Posts by Jeff Wagner

The beautiful Painted Mountain corn is a metaphor for our times, blending together different seeds to create something new and beautiful. Painted Mountain was bred by Dave Christensen in Montana over 20 years ago. He crossed a huge variety of native corns together, selecting traits that led to a short season, drought-tolerant and cold-tolerant corn variety. Typically, when heritage varieties of corn leave indigenous hands, the variety is re-named something generic, severing the ties between the seeds and their cultural stories and histories. All corn […]

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We’re excited to share a short video talking with participants on our Human & Natural Ecologies of Colorado courses on the Grand Mesa in Western Colorado. Participants built their connection with the landscapes of Colorado, from the high alpine down into the aspen groves, scrub oaks, and piñon/juniper forests. Leaving the course, participants walked away with knowledge of wild edible plants, wild edible mushrooms and how to go mushroom hunting, knowledge of ecosystems to help in their foraging, and knowledge of landscape-scale human interactions in […]

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Seeds have a story… Groundwork grows and maintains over 200 varieties of seed. We partner with local seed companies that adapt seeds to our arid Colorado region, breeding resiliency for a changing climate. Indian Blue Pearl Millet. Millet is one of the most drought tolerant, versatile grain crops in the world. Millet is a broad category of grasses with edible seeds. In fact, the word “millet” doesn’t just refer to many species, but it includes 10 different plant genera (that’s the first word in the […]

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This post was written by Cora, a student on a Traveling School semester program that visited the educational farm in fall 2022. Driving up to the Groundwork farm in Paonia, Colorado, I had no idea what I was getting into. Our van sputtered down the Colorado roads, past tall coniferous trees growing in pinkish-orange soil, surely sending rocks skittering as we descended into a stunning valley of yellow aspen and wide green farmland. The van rocked with music (usually Caamp or Taylor Swift) and shook […]

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When I founded Groundwork, I wanted to give voice to the big questions. What does it look like when a society regards the Earth as the source of everything they love? How could people in the modern world treat the Earth as more than something be just barely sustained, an obstacle on the path to profit? What would it take to envision a future that is not just a minor adjustment to the destructive ideologies of the present? I like to think of Earth Day […]

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The core narrative of climate change is one of urgency: “we need to act fast because it’s almost too late.” This urgent time frame is unquestionable. Indeed, climate change could and should have been solved decades ago. It may seem heretical, then, for an environmentalist to question this narrative of “acting fast”—but this is exactly what I’d like to do.  I want to question our society’s default process when confronted with urgency: fast action. The narrative of speed embodies a subtle dissonance—because the Western, capitalist, […]

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Headlines in past weeks have touted reduced greenhouse gas emissions as COVID-19 halts travel and industrial activity. If not for the suffering and death, the pandemic could be a climate activist’s dream: grounded flights and idle cars. It’s tempting to see emissions reductions as a silver lining in this bleak time, but the Wall Street Journal reports that past economic slowdowns have caused only temporary reductions in emissions. A few months of reduced emissions will mean nothing if we return to business as usual once […]

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The Bolivian community of Tiquipaya where I live and work made international headlines this month for the first time in over a decade. After three years of drought, the rains came all at once this month, consolidating an entire rainy season worth of precipitation into one week. It wouldn’t have made such big news, except for the forest. The Cordillera de Tunari forms a 16,000-foot tall mountain wall that defines the valley we live in, and its lower elevations used to be draped in trees. […]

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This animated adaptation of my favorite short reading, “The Man Who Planted Trees” by Jean Giono, won an academy award in 1987. In my opinion, the translation is the best out there: similar to the most common one, but more accessible in its English. A transcript wasn’t available online, so this morning, I transcribed it to include in my readings packet for the field. I hope you enjoy it! Many years ago, I set out on a walking tour high in the Alps, a region […]

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Originally published in Sierra Magazine, Fall 2014 I spend my life taking people into wilderness. I am a 23-year-old outdoor educator, and my students are people not much younger than myself: teenagers and twenty- somethings. Every time, whether we’re out there for a week or a month, there’s always a night when we lie on our backs and stare up at the night sky. The stars out there are like powdered sugar. The silence consumes us until somebody says, “I don’t want to go back.” […]

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