Fast forward some 55 years and not much has changed in this town of 8,500 in Montezuma County. Cortez still has its Old West traditions of doing things as they’ve always been done for decades, though more than one quarter of residents are now Hispanic or Native American. It’s a gun rights stronghold, and to say residents are mostly conservative is putting it mildly.

But what surprised me this year was a painful public example of outright intolerance.

I don’t know Lance McDaniel, 64, well, but I’ve learned that he went to high school here, then left to grow a career and a family elsewhere in Arizona and California. When he moved back he felt a need to serve his community, so stepped up in 2018 to fill a vacancy on the school board. He says he soon realized he wasn’t fitting in, but things came to a head a few months ago.

It all began with pizza. McDaniel and others from a local church had been reading about how difficult it was for LBGTQ+ students to fit into middle school. So the group decided to show the kids that there were friendly people around by delivering free pizzas to three Rainbow Clubs established for LBGTQ+ students in the schools.

The group figured the kids needed community support, having read that several national surveys showed that “four out of five gay and lesbian students say they don’t know one supportive adult at school.”

As for the students, their reaction to the outside support for their get-togethers combined gratitude and relief: “It’s nice to have a place (to eat pizza) where we can hang out with no judgment,” said one student. “It’s nice to be able to talk with people my own age,” said another. McDaniel says it was clear that the kids liked the attention, “always thanking everyone involved” when the pizza showed up.

Somehow, though, as social media began telling the story, “pizza parties” of gender-fluid students were repeatedly mentioned in a negative way. It all came to a head when a virtual school board meeting was interrupted by people complaining loudly about these odd “pizza parties.” Worse, McDaniel and his family became the targets of threats and denunciations on social media. 

Then last July, a petition to oust McDaniel from the school board began to circulate, with a recall election slated for February 16, 2021, if passed.

The petition charged that in several of his posts on social media about social justice, McDaniel had “… proven to be a poor role model for our children.” The petition added, “We need school board members that understand leadership and the power of mentoring, and know not to voice their personal, political, or social opinions that could influence children.”

McDaniel told the local press that he stood by his social media posts. “My personal opinion is that (conservatives) have bullied us long enough, and that we don’t need to be quiet. If I see racism, I’ll point it out; if I see someone being oppressed, I’ll say something about it,” he said to local radio station KSJD.

McDaniel lost the recall by a two-to-one vote in an election that cost the school district $21,000. He could have been voted out for free, as his appointed seat was up in November.

Still, this punitive recall failed to silence McDaniel’s voice. On social media he still sticks up for the underdog and likes to share a quote from Charles Dickens: “Never…be mean in anything; never be false; never be cruel. Avoid those three vices…and (we) can always be hopeful.” And McDaniel and his church friends continue to drop off pizzas for kids at their Rainbow Clubs.

But there’s a new problem: Stories are circulating that the school board wants to close down the Rainbow Clubs. To head that off, some community members presented a petition to the board on May 11, asking for support of the clubs and the students who enjoy getting together.

Let’s let them eat pizza in peace.

The post It all began with pizza appeared first on Writers On The Range.

That’s because the average home in the greater Bozeman area is going for more than $650,000, up from an already astronomical $500,000 in early 2020. A couple of tenured professors at the local Montana State University might be able to swing that, but it is way out of reach for the rest of the faculty.

If college professors can’t afford homes, then what kind of local worker can who has no outside source of income? Certainly not public-school teachers, firefighters, cops, or journalists. Service workers? Forget about it. 

As pandemic-spurred remote work is freeing folks from the office and the cities, they are buying up remote work-centers, aka houses, in places far away from their cubicles. The result is real estate markets blowing up across the West, as well as the nation.

It will take $533,000 to buy an average-price home in Bend, Oregon, and $425,000 in Corvallis — a 23 percent jump from a couple of years ago. The pattern repeats just about everywhere, with 25- to 35-percent price increases in nearly every market: Tucson, Flagstaff, Tahoe, Salt Lake City, Durango.

You can’t escape by forgoing homeownership and renting, either. Rentals, if you can find them, are similarly expensive. Boise’s median rent shot up by 23 percent over the last year, with other mid-sized Western cities seeing similar leaps.

