I met Hue Todd , a Redding based Ag Engineer for the Soil Conservation Service in 1977(now NRCS). I was new to the job. He was a mentor.
Hue was different in more ways than one. Farmers and ranchers would come to Hue with their plans and Hue would start breaking it down. Skeptical they would shake their heads ready to argue, but Hue just kept talking, and their shakes turned into nods. It was phenomenal to watch.
Distilled, Hue taught an ancient lesson: “The farther from Nature you get, the more problems you will have.”
Looking back and around me now I feel a constant sense of vertigo. When I was a child of the Kansas prairie I wished to grow up to be Native. I have now lived within the Little Chico Creek watershed for the last 43 years. Both the place I grew up in and the place I settled have become evermore foreign as the climate tips this way and then that.
We are abandoned pups. Unless we take back the CO2 our ingenuity and creativity put into the sky, there shall soon be nothing recognizably ours; no Native peoples, No native plants or animals, no planet to call Mother.
If our culture is going to carry on, or even if humans are going to exist at all, we must lean, and reflect on, a yardstick that carries us quickly toward a closer relationship to the stable Mother Nature we have estranged ourselves from.
Richard Roth
Mastodon
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