The national pace of climate action, however, likely lies within the slice of independent voters who swing between parties. As 2024 showed, they determine who wins national elections. That’s true in Crested Butte, too, where 53% of voters have declared themselves politically independent.

The absence of Republicans in Crested Butte lays bare the tension between the push of liberal ambition and pull of fear by unaffiliated voters about the cost of taking action.

Crested Butte has been on the sharp edge of the warming, drying climate. Smoky air has our mountain residents scrambling for air conditioners. This February, a time of frequent 30-below temperatures in the 20^th century, rains marred the ski slopes. Fishermen are putting their rods up early as trout struggle to breathe with warming streams holding less oxygen. Down river 45 miles, Blue Mesa Reservoir is two-thirds empty, its water drained to keep Lake Powell from declining to deadpool.

Voters in Crested Butte accept climate change as fact. Incumbent council members ran unopposed in the first election after we became the Colorado’s first municipality to require electrification of new construction as part of our climate action plan.

But the brutal reality of climate change does not prevent grumbling:

“How much did those Teslas the cops are driving cost us?”

“Is the town really paying someone to sort through my trash to understand composting?”

“Really, an extra $400,000 for an electric dump truck?”

Second-guessing council decisions is a well-honored tradition, only made more fun by the absence of context such as the $844,000 state grant for two electric dump trucks.

While it’s easy to dismiss the grousing, the concerns are well placed. Adopting new technology prematurely can be unnecessarily costly. The Gunnison Valley Regional Transportation Authority, which runs buses between the City of Gunnison and Mt. Crested Butte, has struggled to operate compressed natural gas buses. They had been justified in part by reduced emissions.

Mountain Express, which links Crested Butte and Mt. Crested Butte, dodged a bullet when we decided that given the challenges of our climate it was premature to transition to electric buses.

These climate grumblings fit a larger dynamic, a perception that the policies of Democrats are well intended but ineffective — or worse, counterproductive.

Too often, liberals come across as focused on signaling virtue with limited consideration for outcomes or unintended consequences. For example, in the book “Abundance,” Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue that Democrats make critical services like housing and health care less affordable by subsidizing demand while decreasing supply through unhelpful regulatory requirements.

Liberal tone deafness can be especially problematic when it involves the cost of energy, which lies at the center of our economy. We see costs personally in our monthly utility bills and visits to the gas pumps. Less directly it is embedded costs of growing food and moving stuff. With rising costs, political independents can easily be persuaded that climate change is just a progressive plot to drive up the cost of living.

Climate activists cannot lose sight of the fact that (according to Ipsos 2026 polling and most mainstream political reporting) affordability is the most important issue to voters, especially independents. Any sense that climate policy is increasing costs, especially without meaningful emissions reductions, reinforces stereotypes that will keep climate-friendly politicians out of office, delaying the energy transition.

As mayor of Crested Butte unaffiliated with a party, I see the tension between liberal aspiration and independent fear play out regularly. In 2025, when Crested Butte updated our 2030 Climate Action Plan, we initially considered a menu of actions without consideration of cost. In some instances, the actions were recommended under the guise of co-benefits (e.g., social equity and well-being) or sustainability (e.g., water conservation, exposure to plastics, and local food production), largely unrelated to carbon emissions.

Council instead decided to prioritize actions based upon cost-effectiveness in reducing carbon emissions. For example, while we have residents who are passionate about composting, curbside composting is costly and makes a limited dent in emissions reductions. We instead supported less costly drop-off collection points for composters. That allowed us to retain nearly full funding from more impactful strategies, such as electrifying buildings and vehicles or encouraging development close to existing mass transit.

As a scientist and an elected official, the energy transition looks inevitable. While physics sets a limit on the affordability of fossil fuels, we have seen dramatic cost savings globally with emerging renewable technology like heat pumps and batteries. Within a few years rooftop solar exploded in Pakistan as cheap Chinese solar panels flooded across the border. According to Bill McKibben, the Pakistanis installed the equivalent of half their national electric grid in 2024. China, presumably driven by economics and energy security, not liberal aspiration, is rapidly converting from fossil fuels to renewables.

President Trump may turn out to be the climate president, accelerating our transition to a clean energy economy as he makes fossil fuels less attractive. Globally, the Iran war is driving up energy costs, limiting short-term oil-and-gas supplies while introducing long-term uncertainty in shipping access to the Strait of Hormuz.