Many of these places have long been too pricey for the average worker, but a hopeful homeowner could always find look farther afield, as home prices tended to drop in direct proportion to the distance from the town’s center. It’s the old “drive till you qualify” non-policy of affordable housing, leaned on by communities from Jackson to Aspen to Park City.

But now the Zoom Boom-fueled market fire is spreading beyond the “best places” into the once-affordable bastions of working class neighborhoods, the bedroom communities, rural ranchettes and even trailer parks.

In other words, you could drive all night and still not qualify unless you have cash coming in from a trust fund, you sold out of a more expensive market, or you happened to hit it big with cryptocurrency.

Something is bound to break. When even drive-till-you-qualify breaks down, the non-Zoom workers have little choice but to crowd into substandard housing, move into tent-towns, or set up camp in the backseat in the Walmart parking lot. I know experienced teachers who have been forced into rooming with others in small apartments, like college students. It’s hardly surprising that so many businesses are having a hard time finding workers.

Perhaps the most maddening part of all of this is that the Zoom Boom isn’t the half of it: The biggest real estate action is happening in the luxury markets. Aspen saw 90 sales over $10 million last year and the average home price shot up to more than $11 million. Jackson, Wyoming’s, median sale price last year was $2.5 million, and it continues to climb.

This is happening during a time when more than a half-million people have died in the United States due to complications from COVID-19 and the U.S. economy has shed millions of jobs. Los Angeles County’s unhoused population is approaching 70,000 and even quaint small towns are seeing growing numbers of unhoused people. Wyoming, which Jackson Hole real estate firms tout as a “tax haven with a view,” is facing a budget crunch, forcing more than $40 million in cuts at the University of Wyoming.

There are solutions: Tax the wealthy — and the high-dollar real estate transactions — and put the revenues into building affordable housing.

Call it what you want: socialism, redistribution of wealth, compassion, or just a tweak in the system to keep the economy from collapsing and violent revolution from occurring.

Or maybe call it what it is: A return to a time when we took care of one another and no one felt the need to amass billions of dollars of wealth at the expense of the working class, or the people who keep America running.

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One lightning strike or tossed cigarette on the wrong windy day, and Ashland could be destroyed as completely as the town of Paradise, California, in 2018.

This reality was brought home with terrifying force last September, when a wind-driven wildfire roared through the nearby towns of Talent and Phoenix, destroying over 2,500 residences in a matter of hours.  Ashland was largely spared, but only because the wind pushed the fire in another direction.

Over the past several years, the city has implemented the ambitious “Ashland Forest Resiliency” project to reduce flammable fuels on thousands of acres of public lands. Tools in the Ashland Watershed include thinning and controlled burns. The project is considered to be a model ecological approach, not mere window-dressing to justify commercial timber harvest as is true of many “forest health” projects.

As a homeowner, I’ve supported the project, and as a conservation biologist, I’ve been impressed with how it’s been carried out.

Yet even as the city and its partners are diligently reducing forest fuels, more and more homes are being built in every nook and cranny of private land abutting the watershed. Many are McMansions commanding expansive views of the valley below. All these homes are at extreme risk of wildfire. As if the sense of crisis surrounding fuels reduction wasn’t enough, this adds another crisis, one we’ve made ourselves.

Recently, I took a favorite trail leading from the edge of edge of town into the watershed.  I always look forward to walking through an avenue of small manzanita trees. In spring, their pink urn-like blossoms are mobbed by bumble bees and hummingbirds.  In fall and winter, their berries — the “little apples” that give these shrubs their Spanish name —  feed robins, thrushes and bears. Winter storms turn these groves into an enchanted labyrinth of green leaves, red bark and white snow.

Not this year. Not again in my lifetime.  I found that this once intact and healthy wildlife habitat had been reduced to “defensible space.” The manzanitas had been harshly hacked back; those that had been spared stood isolated in a barren expanse of blood-red stumps.  I counted the rings on one of the stumps, revealing that it had been at least 55 years old when we decided it was too dangerous to live.  

The Forest Resiliency Project considered these manzanitas a threat because they were close to the city limits — and even closer to the big new homes being built outside the city limits. 

