and try to come up with a plan that incorporates either a mixture of several of the recommendations or focuses on one of them." Unfortunately, the Report ignores or rationalizes many of the blatant corruptions of justice that occurred during the adjudication of community land grants. If the congressional delegation bases its plan on the Report's findings, it could very well choose to do nothing at all.

La Jicarita News believes that this is a good time to raise some of the issues the Report misrepresents and which the congressional delegation must address if it truly wants to remedy this festering problem.

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

Article VIII of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo states in part: "In the said territories, property of every kind, now belonging to Mexicans . . . , shall be inviolably respected." "Inviolably respected" is a very high, but vaguely defined standard, and it was up to Congress to instruct the Surveyor General and the Court of Private Land Claims how to interpret it. Congress did this with the Acts of 1854 and 1891. Provisions of both Acts, however, made it impossible for the government to justly meet this standard.

The GAO Report maintains that "because of the non-self executing nature of the Treaty, Congress was required to enact legislation to put the provisions into effect. It did so in the 1854 and 1891 Acts establishing the Surveyor General and CPLC [Court of Private Land Claims] procedures, and under U.S. law, any conflict between these statutes and the Treaty provisions (which we do not suggest exists) must be resolved in favor of the statutes." The Report repeatedly falls back on this explanation to rationalize the clearly unjust and inequitable actions of the Surveyor General and the Court of Private Land Claims (i.e., they were acting within the restrictions of their mandates). Because the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was an international treaty, the federal government was obliged "to adjudicate these claims . . . according to the law of nations [and] the stipulations of the treaty concluded between the United States and the Republic of Mexico . . ." The congressional delegation should acknowledge that the Treaty itself, rather than the 1854 and 1891 Acts, defines the obligation the federal government must live up to.

Due Process

Both Congressional Acts failed to mandate that the respective agencies give adequate notice of their proceedings. As a result many potential claimants and potential adverse claimants were completely excluded from the adjudication process.

Legal Burden

An 1833 Supreme Court decision regarding land claims adjudicated under the Florida treaty stated, "the grants shall remain ratified and confirmed to the persons in possession of them [and] to the same extent." The New Mexico adjudication process, however, forced land grant claimants to demonstrate the legitimacy of their claims. By doing this, the federal government often placed an impossible burden on the claimants. Residents of community grants during this period were largely illiterate subsistence farmers and ranchers who spoke only Spanish, knew little of the world outside their communities, and were completely unfamiliar with the American form of jurisprudence. The federal government, on the other hand, had enormous resources to hire expert assistants to research what land grant historian Malcolm Ebright calls the "finely spun technicalit[ies] of Anglo jurisprudence", with which it defeated or reduced legitimate claims. Moreover, the government unjustly laid the responsibility for naming the persons who were in possession of the land claim on the claimant or claimants. This created an obvious conflict of interests for claimants who wished to monopolize a claim and led to grants being confirmed to the wrong people.

Legal Precedents

There were several legal decisions by the United States Supreme Court that resulted in the loss of enormous amounts of community land. The first of these, United States v. Sandoval, misinterpreted and misapplied Spanish and Mexican law. This decision erroneously determined that land grant communities were only granted use of the common lands by the Spanish and Mexican governments. Title to these lands remained vested in those governments and therefore passed to the United States federal government upon the change of sovereignty. Land grant scholars and historians have repeatedly demonstrated that community land grants were severed in their entirety from the public domain under Spanish and Mexican law, custom, and usage.

The second important decision, Hayes v.United States, overturned the presumption that the official or governmental institution that made a land grant had the authority to do so. Once again, the federal government misinterpreted and misapplied Mexican law in erroneously determining that local government officials and institutions such as deputations and ayuntamientos did not have the authority to make land grants or certified copies of grant papers that were lost or had deteriorated. As a result of this decision, at least ten land grants were rejected for confirmation.

Borders and Boundaries

Numerous community grants lost land because of misrepresentation or misinterpretation of boundary calls and incompetent survey field work. The Surveyor General and the Court of Private Land Claims deliberately conspired to reduce legitimate land claims by challenging or maliciously misinterpreting boundary calls. Field workers made numerous errors that were compounded by a burdensome appeals process. Some grants were surveyed three or more times, usually resulting in reduced acreage. Moreover, the government did not apply a just or consistent standard when adjudicating land claims that overlapped, nor did it refer to Spanish and Mexican law or custom and tradition in trying to determine a method for dealing with this important issue. As a result, many community grants lost some or all of their common lands.

Corruption

The Office of the Surveyor General was riddled with corruption. For example, of the nine men to hold the office, three were blatant land speculators and two actually had land grant holdings while they were in office.

