[RC] [ RC ] Quivira Takes Us Back to the Future radical middle / radical center

[BILROJ via Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community]

Telluride Daily Planet  /  Norwood Post
 
 
UP BEAR CREEK |  Quivira Takes Us Back to the Future 

 
 
Posted: Wednesday,  November 19, 2014
 
By Gus Jarvis TellurideNews.com  
 
 
 
RADICAL CENTER … I like to call it the “radical middle” -  the kind of 
Green politics I practice – not too the far left of an issue, but  right in the 
middle of the muddle, where compromise leads to action. Quivira,  the Santa 
Fe-based coalition dedicated to narrowing the widening gap between  
agriculture and environmentalism, prefers the “radical center.” Wherever you  
situate it, Quivira is an attempt to bring right and left, rancher and enviro,  
family farms and the organic movement into the same room and the same  
discussions. Already, its founder, Courtney White, has come to Telluride and  
Norwood to speak of his concept of the carbon ranch and how to capitalize on 
the  fact that carbon is being sequestered in the soil of family farms and 
ranches,  and could be increased with innovative ranching practices … That 
insight, in  turn, has spawned a project I’ve been working on for the last 
several years,  after hearing Sally Collins (then with the USDA) speak about 
Payment for  Ecosysterm Services and how this new environmental tool (PES) was 
being utilized  around the world. While serving a year as a Fellow with the 
Center for  Collaborative Conservation at CSU’s Fort Collins campus, I worked 
with Linda  Luther of the San Miguel County Open Space & Recreation 
Department to  develop and model a pilot PES program involving rare native 
plants. 
Now we’d  like to move on to even bigger PES projects - with weeds, with 
streamside  restoration to increase Gunnison Sage Grouse habitat, and with White
’s carbon  ranch idea … My dream follows along the latter path. What if we 
could figure out  a way to lessen the carbon footprint impacts of the East 
End of San Miguel  County and its industrial tourism economy by offsetting 
that production with the  West End’s documented reduction in carbon 
associated with livestock production  and organic farming. I’m hoping the 
County 
could jumpstart this process with a  PES project. And the mechanism might be a 
voluntary offset program. Or carbon  tax credits (since a local carbon tax 
was discussed at a recent  Intergovernmental Group meeting) … Imagine if there 
was some way to achieve our  carbon reduction goals in San Miguel County by 
moving money from the wealthy  East End to the wealth-challenged West End 
for verified and monitored carbon  sequestering … That’s why I needed to 
attend Quivira’s Albuquerque conference  this year, “Back to the Future: 
Celebrating the International Year of Family  Farming and Ranching.” I wanted 
to 
find out how to measure carbon sequestered in  ag soil, and get some 
feedback on pulling off a PES project like  this.


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