They were sacrificed to increase our sense of security, and for no other reason. They were mostly healthy and important for wildlife.  They shaded the soil and hosted mycorrhizal fungi integral to the nutrient cycles of the forest. 

Yes, someday a wildfire would have burned here.  But without our presence, that fire would not have been a tragedy, merely an episode in the long life of the land, and an opportunity for renewal.  Manzanitas are well-adapted to fire; some species actually require fire for seed germination.  

Oregonians take pride in being environmentally aware. Yet we accept the ecological destruction of the “fuels reduction” paradigm, rather than putting limits on our relentless expansion into the rural landscape. 

Perhaps my town is becoming safer than it was before.  But it’s questionable that any amount of “thinning” could protect Ashland from a wind-driven firestorm coming out of the watershed.  

The fire that destroyed much of Talent and Phoenix, Oregon, like many of last summer’s devastating California wildfires, did not start on heavily forested public land.  

Instead, it ignited and roared through a typical valley mosaic of creekside woodlands, orchards and residential neighborhoods. The hard truth is that for Ashland and many other towns around the West, avoiding catastrophic wildfire is as much a matter of luck as preparedness.

Still, we have to try, right? That means some degree of fuels reduction.  But we must acknowledge the losses to the ecological integrity, the habitat value, and the beauty of this land that we love so much.

The post We blame the trees, but whose fault is it? appeared first on Writers On The Range.

In 1855, when my ancestors entered into a treaty with the United States, we ceded millions of acres in what eventually became Idaho, Oregon and Washington. In exchange we reserved an exclusive homeland and rights to fish, hunt, gather and pasture throughout our vast aboriginal territory.  

Then in 1860 gold was discovered, and thousands of prospectors flooded across our borders in violation of the treaty, damaging our sacred places and natural resources and causing unspeakable injury to our people.

The United States failed to uphold the terms of the 1855 Treaty and instead forced the Nez Perce to enter into a new treaty in 1863.  Known by us as the “steal treaty,” it reduced the size of our homeland by 90% and allowed miners and other non-Indians to remain on lands they had illegally occupied. 

When several Nez Perce bands led by Chief Joseph demanded that the United States uphold the promises it had made in the 1855 Treaty, and refused to move to the new reservation, the federal government resorted to military force, prompting the Nez Perce War of 1877.

A century and a half later, the promise of gold once again threatens our homeland and way of life. 

The Stibnite Gold Project is proposed by Perpetua Resources, formerly Midas Gold, a Canadian company that recently moved to Idaho. The mine site is located within Nez Perce ceded territory in the headwaters of the South Fork Salmon River, a watershed that once was home to one of the largest Chinook salmon runs in the Columbia River Basin.  We have treaty-reserved rights in this culturally significant area, and have worked over the years to restore fish habitat that benefits everyone, an effort that cost millions of dollars.

The Stibnite Gold Project would be one of the largest gold mines in the country.  The company aims to extract between four and five million ounces of gold from three open pit mines during the estimated 21- to 28-year life of the project.

Despite Perpetua’s claim that it will “restore the site” that is already heavily polluted by a legacy of mining, the proposal to expand the area and mine it again will add hundreds of millions of tons of additional mining waste and tailings. The proposal will also require storage of the new toxic waste, plus active water treatment long after the company is done mining the site.

Perpetua’s mining would also restrict or prohibit treaty-reserved access for more than two decades or even longer. It would also destroy critical habitat for endangered Chinook salmon and bull trout, and other resources cherished by the Nez Perce and all Idahoans.

The Nez Perce doubt that Perpetua Resources will stick around if the mine is permitted by the federal government.  Perpetua is now majority-owned by a New York-based corporation that recently replaced most of the mining company’s governing board. 

The company might opt to sell its shares for a huge profit and then exit the scene. A new corporation could then step in to extract gold, leaving behind a new legacy of toxic contamination and resource destruction that will plague our communities for generations to come. 

We know all too well the pattern of exploit-and-abandon. Corporations don’t keep their promises, and federal mining laws offer little or no accountability. We want this permit to mine gold denied.

The United States, as a signatory to the 1855 Treaty and trustee to the Tribe, has a responsibility to protect and honor our treaty rights and resources.  These treaty obligations, which predate the 1872 General Mining Law, are rooted in the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution and represent the solemn word of the United States. 

