Diverse rFEW Economies in the Peri-Urban West

Objectives:

• Investigate the diverse economies that have emerged and are being practiced as a means for building local resilience or transformation, and investigate how may they be cultivated to foster transformation across the peri-urban, intermountain west, USA.
• Investigate the relationship between these diverse, alternative economies and larger food, energy, and water resource (rFEW) economies of the intermountain west

Charter Summary:

The goal of this project is to explore examples of diverse economies within the Intermountain West as a source of capacity and imagination building for transformative possibility. This project focuses on disaster recovery post Calf Canyon Fire in and around Mora, New Mexico, USA. Within this context, the project seeks to understand how diverse economies build resilience, equity, sustainability and justice into recovery. Early geographical research on crisis focused on the ways environmental hazards became disasters. This research began incorporating a greater understanding of social factors in the 1980s as crises began to be understood as political. Thus, crisis is now broadly understood as a process that shapes and is shaped by capital, and as a mechanism that creates and extends policies that support it. We take this critical perspective as a foundation of this work but rely on Gibson-Graham (2006) to argue that by focusing only on the power of capital to shape society through crisis, we may obscure other power relations, or worse, undermine those who are working to resist them. Building from this foundation—understanding crisis from the theoretical perspective of post capitalism—we seek to explore the wildfire recovery that emerges through alternative economies. We focus on the systemic changes emerge that shift subjectivities, values, and ways of being. To do this, we rely on interviews with impacted individuals in the area and leaders in the recovery effort.

Community Partners

• Community of Mora, NM
• Mora Independent Schools
• FEMA
• Santa Fe National Forest Service
• Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire Response Network
• Neighbors Helping Neighbors