Driving into the future

The snow has melted out at the ol’ Wilson ranch so the little Honda decided it was safe to take a break—and broke. So I had a lot of time this week to read. Primarily I’ve been working through Charles Wilkinson’s Fire on the Plateau. Combine that with information gathered through Vernon Masayesva’s Black Mesa Trust and a couple of activist magazines, and a reader is forced to look at a very bleak forecast.

Within 20 years, not only water but petroleum products may be unavailable to much of the country. A California network is urging people to tear up their driveways and plant gardens. In the urban sprawl, most good garden land is indeed under concrete. Roads are continually being built when we don’t even have the budget to maintain the ones already in existence. Scary stuff.

In a nutshell, vehicle travel as we know it will cease. How will city dwellers get food? Frankly, most wouldn’t know how to grow a tomato. During a presentation by Gary Paul Nabhan during the Arizona Ethnobotanical Research Association, I learned that most food I consume travels 2,000 miles from where it is grown to my kitchen.

How will we get to work? And will there be work? Nabhan and others urge us all to tighten our belts now, learn to find and grow food locally or to at least purchase it from local sources. People should be fighting new roads, giving up the second vehicle. Children should be walking to school, riding a bike, or taking a bus instead of driving to school.

And all of this is true. Will most of us do it? Not on your life. Even those like me who live way out of town, use no electricity, recycle and uses less than 50 gallons of water a month must drive longer distances into town. Vehicular travel is a major pollutant.

Okay. All of this is enough to keep me awake at night. But what keeps me awake longer is the fact that people on reservations have lived their entire lives without benefit of all of the environmental rape that has created this nightmare future. My mother-in-law and many of my relatives have never owned their own car. Roads are impassable in hard rains or deep snow. When they are dry, vehicles are eaten alive by ruts and washboards. Mom got running water only two years ago, and she is fortunate to live near a hard road. That is Wide Ruins.

People on the Bennett Freeze are still waiting for something that the majority of the population may use up before they ever get their chance. I’ve traveled the miles and miles of muddy dirt roads. There are so many communities across the reservation that look forward to new roads. By the time they get them, will there be gasoline available to anyone but the very rich?

Historically, the dominant culture has raped and robbed Indian nations of natural resources that they have been unable to benefit from. Now it appears the dominant culture will run like a pack of rabid lemmings off the edge of the proverbial cliff, blindly grasping their gasoline charge cards as they go.

There are plenty of teachers out there; people like Nabhan, Wilkinson, every Navajo and Hopi gardener to name a few. They have the knowledge to ease the crash. Now we only need to learn to do more than just listen. Am I trying to get my car fixed? Sadly, yes.

—By S.J. Wilson

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