For us, the Nimíipuu, the value of the land, fish, wildlife and other natural resources will always be worth more than gold. Chief Joseph left us with these words that we will never forget: “It makes my heart sick when I remember all the good words and the broken promises.” 

The United States must not turn a blind eye to the Stibnite Gold project. We ask that this country honor Nez Perce treaty rights and protect the lands and resources important to all the people of Idaho.

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“That could fall,” the father quavered. “It could kill someone!”

Puzzled, the young man climbed onto a chair, and pulled the axe out of the rafter. Everyone fell all over themselves thanking him. But he quickly broke off the engagement, concerned that such inanity might be inheritable.

This resembles ongoing dithering over the 1922 Colorado River Compact, a 99-year-old agreement among the seven states through which the Colorado River meanders, on how the consumptive use of the river’s water should be divided to give each state a fair share. The agreement was necessary to get federal participation (money) to build dams to control the erratic river.

The best they were able to do, given the sketchy information they had about each state’s future development and also about the flow of the river, was to divide the river into two “basins” around the natural divide of the Colorado River canyons: Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico in the Upper Basin; and California, Arizona and Nevada in the Lower Basin. Each basin would get to consume 7.5 million acre-feet of the river’s water.

This placed a responsibility on the Upper Basin states to “not cause the flow of the river at Lees Ferry (the measuring point in the canyons) to be depleted” below the Lower Basin’s share.

A generous reading of that lawyerly clause in the Compact would say the upper states should just be careful that their water development doesn’t dip into the lower states’ allocation.

A less generous reading would say that if for any reason the flow at Lees Ferry fell below the average of 7.5 million acre feet — whether due to over-appropriation by the upper states, or to a natural cause like a 20-year headwaters drought — the lower states would place a call on the upper states, which would have to cut their own uses and send their water downriver, whether they “caused” the shortage or not.

To maintain that flow in a drought, the upper states would bear the full pain of the drought for the whole river.

Guess which interpretation the upper states chose for their own 1948 compact? Never mind that a Compact call led by California for its share of water is nowhere mentioned in the 1922 Compact. The axe was planted in the rafter.

They might better have asked how the 1922 Compact creators themselves envisioned the unknown future. The transcripts of the 27 Compact meetings show that the seven state commissioners and their federal chairman Herbert Hoover were concerned, as late as their twenty-first meeting, that they did not know enough about the river’s flows to make a permanent equitable division of the waters.

Hoover summarized their concern, and their intent: “We make now, for lack of a better word, a temporary equitable division,” leaving the further apportionment of the river’s use “to the hands of those men who may come after us, possessed of a far greater fund of information.” They even included in the Compact (Article VI) instructions for reconvening to consider “claims or controversy… over the meaning or performance of any of the terms of this compact.”

By the drought years of the1930s, it was already obvious that the 7.5 million-acre feet Compact allocations were unrealistic. That would have been a logical time for the upper states to pull the axe out of the rafter, before the river was so fully developed.

But they didn’t, and as the Compact began to take on the aura of something carved in stone on a holy mountain, the fear of the “Compact call” gradually descended into expensive paranoia.

The vastly expensive 24 million acre-feet of storage in Powell Reservoir just upstream from Lees Ferry was created there to fulfill the Upper Basin’s self-assumed “delivery obligation,” come hell or low water.

But now, hellish low water has come to Powell, and Upper states are developing costly “demand management” programs whereby someone yet unspecified would pay ranchers to fallow fields so their water can be “banked” in Powell against the dreaded “Compact call.”

The seven states are now — finally —initiating negotiations on a more reality-based governance of the Colorado River. Let’s hope they have the good sense to pull that axe out of the rafters before negotiating fair water use under it.

The post Pumping up fear along the Colorado River appeared first on Writers On The Range.

More than 76% of eligible Coloradoans voted in 2020 — second only to Minnesota in statewide turnout. Every registered voter gets a mail-in ballot weeks ahead of election day, there are convenient and safe drop boxes, and in-person voting is also available. People seem to love the choices.

Yet other Rocky Mountain states seem locked in competition to pass the most brazenly anti-democratic election laws.

