Living in a "regenerative" way

My apologies for the silence. It's been nearly two weeks since my last post, the one that opened a new "blog duet" with poet and blogger on community Janet Riehl, in which we are considering the balance between outward-aiming work in the world and the inward work necessary to sustain the spirit and energy that outward work draws on. I'm usually pretty good about maintaining that balance, but in the past week, I "spent" all of my outward-aiming work energy on speaking engagements, so blogging just had to wait until I could let the new ideas settle and hear myself think.

Yesterday, Richard and I drove home from Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I spoke at the New Mexico Xeriscape Council's 13th national conference on water conservation and sustainable landscape design. Some 400 attendees involved in how we design the landscapes where we live and work gathered to hear a fascinating and inspiring line-up of speakers, beginning with New Mexico Senator Jeff Bingaman, who pointed out that conservation is the cheapest and most effective way to "find" new sources of water. Bingaman quoted US Bureau of Reclamation studies saying every dollar spent on water conservation yields around $5 dollars worth of water that can now be used in other ways -- or just allowed to flow downstream to maintain the health of aquatic ecosystems.

Other highlights of the conference: Natural capitalist Hunter Lovins talked compellingly about the opportunities in environmental challenges, from developing renewable energy sources and carbon cap trading to restoring ecosystems. Her three points of natural capitalism:
1. Buy time with increased energy and water-use efficiency.
2. Reinvent with natural technology after studying how nature - the ultimate sustainable, renewable system - does business.
3. Restore natural systems - healthy ecosystems provide trillions of dollars a year in "services" from cleaning and delivering fresh water to fixing carbon to regular CO2, the most important greenhouse gas.

Gloria Flora talked about how to work within human communities to bring change for the better: Find the common ground and work from there. Think in terms of transformation, not destruction. Peter Warshall gave us the global picture on conservation of water and energy. This nugget particularly struck me: 8 barrels of water are used in locating, recovering and refining every barrel of oil. (Yikes! That's a powerful incentive to consume less oil, whether in driving or choosing foods and clothing not dependent on oil-consumptive pesticides and fertilizers.)

NPR correspondent and "doyenne of dirt" Ketzel Levine took us on a tour of some of the heroic ordinary people working with restoring local plant communities whom she has interviewed in the network's series on global climate change. (Check out Ketzel's fabulous NPR blog, "Talking Plants.") Sculptor Betsy Damon showed us the results of her three decades spent using landscape sculpture to restore rivers and educate people in China about clean, healthy water.

The phrase that sticks in my mind from the conference came from Keith Bowers of Biohabitats, an ecological restoration firm based in Maryland. He talked about "regenerative design," designing landscapes and systems that renew or restore themselves, using the integrity of nature to also meet human needs. I hadn't come across the word before, but it was the perfect lead-in for my talk about how Richard and I stumbled into restoring what we only half-jokingly call our "decaying industrial empire," half a block of blighted property that is now the site of our house and our wildflower-filled yard, our lively organic kitchen garden and the restored block of urban creek that edges our property. (The photo at the top of the post is Indian paintbrush in our front-yard native grassland as it looks now; below is the "before" shot.)


We didn't set out to rescue this place, but once we bought it, there was no other option but to return it - and us - to health. It's been a tough project, and it's given us a lot of joy. (Nor are we finished, but that's the story of life!) Now I know it's been regenerative as well, because in restoring this place, much of its native plant community and some of the animals and insects as well, we've restored our own connection to the landscape where we live.

And that brings me back to the blog duet with Janet Riehl on the subject of keeping one's balance between outward-aiming work and inward-aiming sustenance. It seems to me that regenerative applies here too: if we work to make our lives regenerative, to make sure the rhythms of our days restore our own energy and enthusiasm as well as work to restore the communities around us, if we use nature as our model to keep our balance, surely we'll find the balance that brings us both fulfillment and joy.

