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 One of Henry Thoreau’s most intriguing lines, in my mind, was his exhortation: “Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature.” I thought of that one day last week, while following a few public land managers up a gully in an intermittent watershed near Gunnison called Cabin Creek. That quote led, …
By George Sibley We’ve all heard it said: Give a person a fish, you’ve fed the person for a day. Teach the person to fish, and you’ve fed him or her for life. So—Trump threw me a fish. At least he’s the guy who wanted his name on the checks, but our woebegone Congress had …
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 An interesting thing happened mid-March in Boulder which the media seem to have mostly missed. Commissioners from Grand County showed up at a noisy Boulder County commissioners’ hearing on a West Slope-to-East Slope transmountain water diversion project – to testify on behalf of the project. It is probably the first time ever, …
By George Sibley Last month most of us wrote about snow here; maybe this month I’ll write about snow’s dark partner, cold. It’s been so cold over here in Gunnison that when I stepped outside yesterday with a cup of coffee, it froze so fast that it was still hot …. I’d like to be …
By George Sibley This snow issue of Colorado Central sends me back almost forty years to some personal discoveries about how best to live with the stuff. Growing up in America in the Age of the Automobile, it had not really occurred to me that the winter in snowy places had different levels on which …
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 eternal election that was looming last month still looms this month. Mercifully, it will be behind us by next month – although we will then live with the consequences for what, in the worst case, could be a long time, setting up a possible Putinesque “White Palace” coup, unopposed by a …
By George Sibley It’s the culmination of summer over here in the Upper Gunnison, plantwise anyway. My partner Maryo is a serious gardener, and she’s gradually weaving me into that web of life. I reached my current relatively ripe old age without learning much about growing things – something I increasingly see as a flaw …
By George Sibley Said farewell to a couple of friends last week. One was an aspen – a lovely tree about thirty-five years old according to its stump, in the prime of life. After three years of increasingly evident decline, it budded this year but failed to produce any leaves. It was one of a …
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
In the beginning all the world was America … – John Locke, 1689
That these United States are not very united today seems obvious.
We’ve seen the red and blue map from the 2016 election: the blue urban islands that concentrate four fifths of the nation’s population, in a rural red sea over which the remaining fifth is spread. It’s also evident that the red sea has risen to wash over many once-blue urban-industrial places abandoned by their industries, and has also lapped up into the suburbs where urbanites live who don’t want to live in the urb.
The blue islands and the red sea might be two distinct Americas – separate cultures, each with its own beliefs and a shrinking area of shared values and goals. We could even say that each of the Americas elected its own president in 2016 – the metropolitan cities gave Hillary Clinton a popular majority, and the non-metro regions gave Donald Trump the Electoral College – which under the Constitution trumps the popular vote. But in his continued obsessive attacks on Clinton, Trump – the consummate gold-plated metropolitan himself – is behaving as though he were confronting the leader of a foreign power.
What we tend to avoid in all this is just how far back in our history this two-Americas problem might go. We want to think that we have, like the Pledge says, been one nation until recently. But I think a close and non-nostalgic look at our history shows that, while we’ve had episodes of domestic tranquility on the daily surface of life, the hairline cracks have always been there, with someone from one America or the other episodically driving in a big wedge, unleashing that uncompromising violence of faction that was the Founding Brothers’ greatest fear for fragile democracy.
I think this, like so much of our culture, goes all the way back to 18th-century England and Europe.
By George Sibley
Professor John Hausdoerffer is running wild at Western State Colorado University in Gunnison – but not with the conventional 20th-century “born-to-be-wild” wildness.
His is a disciplined, philosophically grounded wildness, most recently manifested in Western’s December announcement that the university (which 25 years ago barely had an Environmental Studies minor) now has a School of Environment and Sustainability, which Dr. Hausdoerffer – Dean of the new school – has worked with other faculty to create from a mix of existing and new Western programs. The new school assembles a place-based but globally-visioned smorgasbord of sustainability transition initiatives and public land initiatives ranging from Mountain Resilience to Environmental Diversity and Justice.
Western has already begun to show up on national surveys of top schools for environmentally oriented programs; under Dr. Hausdoerffer’s leadership the new programs will put Western ahead of many larger and wealthier universities – less fortuitously located and less creatively imagined. Western has finally ceased being embarrassed by the long-obvious fact that most students come here for the mountains and outdoor recreation, and has begun incorporating its advantageous locus into programs in a living laboratory for helping students re-create themselves for the 21st century.
At the heart of Hausdoerffer’s vision lies a concept of wildness, both really new and really old. Despite an obvious talent for negotiation and management in the cultural environment of academic politics, Dr. John (as students call him) is first a philosopher, in his academic preparation as well as by natural inclination, at home with other modern nature philosophers like Gary Snyder, Rod Nash, Vandana Shiva or Winona LaDuke, all of whom he has brought to Western’s autumn Headwaters Conferences.
California philosopher-poet Gary Snyder has long wrestled with the distinct concepts of “wilderness” and “wildness,” and he and Dr. John tag-teamed on it at a Headwaters conference several years ago, planting the concept of working wild.
By George Sibley Soon as a bluebird settles on a fence, Two shall string out and beat it up the trail, A jackass first, a miner at his tail. I’m taking a break this month from the urban-rural, metro-nonmetro divide and what it’s doing to us, and going back to our natural Great Divide and …
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?”
By George Sibley
“Sense of place” is a term that gets used a lot today, but like all terms that get used a lot, its meaning gets as spread out, shallowed and lost in its own debris as a snowmelt stream in October.
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.
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.”
