Narration by Darby Weaver
Humanity Without Homeostasis
Following the warmest Vermont winter on record last year, the polar vortex events that dropped temperatures and snow from New England all the way down to Georgia this past January have been steadying to my spirit. After enduring what felt like a never-ending mud season in 2024, breaking up ice in water troughs, shoveling snow trails to livestock pens, and listening to the eerie creaking of frozen trees at night has been a nostalgic gift. For the first time in a decade, my drive from Vermont to Pennsylvania for the holidays was covered with snow in every state. When I reached my father in Lancaster County, a thin layer of white coated the ground and temperatures slumped down into the single digits. We retreated to the warmth of the house where we waxed poetic about the days in Pennsylvania when blizzards roared through every winter, so much so that my dad had even owned a snowmobile.
Back in Vermont, I’ve been trudging through knee-deep snow and spending most days tirelessly feeding the woodstove in our tiny house. Nurturing the fire is a daily practice akin to prayer and centers me in gratitude for this world and the elemental reality it manifests. As news of the wildfires in California spread quickly across modern media, a familiar gnawing feeling of despair slipped back into my sphere of experience, cutting right through my idyllic winter wonderland. Watching the orange glow emanating out from the air vents on the firebox, I once again held grief for a place in peril due to raging elemental forces that are no longer regulated by a balanced ecological world.
Moments of peace like these here in Vermont where everything seems normal are often interrupted by images and stories of natural disasters laying waste to wild spaces and devastating human communities across the globe. It would be impossible for me to fathom the fear and sadness of those who lost their homes, livelihoods, and loved ones to the fires in California had I not stood inside a catastrophic flash flood event here in my home state that killed 12 people and caused $2.2 billion in damage across New England just two years ago.
ecological systems with abundant and diverse life forms contribute to a healthier whole
We are living in the age of climate crisis, and the natural disasters we see in faraway places on our TVs and phones may feel distant today, but there is no true hiding place from the solemn realities of a living planet that has lost its homeostasis.
Fires and Floods
Since the Gaia hypothesis was first proposed by chemist James Lovelock and co-developed by microbiologist Lynn Margulis in 1970, scientists and researchers have sought to understand what it takes for the Earth to maintain homeostasis as a self-contained living entity. The theory posits that all natural systems, with their biodiversity, dynamics, symbiosis, and influences, merge together to form an overarching, self-regulating system that supports a physical and chemical environment that is optimal for life. This regulation is built through the interaction between living organisms and inorganic materials. From temperature, salinity in the oceans, and oxygen in the atmosphere, it is thought that highly developed ecological systems with abundant and diverse life forms contribute to a healthier whole, which in turn results in more resources, less accumulation of toxins, and more stabilized and predictable weather.
Even so, fires and floods have been occurring on our planet since before human beings made their mark on the landscape. The very natural processes and ecological communities that give Earth its living quality are constantly in flux and have always generated variations in weather and at times contributed to major natural disasters. While the Earth may never be free from the unpredictability of such events, there is an overwhelming quantity of data suggesting that our capital-driven, globalized society has caused severe dysregulation, spurring an unprecedented increase in the frequency and severity of natural disasters. Specific to fires and floods, this destabilization as a consequence of climate change has been termed hydroclimate whiplash and refers to the rapid swings between unusually wet weather to dangerously dry weather that are currently impacting communities all over the planet today.
Science for Capital’s Sake
As scientists continue to collect data about our changing climate, there are many in positions of economic and political power with a vested interest in denying its very existence. To face the truths of our exploited natural world calls into question the methods by which companies and governments derive and hoard capital. With the help of modern media outlets, a story can be told that downplays the role the quest for capital has in dysregulating the homeostasis of our planet and muddies the waters of public perception regarding our human impact. Even so, recognition of the impact of carbon dioxide on the rising average temperature of Earth has been discussed on a scientific level since as far back as 1950.
As President Trump signs the executive order for the declaration of an energy emergency in the United States, it is clearer than ever that the government is big business and is dedicated to ensuring the success of its major stakeholders and investors.
Water Rights in California
Where natural disasters strike, much is revealed about the state of local resources, the allocation of aid, and the systemic issues that cause problems and inequities in the region. For California, much can be attributed to the fact that 40 percent of the state, roughly 40 million acres, is used for irrigated agriculture. California grows 25 percent of the nation’s foods, coming from large plantings of vegetables, nuts, and fibers, as well as grains and hay that are fed to cattle in beef feedlots and to cows on large dairy operations. The beef and dairy sectors themselves contribute to $10 billion of annual revenue.
While communities in California account for just about 10 percent of the state’s total water usage, agriculture is cited as using as much as 40 percent. Much of California’s irrigated agriculture is localized to the Central Valley region, and a devastating drought that lasted from 2020 to 2022 and included threats from extreme heat, wildfire smoke, and overall harvest disruption, lead farmers to lay fallow several hundred thousand acres of cropland, contributing to losses totaling over $1 billion. As climate change continues to raise annual temperatures, decrease the snowpack, and impair the hydrologic cycle through the increase of wildfires in headwater forests, the management of water usage and rights in California is under scrutiny.
