Querencia: Finding One’s Place in Nature
The following is a description of the sound collage that accompanies the exhibit of the same name that is a partial retrospective of the life and work of Jack Loeffler. The exhibit is to be located at H & H Arts from July 3 to August 19, 2026.
The files below can be opened and listened to immediately or downloaded.
2. Program 2 introduces the listener to the radical environmentalism and the Black Mesa Defense Fund, a group of early environmentalists who, at the behest of Hopi traditional elders, attempted to halt the strip-mining of coal on their sacred landform, Black Mesa to provide coal to two coal-fired power generating stations. One of these power plants required coal to be slurried through a 273-mile-long pipeline using water pumped at the rate of 2000 gallons a minute from the Pleistocene aquifer beneath Black Mesa. 25% of the energy generated by the other power plant, the Navajo Generating Station to be located on the shores of Lake Powell, was to provide power to pump water from the Colorado River over the mountains to the central valleys of southern Arizona. This became known as the Central Arizona Project. This program also features the voices of other environmentalists who came into prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Program 3 Clashes and Contentions focuses of problems associated with governance and distribution of the Colorado River waters and is part of a six-part documentary radio series titled Moving Waters: the Colorado River and the West produced in association with a traveling exhibition of the same name sponsored by the Humanities Councils of Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California, administered by The Arizona Humanities Council, and funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation.
Program 4 is the first of a ten-part radio series titled Encounters with Consciousness produced by Jack Loeffler and funded by the Christensen Fund of San Francisco. It features voices of some of the extraordinary people Jack Loeffler has been privileged to meet, record and befriend, many of whose perspectives challenge our present system of cultural attitudes in America.
Number 5, a brief statement by the late Dr. Edward T. “Ned” Hall, a prominent cultural anthropologist and author who pointed out the importance of ethnicity within the human species.
Program 6 provides examples of different sub-movements of counterculture that emerged during that period.
The sound collage ranges through Counter Culture, Radical Environmentalism, Indigenous Mindedness, and Bio-regionalism-Thinking Like a Watershed as revealed through widely diverse perspectives of peoples Loeffler has recorded, many of whom are friends of longstanding. The sound collage and the exhibition provide a broad range of perspectives that provide alternatives to the current systems of attitudes that prevail in America and beyond in a time when corporate economics and attendant governance run counter to the health of our planetary biosphere.
The four radio programs that comprise the major body of the sound collage are
selected from different radio series produced by Jack Loeffler that were broadcast over
Community Public Radio stations, both regionally and nationally spanning a period of
twenty years. The sound collage is approximately two hours long, and each of the six
components may be downloaded and listened to separately.
In 2020, Jack Loeffler donated his entire aural History Archive and papers to the
Chavez Library at the New Mexico History Museum.