su libro

Green is the color of spring, whether it’s green remodeling, green ranching, green thumbs, or green paint.
By Charles C. Poling

This article first appeared in Spring 05 Su Casa

Green Remodeling, Changing the World One Room at a Time, a Mother Earth News Book for Wiser Living, by David Johnston and Kim Masters, LEED AP, New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, B.C., Canada, 400 pages, paperback, $29.95.

Perhaps most of us have tipped past the point of comfortable denial, coming to rest on the side of awareness that our individual actions do affect the environment around us, locally and globally. While trading the CO2-spewing SUV for a cleaner-burning, fuel-efficient car may be a step toward a well-scrubbed conscience, the remodeling and renovation projects we tackle around the house offer continual opportunities to select products and run our homes in ways that create a healthier indoor environment, reduce our impact on the globe, and even stimulate the marketplace toward sustainable goods. Now do you feel better about that kitchen renovation?

Sometimes, though, we get stuck trying to figure out which choices cause harm, which are neutral, and which contribute to improvement. Green Remodeling gives enough specific information to get you unstuck, while it develops the case for and scope of green.

The book begins with a diary-style narrative of co-author David Johnston’s personal remodeling project in Boulder, Colo. Though you could skip this chapter and still get high value from the book, it serves as a case study illustrating how to weigh choices against challenges on a specific job. From there, Green Remodeling advances through chapters on affording and financing your green dream, working with contractors and architects (and your emotions), an overview of building science, the many micro and macro relationships between your remodeling and the world at large.

Then Johnston takes the reader through each room and each system—heat and air conditioning, plumbing, appliances, materials, you name it—with specific recommendations for action. Some of them you could do today for $5. Others require a building permit, architectural plans, code review, and a general contractor. That’s a useful range, making Green Remodeling comprehensive if a bit too thin on detail to qualify as encyclopedic. As an inspirational guide and a compendium of advice in support of decision making, it’s a great reference when planning a project, shopping for materials, or even managing the job site. I know I’ll keep it handy.

New Mexico Artists at Work, text by Dana Newmann, photography by Jack Parsons, Museum of New Mexico Press, Santa Fe, 176 pages, 71 color photographs and 31 duotones, hardcover, $39.95.

Through fluent, keenly observant writing and unfailingly incisive photography, this marvelous book encounters 52 artists in their New Mexico studios—in their natural state, as it were—as a kind of ecological study of the species artistus new mexicanus. Organized into two- to five-page spreads on each artist, with a mini-profile plus at least a pair of photos—a portrait and a shot of the studio—New Mexico Artists at Work is a visual delight, a great read, and a substantive contribution to the venerable canon of books about artistic life in New Mexico.

The ecological metaphor captures the notion that Newmann and Parsons sought the essence of their subjects in their work environments and how they interact with them. These are the places they’ve built around themselves and populated with their tools, their materials, and their disparate collections of stimulating or even random objects. Here, among the things that inspire, facilitate, and focus creativity, Newmann and Parsons have found the conditions of making art.

“At this stage,” writes Parsons, “it’s still all about process and the encompassing space.”

And what a fascinating constellation of spaces. They fall into two broad categories: Zen-like simplicity, à la Georgia O’Keeffe, and chaotic vitality, not unlike my own office, but with more color. It’s fun to speculate about the work styles thus represented. Does this artist with the immaculate studio paint with programmatic precision and explicit intent? Does this woodworker, whose studio resembles an overstuffed, post-earthquake curio shop, work in staccato bursts of spontaneous energy? Read, look, draw your own conclusions.

Newmann opens the text with a background chapter on the artistic heritage of twentieth century New Mexico: the Taos Society of Artists, the centripetal pull by Mabel Dodge Luhan on all manner of creatives in Taos, Santa Fe’s Cinco Pintores of the early century, and O’Keeffe. As Newmann notes, Luhan had been influenced by Gertrude Stein to “value the idea that artists have the power to create new realities and reinvent their lives.” Luhan was central in stamping New Mexico as a place where that could happen, a legacy that continues to this day.

