An environmental education in 5 snapshots

I was so moved by Julia Butterfly Hill, who lived on this ancient redwood tree for over two years and saved it from destruction

1. All I remember from my first grade field trip to the zoo is the giant tortoise. An ancient being, bigger than me, her enclosure was a muddy pit with a pool of brown sludge, where people had thrown plastic straws and cups. Who could be so cruel as to litter the space where this creature lived? As she shuffled toward me, I saw that not only was her space filled with trash, someone had scratched and written on her shell. What kind of hooligan would do that, and why weren't the zoo staff taking better care of their animals? The centenarian creature met my gaze, “Help me,” she communicated as clearly as if she had been speaking plain Spanish. I lowered my head. What could I, a simple 6-year-old, do? That was my first bitter taste of ecological grief. Thirty years later, when I was in shamanic training, the spirit of the tortoise was one of the first to approach me and offer healing to my clients. I recognized her from our encounter long ago.

One of the only pictures I have of my grandma's farm. My father used to make me hold my dress in this dorky posture. My grandpa stands with my mother, my sister and I before the entrance. My grandma was probably working around the farm in her muddy shoes.

2. While my rich classmates from bilingual school vacationed in ski resorts in Vail and on yachts in Cancún, I spent my vacations on my grandmother’s farm. From the cobblestoned street you could see her concord grapevine spilling over the arbor and the fence. Along her property ran an acequia, an old irrigation canal. My sister and I dipped our legs in the cool water on hot days, but only after making sure no snakes lurked under the bridge. Lorenzo, the talking parrot said “Come on in,” in my grandma’s voice when we came through the gate. Behind the house was a navel orange grove, with an avocado and a lime tree outside the kitchen window. Beyond were the honey house, chicken coop, pig pen and milking barn. On the dining table there was always a crock of honey from which my sister and I would pull pieces of honeycomb to chew like gum. My grandma would wake up at first rooster’s crow to milk her cows. I remember the soft feel of the udder in my hands. Grandma made her own cheese. We helped her collect the eggs. On Sundays she would walk around the chicken coop, “Which one of you are we going to eat today? You!” She’d scoop up a chicken and wring its neck, hanging it up from the feet on the clothesline to drain the blood on the dusty ground. Whenever the butcher killed a pig, we could hear the dying squeal of the animal from blocks away. The whole village ate from one animal for days, and no part of it was wasted.

As a child I had some confusion about my family's simple lifestyle compared to my classmates' wealth. They were the children of Mexico City's elite, the CEOs and higher ups in government, ex-pats with foreign last names, blond hair and blue eyes. Bragging was their sport. At the time I didn't feel fortunate to be spending winters and summers on my grandmother's farm, although I did enjoy it. Once I got over having to look for spiders and scorpions every time I sat on the couch, and making sure no snakes lurked under the acequia bridge before we splashed in it, I would relax into the slow life of the village. My grandma would take us swimming in the river where my boy cousins caught trout (because I was a girl, my uncles refused to take me fishing, though I begged them). At the market we would drink water from a fresh coconut and then the vendor would break it open with his machete and arrange the pulp on a plate, bathed in lime juice and chili powder. My grandma cooked star-shaped cactus and yucca flowers, she made the most delicious gorditas and tamales, and she even ate rattlesnake meat!

Today my home state in Mexico has been overtaken by drug lords. My grandma's farm is lost to us, but it lives on in my imagination as a place where I tasted a pure, simple kind of happiness.

Mexico City Birdpocalypse 1988

3. One winter morning in 1988 half the birds in Chapultepec Park dropped dead. Cold morning air condensed the smog trapped in the bowl-like valley of Mexico, making it dangerous to breathe. We all walked around with red eyes and chronic coughs. The government declared a state of emergency, shutting down schools for a month and encouraging parents to take their children out of the city, or keep them indoors until after 10 am. Authorities brainstormed crazy solutions, like placing giant fans on the mountain ridges and blowing the smoke out of the valley. Where would they send it? Thus began major policy changes in the city that moved industry to other towns, tightened standards for car emissions, and enacted the one-day-without-a-car program, forcing people to use more public transportation. The changes were positive, but insufficient. If car drivers could use public transportation one day, why not every day? If there were ways to reduce emissions, why not apply them in the city and elsewhere? Having lived through the Birdpocalypse, and developed asthma as a result, I never forgot the sense that we needed to radically transform our lifestyle.

