ALL THE INFORMATION IS HERE: www.agrariantrust.org/2016symposium

This will be the second Agrarian Trust OUR LAND symposium, and once again we’ve got speakers from around the country and around the region focusing our attention, analysis, activism and collective agency on issues relevant to your regional foodshed.

This event is presented by Agrarian Trust and has a focus on Land access, land transition and the issues underlying ownership and management of the territory required for an autonomous and sovereign food system.

The central themes of this symposium center on land-use and governance regimes of the southwest region.  We will learn about the acequias, a system of irrigation ditch commons brought by the Spanish. The history, management regimes and future prospects of this system represent a powerful curriculum for other commons-based systems. Can these ditch commons be explained to include their uplands and headwaters, or will ditch rights be lost to privatization and sold to developers?

We will also learn a lot about Public Trust law-- a commonwealth legal framework that protects our ecological life-systems with roots in Ancient Roman Law . Mary Wood’s “Nature's Trust” builds on this framework, and lays out the existing jurisprudence that can be employed to protect our commons, a marked contrast from the “ legalized damage” we currently practice .  We will learn about valiant efforts and growing momentum to preserve the wild and scenic Gila River, one of the last free running rivers in the southwest. If you recall the “ OUR LAND: DRY LAND film we produced about the Arizona CAP Canal-- you will understand why yet more large-scale reclamation projects are unacceptable.  And a powerful campaign by the Rainforest Action Network to shift practices and stewardship on public lands, stopping the bargain leases for oil and gas on our national commons on the 400 Million acres of Federal lands.

Eric Holt-Gimenez, a speaker at the first OUR LAND Symposium in Berkeley will lay out “ the land issue” in a social context, in an evening he shares with Rick Prelinger and Kim Stringfellow-- both longtime landscape interpreters. Rick will present a new work called    “Farms Lost and Found” an edited presentation of farmer and rancher-shot homevideoes. Kim Stringfellow, cultural geographer, will present her Guggenheim Award funded work on the Mojave Project, reflecting on how desert landscapes serve as sentinels for the consequences of our stewardships choices. I first learned about Kim’s work through her pod-cast “ toxic tour” of the route 5 corridor called “ Invisible 5”.

With a series of speakers, a  pop up bookshop + multi-media exhibit, an inter-generational acequia walk-- expedition to explore the flowing acequias with young and older farmers, movie night, and sessions at 2 conferences there are plenty of chances to come along!