Things may be settling out a bit by the time you read this. All the cheers and jeers over the election, the anger in “Not My President” and “Build The Wall” rallies here and there, the stock market rollercoaster, the warnings and pleas from leaders around the world, and so on. All of that now settles into a hiatus like the runup to some kind of cross between chess and poker, as Trump begins lining up his pieces for the transition and his opponents start lining up the countering pieces. We’ll see who is bluffing as we move into the first hundred days of the future.
Was Trump’s victory truly a surprise? I will say that I didn’t really believe it would happen, but I also had a creeping feeling about the election from the moment that our English cousins voted to leave the European Union – no more illusions there about “Great Britain,” I guess. It felt like a preview for the morning-after headline in the New York Times: “Donald Trump is Elected President in Stunning Repudiation of the Establishment.” I guess when confronted with really hard realities, “stunning repudiations” are the equivalent of the “denial” stage in the grieving process.
Last month I wrote here about the nature – no, the culture – of democracy in a complex, technologically advanced mass society. Such societies are run, of necessity, by elites who know how to build, operate, manage and maintain the vast systems that provide the food, water, power, fuels and everything else we need to support “civilization as we know it.” It’s a system that works in part because no single elite can do it all; the private and public management teams, the scientists, the technicians, the creatives and innovators, the financiers, the lawmakers and lawyers, the media disseminators – all depend on other elites themselves, both in their work and in their daily lives.
By George Sibley
Trying to reduce the personal library a while back, I came across a book titled The Irony of Democracy: An Uncommon Introduction to American Politics. I have no idea where I got it – probably some yard sale – and don’t remember ever opening it. By the reduction standards I’ve set, it should therefore have gone into the box I’m planning to leave on the public library doorstep some night.
By George Sibley I should probably be trying to write something wonky about American politics, but instead I’m writing this article from the near-wilds on the sunny side of Grand Mesa, at a rendezvous of an organization formerly known as the Crested Butte Hotshots. The Hotshots were a forest-fire crew based in Crested Butte who …
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?”
By George Sibley
May and June are dominated here by the garden. Gardens, I should say; when we moved into our Gunnison home 20-some years ago, we were unimpressed with the expanse of bad lawn that came with it, and we resolved to annually convert 50 square feet of bad lawn to garden space. I lack my partner Maryo’s experience with plants, and undoubtedly some of her dedication – I mean, she grew tomatoes in a community garden in Chicago right by a bus stop, which involved defensive measures like painting the tomatoes with a flour mixture to make them look diseased to random hunter-gatherers. But I signed on as the project heavy-lifter, being no lover of monocultures, and now we have little gardens – some kind of growing together – all over the yard.
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
I sometimes sort of joke, in these pages and elsewhere, about the 21st century, wondering in 2016 if we will ever get to the 21st century, and what it will be like if we do.
I do argue – seriously, not jokingly – that “a new century” will not really begin until we actually start doing a lot of constructive work (not just “regulatory”) to address the challenges we began to bicker about in the late 20th century.
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
It was a moderately surreal event: 80 people gathered on top of Monarch Pass on the Continental Divide in early January (sunny, temperature 9 degrees), around an altar carved out of the deep snowbanks, on which were arranged icons of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
By George Sibley
I got talked into revisiting my checkered past as an instructor at Western Colorado State University this fall; the Environment and Sustainability program needed a class covered, and asked if I would conduct a seminar on Western water. So I cobbled up a seminar titled “The Colorado River in the Anthropocene.”
By George Sibley
T.S. Eliot was wrong: November, not April, is the cruelest month, teasing us not with lilacs from a dead land, but with flirty little snowstorms that promise much but deliver little.
Yes, it’s the November doldrums again over here on the west side of Central Colorado, where we are waiting, as usual in November, for snow. Lots of snow. Monarch Ski Area, on the east side, opened Nov. 20 on a 20-inch base and a prayer, and Crested Butte opened Nov. 25 for Thanksgiving with about the same, plus some manmade stuff.
by George Sibley As birds have flight, our special gift is reason. … Should we choose, we could exercise our reason to what no other animal can do: we could limit ourselves voluntarily, choose to remain God’s creatures instead of making ourselves gods. – Bill McKibben, The End of Nature Reason is just not as …
by George Sibley I’m doing a seminar here at Western State this fall, titled “The Colorado River in the Anthropocene.” The Anthropocene, as many of you have probably read or observed yourselves, is an acknowledgement that humans have, over the course of the past 200-10,000 years, begun imposing the kinds of largely irreversible changes on …
by George Sibley Here in the headwaters of the American West, in Central Colorado where many of our western rivers start, this is a good time to be thinking about what we call “fresh water.” That’s water that lacks most of the dissolved stuff found in the oceans – the essential waters that nurture all …
by George Sibley A couple months ago I wrote about the “One Valley Prosperity Project” (OVPP) in the Upper Gunnison Basin – the western part of Central Colorado. This is our valley’s latest assault on the challenge of economic development for high remote mountain valleys. Most recently, to better inform the discussion, the county-led OVPP …
by George Sibley By the time you read this, something about the future of Central Colorado – this place where the waters of the West start – will be at least written down. I’m writing this a day after I sent off my part of a Gunnison Basin Water Plan out to 2050: an “appendix” …
by George Sibley “Economic development” is again in the air in the Upper Gunnison Valley. For the past three decades, the Upper Gunnison River basin has periodically engaged in the quest for economic development. The first effort, in the 1980s, was mostly the conventional smokestack-chasing gambit typical of mid-20th-century local economic development. That effort ended …
by George Sibley I’ve been following the recent vaccination debate – if that’s the right word – with some growing confusion. I’m a believer in vaccinations if I don’t think about it too much. But, of course, I think about it too much, and I find myself wandering off into the swamps of ambiguity that …
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, …