I am continually amazed how prescient are The Four Agreements posited by Don Miguel Ruiz. Do your best, be impeccable with your word, don’t make assumptions and don’t take things personally. What an extraordinary guide for keeping one’s mind engaged in a positive way, while admitting that our knowledge is limited and hopefully continually evolving. […]
Dale Will
Posted inOpinion
CVEPA Views: All things near and far
My scholastic aptitudes always tended toward the humanities. My high school offered “Humanistic Physics” for such dummies. In the textbook for this class was a quote by English poet Francis Thompson that I have never forgotten. “All things by immortal power, Near or far, Hiddenly To each other linked are, That thou canst not stir […]
Posted inColumns
Solstice thoughts on landscapes — environmental, psychological and political
Walt Whitman said that “all truths wait in all things.” I am often intrigued by patterns that reappear across a spectrum of physical and metaphysical experience. One Lakota proverb landed fairly close to Whitman: “The spiritual landscape is revealed in the physical landscape.” In my experience, the resonance between the physical and the metaphysical is […]
Posted inColumns
CVEPA Views: Some thoughts about Eugene Grubb, Charles McClure and Casey Piscura
Since the time of initial European settlement, our valley has attracted the attention of some brilliant agrarians. These visionaries are sometimes called “bioneers.” One such man was Eugene Grubb, who in 1912 characterized the Valley’s fertility as follows: “No part of the world is better fitted by nature for growing potatoes than the mountain districts […]
Posted inOpinion
Wildlife McCarthyism, impact credits and the humility necessary to share Earth’s beauty
Early in my career, I clerked at the Environmental Defense Fund trying to help negotiate changes in California’s massive irrigation system, trying to stave off the extinction of the Sacramento River winter run of Chinook salmon. The irrigation system, known as the Central Valley Project, irrigates a good share of the fruits and nuts produced […]
Posted inColumns, Opinion, Uncategorized
CVEPA Views: John Osgood, Pitkin County and the Battle at Red Wind Point
The first whites in the Crystal Valley traveled on the Ute Trail, as well documented by the Hayden surveys in 1873. Whites brought with them the wheel, and no sooner than the first homesteads were staked, petitions began flowing into the nascent Pitkin County clerk’s office requesting a wagon road. The 1886 petitioners included Myron […]
Posted inColumns, Opinion, Uncategorized
Land conservation as an act of philanthropy
On Dec. 20, 2022, Jeff and Janette Bier donated 8.5 acres adjacent to the Marble Wetlands to the Trust for Land Restoration (TLR). The 55-acre Marble Wetlands was donated to TLR a year earlier by an anonymous individual. These properties lie between lands already owned by the Division of Colorado Parks and Wildlife. (xanax online […]