A review of Aspen and the American Dream by Jenny Stuber I NEED TO BEGIN THIS COLUMN with an apology to the spirit of this magazine’s cofounders Ed and Martha Quillen. Ed was pretty adamant about not including Crested Butte or any of the recreation-dependent communities in his version of “Central Colorado”; he did not see …
By George Sibley We’ve been told recently that we are “living in a historic time,” but maybe I’m not alone in observing that there is a big difference between “living in a historic time” and actually “making history.” What we are mostly doing today is hunkering down, lying low, invisible we hope to a cute …
By George Sibley The Most Important Election of Our Lifetime is finally behind us, and I can’t tell you how glad I am that I was overly pessimistic last month. A respectable blue wave on the national level restored a measure of democratic process to what was becoming one-party plutocratic rule under a would-be autocrat. …
By George Sibley
The onset of the wildfire season puts our forests back on the front page, but the wildfires are really just a visible symptom of larger troubles among the trees – troubles that track those “natural disasters” right back to us humans and some naive cultural choices.
By George SIbley
When Ryan Zinke was appointed Secretary of the Department of Interior a year ago, he declared himself to be an “unapologetic admirer of Teddy Roosevelt,” whom we think of as the father of American conservation. Secretary Zinke’s actions since then have caused virtually all contemporary American conservation organizations to call him out on that, and to directly challenge his proclaimed commitment to any concept of conservation.
By George Sibley
Two months ago here, I gave a fast 250-year-revisionist overview of a two-Americas perspective on our nation’s history, positing that, from the mid-18th century on, the occupation of the continent by white Europeans was not the unfolding of some common vision of a Manifest Destiny; it was instead a contention between two contrasting cultural visions for America.
By George Sibley
It’s only the ides of March as I write this, but it’s already springtime in this part of the Rockies. I know that because right now it feels like January outside, with snow pellets – nasty little dry lumps, no art to them at all – moving through, too horizontally to imagine they might stay and leave us a little moisture. But beyond the blur of winddriven flakes I can see blue sky, so I know that in a few minutes it will probably be June out in the yard, calm and sunny and warm. That’s how we know it’s springtime in the Rockies; we know only that whatever extreme we’re in at the moment, it’ll be some other extreme within the hour at worst. Or best.
By George Sibley
A quarter-century ago, shortly before starting this magazine, Ed Quillen wrote a major essay for High Country News – preceded by a two-day conference in Denver Ed had instigated with HCN publisher Ed Marston and the Pacific Foundation, assembling a motley of regional journalists, environmentalists, educators and other western thinkers to explore the question (slightly subversive, given the location): “Is Denver necessary?”
The president’s promise to bring “good jobs” back to America, we are told, was a major factor in his election. These “good jobs” he and his supporters want to bring back were mainly manufacturing jobs, in heavy industries such as making steel and other metals, logging and sawing lumber, mining coal and minerals, drilling for petroleum, and assembling those basic resources into material goods from automobiles to bulldozers, trains to airplanes, hand tools to factory machinery. Big tangible stuff – most of which the workers could even afford with the high wages they were getting, back when America was great.
As usual, in trying to figure out what I’m actually doing with my life here in Year One of the Republican Thousand-Year Reign, I’m finding myself spread-eagled over a typical set of random experiences.
I’ve been trying to figure out how and where Central Colorado – the region served (and somewhat created) by this magazine – fits into last month’s topic, “Great Divide” political geography. The Great Divide being not the physical Continental Divide but the demographic metropolitan-nonmetropolitan divide, a major factor in the 2016 election.
By George Sibley
Over here on the west slope of Central Colorado, we continue to be concerned about the evidence indicating the probability of a changing climate, despite official assurances from above that there is no such thing, or if there is, it is nothing to be concerned about.
By George Sibley
I’ll say upfront that this is not just another anti-Trump screed. Like him or not – and I don’t – the real challenge today, I think, is to figure out how we are going to get back to addressing the very real problems facing the whole planet, toward which The Donald is mostly a lump of obfuscation or outright denial. And we are surely not going to get anywhere at all if we continue to let him dominate our attention, pimping us daily into paroxysms of righteous wrath or gleeful rubber-stamping. The Donald knows the magician’s art of distracting with the left hand to cover what the right hand is doing.
