7 December 2022: A storm is imminent as I walk in weather warm for early December. Dark clouds are building to the southwest, and as I watch they sweep northeast and mushroom over the southern slopes of the San Juan Mountains. These rugged mountains have captured my imagination even before we moved here at their southern fringe 25 years ago. While forecasting weather in Nevada earlier in my life, I kept seeing the San Juans excel in capturing whatever winter moisture that the Sierras let go by—an island of rich forest that I envisioned but had never seen.

These mountains have become my landscape focus, my refuge of sorts, over the past quarter century, and we now get to enjoy firsthand those winter storms as well as the dramatic summer thunderstorms. With the San Juan’s impressive elevations, winter can still find a refuge even as the climate warms. I scan the horizon and dream of the time when grizzlies last roamed the mountains just to our east, to where lynx have been reintroduced to our north and east, and where abundant prime habitat still exists for wolves if they decide to move in or if we help them. Refuges past, present, and future—for climate, man, and beast.

Deep Sustainability: I have been writing some bits and pieces over the past 10 years—basically thinking out loud about how we need to get busy in our pursuit of sustainability—seeking deeper sustainability and responding to the urgency of our situation. I begin by posing “Three Questions”—Are we doing enough? Are we doing it fast enough? Why do we do this work? My attempts at answering these questions can be found in the “Getting Serious Now” posts on my website. At this point, I am working to apply these ideas to our own backyard, and they are much of what I suggest we think about—or rather dream about—for the mountains and surrounding lowlands of the greater San Juan Mountain region.

Why Dream? There are so many ways to think about a better future. Most planning processes ask us to envision our preferred future—for ourselves, our community, or for an organization. While we may be asked to think in both long and short terms, the emphasis is usually on the short—three to five years at most. This is very practical, but rarely allows us to escape the current realities of the present—simple things like keeping a job, paying bills, keeping the family farm or business viable, being able to retire comfortably, or helping one’s kids with college or with them getting a rewarding job. Long-term visioning of maybe 25-50 or more years ahead might better be called dreaming—letting go of immediate concerns and envisioning a better world for our great grandchildren and beyond.

But how is long-term dreaming responsive to the urgent issues facing us? Rather than an idle exercise, starting with the long term can pave the way for more enlightened planning for the short term. Instead of feeling trapped by the momentum of the status quo, we can more readily move “out of the box” toward a more desirable future. Only a bold, compelling, yet plausible dream of what is possible can drive us to work toward it despite the pressures of the moment. A daring but responsive dream of the future is needed to help us question the assumptions that hold the status quo in place—by accepting the position that endless growth, consumerism, technological cleverness, and markets free of responsibility and compassion will solve our problems. That it is possible to move past such mindsets is a necessary conviction and a dream in itself. Further, E.O. Wilson, in saying that “Great dreams, as opposed to fantasies, are those that seem to lie at or just beyond the edge of possibility” (Wild Earth intro, Spring 2000) hints at the need to push the envelope of possibility to create dreams worthy of our future—truly dreaming Wild Ideas.

Why Food and Foodsheds? Having worked on sustainable agriculture, local food, and healthy foodsheds for over 35 years here in Colorado, I have found that food and foodsheds offer a useful lens for viewing our relationships with other people, the land, and the planet. Such a view offers a powerful tool for striving for greater sustainability and for ecological integrity for the land—a tool in the hands of everyone who grows food, votes or advocates for leaders and policies, and anyone who chooses what to eat three times a day. It is only one of several ways to approach these issues, but I am convinced that it is one of the most powerful, accessible, and nurturing ways to do so. Having such a powerful tool accessible to everyone, coupled with my belief that as people become more aware, they often tend to become more loving and responsible, there is the good possibility, but not the certainty, of us becoming a much more compassionate and responsible society. A worthy dream to work toward even though it may seem to be on the edge of possibility.