The early “Golden Age” painters preferred “extroverted” studios, Newmann writes, rich with romantic New Mexico iconography or Victorian furnishings. Then came O’Keeffe, initially invited by Luhan. Often photographed in her minimalist studio, O’Keeffe reconciled “monastic austerity with lyricism,” thus showing “the way for a great number of artists in New Mexico and elsewhere” to use their studios as places of “retreat, refuge, or healing.”

First, though, these contemporary artists use their studios as places to work. Parsons makes that point forcefully in his portrait of James Havard. The artist sits in a sea of paint bottles before his current canvas, which seems the controlled interruption of a Pollock-like experiment performed on the colorfully spattered wall behind it. Clutching his brushes, Havard gives the impression he stopped working just long enough to change clothes before having his picture taken. The smell of wet paint practically wafts off the page.

Parsons shot Judy Chicago out of focus, the viewer’s gaze directed instead to a few pictures of her that are thumb tacked to a board over her shoulder; her studio photo glows with indirect window light. In a 15-by-20-foot workspace, Michael Lujan works at a tiny desk, surrounded by a seeming infinity of books, toys, and diverse objects stacked floor to ceiling on shelves, tables, crates, and even power equipment. Much of it will find its way into his art. He tells Newmann, “There are no boundaries here between what I collect and what I make.”

The studio of sculptor Luis Jiménez—apparently, the smaller of his two workspaces—is predictably huge. He salvaged an old basketball court to make the floor, boundary lines intact. Inside, a titanic but headless horse rears to the ceiling; when finished, the bronc will grace the Denver airport. One imagines jets will steer around it. For his portrait, Jiménez goes incognito, donning a duct-taped breathing mask to airbrush a diminutive statue. By contrast, Parsons places contemporary glass sculptor Stacey Neff frankly on a chair outside her studio with two of her suggestively organic, massive forms. Wooden shipping pallets lean against a chain-link fence in the background. This is the Santa Fe where real people work.

Though Parsons unfailingly respects his subjects, he’s made room for a little humor. Look at the photo of Bruce Nauman’s studio, where a feral cat sits contemplating the sculpted metal fish floundering on the floor.

Newmann’s profiles are engaging, light-footed, and unpredictable but never uncomfortable. If she approached each subject with a standard set of interview questions, it doesn’t show. More likely, like Parsons, she worked with what she found, letting the artist shape the story without tolerating self-
congratulation.

Newmann gives only a few indications of the artists’ reputations or achievements, instead revealing the nuances of their personalities and the way their workspaces express them. Sometimes Parsons’ photos, though, give a clue, often an oblique nod, an indirect reference to stature, as in his omission of a portrait of Agnes Martin, instead choosing to photograph a dresser top in her studio. The furniture piece holds an old clock, several brushes, a folded pair of glasses, and—above an open drawer filled with tubes of paint—a small framed photograph of the great artist shaking hands with President Clinton. The photo is a subtle homage to Martin’s national recognition rooted in years of solitary hard work. Her studio is simple and luminous in the companion photo, emphasizing the parallel simplicity and economy of the top painting on a stack tilted against a shadowed wall, while a skylight bathes her workspace in light.

As a firm believer that an artist is someone making art, no more, no less, I bring an innate skepticism and cynicism to the celebritizing of New Mexico painters, sculptors, santeros, and the like. This book’s greatest strength, among many, might just be the rigor of its premise, which is that these people are interesting for their work, not their standing. Newmann and Parsons both eschew deification, adoration, star-worship, preciousness, or pretense. They seek the authentic over the contrived.

Parsons’ clear-eyed, discerning sensibility brings a documentarian’s spontaneity and rejection of artifice. And fittingly, his eye for composition illuminates his subjects, not his own talent. With such fine photography and adept writing, New Mexico Artists at Work cuts to the essence of making art, not selling it, acquiring it, talking about it, viewing it in prestigious galleries, or hanging it on the wall above the sofa as a merit badge of good taste.