Montana bills would eliminate Election Day voter registration and impose new restrictions on absentee voting. In Wyoming, many lawmakers seek to abolish voting by mail entirely.

Hold my beer, says Arizona. Following Democrats’ success in federal races last fall, GOP legislators unleashed a barrage of bills restricting voting, of which seven are advancing through the legislature. Those measures include requiring absentee voters to get their ballots notarized and banning practices that don’t even exist in Arizona, such as automatic voter registration and Election Day registration.

And in Idaho, GOP state House Majority Leader Mike Moyle said, “Voting shouldn’t be easy,” when introducing a bill to make it a felony to collect and return multiple ballots on behalf of others.

While the most extreme measures may fail, still harmful bills remain, showing the need for federal protection of political rights. U.S. election overseers called November’s contests the most secure in history, yet “stolen election” claims still get pushed to justify rules changes. The first three months of 2021 saw legislators across 47 states introduce more than 360 restrictive bills encompassing dozens of voter suppression tactics.

Obstacles to voting impact people of color most heavily, and in the Interior West, Native Americans are the primary casualty. The 65,000-plus votes cast in the Arizona portion of Navajo Nation overwhelmingly favored President Joe Biden in 2020 and easily exceeded his statewide victory margin. In Tohono O’odham Nation, bordering Mexico, about 90% of ballots went for Biden.

It’s no accident that indigenous voters would be most inconvenienced or deterred by the four Arizona bills that would create new obstacles for absentee voters. The sheer size of the Navajo Reservation — 27,000 square miles spanning three states — makes in-person voting difficult.

Multiple studies have found that mail-in voting has been politically neutral. And despite being dragged down in federal elections last year by a historically unpopular candidate atop the ticket, Republicans dominated state elections and made a net gain in Congressional seats.

Meanwhile, more than 500 state bills were introduced this year to improve voter protections and strengthen procedures, including every West Coast and Plains state but Kansas. Kentucky just proved it possible to pass a bipartisan law that both improves election security and protects voters.

But stopping disenfranchisement of vulnerable groups requires federal reform. For decades, our Voting Rights Act required states with histories of voter suppression to get federal approval for new voting laws, ensuring they had no discriminatory purpose or effect. In practice, the law protected citizens in every state.

In 2006, an overwhelming Congressional majority (and a unanimous Senate) extended the Voting Rights Act for 25 years. But in 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts — who worked to restrict ballot access prior to his judicial career — joined the 5-4 Supreme Court majority to gut key protections of the law.

The ruling enabled states to resume voter suppression tactics, which Texas did within hours.

In response, the House of Representatives recently passed the “For the People Act,” potentially the most important voting rights advance since the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Now in the Senate, the bill would expand and secure ballot access, increase election security and reduce the power of money over elections.

With not a single Republican supporting the House bill, however, the bill is doomed unless the filibuster is ended. Even if the Act passed, one more task remains: passing a constitutional Amendment that embeds an affirmative right to vote and ensuresour votes count equally.

For as long as our ability to vote depends on the state we live in, and the political party controlling it, voting is merely a vulnerable privilege, not a right.

The post Some Western states join the rush to suppress voting appeared first on Writers On The Range.

But when Western cities grow, they look everywhere for more water, with little regard for the rivers they drain. As the city’s population grew, Santa Fe turned to its groundwater. Later, New Mexico reached across the desert to take water from the Colorado River and deliver it to Santa Fe, Albuquerque and other beneficiaries on the Rio Grande.

And yet the Santa Fe River downstream was not reduced to a dry and dusty arroyo. In fact, the riverbed is relatively verdant, supporting cottonwoods, willows and sustaining some irrigation in communities downstream. That moisture helps make Santa Fe a beautiful place in the desert.

That’s because the water that Santa Fe residents use to flush their toilets or pour down the drain ultimately makes its way to the wastewater treatment plant, which returns the treated water to the Santa Fe River. That could soon change.

The city’s water bureaucrats have fastened on the idea of capturing some of that treated effluent, either to get additional “return flow” credits by returning it to the Rio Grande, or by moving to direct potable reuse, a process derided in California as “toilet to tap.”

But both of these proposals will also take water out of the Santa Fe River, affecting downstream irrigators, wildlife and even the cultural identity of the region.

