REVIEW: Essays put Southwest, water into perspective

With the anthology “Thinking Like a Watershed,” Santa Fe’s Jack Loeffler can add editor and essayist to a list of paths through which he’s made important contributions to understanding the people of the American Southwest. Those paths include ethnomusicologist, oral historian, radio producer, writer and musician.

Loeffler’s lengthy introduction to the anthology is itself an essay that provides a well-thought-out, wide-ranging historical overview of the watersheds, water usage and water compacts in the arid land called the American Southwest. He links those issues to the forces of cultures, population growth and economics.

Loeffler cites Maj. John Wesley Powell, a geologist who explored the Colorado River, as an inspiration for the book. Loeffler refers to Powell’s unheeded recommendation to a congressional committee in 1890 that watersheds be governed by communities from within those watersheds.

	“Thinking Like a Watershed -Voices from the West” edited by Jack Loeffler and Celestia Loeffler UNM Press, $24.95, 266 pp.

Near the end of the introduction, Loeffler reminds readers that “Nature has a mind of its own” and that local communities understand that unpredictability better than bureaucrats.

The central section of the book has several extended interviews. They include Loeffler’s with the late Stewart Udall, a former secretary of the Interior, and with rancher Sid Goodloe, who helped introduce Allan Savory’s holistic ranch management techniques to southern New Mexico.

Essayists in this section present multicultural perspectives.

For example, author Rina Swentzell of Santa Clara Pueblo writes in her essay that Pueblo people she interviewed speak of “a cycle of movement in which water, people and life are included”; Hopi archaeologist Lyle Balenquah discusses dryland farming; Juan Estevan Arellano suggests looking to 16th-century Spanish New World ordinances on locating communities and thinking of those rules as the first green laws; and Sonia Dickey, whose essay title encapsulates its content – “Don’t Let That Deal Go Down – Navajo Water Rights and the Black Mesa Struggle.”

This anthology brings to mind the possibility of a future that is summed up in the opening line of the 1930s cowboy lament “Cool Water.” The song begins, “All day I’ve faced a barren waste without the taste of water …”

– Jack Loeffler and Celestia Loeffler discuss “Thinking Like a Watershed” at 6 p.m. Friday, Oct. 19, at Collected Works, 202 Galisteo, Santa Fe, and at 3 p.m. Oct. 21 at Bookworks, 4022 Rio Grande NW.