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  • From: Scott Pittman <pci@permaculture-inst.org>
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [permaculture] Re: Our Bioregion and a little history
  • Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2002 20:34:31 -0600

At 08:19 PM 10/26/02 -0400, you wrote:
> IS anyone interested in disclosing their bioregion, so we (I) can see
where
> we are all from, and how that might open some discussion.
>
> A thought, I am still new.


I live, with my wife and six other households, on 10 acres of land in Pojoaque, New Mexico. Pojoaque is Tewa for butterfly springs.
This is currently the home of the Permaculture Institute, and I am a board member of the (1st) Permaculture Credit Union, and Permacultura America Latina which represents projects in Ecuador, Peru, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Brazil.

I have spent the past 17 years teaching permaculture, and designing permaculture around the world, five of those years were spent co-teaching with Bill Mollison. We taught the first permaculture courses in the Former Soviet Union, Mexico, and Brazil. I continue to teach here in New Mexico and in South and Central America.

My wife and I have just completed our strawbale/adobe home and are planting our tropical garden in an interior greenhouse that is our heat source for our home.

Our land is a mix of old estate landscape and permaculture experiment. Our primary experiments have been in creating different guilds to see which analog plants are most suitable for our ecosystem. Caragana has been one plant that has proven itself over and over. We have a large annual garden that provides approximately 60% of our food, and a two plus acre wetland pond/chinampa system that hosts lots of wildlife and orphaned geese, ducks, swans, and other cast offs of this area. We are planting willow for basketry and woven panels for shade structures, and water loving fruit bearers around the pond and chinampa.

We have just endured a two year drought, which the Fall and early Winter rains seem to be ending. This drought has precipitated the
loss of thousands of acres of Pinyon pine, it seems that our PJ (Pinon Juniper) ecosystem is going through a major collapse with no clue yet of what the succession will be. It is a little awesome, in the middle of all of this man made catastrophe, to witness in very short time frame one collapse after another of ancient living systems. It is also very sobering and scary.

We normally have 11 inches of precipitation annually, and straddle zones 4 and 5. We are at 6500 feet altitude in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, and in the upper Rio Grande water shed. New Mexico typically ranks in the last ten percent of states in education, poverty, infant mortality, alcoholism, and etc. We sometimes are edged out of last by Mississippi, or Alabama. This area defines the upper reaches of the Chihuahuan, and Sonoran deserts, though I don't think the geographers have caught up with that fact yet.

This area is rich in history of three cultures; Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo all of which have contributed to the degradation of the environment and all of whom point the finger at the other for the bad state of affairs. Permaculture has found its way into the Native American and Anglo cultures but has not seemed appealing to the Hispanic population, perhaps because they are the most disenfranchised group in this area, at least the Native Americans have a land base and a community of support that helps them endure their poverty and loss of cultural identity.

Scott







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