This past May the Colorado Farm & Food Alliance joined with partners and friends including Slow Food Western Slope, the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union, and the Valley Organic Growers Association to bring a sampling of top quality Colorado-sourced food and drink to Denver, with a message.
If you care about food you need to care about how oil and gas is getting developed in Colorado.
“It’s very important that oil and gas development happen responsibly,” said Jim Brett of Slow Food Western Slope. “It doesn’t need to happen everywhere, we must be careful about our food sources.”
Business friends and partners included The Kitchen-Denver Restaurant (“Community through Food”) which hosted the event, and Peak Spirits Distillery at Jack Rabbit Hill Farm, Big B’s Juices & Hard Ciders, Alfred Eames Cellars, Stone Cottage Cellars, and Thistle Whistle Farm, who donated their time and top quality skills and product.
Crossposted at NorthForkScrapbook.org
America’s public lands are a national birthright, an exemplar of global conservation leadership, and a tremendous source of local pride and benefit. In the North Fork Valley our National Forest lands are a testament to the foresight of leaders from more than a century ago, and the wisdom of our own forebears.
Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations. The movement for the conservation of wild life and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method. Theodore Roosevelt
The National Forest lands in the North Fork valley are mostly within the Gunnison National Forest, which is itself part of a larger ‘administrative unit’ of three individual forests often referred to as the ‘GMUG’ or Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre, Gunnison National Forests. Colorado has eleven National Forests, managed as 6 units. As a single unit the GMUG is the largest. (However, the White River National Forest is the largest single National Forest in the state).
(Crossposted at Colorado Pols)
Colorado, summertime. The living is easy…
Sure we have some of the best winter recreation in the world, and Color Sunday drives and hunting season make fall the busiest part of the season for many Colorado communities. But there is something about a Rocky Mountain summer that is hard to beat.
The wet May and early, heavy monsoons much of the state has been getting since, have brought forth wildflowers that many say are the most outrageous, rainbow array seen in years. Truly a display of Colorado pride.
All the moisture, and warm weather between, has also led to another fact in this year’s backcountry – there are lots of mosquitoes out there. And mosquitoes are not just an annoyance, but bring public health warnings. In Colorado, for the West Nile Virus, which is likely to become an even larger problem under climate change.
Invasive species aren’t just species — they can also be pathogens. Such is the case with the West Nile virus.
(Crossposted at Colorado Pols)
Like a number of communities in Colorado, the valley where I live has been engaged in an effort to constrain oil and gas development to keep it out of our water supplies, our favorite recreational areas, our towns, farms and communities.
This effort has been met with mixed success. We banded together to stop an ill-advised Bureau of Land Management lease sale, deferring it twice. We compelled the BLM to consider a community-based alternative as it revises its very stale 1980s era land use plan, and local conservation groups have successfully challenged some other projects—sending them back for a time to the drawing board.
But more than 80,000 acres of public lands are leased in the upper reaches of the North Fork, many private lands are already under industry control, and Texas billionaires with privately held gas companies have their sights on acquiring more.
(Crossposted at Colorado Pols)
The Pope is getting all the news today on Climate, having clarified – the faithful are told to believe—that God is not OK with trashing the earth, and that we need to do something about that.
“The climate is a common good, belonging to all and meant for all.”
But as Francis has his eyes on all Creation – the World writ large – the sometimes mysterious working of the world in detail are where most of the stuff gets done. Like pollination. This week is, after all, also National Pollinators Week.
Birds, and bees and others among the panoply of species populating our planet are not just buzzing around your sugary drink, or swooping hotdogs off your picnic table. They too are doing the Lord’s bidding, in small but crucial ways. Like keeping three-quarters of the world’s plants alive.
Most people know by now that bees are in decline and that this is a major problem – for the obvious reasons, because we also like food. Some important food crops, like corn, are wind pollinated. But most rely on pollinators. 