Fiduciary Responsibility

The GAO Report asserts that the federal government bore no responsibility for protecting community land grants once they were adjudicated. As a result, many community grants unjustly lost part or all of their common lands to taxation and partitioning. The federal government clearly should have insisted that the common lands of community land grants be treated as municipal property by state and county governments so that they would not have been subject to taxation or partitioning.

Manifest Destiny

Finally, the Congressional delegation must bear in mind that these adjudications were part of an aggressive colonialist policy, fueled by racial prejudice and the concept of "Manifest Destiny", which posited that Anglo-America was preordained to settle America from the Atlantic to the Pacific and bring Eurocentric enlightenment to the "ignorant" Native Americans and Indo-Hispanos. These prejudices acted as a rationalization for many of the injustices that occurred and tainted the entire adjudication process.

Earth Works Institute: Organizing in the Galisteo Watershed

Editor's Note: The Galisteo Watershed is bounded by Glorieta and Rowe mesas, the Estancia Basin Escarpment, and the Ortiz Mountains to the south; Thompson Peak, Glorieta Baldy, the Sunlit Hills, the heights of Rancho San Marcos, and the Cerrillos Hills to the north, encompassing 467,000 acres.

The history of Earth Works Institute is the story of how a group concerned with sustainable land use evolved into a watershed restoration group and managed to gain the trust and commitment of community people through years of hard work and outreach. While it's only one story, many of the issues the group encountered and the techniques it used to overcome obstacles and engage participation could be used as a model statewide.

Earth Works was founded in 1994 by Leslie Barclay, a Galisteo area landowner who has a background in land conservation. Barclay saw extensive land degradation on surrounding Cerrillos-Galisteo ranches and wanted to use her own ranch as a model for sustainability. Earth Works developed a master plan for a 160-acre demonstration ranch with a straw bale barn, a greenhouse for native plants, and schoolhouse (off the grid) and began networking with Galisteo neighbors, land management agencies, and consultants, quickly realizing that to address land use problems in the lower basin there needed to be collaboration with upstream communities.

Jan-Willem Jansens, a landscape architect who previously worked with Forest Trust, came on board in 1998 and Earth Works began mapping the watershed and identifying communities, agencies, and funding sources for watershed planning. The McCune Charitable Foundation provided seed money for community meetings and the group also received support from the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED), which had money for monitoring watersheds throughout the state.

Earth Works put forth the idea of developing a watershed association and initiated meetings in the upper watershed communities of Apache Canyon and Cañoncito in 1998. Subsequent meetings followed in the lower watershed communities of Galisteo and Cerrillos. Issues raised included soil erosion, the pollution of the night sky, growth, and the lack of a sense of community within the watershed.

In 1999 Earth Works received a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Clean Water Act Section 319 grant for the Galisteo Watershed Restoration Project: publication of educational guides on erosion control and rainwater catchment systems, community outreach, and on-the-ground work, with the idea of eventually forming a watershed association. Restoration projects were initiated in Cañoncito and Galisteo that addressed long-term watershed problems: overgrazing that depleted riparian vegetation; extermination of the beaver population whose dams helped slow creek flows; the building of roads and the railroad in the floodplain; loss of land grants; and increased residential development. With the help of Bill Zeedyk, a streamflow specialist, project designs were developed that helped recreate natural river meanders to prevent erosion and maintain a healthy stream flow.

With a second EPA grant in 2002 Earth Works has been continuing its community outreach efforts and has developed restoration neighborhoods. For example in the watershed communities of Galisteo, Madrid, San Marcos, and El Dorado people have come together and formed committees to organize watershed events, provide educational material, and write a watershed restoration plan.

As is the case all over New Mexico, one of the most pressing issues in the Galisteo is the threat of loss of open lands to suburban development. In 2002 a large ranch south of El Dorado was slated for development, which would have created an entirely new village near Galisteo (the project subsequently fell through). Throughout the watershed five hundred new homes per year were being built, and from 1998 to 2003 the population had increased from 10,000 to 17,000. Earth Works began collaborating with non-profit, smart growth organizations as well as the Santa Fe Conservation Trust and the Santa Fe County Land Use Department to develop a vision and plan that would incorporate the work already being done at the community level. The draft version of the plan states: "The challenge for the people living in the watershed is how they can live in balance with a fragile, impermanent environment. Thus, what should guide how people in the watershed plan for the future?"

At the end of 2004 the Galisteo Watershed Partnership, a public-private association, envisioned many years ago, was gradually being formed. The group has developed a Memorandum of Understanding and was officially launched on July 7, 2005. While CWA Section 319 funding for the Galisteo Watershed Restoration Project has been spent, a wetlands project is currently being developed with an additional EPA grant. This summer, Earth Works also sponsored the H20 Festival and Symposium in collaboration with The Center for Contemporary Arts of Santa Fe. And so the work continues, poco a poco, bringing together the people who live and work in a watershed: people who have a stake in its health and vitality and whose future economic, ecological, and social well-being depend on its sustainability.