On Navajo Lands, Ancient Ways Are Restoring the Parched Earth
On Navajo Lands, Ancient Ways Are Restoring the Parched Earth
Excerpt from this story from Yale Environment 360:
Here in Burnt Corn Valley, smack in the middle of the Navajo reservation’s vast Black Mesa region, the hilly land both craves water and is brutalized by it. The sandy Arizona soil cracks under a punishing August sun as red-striped blister beetles search for moisture across its baked surface. Cottonwood trees and sagebrush rise from deep gullies carved by floodwaters that, during the intensifying summer monsoon, sluice off surrounding mesas and wash away fragile topsoil — reminders that with climate change, even quenching rains harbor powers of destruction.
This portrait of climatic havoc belies a softer reality, though. Farming once thrived in this parched region and could once again — if the right practices are adopted. Exhibit A: The crops on Roberto Nutlouis’s 12-acre Sliding Rock Farm, in his reservation hometown of Piñon, a five-hour drive north of Phoenix. “The corn is actually pretty big and thriving,” Nutlouis says. He believes — and both Western science and the lived experience of his Native elders affirm — that the traditional rock and stick structures he’s built on his property, which help store water and prevent erosion, have a lot to do with it. These structures, similar to those used by Native peoples long before Europeans arrived on the continent, are not only delivering water to crops (the broader, 27,000-square-mile reservation has the highest reported rate of food insecurity in the U.S.). They are also restoring Nutlouis’s watershed and those of his neighbors, helping to sequester carbon, and reviving this high-desert ecosystem. It’s all part of a bigger effort among a range of local and regional grassroots organizations to build back the reservation’s fragile, depleted ecosystems and bring greater sovereignty over food, water, and health to its communities.
Diné (the Navajo name for themselves) are well aware that climate change is making the weather on their semi-arid plateau weirder, wilder, and more destructive. Depending on elevation, precipitation in Black Mesa averages 6 to 16 inches a year; recent heat extremes — the Navajo government declared a state of emergency in 2023 due to soaring temperatures —mean that the scant water evaporates more quickly. Climate models predict the region will experience increasing droughts that decimate plant life, part of a growing trend of human-caused desertification across the globe, as well as higher-intensity seasonal rainfall, which can sweep away crops and roads. The ecological health of the reservation has also been weakened by deforestation from timbering operations and from overgrazing over the years.
Still, this season, Nutlouis, 44, has been able to skip his usual two-hour roundtrip drive to a reliable well to haul water home for his corn. His crop is healthy and hydrated because his land still holds last winter’s snowmelt. Clearly, his heavy labor over the past 20 years — during which he has built woven brush dams, gabions (wirework cages filled with rocks), earthen berms, concrete spillways and trenches, limestone aprons and walls, and stone-lined “Zuni bowls,” which stabilize eroding streambeds — is paying off.