The Texcoco Marvel

How Aztec engineers tamed an environmental nightmare gives a lesson for today

In August, 2022, I described here on The Great Change how we had attempted to recreate an ancient indigenous farming method in the highlands of middle Tennessee.

This week I donned my tall boots and waded back into our constructed wetland to restore and rebuild the chinampas. Rob Wheeler, for more than 20 years the Global Ecovillage Network representative to the UN Headquarters in New York, brought along loppers, machete and a portable saber saw to assist me. During my nearly three years pandemic absence, the wetlands had taken on a life of their own and become a swampy thicket of fallen branches, bent-over bamboo, and nettles. One could be forgiven for not seeing beneath all that to what it will eventually become — the most productive food system, on a calorie per square foot basis, ever devised by humans.

Among the engineering wonders deconstructed by the Spanish conquistadors in the 16th and 17th centuries were the vast systems of chinampas that sustained a dense metropolitan population in the high central valley of México. Their aquatic earthworks consisted of alternating narrow islands and canals, initially formed by willow fences and composted fill from the kitchen wastes, lake mud, rubbish and sewage of the lakeside villages…