When water is held as a commodity that can be bought and sold, it becomes most available to those who offer the highest bid
To help direct scarce water supplies, California has long maintained a water market where cities, Native American Tribes, individuals, and farms can own and trade the rights to the use of water reserves held within the state. This market first took off during a devastating drought in 1987 that spurred the need to manage this valuable resource. Today, water rights of certain quantities of available surface water and even small amounts of groundwater can be held in long- and short-term leases, held permanently, and traded among major players within the water market. Large farms hold around four times as many water rights as municipalities and often sell water rights to California cities in times of need.
The equity of water markets as a method for the fair distribution of the resource has been called into question, especially as incidents of wildfires and droughts increase in frequency around the globe. When water is held as a commodity that can be bought and sold, it becomes most available to those who offer the highest bid, and this does not bode well for the average California resident or small farm facing a future with increased water scarcity.
Management of the Acequias of New Mexico
At The Farmers Land Trust, we view access to water and all other shared natural resources as a human right. We also believe that the use and access to these life-sustaining resources is a right held by all of nature. Clean, properly managed water maintained in abundance is a gift that trickles down to us all.
Water and other natural resources when held by the Commons model, termed Community Pool Resources (CPR) by Nobel Prize-winning political economist and professor Elinor Ostrom, are most equitably managed by communities in cooperation when they are maintained outside of the influences of the capitalist marketplace. The management of a local water source as a CPR, as opposed to as a traded commodity that must be bought and sold, pays tribute to the intrinsic value water has on Earth and prevents overuse by capital-driven entities at the expense of others and the environment for personal profit.
Fortunately, the Commons model for the management of community water exists and is an aspect of the essential work being done by the New Mexico Acequia Association. Founded in 1990, the project is a statewide, nonprofit with a mission to protect water, preserve the use of shared water canals known as acequias in Spanish, and celebrate the cultural heritage of community stewardship of their shared, living home.
Acequias are gravity-fed irrigation canals that have been managed by communities and farmers for hundreds of years in the state. They pre-date the arrival of Spanish colonizers and have been managed as CPRs, maintaining a different governance structure and usage template than the canals and ditches dug to feed the settlements of Spanish invaders. Their presence not only delivers water to farmland and orchards but also promotes tree canopy and green space following the path of the canals, leading to an increase in moisture production and retention in the arid landscape. It is a relationship that the community holds with each other and with the land, based on the community-ownership models held by traditional Mexican legal systems. It is an embodiment of intention and as much a physical relationship as a spiritual one.
The term acequia refers not only to the physical canal but also the societal structure that manages it. Mayordomo, or ditch bosses, organize the community around the needs of the acequia and regulate its flow during periods of drought. The receivers of the water to their farms and properties, parciantes, have access to the water at allotted times in allotted quantities. These are agreed-upon terms decided by the community.
The New Mexico Acequia Association recognizes 700 of these individual acequias, each considered political subdivisions subject to state laws. Within the organization is The Acequia Governance Project, a group focused on the governance of acequias, offering support through legal advice, technical assistance, and community education. Through the efforts of this project, an Acequia Governance Handbook was made that outlines the management of water rights within this shared system and includes information on how to keep acequias compliant with state laws, how to hold meetings regarding the canal’s management, capital improvement plans, and over 400 bylaws, among many other resources and helpful templates.
Community Investment Is the Climate Solution
When comparing the water markets of the world to the acequia governance model, it’s not too difficult to see a difference. Where capital reigns supreme, the goals of the market will inevitably lean toward profit generation, regardless of how well-meaning some of the involved parties may be. As for the acequias, snaking through New Mexico spreading green life like enlivening veins through the desert, community collaboration and engagement have facilitated the measured use of a treasured resource through centuries—efforts whose only externalities are benefits that help the planet and people. When the community comes together to care for and share a natural resource, a healing of the landscape is an inevitable reality.
In these times that feel so outside of our reach as individuals, it is important to acknowledge that our action is our prayer for hope. Our unlimited access to media and content can bewilder us into believing we have no gifts to give and no way of making a difference in a world already too far gone. The truth is the collective efforts we undertake where we live have positive impacts that will grow.
There is not one answer or one product that can save our planet from the raging irregularities of climate change. We are the answer and every action we take and every community investment we make is an opportunity for us to embody the solutions we seek. Through accountability, mutual aid, and allyship rooted in action, we can remodel our systems to be fueled by nature’s momentous, renewable engine. When we divest from big business, we change the course of history. When we invest in community development and local business, we build the future the Earth needs to thrive. This is in alignment with the natural processes of this planet, after all, the Earth itself is designed to generate conditions that are optimal for diversity and life.
Are there natural resources in your community that you’d like to see collectively supported? Reach out to us today and learn more about our Farmland Commons Model and how we work to help farmers and communities preserve regenerative, working farmland and its essential natural resources in perpetuity.
“The biggest gift you can give is to be absolutely present. And when you’re worrying about whether you’re hopeful or hopeless or pessimistic or optimistic, who cares? The main thing is that you’re showing up, that you’re here, and that you’re finding ever more capacity to love this world because it will not be healed without that. That is what is going to unleash our intelligence and our ingenuity and our solidarity for the healing of our world.” – Joanna Macy, A Wild Love for the World
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