bellow forth
bellow forth
restor(y)ing soil
ABOUT
Bellow Forth is a community project focused on restoring soil health and environmental resiliency through storytelling and collaboration, community and ecosystem science, and social art practice in wildfire-impacted lands and communities in northern New Mexico. In 2022, nearly 350,000 acres were burned in the Calf Canyon and Hermit’s Peak wildfires, the largest wildfire in New Mexico’s state history.
This project is multi-specied and multidisciplinary, imbricating biodiverse soil systems with human stories to foster relationships, facilitate succession in post wildfire landscapes, and embed a deeper appreciation for and accountability to the diminishing, living world.
The project is largely inspired by the poem, “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude” by Ross Gay, which catalogs Gay’s experiences of place, life, family, and love that he wants to thank, acknowledge, and praise. The poem begins with a recounting of a dream where he is called by a robin to “bellow forth” a long list of gratitude that is an authentic gesture for loving and singing for, “what every second goes away.” To honor and catalog what was lost during the Calf Canyon and Hermit’s Peak wildfires last year (and what is continuing to disappear due to the climate crisis) the project aims at creating a similar catalog of gratitude through community stories. However, these stories are embroidered into a large story quilt and will be offered to the ground to restory* the soil.
*We are grateful to the author/legend, Sophie Strand who led us to this term and magic ;)
The story quilt will be inoculated with nutrients to attract native fungi and microbes who are essential for soil and land regeneration. Healthy ecosystems and communities begin in the soil; if there is a thriving population of fungi and microbes, there is a better chance at future successive processes, water retention, and native plant establishment.
Bellow Forth has been made possible with support from Anonymous Was a Woman in partnership with The New York Foundation for the Arts.
Photo by Dylan McLaughlinWildfires
On April 6, 2022 a wildfire started near Hermit’s Peak by the U.S. Forest Service who lost control of a prescribed burn due to extreme high winds. The Hermit’s Peak wildfire merged with the Calf Canyon wildfire on April 22, once again, due to extreme wind conditions. The fires forced 15,500 New Mexicans to evacuate their homes, land, animals and lives. Between 1,000-1,500 people did not have anything to return to as the fires consumed their dwellings, farm lands and memories.
The conditions for this extreme event have been brewing for years due to climate change and impacts of colonization. The spring of 2022 was one of the hottest in recorded history in New Mexico and the American Southwest has been suffering from a mega-drought since 2000. These factors combined with lack of Indigenous fire management for years created a combustable situation.
In some areas the fires burned so hot roots incinerated underground and fragile soil communities were severely damaged and/or completely eradicated.
COMMUNITY + STORIES
We have been working with impacted residents since January 2023 to collect and archive their stories, experiences and relationships to the land before and after the wildfires. In exchange for sharing their stories, folks have been provided with home-cooked meals, resources, donations, and assistance with labor.
Their stories will come together to create a place-based catalog of gratitude to resonate as a reminder of what we have, what we have lost, and what we can dream. The localized catalog is being embroidered onto a story quilt, an artwork which will be buried and used in an upcoming (2024) field experiment (see science). The story quilt offers stories and assets from the human world, back to the soil food web. In this way community words will directly feed fungi and other microbes that consume the textile during its decay. This is how we believe we can both restore/restory the ground.
environmental and social impacts
The project addresses reciprocal restoration (Robin Wall Kimmerer) and interspecies relationships through Indigenous-led collaboration and soil science based in Traditional Ecological Knowledge. TEK invites us to consider the implications of multispecies connection when conducting scientific experiments and urges us to repair broken relationships to land through acts of reciprocity as well as to return land back to their original peoples and caretakers. To acknowledge our connection to ecologically complex soil systems, this community-driven artwork centers reciprocity, Land Back and mending broken relationships as the key components of repair.