I know this is the music issue, but there are a lot of other things kicking around in my mind these days. So my musical focus for this column is going to be short and sweet. Last week, Netflix failed us one night, so my partner Maryo and I watched Casablanca for about the fifth or tenth time. One of the great moments of that movie is when the Nazis are singing their Horst Wessel song in Rick’s Café Américain, and the resistance hero trying to escape to America gets the band to play the French national anthem; the crowd of Free French and other hangers-on drown out the bad guys. Where’s Victor Laszlo when we need him?
That’s what music ought to do for people, it seems to me – unite them when they need uniting. I find myself dredging for inspirational music these days, or inspirational anything; but it may be that January, especially this January, is no time to expect inspiration, time to just hunker down and wait for the planet to again remember to tilt us toward the sun. A good time too to think about old movies, maybe not so old as Casablanca (1943), but old enough so it’s a little surprising to find them still current, or current again, today.
I’m not thinking about The Manchurian Candidate, although that twice-made movie (1962 and 2004) was back in the public eye in December because our new president espouses admiration for a Russian dictator whose minions allegedly interfered electronically in the presidential election. This was seen by some as a parallel to the movie story of an American hero who was brainwashed by the Chinese Communists into serving as an agent for them. That seems to me to be too far a stretch – to think that Donald Trump could be made to cleave to any ideology more complex than “Look out for Number One.”
By George Sibley
Colorado has now had a state water plan long enough (half a year) for critical commentary to crank up.
The main criticism seems to be that the water plan is “not a plan at all, but just a lot of ideas and suggestions” for better water use. The critics seem to want a twelve-step program to follow, one step at a time, for meeting a mid-century gap between an unknown demand and an unknown supply, but there are just too many things we don’t know for sure but must try to prepare for. Will the 2050 population be 50, 75, or 100 percent higher? And how much of the increase will be in the metropolitan areas, and how much in places like Salida and Gunnison?
By George Sibley
I’ve been trying to figure out Colorado. I’m always a little irritated when I’m driving through the Upper Arkansas Valley, on my way to the Upper Gunnison, and I see one of those signs: “Now this is Colorado.” Sez who? And is my Upper Gunnison also “really Colorado” even though it is somewhat different ecologically and economically from the Upper Ark? What is “real Colorado?”
Water again. Just can’t get away from the stuff – literally can’t, I guess, being myself about 70 percent just water that learned how to stand up and look around.
What’s caught my attention this month is a new study from the U.S. Geological Survey, finding that more of the water in the Upper Colorado River streams and rivers originates from groundwater than from snowmelt runoff. This is a little counterintuitive – especially now in May and June, with our rivers so exuberant – sometimes a little ominously – with snowmelt.
By George Sibley
“Creative destruction” is a term we’re most familiar with in the context of capitalist economics: the restless flow and ebb of capital in its often mindless, generally heartless, search for The Next Big Thing – steam abandoned for internal combustion, coal yielding to natural gas yielding to solar, typewriters losing to computers, with individual lives and communities at least temporarily devastated if not destroyed as whole industries disappear here and new ones pop up a thousand miles away. Creative destruction.
by George Sibley With the holiday season upon us and 2014 gimping off, it’s that time of year when we try to slow down a little, contemplate the past year and plot a trajectory into the new year. But thanks to the recent election, the coming year looks like a mere continuation of last year, …
By George Sibley
I started writing this a couple days after Memorial Day – the beginning of “the patriot season.” Memorial Day, followed by Flag Day which is now past, with Independence Day on the horizon; the patriot season.
The patriot season began for me this year a couple days before Memorial Day. Every Friday afternoon, a group of musicians and singers assembles in random combinations down at Gunnison’s “living care center,” where we do an unrehearsed combination concert and group sing with the old folk biding their final time there. Many of the folks, unfortunately, no longer know who they are, but they still remember the words to the kinds of songs people used to sing to and for each other around the family piano, before capitalist entrepreneurs took over the task of entertaining us more professionally.