The 2008 Quivira Coalition 7th annual conference just took place here in Albuquerque at the Marriot Pyramid over the weekend of January 18th.  The theme for this year’s conference was Building Resilience: Creating Hope in an Age of Consequences.

Echoing this theme, the group's Executive Director recently wrote, in an opinion piece for the Albuquerque Tribune, that we must build economic resilience in our economy through relocalization.  Courtney White contents that "the inevitability of rising energy costs, for instance, means more and more of our daily lives, from food production to where we work and play, will be lived closer to home. This won't be by choice, as it is currently, but by necessity."

White contends that at a minimum, relocalization includes:

The development of local food and energy sources. Working landscapes will become critical again. So will the innovations currently taking place at the nexus of agriculture and ecology - a nexus that requires working lands. Could New Mexico feed itself? If not, why not, and what can we do to stimulate local food and energy production?

The increasing importance of farmers and ranchers. Not only does local food and energy require local land, it also requires local people with local knowledge to do the work. This means figuring out how to keep the current generation of farmers and ranchers on the land, as well as encourage the next generation to stay, come back or give agriculture a try.

Restoration becoming an important business. Producing local food and energy from working landscapes, especially in quantity, will require healthy land as well as best management practices that work within nature's model. However, much of our land is in poor-to-fair condition for a variety of reasons. The good news is that restoration can afford local communities a bounty of jobs at good wages. Read the full commentary online here.

About the Conference 

Each year the event attracts over 500 attendees from all over the southwest region, including ranchers, scientists, educators, students, activists, policy makers and other individuals interested in the future of land use and its implications. This year was no different. The presentations, which took place over three days, were informative, inspiring and appealing to a broad range of land and natural resource use interests.

Renown authors, scientists, educators and other land use practitioners spoke on topics around progressive ranch management, ranching during times of drought, water harvesting for drylands, agri-tourism, globalization, historical adaptation to climate change, resilient energy future, local energy, local food, commonwealths and more.

For those of you who may have missed the conference, presentations will be available on the Quivira Coalition websiteby February 1st. Audio CDs are already available through the organization. As for next year’s conference, it was reported by a member of the Coalition that the theme will be around Aldo Leopold and land ethics.