Albuquerque Community Farming: Late Winter - Early Spring
This body of work chronicles Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a region better known for its radioactivity than its food production. When visitors come from out of state they invariably mention how brown it is here. The climate is high desert; we're in the northern reaches of the Chihuahuan Desert and average 8.91 inches of rain a year. Most population centers sprung up around rivers, especially the Rio Grande. Because of the limited water, it would seem impossible to grow much food locally, and the vast majority of food in the grocery store comes from a vague "somewhere else." For the last 50 years this has been an acceptable solution to feeding the city.
But the hidden costs of food that comes from "somewhere else" are becoming hard to ignore. Fertilizer runoff is causing destructive algae blooms in the Gulf of Mexico. High-density feedlots are responsible for e-coli outbreaks. Undocumented workers cross the border to toil for substandard wages. Moving refrigerated food around the globe consumes millions of barrels of oil a day.
All this unsettles me, and I've wondered about alternative ways of getting food, ways that will lessen my footprint on the world. My exploration led me to the CSAs in Albuquerque. It's a thriving community; from the multi-acre farms to the multiple grower's markets, there is a lot of sustainable farming in the desert. People buy memberships with the CSA, and in return they receive fresh produce. Buying locally removes most of the problems of industrial food production. It's not neutral by any means, but it's a great improvement over the practices of the last 50 years.
I've been visiting the CSAs around town, recording how they produce the food offered to their members. From fallow fields to lushly saturate vegetable stands, community-based farming and the implications of taking sustenance from the native ecosystem fascinates me. It's a simple step, with big implications for our future.
Bosque Holga images.
This forest is dead. New Mexico definitively killed it in 1973 when Cochiti Dam was completed, fulfilling a decades-long attempt to normalize the flow of water along the Rio Grande, to prevent floods and control sediment build-up. What the Army Corps of Engineers did not consider is that the ecosystem of the river evolved around regular flooding and sediment build-up. Tasked with tidying up the place, the Corps was helping water compacts be fulfilled, as well as ensuring riverfront property didn't become mid-river property. For nearly 40 years the Rio Grande bosque has been slowly dehydrating. With no regular floods, there are no young native cottonwood trees and the Silvery Minnow has lost its breeding grounds. Tamarisk, a water-thirsty exotic species, has taken root with a vengeance. The dry forest catches on fire, and the jetty jacks from earlier attempts to channelize the river prevent fire teams from reaching the blazes; they become raging infernos.
Simultaneously, the forest is a refuge. Stretching nearly 200 miles, much of the land within the Albuquerque city limits has been acquired by municipal government and turned into publicly accessible open space and park systems. There are multiple walking and biking trails through the trees. It's quiet; the hum of the city is distant, the gurgle of the river is constant. Coyotes can be seen in the ghostly, pre-dawn light. Demonstration projects, oases designed by scientists, point to the possibility of healing the ecosystem, restoring what was lost. They are small plots proving that we can create, as well as destroy.
I walk through this space with my toy camera, observing and reflecting on the conflicting realities of the bosque. A corpse. A refuge. A possibility. Greater issues, the big ideas that philosophers and theologians have grappled with for eons seem nearby. Is there any decency in us if we suffocate the land where we live? Is the greed responsible for sub-prime mortgages any surprise when we have so readily destroyed vast tracts of land to harness natural resources? Is there a strange justice to riverfront mansions up for sale in a crumbling economy? Are our bumbling attempts to discover new solutions to decades-old ecological damage inspiring, or darkly humorous? I hope that my photographs of the Rio Grande bosque might capture some of these contradictions, and the eerie beauty of this place that hangs by a thread.