Photo: Roberto Nutlouis.
Danielle Kaye builds a berm spillway on the farm of Roberto Nutlouis. The berm holds back water, flooding the cornfield behind it. Navajos are using ancient ways to restore parched earth.
In their eagerness to invent, humans seem to be programmed to forget why ancient ways worked. Then they have to reinvent the wheel. Fortunately, indigenous people often are repositories of that wisdom and can produce it as needed.
Lela Nari writes at YaleEnvironment360, “Here in Burnt Corn Valley, smack in the middle of the Navajo reservation’s vast Black Mesa region, the hilly land both craves water and is brutalized by it. The sandy Arizona soil cracks under a punishing August sun as red-striped blister beetles search for moisture across its baked surface. Cottonwood trees and sagebrush rise from deep gullies carved by floodwaters that, during the intensifying summer monsoon, sluice off surrounding mesas and wash away fragile topsoil — reminders that with climate change, even quenching rains harbor powers of destruction.
“This portrait of climatic havoc belies a softer reality, though. Farming once thrived in this parched region and could once again — if the right practices are adopted. Exhibit A: The crops on Roberto Nutlouis’s 12-acre Sliding Rock Farm, in his reservation hometown of Piñon, a five-hour drive north of Phoenix.
“ ‘The corn is actually pretty big and thriving,’ Nutlouis says. He believes — and both Western science and the lived experience of his Native elders affirm — that the traditional rock and stick structures he’s built on his property, which help store water and prevent erosion, have a lot to do with it.
“These structures, similar to those used by Native peoples long before Europeans arrived on the continent, are not only delivering water to crops. … They are also restoring Nutlouis’s watershed and those of his neighbors, helping to sequester carbon, and reviving this high-desert ecosystem. It’s all part of a bigger effort among a range of local and regional grassroots organizations to build back the reservation’s fragile, depleted ecosystems and bring greater sovereignty over food, water, and health to its communities.
“Diné (the Navajo name for themselves) are well aware that climate change is making the weather on their semi-arid plateau weirder, wilder, and more destructive. … The ecological health of the reservation has also been weakened by deforestation from timbering operations and from overgrazing over the years.
“Still, this season, Nutlouis, 44, has been able to skip his usual two-hour roundtrip drive to a reliable well to haul water home for his corn. His crop is healthy and hydrated because his land still holds last winter’s snowmelt. Clearly, his heavy labor over the past 20 years — during which he has built woven brush dams, gabions (wirework cages filled with rocks), earthen berms, concrete spillways and trenches, limestone aprons and walls, and stone-lined ‘Zuni bowls,’ which stabilize eroding streambeds — is paying off.
“Diné and others living in arid zones around the world have long used structures made of naturally occurring materials to capture and control water to grow crops and to mitigate the devastation of floods in ephemeral stream systems. …
“Time and again over the last 15 years, Laura Norman, a research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, has seen evidence that when these structures — which Norman calls Natural Infrastructure in Dryland Streams, or NIDS — are placed in gullies, they slow water to mitigate erosion, collect nutrient-rich sediment and plant debris that nourish both crops and wild plants, help store carbon, improve groundwater recharge, and increase downstream water availability by as much as 28 percent. ‘It’s a snowball effect that counters degradation, and you get all of these ecosystem services,’ she says.
“The structures on Nutlouis’s farm are integral cogs in a larger system. … Nutlouis’s property lies in an alluvial fan, where mineral-rich sediments and plant waste atop mesas and other uplands wash down onto flatter ground with rainwater, snowmelt, and spring water. Across the valley, similar farms rely on this kind of system, many of which feature stone and stick constructions that Nutlouis helped build. The organic materials trapped behind the structures, says Jonathan Sandor, an emeritus agronomy professor at Iowa State University, ‘are a major input into keeping the fertility of the soils up.’ …
“Whether rock walls or ramps, hand-dug depressions in the soil, earthen walls, or branches plaited into dams, NIDS splash water over a wider area and slow its flow so it can better soak into the soil. Many trap sediments behind them, fertilizing whatever grows nearby. The stone structures create a hyperlocal cooling effect, especially when they’re combined with shade-making vegetation.
“Here, too, smallness is a boon. ‘Even tiny little one-rock dams can make big changes on the landscape,’ Norman says. …
“Lately, climate change has thrown extra challenges at the reservation. … But the ecosystem services provided by Nutlouis’s structures on his farm and elsewhere do seem to be meeting those climatic challenges. He’s noticed small juniper trees popping up on hillsides around his property despite the dryness; A cottonwood tree towering over one cornfield is also lush and full. ‘The idea that Earth will restore itself with natural seed dispersal’ after NIDS begin to do their job ‘has been my observation,’ says Norman.
“Or as Nutlouis puts it, ‘We’re allowing nature to do its own thing and restore itself.’ ”
More at Yale e360, here. Fascinating pictures. No firewall.
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