Green morals

I'm always astonished when people justify some action that hurts another species or its habitat by saying something like, "If we don't do this, people will suffer. We can't save every species, after all." Why not? Life, as it turns out, is not all about humans. It's not even mostly about humans. It's a community effort involving more species than we even know exist. It's the relationships and interactions between all of those species - not just the ones we bother to conserve - that keeps ecosystems healthy, that buffers fluctuations in climate and weather (until things get out of control, as they have with rising levels of greenhouse gases), and that keeps Earth a green and habitable place for us all. But we consistently don't get that point. You'd think we were the only species that mattered.

"Saving Fens" read the headline on the front page of my small-town newspaper, the Mountain Mail, recently. A fen is a cold-water, high-mountain bog or marsh, in other words, a wetland at high altitude. Here in the arid West, the species that depend on our scarce and unevenly distributed water supplies have evolved all sorts of ways to take advantage of the liquid stuff wherever it occurs, and fens are no exception. These mucky, marshy swales in high valleys where summer - the time from thaw to freeze-up - may last two months or less, are incredibly diverse places, richer in species than any other habitat around them. They are home to a host of lives unique and common, from tiny primroses, rare scarlet wood lilies, and dwarf willows to mountain plover, an endangered grassland-dwelling cousin to common killdeer, and speed-demon pronghorn antelope. Fens are high-altitude sponges, storing water that, released slowly over the summer, evens out fluctuations in streamflow, keeping aquatic insects and trout alive.

So saving fens seems like a good idea. But that's not actually what's happening, as a closer reading reveals. The City of Aurora, Denver's thirstiest suburb, and the Pueblo water utility, are looking for support for an effort to legitimize destroying fens, by drowning them under high-mountain reservoirs. Their plan: pick the chunks of the bog with heavy earth-moving equipment and move it elsewhere. Why? Not because they like fens: because the presence of fens has already derailed a reservoir project proposed by Pueblo and prevented Aurora from submitting an application for another.

Most of your high mountain valleys are going to have fens and that's the same area you are going to look at for development, said Gerry Knapp of the City of Aurora.
Currently there are no mitigation tools out there if you impact a fen. . . . We are trying to develop and show a method of mitigation.

Mitigation, for those who aren't familiar with that multi-syllabic jargon, means "recreating destroyed habitat somewhere else." Sounds reasonable on the surface. But it's very difficult to "recreate" a wetland, especially a high-mountain fen, where growth is slow because of the short summers - the thick layers of peat soil that form the spongy and nutrient-rich base of these wetlands may take centuries or millennia to accumulate. And the standards for what constitutes "recreation" are not all that stringent. So what these water entities are proposing is basically to be allowed to destroy wetlands assuming they can demonstrate some standard of "mitigation." But if you can't tell for centuries to come whether you've been successful in recreating the wetland, what happens if you've fails, and the original wetland has long since been drowned under a reservoir? You lose a wetland, a sponge that assures streamflow, habitat for mountain plovers and deer flies and technicolor wood lilies, a unique piece of life on Earth, that's what.

And for what? This is not about humans' survival or even their great inconvenience. It's about preservation of lawns. The reservoirs that Aurora and Pueblo would like to build will largely go to supply residential water use, some 60 percent of which will irrigate home landscapes, that is, lawns. Neither city emphasizes water conservation, which studies show could supply their water needs for the near future. Instead of devoting resources to supplying water through conservation, they're devoting resources to evading the regulations that prevent them from drowning high-mountain valleys, and the marshes that are the richest and most diverse places around. That's as smart as cutting down the rainforest, the lungs of the planet, so we can have cheaper hamburger. Destroying fens to store water for people's lawns and toilets is just wrong.

Not just wrong, it's immoral. And I'm not alone in thinking that way. No less than the editorial board of the New York Times has come out for green morals. In "Evangelical Environmentalism," the paper's editorial board emphatically stands up for our moral responsibility to this rare blue planet:

. . . It is antiquated to limit the definition of morality to the way humans behave among humans. Those days have been over ever since it became apparent that humans - busy thinking about only their lives - had the power to destroy huge numbers of species, whole landscapes of habitat, and in fact, the balance of life on earth. The greatest moral issue of our time is our responsibility to the planet and to all its inhabitants.

From a hot and windy March day in a valley in the arid West, where our winter snowpack has already given way to powder-dry soils, I say, Hear, Hear! And blessings on us all, for we're all in this together.