Ben Haggard

Two months ago, my colleague Tim and I paid a visit to the land of mezcal. We were working with a band of young, Mexico City-based architects, artists, and idealists. Mezcal, as far as they were concerned, is the essence of Mexico.

Our purpose was to launch of a Story of Place for Mexico City. Though we were supposed to be paying attention to more important things, I was mostly aware of the food and drink. On our first morning we were taken to an old Mercado for a breakfast of tacos made from goat roasted in the traditional underground pit. From there we toured an ecological park in the ancient chinampas (floating gardens) of Xochimilco and then into a narrow cleft in the mountains where we stopped for quesadillas prepared with squash blossoms and corn smut. The open-air mountain kitchen also served homemade pulque, a sweet and lightly alcoholic beverage made from agave—the first stage in making mezcal.

That night, to celebrate more than eight hours negotiating nightmare traffic, we stopped in Coyoacan for a pre-dinner snack and the main attraction—very good quality mezcal. Spicy roasted grasshoppers and orange slices were offered as accompaniments. The mescal was clear, vaguely sweet, delicious. We tried several varieties and styles.

I warned my companions that I’m a cheap date—half a beer is my limit. They smiled and surreptitiously refilled my glass every time I looked away. Before long I certainly was high. We all were. It was pleasant, cheerful, and definitely mind altering—on the edge of hallucinogenic. It was the first time I had the experience of an alcoholic beverage as a “plant medicine.” It had a personality, a point of view about the world. Wine elevates spirit. Beer is, well, beery. Mezcal is a journey. The most surprising thing was I had no hangover the next morning. They had told me this would be so and I didn’t believe them.

Mezcal is exciting in part because it is often still produced artisanally, made in small quantities by village craftsmen using an indigenous desert plant. The agave is harvested just as it is preparing to send up a flower spike, when the sugars are concentrated in the heart. It is traditionally roasted using oak charcoal, then fermented and distilled. It carries the signature of its terroir, of the place where it was made, and is highly differentiated from region to region and maker to maker.

Because it is a high value product that can be produced in a perennial agricultural system while leaving the majority of biomass on site, mezcal has an ongoing role to play in rural economies of Mexico. Agave can be grown as an understory plant in a mixed oak savannah, making it useful economic element in a regenerative land management program that restores habitat, heals watersheds, and diversifies ecosystems. Mezcal has so much potential—as an economic driver for land restoration and rural viability, as a distinctive product with international appeal, and as a carrier of cultural traditions and craftsmanship.

My acupuncturist told me a story about suffering from a debilitating spinal illness—one for which there is “no cure.”  The specialist she had been seeing advised her to prepare for life in a wheelchair.  Luckily, she was introduced to a master Japanese acupuncturist who, over a period of months, reversed and healed the degeneration in her spine.

In spite of her strong reluctance, the Japanese master insisted she go back to her doctor for testing.  When the doctor came into the examining room and saw the x-rays he snapped at the nurse for bringing him the wrong set.  No, she pointed out, these were correct.  The doctor studied the x-rays for a while, then walked out of the room without a word.  In an instant, my friend saw objective confirmation of the “miraculous” cure she had undergone and the poverty of western medicine.  That day she committed herself to becoming an acupuncturist.

I don’t really grasp the theoretical foundations of acupuncture.  But as I heard this story, I made an intuitive leap:  What if Earth was a planetary body, and what if we could use “planetary acupuncture” to achieve planetary healing?

Acupuncture works, I believe, from a non-material causality.  Using needles and other instruments, the acupuncturist reaches through the physical body to tap an underlying energy body and call forward a new material pattern.  This results in seemingly miraculous and instantaneous cures.

Our cities tend to arise at “energy nodes”—places where multiple ecosystems and flows intersect.  This is because cities, if they are to last for any length of time, require vast amounts of resources to grow and maintain themselves.  Put another way, cities are energy concentrators.  What if our cities were like acupuncture needles, interacting with the body of Earth?  Could we learn how to tune them so they interacted in a positive rather than a negative way?

Nearly every culture has a tradition of geomancy (the mapping of the “energy body” of the planet)—from European ley lines, to Chinese feng shui, to Ayurvedic principles of design, to Native American power points.  Could these traditions be assembled into a science or cosmology that would allow humans to play a role as planetary healers, maintainers, and co-creators?  Who then would humans need to become

After the economic meltdown of last year, the art world seems to have woken up with a hangover and some remorse over who it was in bed with.  Not that I would know.  I work in a backwater that is both marginalized (no serious artist paints landscapes) and commoditized (can you do one to match the rug?)  So I have an outsider’s vantage.

Art has always mediated between commerce and spirit.  It’s about adorning, after all, and what we adorn we pay honor to.  I have no objection to people placing high value on important works of art, though I’ve never been able to make sense of art as a speculative (Ponzi?) investment.  From my parochial perspective, Damien Hirst exemplifies the art of the scam—through him we honor the god of tricksters.

Several years ago Newton Harrison, a California-based conceptual artist, urged me to give up object making.  Narrative, he said, was the essence of art—the narrative evoked in the mind of an audience.  The imagery that does the evoking is incidental.  I’m too much of an artisan to take his advice at face value.  But I’m beginning to see a way to apply his recommendation.

Over the years, Regenesis (the design collaborative I’m part of) has been evolving a process called Story of Place.   Sifting through data sets, histories, field observations, and interviews, we seek to discern the heart of a place—how it works and it’s unique identity—and to convey that heart through poetic imagery.  We then work with local communities to elicit their own stories and to discover their own vocation, along with strategies for enacting that vocation.

All of this is conveyed through a framework, a conceptual armature on which a community can hang its stories, its experiences, its love of place.  When it works, people have a powerful experience of seeing their home as if for the first time.  All of the bits and pieces of what they know become part of an intelligible pattern, a pattern that operates in ecological, cultural, and even economic dimensions.

It finally dawned on me that this is conceptual art.  Place is a narrative evoked in the mind of an audience.  Some places have such powerful narratives (Paris, Yosemite, Jerusalem) that people around the world know and even contribute to their story.  By surfacing the underlying structure and meaning of those narratives, perhaps we can find a new, more conscious platform from which to generate their future trajectories.

Fourteen years into it and my friends still don’t understand what Regenesis (the consulting group I’m a member of) does.  It isn’t easy to describe, though the experience of it is pretty profound.  Here’s a recent short video that maybe gives a taste.

Twenty-four students crowded into my living room. They were visiting from the Intro to Sustainability program at the Santa Fe Community College and had come to see the way I live with my garden.

Earlier this year I had decided to open up my house for local groups wanting to learn more about permaculture. I wanted the effort and resources I was investing in the garden to serve something larger than a nice view from my dining room.

The garden is designed with over-planted beds and narrow winding paths. It works great for one or two, but twenty-four is another story. So I invited smaller teams to spread out and see what they could figure out about what was going on with this property. One group took on the topic of water, another food, another energy, and the last habitat. Then we regrouped and collected their observations.

Afterward we met in the living room, and they described the potential they saw, and things I could improve to realize that potential. Two ideas particularly struck me. First, they suggested that I could involve my tenants in the garden—offering opportunities both for apprenticeship as well as creating a stronger sense of community among us. The second was to extend habitat beyond the boundaries of the property—recruiting my neighbors for a neighborhood habitat program.

In the most natural way, the conversation had shifted from what I could do as an individual to what a collective can do. I believe that the issues the planet is facing will require communities to come together to do what an individual can’t. Professionally, my focus has shifted to helping communities figure out how to work together on restoring the natural and human ecosystems they are part of. This group of students challenged me to do the same in my personal life.