The foodsheds lens makes food systems much more tangible for most people and forces us to consider the impacts on the land. I consider the local foodshed as 1) the land that we should look to first, but not exclusively, for our food, and 2) that land that we should feel most responsible for. Since our farms, gardens, and ranches are so intimately interdependent on surrounding ecosystems, I find it most practical and effective to consider those surrounding lands—the whole landscape—as part of our foodshed. Since the San Juan Mountains can be considered the hydrologic, meteorologic, ecologic, and aesthetic anchor for our region, the mosaic of overlapping local foodsheds in Southwest Colorado making up our regional foodshed is what I dream of being considered the “Greater San Juan Mountain Ecosystem”—and being treated as such. It would be a giant leap toward finding our appropriate place as a species in this beautiful, rich, and still rather wild region.

What if? There are many lenses other than food and foodsheds that can be used to dream of a better future here—water, energy, climate and biodiversity, land use, economic development, to name a few—although food will inevitably lead to these others as well. Here are just a few examples of dreams I have and hope to get a chance to pursue further:

Food—What if we developed the habit of looking first to our local and regional foodsheds for the food we need, considered the impact of our food footprint around the world, and greatly strengthened our local growers’ ability to grow food for us?

Water—What if we learned from, mimicked, and enlisted the aid of beavers in our water management?

Land Use—What if we considered the Greater San Juan Mountain region first and foremost as a beautiful and rich ecosystem whose wild character must be protected and restored—first for its own sake—and to benefit residents, tourists, our economy, and our grandchildren’s future?

 Economic Development—What if we saw the development of a delicious, sustainable, healthy, unique, locally based cuisine as a core economic development strategy for our tourism-based mountain towns that would also provide food security and abundance for local full-time residents with the aid of those tourist revenues?

Climate, Energy, & Biodiversity—What if we saw our food choices—personal as well as policy choices that prioritize local and sustainable foods—as a powerful tool to address the climate and biodiversity crises as well as food security, health, and economic development?

The Path Ahead: This work combines my belief in using food for good and my passion for protecting, restoring, and enjoying the San Juan Mountains and surrounding lowlands. I am looking forward to exploring these dreams further, hearing from others about their dreams along this line, and remain convinced that such dreaming is a key to developing the insights, innovation, and passion needed to pursue deeper sustainability in our region—and to find our appropriate place in this landscape we call home.

Was it enough, and what now?

Fall 2022. Major sustainability reports are piling up again, digitally that is, on my desktop—falling as fast as the leaves outside my window. The next climate conference is near, so those unnerving reports are right on time. Sad reports about the numbers of birds and mammals lost in the past few decades are here too.

Close to home. So many reports are showing profound losses over a timeframe of the last 50 years. This hits close to home since this period coincides with my career—one that I see largely as trying to make progress on ecological sustainability. To me, the record on progress during that time includes some genuine and heartening highlights for sure, and that should not be discounted by any means—we must celebrate the gains. Yet, on balance I feel confident in saying that we are seriously losing ground—far more loss than gain. How could you otherwise interpret the reports that worldwide populations of vertebrate species studied by the World Wildlife Fund have declined 69% since 1970? That a number of critical tipping points in climate change are near or already reached? Or that half of US birds are declining?

Earth’s Music. A book I have read and studied this year has so many dog-eared pages that the book is thicker than when I began. Earth’s Wild Music by naturalist-philosopher-ethicist Kathleen Dean Moore is a hard-hitting yet lyrical account of her 50-year career, also coinciding with the time span of the reports on my desktop and with my career. She reflects on her early writings “when loving the world seemed pure and simple,” and goes on to recount—sadly but beautifully—the losses. In an analogy to the common five stages of grief, she sees her passage in coping with these losses as “Tremble—Weep—Awaken—Sing Out.”