New Mexico: Images of a Land and Its People, by Lucian Niemeyer, foreword by Governor Bill Richardson, text by Art Gómez, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 155 pages, 161 color photos, hardcover, $39.95.

Because of New Mexico’s relative isolation, small population, and limited economic opportunities, the past remains strongly present in this state. Dinosaur bones erode visibly from red-dirt hillsides, Anasazi ruins tilt in deserted canyons, Pueblo people inhabit ancestral towns predating the appearance of Europeans, and a growing population continues to etch the expanding boundaries of cities and towns across the desert.

So what? So you’ll never “get” New Mexico if you don’t know what happened here not just last week, last month, or last year, but last century, even last millennium. A pretty picture book like New Mexico offers a palatable tray of historical hors d’oeuvres to whet the appetite for further cognitive dining on the issues and events that resonate in present-day issues like economic development, environmental limits to growth, cultural clashes, and cross-
cultural fertilization.

In the text by Art Gómez and color photos by Lucian Niemeyer, New Mexico assumes its long-familiar role of America’s exotic state. Unlike so many photo books, though, this one is well worth reading. It’s a solid introduction to New Mexico history, particularly its Hispanic history. Gómez’s fluid, agile narrative arcs from geography and natural history through the archaeology of prehistory. Then the story settles into detail about the arrival of the Spanish under Coronado and the checkered colonization of New Mexico. Drawing on established sources, Gómez taps the highlights of Spanish rule, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, the re-conquest by Vargas, the economy of the 1700s, the Mexican period, the coming of the Americans down the Santa Fe Trail, the conquest by General Kearney, and the annexation into the United States. It’s all here. In the second part of the book, Gómez adopts a metaphor of corridors as a lens to view themes in history.

The photos are a collection of post-card landscapes, cowboys, Indian ruins, wildlife, flowers. A Santa Fe street scene, a log cabin, Truchas in a storm. The Plains of San Agustín, one of our nearest Empty Quarters. It’s enough to make you want to gas up and hit the road. Let the text, pictures, and bibliography pique your interest and guide you deeper into discovering New Mexico yourself.

Saving the Ranch: Conservation Easement Design in the American West, by Anthony Anella and John B. Wright, photographs by Edward Ranney, Island Press, Washington, D.C., 173 pages, paperback, $30.

This timely, highly targeted book is based on a tight-cinched syllogism: you can’t save the West without saving ranches, therefore saving ranches saves the West. Their fates are intertwined. For ranchers, Saving the Ranch is a decision-making tool. It addresses in great detail and with even-handed analysis the crucial choice of whether to keep the ranch or sell it. Then, if ranchers stay on the ranch, Anthony Anella and John B. Wright show how to preserve their way of life as ranchers and still raise the capital they need to move forward with their life plans.

The authors also show how a ranch can be subdivided into low-impact lots that preserve open views and plenty of grazing land. Conventional, grid-style development often hacks up the land into a patchwork of intrusive “ranchettes” that might be far less satisfying both for the new neighbors and the remaining ranch family. The conservation development approach asserted by Anella and Wright can increase the value of the newly created real estate while maintaining the integrity of the ranch as both a commercial enterprise and a legacy of untrammeled America.

The key to this compromise is the conservation easement, which the authors call one of the “last best chances” for ranchers to maintain their way of life and stay on the ranch. “A conservation easement is a legal agreement between a land owner and a land trust or other qualified group that permanently protects the conservation values of a ranch by limiting or restricting future development.” That is, things like the open space, wildlife corridors, and open views on a ranch are worth cash dollars. A rancher can sell them but keep the land in cattle, his cattle.

