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We live in “interesting times.” The interconnected challenges to our supplies of energy, water, and food grow daily. For example, the skyrocketing cost of energy is largely behind the push to drill for oil and gas in SF County, threatening the water in our aquifers. Increasing competition from Asia spurs rising energy costs, causing the price of food to soar. Climate change affects the whole planet, but it is exacerbated in the Southwest, where precious food and water supplies have become ever more precarious as population soars.
Hard times for people – including people in NM – are nothing new. Recently I read William DeBuys’ book “The Walk” and was struck by the story of the people who first settled Las Trampas, a village about 40 miles north of SF (then capital of the province of Nuevo Mexico). In 1751, the governor awarded the Trampas Land Grant to twelve heads of families who lived in the poorest barrio of SF. In those days, the Comanches carried out periodic raids on the city, harvesting animals, women, and children as though they were crops. The motivation behind the Grant was not entirely generous, in that it was intended both to help relieve population pressure in SF (too many mouths to feed) as well as to provide a defensive bulwark against Comanche raids. Very little is known about the early details of the settlement, other than the story told by the buildings they constructed. Homes were built wall-to-wall, creating a fortified plaza. The adobe church, Santo Tomas Apostol de Las Trampas, beloved by today’s tourists, is one of the finest examples of Spanish colonial mission architecture in northern NM. Since the people were nearly all illiterate, there are no written records of their hardscrabble life, constantly threatened as they were by starvation and Indian raids. Nevertheless, we know the tenacious little community survived. |
In 1816, the Trampaseños built a mill outside of their compound area – a symbol of hope. Obviously, one of the most critical factors in the location of the village was its water source, a stream that flows down from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, from which flows the life of the people: their crops grow in the fields irrigated by the acequia diverted from it; their livestock graze in the pastures on either side; and the mill that ground the flour from grain they grew was powered by it. The community’s construction of the mill was the clearest sign that the people in the village had “arrived.” Comanche raids would never again defeat them. The people had prospered in a way they could never have imagined when they were living in their poor barrio in SF. They were now wealthy enough to feed themselves and sell their flour to their former neighbors in the city.
Shifting to a local, self-sufficient economy is crucial to surviving the growing challenges of the future. But the story of the Trampaseños teaches us that we can actually thrive in the face of difficulties if we stand united as a community.
Water is probably our most pressing problem in the high mountain desert. Fortunately, water is intrinsically a sustainable, renewable resource, unlike fossil fuels. Unfortunately, our present sources of water – wells and surface water from rivers – are not without limits, including the growing energy costs for pumping.
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