Locally, according to the Colorado Sun, recent federal orders to keep Colorado’s older coal plants operating beyond their planned retirement are estimated to cost ratepayers upwards of $87 million.

These policies create a unique opening for climate activists to demonstrate they can be trusted. According to the Third Way, a think tank focused on moderate policy, polling shows Democrats are now more trusted on affordability, almost an 18% turnaround since 2022.

Taking advantage of this energy opportunity will require discipline. Climate activists need to take the high ground on affordability, avoiding costly stances because they sound good and calling out the fossil fuel industry when they dip into consumer pocketbooks.

For example, while eliminating natural gas sounds appealing, whether it makes sense from a cost/benefit perspective to increase natural gas capacity for baseline power generation while reducing methane emissions along pipelines depends critically upon how fast battery storage technology progresses, an issue climate activists need to navigate carefully.

On the flip side, activists shouldn’t hesitate to call out the potential costs of Initiative 177, the “Right to Natural Gas.” This constitutional amendment in Colorado could be very expensive for consumers as it would requires new developments to install costly, redundant natural gas infrastructure. The evidence continues to grow that exposure to natural gas in homes has costly health effects.

Similarly, whether data centers are bad in terms of carbon emissions and affordability will depend upon the details. If renewables power data centers and in doing so they help cover the substantial costs of overhauling the grid to move away from fossil fuels, they will be a net benefit. Even so, communities may reject data centers for other reasons, such as water or loss of agricultural land. If so, as with composting, climate action shouldn’t be used to justify rejecting them, unless supported by the emissions math.

Emerging renewable technology makes it possible to rapidly reduce emissions while making our communities richer and healthier. Still, we will have only ourselves to blame if we move too ambitiously and with limited impact, feeding fear over affordability.

This piece originally ran in Big Pivots, Aug. 14, 2026. Thanks to Allen Best for his wonderful editing!

I’m just back from celebrating the San Lorenzo Feast Day at the Acoma Pueblo southwest of Albuquerque. I’m still digesting the experience and mulling an essay around the idea of whose stories get told and why.

In the meantime, it is hard to say anything but “amazing”— rich history and a community that combines openness with clear boundaries (and all photos that I took strictly follow the Pueblo’s prohibitions on photographing certain events and places).

In a few days I take off with friends for Fair Isle, a remote island in the North Sea between the Orkney and Shetland Archipelago. I’ll be staying at the Fair Isle Bird Observatory, a chance to combine immersion in one of the world’s more remote communities with bird watching and an opportunity to see a Scottish version of RMBL. We also have a few days planned for the Inner Hebrides, an opportunity to restock scotch and gin.

After several weeks in Crested Butte to regroup and wash clothes, Jennie and I will cut electronic ties for 2+ weeks as we follow John Wesley Powell’s paddle strokes down the Grand Canyon. My writing will be intermittent this fall as I accumulate experiences upon which to cogitate!

I intend to post an essay in September on a ballot question the Crested Butte Town Council is likely to put front of the public concerning an empty home tax, something a number of communities are considering, most famously New York. As part of a larger conversation around the growing wealth divide it understandably attracts a lot of emotions. A small community big enough for the (former) owner of the Lakers (current owner of the Dodgers) and supermodels to share a small downtown with crusty locals the wealth divide is perhaps more obvious here than other communities where there is more room “to spread out”. My May 30th essay “Mad as a Hatter” on the potential tax recently attracted attention in the Crested Butte News and I welcome any new readers as a result. One of my goals with this substack is to provide some transparency into my thinking as an elected official.

Finally, this a reminder to take time for yourself and your loved ones. In addition to managing the recent passing of my father, I had time to visit with the family of Ryan Brown. Ryan followed me to RMBL as a research assistant in the summer of 2000 before tragically dying on Gothic Mountain. His memory, and family, are an important part of my life. Also, one of my recent traveling companions had to leave a journey early to deal with the passing of a loved one, just another reminder that we have but a brief slice of time on this journey. Treasure this moment with your fellow passengers— may you find joy, extend grace, and provide and take nourishment from all around you.

