Location
Ghost Ranch
1708 Highway 84
Abiquiu, NM, 87510
Date/Time
Date(s) - 04/05/2013 - 04/07/2013
All Day
Category(ies)
Earth Day Celebration at Ghost Ranch: Water’s for Cooperating Over
Workshop ID: G13SW41W
More information can be found at the Ghost Ranch website.
Dates: April 5, 2013 – April 7, 2013 Price: $150.00
The arid Southwest generally, and New Mexico specifically, has been the scene of intense competition for resources. With today’s news filled with stories of conflict over water- lawsuits and jurisdictional disputes, compromised water supplies, runaway development, drought and climate change, it is easy to accept the old canard that ‘water’s for fighting over’. But is it really? This program will examine historic instances in which societies have come together to share nature’s most precious resource. Folklorist Jack Loeffler, Anthropologist Rina Swintzell, Historian Estevan Arellano will present stories which highlight such social systems, explode the myth of water conflict and point toward a future with ‘just enough’ water for human and nature’s uses.
Instructor(s)
Steve Harris describes his career as that of a “River Worker”, centered on the Rio Grande as it courses through the desert Southwest. He is a river outfitter and guide, a river and flood rescue instructor to various local, state and federal agencies and a river conservation activist, as well as a student of the history and natural history of the Ghost Ranch region.
Jack Loeffler is an aural historian, writer, radio producer and sound collage artist who was born in Parkersburg, West Virginia in 1936. He studied music at Julius Hartt Conservatory in Hartford, and Westminster College Conservatory in Pennsylvania. In early 1970, he founded both the Central Clearing House and Black Mesa Defense Fund, environmental organizations committed to environmental activism, and preservation of indigenous culture within the context of native habitat. He has continued his fieldwork with indigenous and traditional cultures throughout the American West, Mexico and the Cook Islands recording music and lore. He has conducted hundreds of field recording sessions of music, interviews and the sounds of natural habitats throughout the southwestern quadrant of North America.
Dr. Rina Swentzell earned her B. A. in Education from New Mexico Highlands University, as well as her M. A. in Architecture in 1976 and her Ph. D. in American Studies in 1982 at the University of New Mexico. She writes and lectures on the philosophical and cultural basis of the Pueblo world and its educational, artistic and architectural expressions. Her writing appears in magazines, scholarly journals, and edited collections and she appears in video presentation for television and museums commenting upon Pueblo cultural values. She acts as a consultant to a number of museums including Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts and the Smithsonian, and was a visiting lecturer at both Yale and Oxford in 1996.
Estevan Arellano is a northern New Mexican poet, historian, farmer and journalist. In 2006 he translated and publised “Ancient Agriculture”, a text originally written by Gabriel Alonso de Herrera in sixteenth century Spain. This text was later brought to New Mexico and continues to influence how agriculture is practiced today.