Sadness and determination. An anonymous reviewer on Amazon of Moore’s book paraphrased this progression in a way that I can identify with more readily as “Celebration—Lamentation—Bewilderment—Determination.” Less eloquently, I see it as Sad-Mad-Glad: sad at what has been lost in the natural world, mad at how and why this has happened, but glad that there is so much beauty and awe still left in the world to enjoy and protect—and that we have so many things we can still do to help stem the losses and heal the natural world and our relationship to it. People are finding a variety of ways of coping with the losses, but I do see the need for paying attention to what is going on, feeling okay with the stream of emotions it can bring, but ending up at a point recommitted to doing all we can to protect and heal the planet.

What did we miss over the past 50 years? How did we end up at such a precarious spot? I have gone back to textbooks I used in teaching college science in the 1970s and 1980s. I have looked back at weather, climate, and environmental class lectures I gave starting in the mid-1970s. Michael Mann’s new book, The New Climate War, recounts clearly the history of what we knew of climate change over the past decades, and goes on to reveal the disinformation campaigns that I think our society still finds far too convenient to accept. LBJ’s warning to Congress came over 50 years ago, Hansen’s warning nearly 35 years in the past. It’s clear to me that we had plenty of indications early on of where we were heading—lacking some details and a clear timeline of course—as well as the broad direction of what was needed to avoid the catastrophes facing us today. We weren’t so much missing sufficient information as missing many critical opportunities. What opportunities are we failing to act on today?

The Everglades Paradox, as I call it, strikes me whenever we visit our daughter in South Florida. In preparing for these trips, I have read much about how the Everglades have been devastated by human greed and indifference. So many birds and other animals have been lost as the ecosystems were ravaged. Yet, whenever we visit, the expansive views of sawgrass and the fascinating ecosystems that arise from just a few feet of elevation change are awesome. And so many birds! We can’t—or shouldn’t—ignore the history of loss as we delight in what is still here to enjoy, what is still here needing our protection and restoration. The Everglades are the clearest case for me of this contradiction, but I see it everywhere—that there has been so much loss, but much remains. Keeping both competing ideas in mind may be the only way to summon the determination to keep fighting for the natural world.

Staying engaged in fighting for our children’s future is critical. It is easy to become disheartened, bewildered, fatalistic, apathetic, and too paralyzed to act. The forces of disinformation that feed the status quo are all too effective. The status quo will not serve us or our children. As Moore concludes The Earth’s Wild Music, “Our work is not to save our way of life, but to save the world from this way of life’s destructive power.” For me, staying engaged in protecting the natural world, being outside immersed in it, being saddened by the loss but buoyed up by the beauty, the awe, and the good that we can still do is exactly the therapy and inspiration I need.

Sorting out foodsheds is a bit complicated. Rather than precise areas on a map, they are best used as a concept to think critically about where our food comes from and its impact on the land and on all that depends on that land, including other people. And by land, we mean the ecosystems including the soils, water, air, climate, and biodiversity. Further, since the health of the ecosystems on which our food is produced is so inter-dependent on the health of surrounding ecosystems, we prefer to think of the whole landscape of an area as the foodshed—the gardens, farms, ranches, and the surrounding ecosystems. Obviously, foodsheds overlap, change over time, and are a matter of opinion. Despite all the uncertainty and fluidity, we feel the foodshed is a useful concept for pursuing sustainability and fairness in our dealings with food.

The “local foodshed” as we view it, is the area that we a) should look to first for our food—not exclusively but deliberately first, and b) that area we are most responsible for—both ethically as it is our backyard and practically since we have more political power closer to home over food and land use policies. It could be considered our own backyard garden, then extending out to local farms and ranches, and then to regional sources. At that point it would be good to pause in our food sourcing and consider the pros and cons of going further afield and pause even more deliberately when crossing national boundaries and oceans as we often do without knowing or thinking of the implications.

This all begs the question—are we not also responsible for the health of distant lands that we appropriate as part of our extended foodshed—of other people’s backyards?

