Land Desk re-share: mining, spring runoff and real estate in the Four Corners
As always, impressed by Land Desk’s comprehensive and well rounded coverage of all things resource extraction in the Southwest. Water, minerals, mines and weather. As I prepare to teach ecology programs this summer in western Colorado, hike a section of the CDT and CT again in Colorado with an old philosophy professor doing the whole CDT, and teach my online critical ethnobotany study groups, I’m constantly working to continue to inform myself of the complexity of these multi-layered land issues in order to be able to teach fuller stories about the land. And as always, I am reminded that our somatic maps are poisoned and having healthy relationships with one another and the land is a difficult and brave journey in a time where the norm is to permanently invert the land into the temporary material working of our society and we must be a certain level of emotionally numb in order to be able to keep accepting it. The ecologies of our bodies feel it and we must act on any voice of reason (or perhaps de-reasoning, as the animist stories of the magical and sentient world aren’t always reasonable) to plant seeds of resistance against this narratives that we must treat the land as a means to an end or the other living beings in our lives as disposable and a sacrifice for temporary desires.