All of the summaries of the books we have read include (many) links. Links evaporate. I check them when I post the summary and randomly go back in over time to check. If you find a broken link, please let me know via a comment or a direct email. Let me know which link was broken and I will fix it, replace it, or remove it.

Gary Paul Nabham has an excellent website that seems only to get more interesting every time I look at it. He also moves things around a lot so the links I used when we discussed the book are generally no longer there although I imagine that poking around a bit might lead you to them. For the moment, I’ll limit what I say here to indicating that the former link is either broken or has changed in some substantive way.

I showed a bit of a written interview with Gary Paul Nabhan from the University of Utah’s Extension Service related to permaculture and growing food in a hotter, drier land. The link is broken (15 July 2022) and I can’t find this article elsewhere.

The ideas of permaculture (that were discussed in the interview with the broken link) involve planting food forests, that is communities of plants that include trees, understory shrubs, and shorter plants – herbs, grasses, etc. The plants are often perennial, and are plants that are good companions in terms of water and resource needs. In 2019, we read Paradise Lot, a permaculture romance that dealt with creating a permaculture landscape in great detail. As part of that, I had sent out links to some local and not local permaculture groups:

The Permaculture Institute is based in Santa Fe and grew out of the program developed by Bill Mollison (who wrote THE book on Permaculture).  We do have the book in the reference section in the Albuquerque Garden Center Library if you’re interested in seeing this classic treatment of permaculture.

The Permaculture Design Magazine.  The link opens on a page that lists permaculture and sustainability sites throughout New Mexico but you can go to the home page for information about the organization and the various things they do.

One other resource is Ampersand up in Madrid.

I had found a close-to-an-hour audio interview Gary Paul Nabhan had given in Las Cruces about the border wall, native plants, and overcoming divisiveness. The link here is to a blog page about the book but that page has a link to the interview plus a kind of cute mediation between an ironwood and a saguaro… Alas, the link does still have a short blog post about the book but the other information I had mentioned cannot be readily found, although there’s a slider with many of his other blog posts…

Cadillac desert

Straight from wikipedia: “Cadillac Desert (1986), is a history by American Marc Reisner about land development and water policy in the western United States. Subtitled The American West and its Disappearing Water, it explores the history of the federal agencies, Bureau of Reclamation and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and their struggles to remake the American West in ways to satisfy national settlement goals. The book concludes that the development-driven policies, formed when settling the West was the country’s main concern, have had serious long-term negative effects on the environment and water quantity. The book was revised and updated in 1993.”

Someone has put together the four 1-hour PBS series from the book.

Nabham referred to a relatively recent study comparing the predictions of Cadillac Desert to where we are now (about 2012 when Nabhan’s book was being written). I referenced an opinion piece in the Sacramento Bee, Legacy, which is now behind a pay wall. Not to be deterred, in July 2022, I found a Daily Beast article from July 12, 2017, titled: If you only read one book about the water crisis: ‘Cadillac Desert.’

One thing about books with predictions is that you can compare what was predicted to what has passed, given enough time. Although it’s not related to the book I mentioned The Limits to Growth and Models of Doom and what happened in an intervening 40 years.

Nabhan also mentioned Biosphere 2. This project has has something of a rocky history but seems to be working well at the moment. Here’s a link to their website.

We watched this short clip about the Loess Plateau in China when we read Replenish. Here’s the link to a nearly full hour version. And more recently I read somewhere that many of the trees have died. Still, it’s quite a success when compared to the status when they began the work. One thing Nabhan talks about is shifting away from fossil fuels in growing food. Although I’m sure there was some fossil fuel use involved in restoring the Loess Plateau, much of the work was done by hand.

Water from the Colorado river. We watched this clip in conjunction with Sandra Postel’s Replenish.

Jim Corbett and the Sanctuary Movement.

One of the strengths of the book is that it ties together (inspirational) stories with practical actions you can take, whether your landscape is small or large. The questions Nabhan asks in each chapter made me think of Judith Phillips, a local landscape designer. We looked at her website, which has a similar list of questions to help the homeowner think about their landscape whether it involves food plants or not. There are many other resources to help you think about “waterwise” landscaping and use of native plants. A couple I know are the NM Native Plants Society, Waterwise Landscape Design, the ABC Water Utility Authority, and the Xeric Garden Club of Albuquerque to name but a few. Since I prepared these notes originally, there is now an ABQ Backyard Refuge Program that helps homeowners design pollinator-friendly landscapse.These resources are all helpful for figuring out ways to use water to its best advantage but the emphasis is not on food production.

One member has roses and told us that she has begun interplanting her roses with vegetables like asparagus. So there is a way to have ornamentals and vegetables growing together. And, of course, many flowers, including roses, have culinary value as well.

Finally, this link is to the power point slides from a talk that Israel Calsoyas, from NMSU gave on water-wise vegetable gardening. I am sure that any search on ‘growing vegetables with less water’ will generate multitudes of responses. Remember that for the most reliable results, be sure the source you choose has tested (and proved) information. One indicator is an extension of dot edu. All the federally funded agricultural extension programs are operated through universities. One other thing to watch is that the advice is relevant to the climate in which you are gardening.