Watersheds As Commons, a new 14-part radio series produced by Jack Loeffler and Celestia Loeffler will premiere on KUNM-FM Public Radio at 89.9 beginning in April, 2011.  It will be broadcast at 8:30 AM on Wednesdays for fourteen consecutive weeks. Watersheds As Commons is set in the American Southwest, the most arid region on the North American continent.  The dozens of interviewees include New Mexico Puebloan, Hopi, Navajo, Chiricahua Apache, and Tohono O’odham Native American people; Hispano scholars, Anglo ranchers, writers, historians, environmental activists, scientists, lawyers, politicians, agency bureaucrats, poets, musicians and salt-of-the-Earth people, all of whom are deeply concerned about the threatened watersheds and bioregions of the American Southwest and beyond.

HIstorian Jack Loeffler

This series was produced with the intent to expand the dominant cultural purview by including the points of view of many who still live close to the land, who understand natural processes, who see far beyond aneconomically dominated paradigm, who perceive the conflict between corporate-funded legislation and natural law, who understand ecology and aesthetics, who regard homeland as sacred, who recognize that our species, the human species, is but one of many species who live in a common landscape, who sip from common waters.  People speak from within watersheds of the Canadian, Pecos, San Juan, Animas, Mancos, Río Grande, Gila and Colorado Rivers.

A goal of this series is to re-introduce the listener to a major concept forwarded by John Wesley Powell in the 19th century: to organize the arid West by watersheds that are largely governed from within.  Another goal is to convey the importance of becoming sensitive to the needs of homeland.  And yet another goal is to understand that human over-population in watersheds with diminishing waters is ultimately disastrous. Finally, we must understand as a culture that economics is but a piece of a much larger pie, and that we must expand our consciousness to include the needs of the planet that sustains us, then make that understanding central to our way of life.

Watersheds As Commons was funded by grants from the Christensen Fund in San Francisco, and the New Mexico Humanities Council in Albuquerque, and is a production of the Lore of the Land, Inc., produced in the Loeffler Aural History Archive in association with KUNM Community Public Radio in Albuquerque, New Mexico.   Please visit our website at www.loreoftheland.org