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The West: A Dry Thirsty Tinderbox
April 9, 2007 5:21 PM
The Rocky Mountain West is growing fast, thirsty and poised to burn on a massive scale. Those are some of the conclusions from this year's State of the Rockies Report Card, unveiled today at Colorado College.
WHITNEY: This is the fifth year CC has published a report card that looks at social, political and environmental trends in the eight state Rocky Mountain region stretching from Montana to New Mexico.
HECOX: This year we've written about what I call a perfect storm in the Rockies.
WHITNEY: Professor Walt Hecox is the faculty director of the State of the Rockies project. He says the storm consists of three elements. One, persistent drought, two, heavily diseased and overgrown forests, and three, a rapidly expanding population that is building houses in or on the edge of those forests. The West, he says, is growing at a rate four-and-a-half times that of the rest of the country.
HECOX: The perfect storm is already hitting, if you go over to Winterpark or Grandby you'll see probably 60-70% of the trees dead in the Vail valley. That's coming quickly. In a couple years we'll see the same impact is already reducing housing values. Realtors are having to list this as part of the downside of buying a property. We also have the dilemma of millions of dollars needed to begin deal with these trees. We don't know what to do with them. The beetles are moving rapidly. We haven't had really heavy cold winters so that every winter they are able to move over to the next summer and then expand exponentially.
WHITNEY: The details of the perfect storm are contained in the report card released today, available online at Colorado College dot EDU. The college also hosts a conference on report card topics, which opened today and runs through Wednesday. It's free and open to the public. Forest health is the topic of discussions tomorrow afternoon and evening (Tue., April 10). Starting at four in the afternoon a panel of forest experts trade insights, and then at 7:00 each night there's a keynote speaker. Walt Hecox.
HECOX: Tomorrow night is James Hubbard he is the U.S. Forest Service Deputy Chief for state and private forestry. And we're anxious to hear him talk because the solutions we think to many of our forest problems are not in the public sector. We've got to have partnerships, we've got to have uses for this fuel which is dead. We've got to find ways to chip it, to turn it into furniture, turn it into small diameter products. If we don't we've got millions of acres of dead trees and we don't know what to do with them. And we hope that he can bring some solutions and ideas
WHITNEY: Tonight's keynote, also at 7:00, is water. Specifically, the growing trend in transferring water currently being used to grow crops over to urban areas, for city people to drink, water, and wash their cars with. Speaking on topic is Kay Brothers, deputy general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority.
HECOX: Probably the ultimate water buffalo I like to call them, they are madly moving more and more water out of agriculture to urban areas and they really are a bellwether for what's happening in the region. They just happen to be ahead of us and possibly more aggressive We laugh in the Rockies that water moves uphill to money, and that's absolutely true, but is that what we want to happen everywhere? And that's one of the tough issues which we'll have to discuss.
WHITNEY: On Wednesday, the topic is: "New People, New Communities, New Urbanism," looking at how we choose to accommodate the rapid growth in the Rockies. Designing cities to be more water and energy efficient is a growing trend. Wednesday night's keynote is Peter Calthorpe, urban planner, architect and co-author of "Sustainable Communities." Walt Hecox.
HECOX: He is probably, around our region, well known for the redesign of Stapleton the work that's going on there when the airport was ripped up. He's done much similar work on sustainable communities around the world
WHITNEY: More information about CC's State of the Rockies conference and report card, including a schedule of events, is available online at www.coloradocollege.edu.
Posted by Eric Whitney on April 9, 2007 5:21 PM | Permalink
