About Us

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History

Earth Works Institute is a 501c3 non-profit organization that was founded in 1994, by Leslie Barclay. It is located on a 160 acre piece of range land, in the pinon-juniper high-desert ecosystem east of Cerrillos, NM.

Since 1994, EWI has created demonstration models and education programs of sustainable food production, soil conservation, water harvesting, natural home design, forest and grassland management, sustainable energy generation systems and biological septic waste treatment.

EWI is currently designing a rural settlement and developing a training center for the purpose of demonstrating the viability of the models developed. In this way we will teach people how to make informed decisions in a holistic way that enrich rather than deplete our natural capital.

EWI will pursue this goal through the integration of appropriate technologies with living systems and through the collaboration of all participants in our research and educational outreach programs.

EWI enlisted the help of a handful of local experts to develop a natural resource inventory and data base of the site as well as an historical and archaeological history. This site, over a thousand years ago, nurtured the crops of the Native American tribes who called this land "home". As they migrated to the Rio Grande valley they were followed, in turn, by Hispanic conquerors, railroad construction crews, cattle and sheep barons, turquoise and silver miners, civil war soldiers and most recently waves of immigrants seeking a life in the fabled west.

In 1995 and ’96, EWI organized a series of training workshops with internationally renowned trainers in permaculture, alternative building techniques, erosion control and orchard design..

This activity led to the formation of the Galisteo Watershed Restoration Project, a large, collaborative effort with the help of various agencies and landowners.
The goal of the project is to help all interested residents learn about practical land rehabilitation strategies for the watershed: the riparian areas, the pasture land and the forest.

Over the past two years, EWI has established several demonstration sites throughout the watershed through the cooperation of landowners, educators and scientists.
Together with our volunteers, we are currently monitoring progress at these sites.

Simultaneously we began working with local schools in our watershed, teaching basic stream biology to students from grades 4-8 at the Santa Fe Waldorf School and the Eldorado Elementary School. These students have learned how to build small erosion check dams and plant a variety of materials that help to revegetate riparian areas.

We seek to discover if cashmere goats are an appropriate tool to help diminish our extensive population of salt cedar and Russian olive trees. Can we slowly browse them out and replace them with native cottonwoods and willows? Will the goats help to restore our meadows by adding nutrients to our impoverished
soils and restoring water to the water table by killing off these thirsty invasive species?

Through biological waste treatment methods we seek to turn human waste (septage) into profitable economic by-products and sources of nutrient rich water. Perhaps we would then change our attitude about human waste and finally view it as a resource that could help us to restore our lands.

As the population of our area increases and the water resources diminish it is imperative that we learn how to nurture our resources: we must discover and develop techniques that replenish our natural resources rather than continue the extermination of them. If we are to be good land stewards we must restore and nourish this land and teach our young how to love and care for it so that it continues to grow in health and prosperity for generations who follow. There is no alternative!

Who We Are & What We Do

Wouldn't it be wonderful to eat food that comes from your own region and use all the little rain we collect off 0f our roofs? Yet, more and more people live in urban areas away from their sources of food, water and energy, and rural areas become smaller and have to feed more and more people. Rural and urban fringe areas are losing fertile soil, water, plant species, wildlife, and opportunities for us to learn from the land.

We at Earth Works Institute (EWI), however, believe that if we restore peoples relationship to the land, we can restore the land itself for future generations. Since 1994, EWI has worked on setting up demonstration models and education programs of sustainable food production, soil conservation, water harvesting, home building, forest and grassland management, energy generation, and septic waste treatment. EWI is seeking the relationships between all these land components to make them support each other, so that production is maximized while no resources are wasted.

Earth Works Institutes activities focus on:

Through these projects, EWI promotes concepts of collaborative watershed planning and management, industrial ecology (zero-emmisions business development), managed and restorative grazing (the "New Ranch" model), permaculture, and restoration forestry. EWI uses these new approaches to resource management to develop demonstration models for sustainable living in the high-desert ecosystem in northern New Mexico.

Sarah Grant - Secretary & Treasurer