As climate change tightens its grip on the arid West, water managers are focusing on wastewater as a source of “new” water for cities. It’s hard to blame them: Municipalities don’t need new water rights in order to reuse treated effluent.

Communities dump their treated sewage into rivers, and downstream users draw that water, treat it, and send it to residents’ homes. Orange County and Irvine Ranch in California are pioneers in recycling wastewater. The Bureau of Reclamation now administers a fund for water-reuse projects, and the Environmental Protection Agency has made it a national priority.

There’s another strategy that Western cities like Santa Fe are exploiting to make use of their wastewater. Instead of sending all of the treated wastewater back into the potable water supply, Santa Fe plans to send some of its wastewater to the Rio Grande via a $20 million pipeline. This would give the city the right to pump additional water from the Rio Grande. Regardless of how the city proceeds, the Santa Fe River will end up losing some of the water that provides for its existence.

Never forget that Western water law was set up to serve users, not rivers. And under Western states’ laws, cities own their treated sewage, meaning they can use it or sell it downstream as they wish. In fact, wastewater is such a reliable supply that it gets top value at Western water auctions.

Santa Fe’s webpages overflow with the community’s commitment to sustainability. But these values were disregarded in the city’s focus on squeezing more water out of the system for a growing populace.

Wastewater has other values and uses, though. How do we draw attention to them? A report by the National Wildlife Federation, the Pacific Institute and the Meadows Institute warns that reusing water can inadvertently “starve natural systems of needed flows and potentially reduce water available to communities downstream.”

Instead, the groups urge planners to “incorporate actions to protect (and where possible, enhance) river flows downstream for the benefit of people and the environment” https://pacinst.org/publication/healthy-waterways/.

By now, years of battles over Western water should have taught water managers that while people value reliable water supplies, they also value living rivers, small farms, historic communities and recreation. The report urges water managers to consult with the public before making decisions. It also lays out a blueprint for incorporating the value of living rivers, as well as addressing water supply.

Wringing more use from water, even wastewater, is a powerful tool in addressing water scarcity. But just like the dams, pipelines and other tools of the Cadillac Desert era, wastewater ought to be approached with respect for all of its values. The proponents of water reuse need to acknowledge this.

The post Water can be wrung out too much appeared first on Writers On The Range.

Afterward, Polis’s press aides pointed to the hundreds of do-good proclamations the governor issues each year, and the governor quickly declared his beef brisket the rival of any in Colorado.

But this proclamation differed from those affirming truck drivers, bat awareness and breakfast burritos. It called for broad change. Using the language of a “MeatOut” Day proclamation written by an animal rights group, his statement cited the benefits of a plant-based diet in reducing our carbon footprint, preserving ecosystems and preventing animal cruelty. It also noted the growing alternatives to meat, dairy and eggs.

In the 1880s, when my great-grandparents homesteaded in eastern Colorado, they grazed cattle on the short-grass prairie. Ranchers still do. Once off the range, though, our beef production is best understood as an industrial process. The foundation is grain.

In his book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Bill Gates explains the modern pyramid of protein: A chicken eats two calories’ worth of grain to give us one calorie of poultry. For cattle, it’s six calories of feed to produce one calorie of beef. I’ve stood in rows of corn tassels 12 feet high at maturity, the growth boosted by luxuriant applications of fertilizer. I’ve pinched my nose while driving past feedlots large enough for 80,000 or more head. I’ve heard the bellow of cows minutes away from the knife at slaughterhouses.

Denver no longer has slaughterhouses but still prides itself on its livestock heritage. The annual Western Stock Show puts cowboy hats in high-end restaurants and strip joints alike. Cattle represent 50% of Colorado’s $7 billion agriculture economy, and livestock altogether 70%. After Polis’s proclamation, livestock producers debated boycotting Denver’s Stock Show for other venues — perhaps Oklahoma.

Even a legislator from one of metro Denver’s poorer neighborhoods objected to Polis’s proclamation, pointing out that nutritious vegetarian options aren’t available to many of her constituents.

But it’s not just low-income areas that lack meal choices. Fast-food franchises in big cities and small towns all cater to the lowest-common denominator, their high-volume enterprises predicated on cheap meat, especially beef. The consequences are that we now have bulbous bellies and too many heart attacks. We struggle to live with restraint.

