Time to Save the Planet!

Winter hasn’t hit hard yet in much of the country. Talk to gardeners in your area and see whether you still have time to plant trees and enable their positive effects on the climate. A version of this article first appeared in 2018, but its topic is even more urgent now. For more on related subjects, see my book, American Apartheid: The Native American Struggle....

Don’t despair about the immense challenges the planet faces. So says Clayton Apikan Brascoupé, a Mohawk farmer, shown left, who has lived and worked for many years at Tesuque Pueblo, in New Mexico.

What to do? “Start by planting trees,” he says. “They are a positive answer to climate change and much more. Trees build up soils organically and increase their water-holding capacity. They sequester excess climate-altering carbon dioxide. They attract beneficial insects that help other crops and produce food, medicine, building material and other useful items. Planting them can transform a community.” 

Brascoupé directs the Traditional Native American Farmers Association (TNAFA), headquartered in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Tiny TNAFA, with its director and a few volunteers, specializes in projects that are accomplished easily with inexpensive locally sourced items, yet have gargantuan effects. “Our philosophy is keeping small and collaborating with people who are committed to doing this work,” says Brascoupé. “They can then run with the ideas.”

In May, TNAFA held a two-day tree-planting and -care workshop. The course attracted some 25 students from an Apache community, the Navajo Nation and other Pueblos, including Acoma, Zuni, Taos, Hopi and Ohkay Owingeh (formerly called San Juan Pueblo). Participants, shown below, put in trees and mulched them with donated plant debris from a large commercial greenhouse operation and with easily obtained discarded cardboard and newspaper (“it’s everywhere!” says Brascoupé). Water was diverted from sources, like runoff from buildings, that might have been ignored or lost otherwise.

Partners included the Taos County Economic Development Corporation (TCEDC), where the trees were installed, New Moon Lodge, a Pueblo-based substance-abuse rehabilitation service that provided some of the students, and naturalist Joel Glanzberg, who was one of the presenters. Hopi Tutskwa Permaculture, a community-based organization at Hopi Pueblo with an orchard, farmers’ market, youth summer program, home-building project and much more provided instructor Jacobo Marcus.

“The students were excited by the information we covered and planned to stay involved. One will work in his family’s orchard and asked if he could also come by and help out at Tesuque,” says Brascoupé. Another tree-centric TNAFA course included more information on propagation and grafting and explored tapping the sweet maple-like sap of box-elder, a tree that is native to the area.

TNAFA offers an annual residential Indigenous Sustainable Food Systems Design Course. (This year’s course took place in late July.) Lessons are based on traditional concepts that mimic natural processes and, in doing so, improve the many systems that are under siege nowadays, from air and water quality to personal and community diet and health. TNAFA attracts young people to its courses, along with interested adults, ensuring that subtly effective indigenous environmental thinking continues into the future.

From the international perspective, Brascoupé is one of many who are using environmental actions to increase empowerment and improve access to justice. The late Wathari Mangai won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 with a women’s tree-planting program in Kenya that empowered participants and resulted in constructive political change. “We too can create change in our own communities, our states and the nation,” says Brascoupé.

Cities as well as rural areas are behind the fight against climate change. These include New York City, Houston, Miami, and San Francisco, among many. New York City’s battle against climate degradation is longstanding, with well-established programs such as free rain barrels for residents, a Million Trees planting program, and a local volunteer corps of some 15,000 Citizen Pruners and 8,000 additional youth trained to care for street trees. (Citizen Pruner Peter Zummo is shown left, working on a city street tree.) New York City has also set aside money to retrofit one million buildings and its official vehicle fleet for less energy use. Public transportation is an efficient and popular option throughout the city.

Indigenous people living in urban areas have also found their way to Brascoupé’s courses. “They can do plenty in urban settings—certainly by planting trees,” he says. “Trees offer privacy, shade and peace of mind. They clean the air and cool buildings. They encourage people to harvest water and put in gardens.”

It works when all the actions are easy and the components available, he says. “Identify resources that are cheap or free and already in your community. Find people who are interested, and get started!”

Text c. Stephanie Woodard; two photographs courtesy Clayton Brascoupé, one by SW.



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