Correction: Last week’s coverage of the Regional Candidate Forum held at the Ute Theatre misstated that the forum was on Tuesday, when it was in fact on Monday, Sept. 28.
Potato Days
It happens a lot in Carbondale, feeling proud and grateful for a vibrant community that cares. And Potato Days bring that feeling in spades! A BIG THANK YOU to everyone who made it happen.
Kay Clarke
Carbondale
Re: Therapy Pool
I don’t really agree with Fred Malo that the items he cites add up to “Happy Climate News.” Mostly “the climate” worldwide is deteriorating at an unexpectedly fast pace. In Colorado, it’s a bit disappointing to read or hear endless handwringing about water shortages with minimal mention of the connection to the combustion emissions from our cars, trucks, furnaces and boilers, and the belching of methane from our gas-stripper wells and appliances, and even our cattle.
Yes, wind and solar deployment accelerated for the past year in Colorado and the U.S., but the shift in our electricity supply from fossil fuel to wind and solar should be faster. Also, many of the solar and wind farms built in the last year, and nearing completion, started planning four or five years ago. Future plans could be stalled.
The Republican party, from the top down, has been throwing sand in the gears of wind and solar and batteries and electric vehicles and electric heating and even energy efficiency. All of these are generally effective, mostly “affordable,” and their adoption is accelerating in the rest of the world. (I agree, that’s “Happy Climate News.”) In the U.S., the fossil fuel industry has been incredibly effective at spreading the opposite message.
“Sand in the gears” includes denials and delays of permits, huge and unpredictable tariffs, bans on imports that target decarbonization technologies and more. It includes propaganda that hypes impractical alternatives and vastly overstates any problems, including environmental side-effects of decarbonization. The federal government is even muscling our allies to accept more fossil fuels. We need to keep up the pressure to get back on track because even many Democrats seem to be bending to this pressure.
Here in Colorado, our ballots include a vote for or against a “Right to Natural Gas” proposed by the fossil fuel industry. I’m sorry, there is no “right” to burn gas and further triple-glaze the planet. To me, it’s as if 50 years ago we were asked to vote for a “right to lead gasoline.” When I was raised in New Jersey, blood-lead levels of average kids were almost four-times above current limits. Federal requirements for unleaded gasoline solved that. Similarly, restrictions on “natural” gas will help reduce future heat and drought. So please vote “No” on that “right,” and don’t throw sand in the gears of the energy transition.
Fred Porter
Carbondale
Indigenous Peoples’ Day
Thank you for all the gifts the Indigenous peoples bequeathed us.
We learned in first grade that the Mayflower Pilgrim colonists learned to plant corn from the Native people who inhabited where they landed in what became Massachusetts. I learned many decades later that these were the Wampanoag people who shared seeds and planting techniques for the native North American crops, corn, beans and squash. Only in graduate school did I learn that the people native to the area between Puebla and Oaxaca, brilliant agriculturalists, actually developed corn from a grass called teosinte.
In adulthood, I read New York Historical Society articles on the Mohicans and Mohawks who gave some land to Queen Anne when they came to England in 1710 seeking help from the British forces to defend their lands from the French coming from Quebec into northern New York. The Native Americans wanted the Queen to send Protestant missionaries to New York because they did not like the French Catholics (evidently). My many times great-grandfather, Johannes Lawyer, came as a refugee from the French war against Lutherans in Palatine, Germany, and settled in 1710 in New York as a founder of Lawyerville, now part of Cobleskill. He established a trading post to do business with the Mohawks and was a founder of the Lutheran church there.
Today, AI told me that his son, Johannes Jr., was involved in swindling land from the Mohawks, a case eventually settled by the Crown with payment to the Mohawks because it needed the military help of the Mohawks and Mohicans in the French and Indian War, and then again in the Revolutionary War. That phrase in the Declaration of Independence, “merciless Indian savages,” probably refers in part to these Mohawks and Mohicans who pledged to help the British if the British would help them defend their own lands from the French. Politics are never simple, and alliances change. Joseph Brant, the Mohawk who led the attack on Lawyerville during the Revolutionary War, spared the lives of the Lawyer men he captured when he saw them give a Mason’s handshake, because he too was a Mason, educated at the Native American College, now Dartmouth.
Every day we can learn something new. I am relieved to know that I descend from Fredrick Lawyer, not Johannes Jr.
On the maternal side of my family, I learned only a few years ago from my cousins that our Cord’homme grandfather’s life was saved by Guarani Native Americans in Paraguay when he was a child. His father, Gabriel, was the French consul to Paraguay and hunted with the Guarani and had great respect for their understanding of their environment. When European trained doctors could not cure my grandfather of a lung disease (I am guessing TB), his parents sent him to live with the Guarani. The Guarani plant medicine cured him. So, thanks to the Guarani and thanks to the Mohawks, I exist. That’s a big thank you!
Join us at Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Oct. 12, at 3:30pm at Sopris Park and 6pm for a potluck at the Calaway Room in the Third Street Center, followed by a documentary at 7pm, “The Condor and the Eagle.” Bryan Parras, one of the film’s producers, who is also in the film, will be with us to introduce it and answer questions. Please join us.
Illène Pevec
Carbondale
Public lands & health
Wilderness areas are critical to our mental and physical wellbeing. Despite their importance, they are being increasingly compromised. These losses have significant effects on our health. As a family physician, I encounter patients suffering from what is known as “nature-deficit disorder.” This term, coined in 2005, describes the symptoms that occur when people are alienated from nature and no longer enjoy the health benefits of spending time outdoors.
Access to undeveloped regions encourages people to exercise, through activities such as hiking and biking, which directly improve health. Spending time in the wild also enables people to breathe fresh air, relax and peacefully enjoy their surroundings. These benefits diminish when access to the wilderness is lost. Nature-deficit disorder leads to decreased physical activity, and contributes to diseases such as diabetes, hypertension and heart disease. Mental health conditions associated with nature-deficit disorder include depression and anxiety.
Recently, there have been a number of threats to our public lands. The “Roadless Rule”— a longstanding federal regulation that protects tens of millions of acres of national forests — is at risk of being repealed. At least 20% of our national parks are significantly understaffed. Recent reports from the U.S. National Park Service show that $323 million has been routed away from parks such as Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Grand Canyon into other non-essential projects. In fact, there are plans to sell part of Yosemite to a private developer who wants access for his investors to prime real estate within our National Park.
Right now, we have valuable opportunities to protect some of our most treasured natural sites. Each piece of wilderness that we preserve translates into better health for ourselves and our children and grandchildren. Please email or call your members of Congress, to ask them to protect the “Roadless Rule,” limit misappropriations of funds intended to maintain federal lands and prevent sale or trade of lands included in our public reserves. And please remember to vote in November!
Maria Chansky
Glenwood Springs