Rain & Shine

The Beaver, or Full Frost Moon is the name of this season’s luna llena. With the moonlight sparkling on a heavy frost and a beaver moving into a new bend of one of the ditches that runs by my house, I think it is well named. Our question this week was, why is the Moon bigger when it rises?

The Old Farmer's Almanac has been sharing farming and homesteading tips and offering weather predictions since the 1700’s. While it is unclear exactly how they make their weather predictions, an answer to a listener's question helps us see that what is clear is that climate change is making weather much more variable and extreme and so prediction methodologies based primarily on historical weather patterns are becoming less reliable.

It behooves those of us who live in the West to think proactively about how to fight desertification. At this point, if we are not actively making choices to do so we will become desertified. The basic thing to understand is that anything which decreases the ability of the land to retain water, or increases the rate at which water leaves the land is adding to the problem. Anything that slows water down and helps it stick around is the solution.

Here on Rain & Shine we are looking at ways we can protect our communities from desertification in the face of a destabilizing climate by slowing down the rate at which water moves through our landscapes.

Here on the western slope we have been blessed with a combination of warmth from the desert combined with steady streams of water that flow down from the mountains in our rivers. This lovely combination makes our area agriculturally rich and abundant, allowing us to grow crops that cannot be grown anywhere else in the Rocky Mountain region.  But living on the edge of a desert means it's all too easy for us to become a desert too!

Indegenious cultures have historically practiced agriculture from a position that is deeply centered in a particular landscape. There was little difference between “wild” and “farmed” in cultures indegenious to the land called Turtle Island. This led to relationships which sought to understand and work within the natural cycles and patterns of the elements, plants and animals, supporting and caring for them in ways yielded the food supply needed to sustain the many people who called the land home. 

Nitrogen is the basis of fertility. It’s the base of the amino acids that make up our DNA and the proteins in our bodies. Nitrogen is a common limiting nutrient in nature, and agriculture, meaning that naturally it is in the shortest supply and limits growth.

The excessive burning of fossil fuels and mismanagement of forests and soils have released vast amounts of terrestrial and fossil carbon into the atmosphere throwing the global carbon cycle, that underpins life as we know it, out of the balance. But there are ways we can help rebalance the cycle.  Of course we have to stop burning so many fossil fuels. We can also pull the excess carbon out of the atmosphere and give it back to the soil.  Unlike more carbon in the atmosphere, more carbon in the soil is good for us. It makes soil healthy! Healthy soil makes healthy food and that's good for everyone. 

In mid September 2020 the biggest cold snap in the history of the western united states occurred in southwest Colorado. Just a few weeks earlier raging wildfires in California and Oregon forced the early migration of thousands of songbirds. Stressed from early migration, underfed and experiencing the sudden cold, thousands of birds died and many many more panicked. 

In a drying landscape one thing we can do to halt desertification is to restore small water cycles. What does that mean? It means keeping the water that does fall or comes down through irrigation and streams in local circulation. There are many ways to do this through the way we graze animals, to keeping our ditch water above ground, planting and caring for trees, and restoring soil health. The simple global principal at work here is that in the biosphere, water follows carbon. Where there is more carbon there will be more water.

The way we manage water has largely been focused on quantity and quality. This has led to a scarcity mentality where we are faced with there not being “enough” water immediately available. When we step back and look at the way water moves throughout the planet-in large and small water cycles- we can begin to see that all the water there is, is still there.

While we can't control the weather, we can and do have dramatic impacts on our climate and environment. New science is showing that it is possible to attract water back into our landscapes and get ahead of catastrophic wildfires. When it comes to managing our lands and mitigating the impacts of weather, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

There is a new season in the west: fire season! We have always had wild fire in our landscapes but fires are now coming much earlier, burning hotter and often leaving catastrophic impacts. Like all living systems, it's not just one thing, but an interconnected and compounding set of environmental and social issues that are causing these fires to be so much worse than they were. 

Snowpack was good in winter 2019/2020 so why did our rivers get low so early? The snow melted early and extraordinarily quickly this spring. This along with a combination of effects from a rapidly changing climate are colliding to cause dramatic shifts in how water interacts with our landscape. 

Water is life. It is what makes life possible on Earth and here in the west we are very vulnerable to how much water we get or don't get. Our area is in what scientists call a “megadrought”; a period of drought that extends for over a decade. And this one is the longest on record.