4. In spring of 1999 I fell in love with Scottie, a gentle Texan red-headed giant, and in fall I married him. Two days later, we moved across the country to live on an eco-village in Oregon.

We were both fresh out of college, he with a Spanish degree and I with an English one. Not the most practical life plan. Scottie had put himself through school by working as a night watchman at the police station (Couldn´t the police protect themselves?). As he did his rounds in the darkness, he listened to Coast to Coast with Art Bell on the AM radio, whose favorite topics were aliens, impending ecological disaster, conspiracy theories, aliens, and Y2K. Remember? The threat of a planetary crisis unleashed by computers crashing when their calendars hit the year 2000, bringing down the grid and creating chaos? Yeah, it never happened. Through his nightly radio show, Scottie learned about permaculture—a sustainable design to produce food by collaborating with instead of controlling nature--the perfect solution for impending ecological disaster and Y2K.

I owe it to this illustrious radio host that my life turned out this way, because Scottie wanted to be living on a permaculture farm before the big Y2K disaster hit. We found a course in an eco-village and conference center founded in the 1960s in Oregon. That is where we headed right after our wedding, with our meager worldly possessions crammed into his old Ford Bronco II, in September 1999.

Lost Valley Educational Center was an 87-acre forest and permaculture farm run by a community of 30 adults and 15 children who lived in cabins and yurts. Food was grown in greenhouses, vast vegetable gardens and a forest garden of fruit and nut trees. The farm raised chickens for eggs and manure, and ducks to feed on slugs. It spanned a huge camping meadow with outdoor kitchen, a creek with a swimming hole and sweat lodge, and a wood-fired hot tub. Although the setting was much colder, the trees much taller, and the land much wetter than my state in the Northeast of Mexico, life in the community reminded me intensely of my grandmother's farm.

Scottie and I moved into a tiny cabin surrounded by douglas fir and cedar. Scottie joined the gardening and maintenance teams, and I worked with the kitchen and dorm cleaning crew. Life was not free from difficulty at Lost Valley, but looking back twenty years later, I feel nothing but gratitude for the education I got there.

I learned about how quickly the forests were being decimated by clear cutting. Sometimes we gave shelter and food to activists who lived in some of the oldest trees to prevent them from being cut. Some of our community members attended the protest that shut down the Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization in November 1999 and they came back, beaten and tear-gassed. I helped nurse them back to health and heard their stories. Until then, I'd thought that government repression only happened in countries like mine.

There was a wealth of knowledge among the people who lived in and frequented Lost Valley: we took plant identification hikes, made herbal tinctures, built cob buildings, assembled solar and rocket stoves, created rain water catchment systems. Community members attended conferences on sustainability and came back to share their lessons. It was at the Environmental Law Conference that I was moved to tears when I heard a presentation by Julia Butterfly Hill, the woman who had just come down from living on a giant 1500-year-old redwood tree for over two years, saving it from destruction.

Y2K came and went without a whisper, but Scottie and I were all the richer for it. I ran kitchen shifts where we cooked delicious vegetarian meals for up to 150 guests, he learned permaculture and carpentry. With our days full of manual work, our minds were free to read voraciously, stimulated by conversation with some of the smartest people we’d ever met. The agenda was saving our planet, and we had all the solutions… it was only a matter of putting them into practice.

5. A year later, the forest behind Lost Valley was mercilessly logged to the last stump. How could it be, that a community of environmentalists were unable to prevent the clear cutting of their neighbors' forest? I felt every fallen tree like a death sentence for the planet. I left the farm where Scottie remained for the following decade. Our relationship did not survive long after that, but we remained friends. I moved to nearby Eugene and got my first job in social work, at a homeless youth shelter. It was clear to me that the only thing in the way of enacting environmental solutions was people. I always return to the idea that if some divine power were to hand us a pristine Earth 2.0, in our current state of awarness we'd destroy it within decades too. Once I understood that what we need is to transform ourselves, I decided that I would dedicate my life to working with people.

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How did you get your environmental education? How did your moments of realization come about? When did you discover that we humans have tampered with nature to such a degree that our own lives are endangered? How do you want to contribute to the solutions?