The meaty issue here is not about meat vs. no-meat. Rather, it’s about scale and processes. What have we sacrificed in pursuit of volume?

Credit the ranchers who graze cattle holistically in an attempt to replicate the once-vast herds of bison. But also note that grass-fed beef needs buyers. Most holistically raised cows get further fattened on grain. That’s where the market is.

There’s also the looming issue of cows contributing to climate change, as highly polluting methane comes out of both ends of cattle. Gates, always the technologist, insists that innovation can reduce the carbon output of agriculture by reducing our yen for real beef. He put his money where my mouth is by investing in a vegetarian product called the Impossible Burger. Last week I had one. It fooled me. I thought it was beef.

Meanwhile, the urban-rural divide remains starkly real and evident in voting and development patterns. While cities struggle to contain their growth, many small towns struggle to hang on. Ironically, the economies of most of these at-risk rural towns are premised on industrial-scale agriculture.

Rural Colorado never has liked Polis, a savvy businessman from the exurbs of Boulder who favors market solutions. He had barely warmed his gubernatorial seat when handmade signs began showing up on rural country roads asking “Why does Polis hate…” You fill in the blank.

This meatless proclamation was tone-deaf. It could have narrowly affirmed meatless alternatives rather than decried meat. Denial and anger will not prevail, though. I’m reminded of when coal producers, 10 and 15 years ago, were fighting the future of renewables instead of figuring out their place in the world to come.

 Though most of us may continue to eat beef, some of us have already begun to shift away. Polis was perhaps the unwitting messenger of that truth — that cows in the West are no longer sacred.

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That may explain the spirit of can-do volunteerism that drove the county’s early COVID-19 vaccine efforts. Nurse practitioner Karen Zink took on the push for organizing with a Dec. 30 call to San Juan Basin Public Health director Liane Jollon, who gave Zink permission to start planning. 

“We were out of the gate in 18 days, with first vaccinations January 18,” says Zink. Their base was the La Plata County Fairgrounds, which Zink credits with being a trusted place, not clinical or political.

Basin Health, which oversees Archuleta and La Plata counties, has since taken over, but Zink’s team pushed the region into the lead statewide, at one point vaccinating 254 people an hour. Now the proof is in the numbers: 70 percent of seniors over 70 are vaccinated in La Plata County alone.

Why was the county so successful? One answer can be found in the Latinx community. La Plata County is smothered by federal immigration employees, with more working in the Four Corners area than in any other region in the state.

“That consistent threat forced us to organize,” says Enrique Orozco, lead community advocate for Compañeros Immigrant Resource Center, a nonprofit based in Durango. “When the chance for mass vaccination came, we had the beginnings of a network to get the word out if vaccines became available.”

But challenges were everywhere: Few people had access to computers, many had a deep-seated fear of any governmental authority and the population was widely dispersed.

But Orozco had a superb organizer in Beatriz Garcia, program manager at Compañeros who distributes food on Fridays from Compañeros’ office. Orozco says the network she grew to distribute food was perfect for developing a get-the-vaccine chain.

Orozco credits early vaccine recipients for helping to counter COVID vaccination fears. They went out in the community, explaining that the side effects were mild and ensuring that “Latinx vaccine sites (run by Basin Heath) had no police presence and brown Spanish-speaking people were on site for comfort,” says Orozco.

The last 12 months have been painful and sometimes desperate for the people in his community, says Orozco. There were no three rounds of stimulus checks, or extended unemployment help: “If you’re undocumented, and you don’t work, you don’t eat.”

Zink, whose family has ranched the area for several generations and who is founder and co-owner of Southwest Women’s Health Associates, was key to the two counties’ success.

Her fast start was spurred by a Durango Herald article, which ultimately led to 400 volunteers signing up, all of whom had to be certified as health workers via the nationwide Medical Reserve Corps. “I think people were tired of being cooped up,” Zink says.

The big volunteer base meant Zink’s team fielded 15 separate vaccination teams, each with intake personnel, post-shot caregivers and even traffic directors.  Combined with other vaccination teams, this gave Executive Director Liane Jollon confidence to tell Gov. Jared Polis that the Durango community could take every shot he could spare when 40,000 doses landed in Denver.