Local food itself may not be the goal, but it is the answer—or at least one key answer to how we can best be responsible in our food choices—personal and policy-wise. Being aware of the well-being of our local foodsheds and all who depend on those lands, as well as taking responsibility for those areas, is so much easier since they are in our own backyard. We may choose not to be aware or responsible, but it is harder to do. The farther our reach for food extends outward, the less we can know about our impacts on those ecosystems, those backyards of others, even if we try. Likewise, the farther afield we reach, the less able we are to protect those lands and ecosystems, even if we want to.

Ironically, however, it could be argued that we in the Western world as a rich people, as rich nations, have much more power to harm the local foodsheds or backyards of many others around the world with our food dollars and policies, than we have the power to protect them (unless, of course, we stay local). To me, this makes local food a crucial answer even if it isn’t the primary goal. Look local first—and when we do reach out for foods from more distant foodsheds, extend the same concern and fairness to their backyards that we do (or should) to our own.

Fairness, as I see it, is the primary goal in our dealings with food. Fairness to ourselves—the health of ourselves and our families, to the health of our local foodsheds, to the health of all people and their backyards, and fairness to the planet and future generations. Ultimately, we might circle back to ourselves and see that our attempt to be fair to all around us is in fact being fundamentally fair to ourselves and our moral well-being.

Dreaming/Re-imagining: We are still dreaming (or re-imagining if dreaming sounds too lazy and unprofessional) of how productive, fair, and rewarding our food system could be as we emerge and learn lessons from the pandemic—and we hope you are too. As the Dust Settles, we see both concerning and promising signs and lessons.

On the concerning side, inequities remain and reports, for example, of the world’s 10 richest men getting obscenely richer during COVID just hint at what we may face after the pandemic if we don’t pay attention and get involved. As emergency food assistance runs out in some cases, it is unclear whether we have the resolve to continue the assistance that is still needed until income and food access disparities are resolved. Prospects for proactively addressing the climate crisis are unclear from the public response we have seen to the COVID crisis.

Promisingly, schools have risen to the task of helping more and more with emergency food distribution which may morph into a longer-term, more proactive food access role. Caregivers and emergency workers of all sorts have inspired us. Local producers in some areas have received greater attention and respect. More people are questioning the status quo. Fairness for all—in food as in other necessities of life—is a top priority for more and more people. All these opportunities for constructive and sustainable change call for more concerted action on our part.

Taking Responsibility: Most people would agree, if asked, that we do need to recognize the consequences of our actions. In the food arena, that means the consequences of our personal food choices—how we make the effort to become informed and then choose, grow, buy, eat, and share food sustainably; and our civic food choices—how we affect the food policies of our governments, our economic sector, and our society more broadly. In terms of policy, voting for fair and sustainable policies and policymakers is paramount. We also need to find ways in our own lives to advocate for policies we know are essential for a fair and sustainable future. Simply talking with others (as voters) can be a powerful form of advocacy. I am seeing a critical need for constructive talk, or discourse, not just about our concerns and fears, but also about our dreams and hopes for our future—including our food systems.

Civil Discourse: Talk lately has certainly had its share of incivility. It seems to be a potent tool of some people and groups to achieve their aims through turmoil and confusion. Even among those who want to be “civil” and fair and compassionate, there is a tendency to avoid talking about our differences—keep to the safe topics. I see the lack of “civil discourse” as a sign of our times that is making progress very difficult. I do believe that we all have a “civic” responsibility to share our concerns as well as our hopes and dreams for the future with others, even with those we assume will never agree with us—how nice it would be to be wrong in this assumption.

Food as Common Ground: So, as we see the pandemic (hopefully) easing, and as we reimagine our future including that of our food systems, I’d suggest that we 1) do all we can with our personal food choices within the constraints that policies of the current food system impose on us, 2) take responsibility to affect those public food policies by voting and advocating for needed changes, and 3) make a concerted effort to talk with others—those likeminded and otherwise—in constructive and respectful ways about those things that bother us, but more importantly about all those dreams that are very likely to connect us and that can inspire us to work together for a better food system and a better world now and into the future—a much needed Civil Discourse!