To make that happen, the rancher sells or donates a conservation easement—of his own design—to a land trust or similar group, but he or she still owns the ranch. These groups include the American Farmland Trust, which “works to keep farms and ranches undeveloped and in production”; the Nature Conservancy, well known in New Mexico and internationally for its efforts to preserve rare-species habitat; and the hunter-friendly Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. They’re not all granola crunching tree huggers, that’s for sure. It’s an important point in the rural west, where the word “conservation” rhymes with “environmentalist” and sometimes provokes a trigger finger twitch. Some folks are still smarting over the spotted owl and Mexican wolf reintroduction.

The beauty part of the conservation easement is that it serves the rancher by protecting that most fundamental of American values—private property rights. It serves the land trusts—and conservationists everywhere—by protecting the land in perpetuity.

Saving the Ranch thoroughly explores the consequences of selling or donating a conservation easement. The book examines income tax and inheritance tax benefits, and pencils-out various scenarios for a typical ranch. These scenarios illustrate in simple math the financial implications of a handful of different examples for a conservation easement, from preserving only the “viewshed” to an entire 32,000-acre ranch. The scenarios and several case studies help ground the concepts in ranch reality, particularly the section on B. W. and Billie Cox of the Montosa Ranch near Magdalena, N.M. In the back of the book, a sample conservation easement spells out the details in appropriate legalese.

All developers of large properties, not just ranchers, will be interested in Anella’s example of applying sieve mapping to the Montosa Ranch. As an approach to responsible subdividing, sieve mapping lets the planner screen out areas that shouldn’t be developed based on specific criteria. These criteria might include views, unbuildable peaks, wildlife habitat and corridors, drainages and arroyos, etc.

The planner then builds a composite map—the sieve—by creating a series of overlays, one for each criterion. The composite then sifts out the rejected sites that should be set aside from development and shows where to build. Lot lines flow naturally from it. Anella argues that development based on sieve mapping increases individual lot values because the technique capitalizes on the increased economic value of home sites near open space that will remain forever untouched.

This is all great, practical information. Every rancher wondering “what next?” ought to read it. While text gives the “how,” Edward Ranney’s photographs give the “why”: because, as the photos emphasize, ranches are the rural West. It’s a land of tremendous beauty, stark solitude, inspiring vastness. The photos have the frankness of intimate knowledge. To see something clearly, and photograph it insightfully, requires the familiarity of long association. Ranney brings that to these images.

But Saving the Ranch is important in a broader context because it provides a mutually beneficial bridge between two groups, ranchers and conservationists, who are more often in fierce conflict over range management. By offering solutions for managing development while preserving both land and the ranching way of life, Anella and Wright give hope to us all. And with several large ranches near Albuquerque either already subdividing or poised to start blading roads, it could hardly be more relevant.

New Mexico Gardener’s Guide, revised edition, by Judith Phillips, Cool Springs Press, Nashville, Tenn., 240 pages, paperback, $24.99.

Judith Phillips’ revised gardening guide is a must-have reference that you just might unshelve in every season for some quick, friendly, thorough advice on how to manage your personal outdoors.

I can’t imagine a Southwest gardening question that this book doesn’t answer. Phillips, who writes the In the Garden column for Su Casa, covers everything from the geography and climate of New Mexico—complete with cold-hardiness zones, temperature and precipitation charts for every major community, a state elevation map, and a glossary—to thorough descriptions of more than 100 plants. They include flowers of all kinds, cacti, groundcovers, grasses, trees, perennials, roses, shrubs, trees, and vines.

For each plant, Phillips gives a general description, plus the blooming period, mature size, and hardiness zone adaptability. She also tells how to plant it, and covers growing tips, care, companion planting and design, and recommended varieties or even related species. Clever, cartoony icons indicate whether a plant attracts butterflies or hummingbirds, produces edible fruit, is drought resistant, tolerates full sunlight, supports bees, provides good fall color, and so forth—it’s a simple, intuitive symbology. Clear photos show what the plant will look like, and general photos illustrate examples of attractive New Mexico–adapted gardens.

You won’t want to face the bare dirt of a new home without this guide in one hand and a few hundred feet of drip irrigation hose in the other. You might even find yourself reading it just for fun. It’s the perfect cure for spring fever.