The two small counties, including the indigenous community of the Southern Ute Nation, were ready when 4,000 of those doses—10% of the state’s total—arrived. The Anglo community helped by calling at-risk residents. A crucial link between Zink and the Latinx community was Anne Markward, who handled technology for the effort with her husband Doug. She had a Zoom meeting with Orozco about getting his list of recipients together. At the time, state guidelines mandated only elderly and folks with impaired health, but once they were vaccinated, the excess went to the Latinx community and other service workers.

With everyone working together, every dose found an arm.

La Plata and Archuleta counties now brag they have one of the highest rates of COVID-19 vaccination in the state, and this is crucial for an economy that depends on tourism for one-third of its economic activity. No one should forget, says vaccine volunteer Jessica Wheeler, that “our economy could not survive without the Latinx community. Whether it’s skilled labor, housekeeping, maintenance or kitchen staff, they support us all.”

Orozco has another group to thank. He credits public health officials for making sure people get protected: “They don’t ask for your age or your job and are doing it on trust.”

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There have been 36 avalanche fatalities in the United States this winter, a streak of avalanche deaths not seen since 1918.

The accidents all occurred at a time when forecasters had rated the avalanche danger considerable or high. Both ratings mean avalanches are likely and travel in avalanche terrain is not recommended, and yet people, including me, chose to venture out despite the warnings. The question is, why?

Research shows that people push the limits of safety in pursuit of a reward, usually in the form of a flush of dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is released when your brain is expecting pleasure. All of us seek it out in some form. For winter recreationists like me, powder skiing — which at its best feels like flying — is the ultimate dopamine high. 

“Dopamine is how we use positive reinforcement to train dogs,” writes Jake Hutchinson, in the April 2021 issue of The Avalanche Review. Hutchison is an avalanche educator based in Utah. “In the same way, it unwittingly trains us. Each ski run we take that doesn’t have consequences subconsciously reinforces our behavior.”

Snow is often described as a “wicked” learning environment, a term first used by psychologist Robin Hogarth in 2015. He says a learning environment is like a game of chess, where rules are rigid, the board and pieces visible, and feedback immediate. “Kind” learning environments allow people to learn from their mistakes. But in wicked environments, feedback is delayed or nonexistent; people never learn.

Backcountry skiing is thus a classic wicked environment. Every time you successfully ski a slope without it avalanching, the lesson you take away is “OK, you made a good decision.”

This winter, many skiers became cautious because of the dangerous snowpack and were able to safely recreate even when avalanches were a concern. Others pushed the envelope, and while most got away with it, 36 people went from the euphoria of a powder run to the terror of being caught in an avalanche.

“We so well understand the rewards of powder skiing, but we as humans fail to grasp the consequences,” says Drew Hardesty, a forecaster for the Utah Avalanche Center. “The subconscious mind does not know death… and on a visceral plane, it remains this esoteric concept… But who among us has experienced the absolute joy and ecstasy of a powder run? Yes, that would be all of us.”

Avalanche educators believe that their efforts over the past 10 to 15 years have had a positive effect in reducing avalanche accidents. Even as numbers of backcountry winter recreationists have risen, avalanche fatalities have been flat or even decreased in recent years. Per capita, the likelihood of dying while skiing in the backcountry still remains rare. Yet deaths by avalanche always make headlines, leaving non-skiers to question what can seem like reckless behavior.

“I don’t know anyone who’s stood at the top of a slope and thought, ‘Well, this could kill me, but it’s going to be epic powder skiing!’” says Jenna Malone, an avalanche educator and physician’s assistant in Salt Lake City.

“All of us who ski tour have loved ones, families, people who care about us. No powder turn is worth the pain we would cause them by dying in an avalanche, and on a deep level we all know that. We go anyway. We believe that with training, a solid ski partner who calls us on our blind spots, planning and good decision-making, we can make it safer.”

 All of us rationalize our choices. It can be easy to call someone’s decisions foolhardy or risky, especially when we don’t understand what they are doing. We backcountry recreationists are aware of the potential danger of our sport, but like anyone who puts on a seatbelt when they get in a car, we take steps to minimize our exposure.

 Unfortunately, some mistakes will always be tragic.

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