He helped residents build solar greenhouses, heating their homes with less propane or firewood and allowing them to qualify for conservation tax credits. The people I lived with knew about the damage done by grazing cattle near streams. They knew what birds nested in the dead trees people chopped down for firewood. It's their leaders that are in denial. On a blustery summer day, Hitt trudges along one of the places he worries about.
Stream banks are bald.
Dust devils swirl around clumps of cholla and prickly pear, about the only vegetation left in what was once a green bosque thick with willows, cottonwoods and migrating songbirds. Hitt, who is running as a Green Party candidate for state lands commissioner, comes here to make a point about desertification, a process more commonly associated with Africa and Asia. Experts believe that, over the past century, the pace of land degradation has been more rapid in the fragile greenbelts of the American Southwest than in most Third World areas. This little valley, along Ojo Caliente Creek, was once part of the historic commons open to untold numbers of livestock for hundreds of years. In the last four years, it has been fenced off by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.