About Rancho de la Libertad
Libertad, soltura, amplitud, espacio. Rancho de la Libertad asks you to reconsider what you believe "freedom" to mean: to consider it not as individualism or lonely independence, but as space, expansiveness, openness, opportunity. Rancho de la Libertad is a pioneering regenerative space located in the Mojave desert of California, seeking to change the ways we connect to ourselves, the land, and our community.
In uncertain times, we return to the wisdom of our ancestors, working their proven knowledge back into the desecrated soil of this land, and offering it back to our community. We seek to regenerate this land, to steward it back to its historical abundance, and we understand that to regenerate the land we must first regenerate ourselves, because we are all one.
Our Mission:
Our mission is threefold:
- Regenerate desertified land, to bring back a fruitful ecosystem that is cyclical and encapsulated, functioning without external inputs.
- Create community reliance via an in-person, on-site resident group engaged in food production and other sustaining activities. Additionally, through the creation of distributed supply and production networks with the ultimate goal of insulation from regional, national, and global climate and political instability and the preservation of member and community freedom and sovereignty.
- Hold space for education, to enable others who are seeking a new way of living to experience firsthand what it is to exit hyperindividualist consumerism and learn necessary skills for reconnection with self, land, and community.
What do we do?
On approximately six acres of severely desertified and abused land East of Joshua Tree, California, we use pioneering, place-sensible methods to return and maintain both native and non-native species that support the renewal of flourishing ecosystem. We weave together the ideals of permaculture and holistic management with close observation and careful experimentation to create a way of working with the land that is hyperspecific to this particular location. We understand that in the severe absence of biodiversity and the presence of extreme weather conditions we must work with, rather than against, the existing environment.
The History of the Property
When we arrived on this site, it had been abandoned for several years after being owned by an individual who got too old to maintain any aspect of the property. He had used much of the back five acres as a landfill, and the buildings on the property were in disrepair and full of discarded belongings.
At first, we were uncertain of our direction. It took several months of getting the house liveable before we felt prepared to consider how to manage the rest of the property. We were visited by the old stewards of this land, semi-nomadic peoples who loved and cared for it, and they shared with us their memories and vision. We saw sequences of generations, moving through this land across seasons, and at first we did not recognize it as this place. It was green, with juniper, mighty oak, mesquite, and other yet unrecognized trees dotting the rolling hills and valleys at the foothills of the mountains that frame this great valley. Water was not unknown: small seasonal streams ran from the corralada of mountains each time it rained or with snowmelt, nourishing the growth at their banks and the people who tended them. It was shared with us that this was what this land was before the arrival of settlers: before greed in its rush to clutch gold devastated the environment, razing the trees to fuel their forges and mills, running thousands upon thousands of alien cattle across the now-vulnerable grass, grading enormous sections of valley flat and bare to run carts across.
We knew, then, what we needed to do, but we did not yet know where to begin. Slowly we accumulated books and information, and through much trial and error and seeking knowledge from others in neighboring holy Sonora, we’ve stumbled into a somewhat humble footing, nourishing this land day by day.
Progress
In 2023 we planted our first dozen trees, and have now planted over thirty trees on the property. As they grow they will provide the canopy for understory trees and more food crops than we can currently support.
We have been utilizing a method of composting in-place, underground, to bring organic matter back to the soil, as all other composting methods fail in our dry environment. We have planted medicinal herbs, place-sensible food trees and crops, and are doing immense earthworks to allow our sacred rains to settle and replenish our groundwater source. Little by little, we are bringing back life.
The year we moved in, there were no birds, no squirrels, rats, or lizards. The occasional desert iguana would skitter away, and the coyotes howled, and a single pair of ravens stalked us from the neighboring property, but there was little else.
Now we support a healthy population of endangered kangaroo rats, ground squirrels, local and migrating songbirds (dozens of varieties), quail, sidewinders and Mojave rattlesnakes, desert geckos, several other lizard varieties, desert iguanas, and more. Every year we see more life return.
Join our community
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Signing up makes you part of our community and enables you to connect with others who share your values and dreams of liberation and community sovereignty. It also helps us support our mission, making the simple act of signing up a powerful piece of direct action.
