The
Jornada RC&D Council, Inc. teamed up with the USDA. Bureau of
Reclamation
(BOR), and a private landowner to address a
critically
eroding area of abandoned cropland in Sierra County.
Lucy Lippard, in The
Lure of the Local, begins her second chapter "Being in Place"
with a quote from Marlene Creates. "The land is important to me. But even
more important is the idea that it becomes a 'place' because someone has
been there."… Lippard weaves history, reflection, philosophy, personal
narrative and examples into her work on place to create a book that is highly
informative, deeply enjoyable and useful book. This last quality is important.
The book is useful because it shows how places come into being prosper, fade,
revive or disappear. It is useful because it teaches its audience something
about place and how place is talked about by academics without being academic.
It is useful because it shows how important people are in shaping the
landscape where we live….
Philosopher Bertrand
Russel argues that "if all men were
well off, if poverty and disease had been reduced to their lowest possible
point, there would still remain much to be done to produce a valuable
society." Though we may never get to this point of well-to-do, it is a
good sentiment. There are a lot of people who work tirelessly to do useful
things, in order to make good places. People may differ in what makes a good
place, but most can agree that the sum of places, the identity, feel, look
and sense of a place comes from what people do, say and believe. This is
place making. This is the hard work of being useful that is easily
overlooked, often unrewarded and generally unrecognized. This is the sort of work
that Resource Conservation and Development Councils do. If there always
"remains much to be done to produce a valuable
society," RC & D Councils are out doing it…
Resource Conservation
and Development Councils have not, historically, been showy
organizations. Made up of ranchers and private landowners, volunteers of
all sorts, and agency partners, RC & D Councils did their hard work without
the fanfare that accompanies similar work in communities where stakeholders
are, for example, elected officials. This is evident in the length of the
project description.
Jornada RC&D Council, Inc.
2101 S. Broadway
Truth Or Consequences, NM 87901
Palomas Creek
Abandoned Cropland Protection Project
The Jornada RC&D Council, Inc. teamed up
with the USDI Bureau of Reclamation (BOR), and a private landowner to address a
critically eroding area of abandoned cropland in Sierra County. The council
received a generous donation from a nearby landowner and native grass seed from
the BOR to set this project in motion. The local Soil and Water Conservation
District (Sierra SWCD) provided manpower and native plant transplants for an
herbaceous wind barrier. Total project cost was $4000.00 of which $3500 was
in-kind from BOR and Sierra SWCD to treat 22 acres.
Area
after seeding 22 acres and installing a 1320’ herbaceous wind barrier
Results of seeding and
herbaceous wind barrier after 1 growing season: Wind erosion reduced from an
estimated 15 tons annually to less than 5.
HISTORY OF RESOURCE CONSERVATION &
DEVELOPMENT COUNCILS
The following history
was borrowed from the Western RC & D website, which also featured the
"success story" featured above. All of the stories are worth reading
at http://www.westernrcd.org/about.htm. RC
& D Councils across the nation are struggling to maintain their
community presence. There is more on that below…
Resource Conservation
and Development is a program of the United States Department of Agriculture.
It was created by a provision of the Food and Agriculture Act of 1962.
The Secretary of Agriculture gave Natural Resources Conservation Service
(NRCS - formerly Soil Conservation Service) responsibility for administering
the program. RC&D is based on the assumption that local citizens,
with help provided through the USDA, can develop and carry out an action
oriented plan for the social, economic and environmental enrichment of their
communities…
The purpose of
RC&D is to promote conservation, development and utilization of natural
resources; to improve the general level of economic activity; and to enhance
the environmental and standard of living in all communities. The aim is
to provide a system of rural development, encourage the wise use of natural resources,
and improve the quality of life in America…
Not many people have
heard of Resource Conservation and Development Councils. Neither had I before I
sat in on a meeting last Thursday of the Jornada RC & D Council at the
Sierra County County Soil and Water Conservation District building in Truth or
Consequences. (Sierra SWCD). Academics get a lot of grief for jargon, which
they should, but to get really lost, try sitting in on a meeting full of people
who have worked for a couple of decades doing things in rural America,
especially through the multitude of agencies, organizations, bureaus and the
like. The acronyms are so thick you want subtitles. It is a foreign world for a
minute, until you realize every local place you have ever been is connected to
these initials. From the BOR, or Bureau of Reclamation's Elephant Butte Dam and
the Hatch chile that get irrigated from their water to the NPS, or National
Park Service, where our watersheds are protected, from the BLM, or Bureau of
Land Management, who manages the vast federal lands in the West, public lands
that fund out schools, the sheer number of organizations is staggering.
Local people know what
is best for their communities. That is the core premise of the Resource
Conservation and Development (RC&D) Program and the key to its success. The
RC&D Program provides a development process that is unique in that it is
driven by a passion to mobilize local, state and national resources to address
economic, social, and environmental and quality of life issues on the ground
where those issues occur. Often that ground is rural America and the partnerships
formed are rooted in the communities being served.
The hallmark of the
program is its diversity and scope. There is no one RC&D model. There are
375 local RC&D Councils across the United States and several of its
territories. Each council is made up of local leaders of all types who know
their communities well. These volunteers are driven by a passion to serve their
home places. They identify the challenges their communities are facing, forge
partnerships to take on those challenges…
The focus on local
direction and control has made the RC&D Program one of the Federal
government’s most successful rural development programs, with RC&D Councils
able to leverage approximately $7 for every Federal dollar invested in the
program. Today, More than 32,000 volunteers are serving on and with RC&D
councils. The 375 RC&D Councils are located in all 50 states, the
Caribbean, and the Pacific Basin and serve a combined 85% of all US counties
and 77% of the total US population.
Comments from the Gallery:
RC & D are
currently struggling to re-envision their organizations. They are organized as
501c3 not-for-profit organizations but until recently had federally-funded coordinators. While these coordinators were
never meant to stay on indefinitely, the loss of the one paid employee has
left most councils in a bind. While some are thriving, many have been
lost or are in danger of being lost in our rural communities. The people who
get together to work tirelessly to make our places safe, economically viable,
sustainable, beautiful, productive, bountiful, and enjoyable, can only do
so much in their spare time as volunteers. The Jornada RC & D is where I
have begun the cataloging of the many organizations that work in our
local communities, and there are a lot. A little because it is
struggling to re-tool itself, but also because it is so obscure. This is
obviously one of the challenges that it faces. But mostly because it builds on
the argument I began in the last post (Where Everybody Knows Your Name). This is
the idea that volunteers are being asked to do more and more. And one of the
ways they are supposed to do it is with grant money, if you can find
a volunteer to find and write a grant.
This is a trend that seems to be
everywhere. It is the shifting of money from hard money, line item budget
money, to soft money, cyclically awarded grant money, in public works.
More to come on this idea of a "trend" (if it is one, and a lot of
community people I know attest to this fact) as research
develops. To what extent it is happening, and where it
is happening is important for a lot of reasons. It potentially shifts
the money of community funding for services to a whole new model….. You have to
ask people to do for free what used to be funded. Additionally, in order to get
the soft money, the grant money, to provide the services that used to be
funded, you need to get people together. Although it is a model, like
volunteering, where a few people do a LOT of work, soft money still usually
demands a higher level of community and civic collaboration than hard money and
paid positions. This may be a good thing in some, but only if you have a town
that has a committed and collaborative spirit. Thus far, a month into
my research on Truth or Consequences, there are a lot of promising signs…
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