A blood red blanket falls across the West Elks, a murky thickness beckoned by innumerable, global acts of daily consumption supporting the accumulation of plastic, wealth, and power for a diminishing few; modeled with scientific measurements feeding endless political chatter chasing an attentional economy; experienced as a thickened viscosity taxing our collective breathing and smelling of transmogrified carbon; vital, living cells reduced by raging combustion to primal bits; winds capriciously carrying ash and soot to join the shattered remnants of crashing tectonic plates and the crustal rebounding of magma dropping deep in the earth’s mantle to mix with molten rock pushed from depths unimaginable to birth dykes, sills, laccoliths, and volcanos, all received into wind and water’s sculpting embrace; visceral and vivid in the moment but disappearing into the mists of geologic time, the shrouding of the present revealing a future foretold and forgotten.

In a prior time revealed by apocalyptic whites, reds, blacks, and ash, before surveyors ascended West Elk peak with theodolite chain and rod in hand to create a radiating network of angles and distances to feed the insatiable law of cosines as it transformed a sacred landscape warped and woofed by waterways, trails, and wisdom into an onomastic taxonomy of an emerging new world order, the highest peaks overtopped by even higher institutions of learning, interspersed with cartographic station points defined by topographic necessity to generate layers of knowledge displayed in tomes to circulate among the halls of congress, calling forth waves of colliers, sappers, and pitmen to displace, dig, and die in a dance of metallic flows nourishing global capitalism, banishing dragons beyond the myths of time; and before William Shockley concocted a silicon-based witches’ brew enabling a surfectational world of constant connectedness and informational overload used by AI to play upon our neurophysiology as a god plucking a harp, metal rectangles creating algorithmic harmonies of dopamine, endogenous opioids, and endocannabinoids capturing eyeballs and reducing sentient beings to passing phases of paralysis on streets and in living rooms; before all this, the blood red blanket would have been born on the horses of pestilence, war, famine, and death, experienced by an unlucky few but passing, encyclically unnoticed and unconnected to past sin or future torment.

Today, a haze of apocalyptic black, yellow, amber, and pink spreads across the earth, virtually and vertiginously, shared by all, seen by few, oozing solid and symbolic, testament to a western world cast ablaze, a broader, communal collapse born upon winds of diminishing trust, political dysfunction, and unhelpful aspiration overseen by an oddly-coiffed, orange-hued puppet master and carnival barker extraordinaire; cryptically shilling dollars with those willing to trade their soul to dance in the frenzy of the inner circle; teetering between jail and overseeing the disorderly demise of a once great nation; dodging lawsuits of family members, business partners, and citizens alike; a false, tweeting prophet momentarily defying the laws of physics, biology, and economics ultimately headed to a personal reckoning writ global.

This blood red blanket is woven of the elements of the apocalypse, carbon, silicon, lanthanum, and erbium, a singularity birthed by revelatory waves upon which an uncountable us surf, waves that reach beyond the bits and bytes of deoxyribonucleic acids to carry an infinitude of oscillating possibilities before collapsing upon the shores of an inevitable now emerging from the mists of Cantorian infinitudes.

Amidst this blood red sky we, all and every version of us, momentarily pierce both time’s possibilities and scriptural, abstract excesses to step onto a West Elk cliff standing atop a boiling sea, out of place only in time, perhaps the Western Interior Sea or some enormous, epeiric sea yet to emerge.

Three cloaked women, sheltered from salty ocean spray by the trunk and branches of an enormous tree, beckon us into a cave formed nested of the tree’s roots, the warmth and bracing smells of pinenes and limonenes wafting from a smoking cauldron. Watching our feet, undistracted by the land behind or the boiling sea in front, we step inside an arboreous Delphic temple.

Urd runs her hand across a plank carved with symbols.

“Long banished, magic and dragons return as humans feed upon the seed corn of scientific innovation, yielding discovery and control to AI overlords, algorithms inscrutable and whimsical. As generations of monks labored in scriptoriums to nurture fragile roots of knowledge beyond waves of barbarians to set the stage for a thunderous revealing that swept the world, you too must prepare for an apocalypse that is yet but a distant swell in seas unimaginable. Retreat to prepare for the next blossoming.”

Verdandi casts woodlots crafted of driftwood.

“Gaze upon the black meridian, the release of a wizard’s brew formed across unimaginable stretches of time, the squeezing, reducing, and distillation of improbably innumerable pockets of localized order, from chitinous, mandibilated and maxillated, ambulatory crustal beings to wonderous and colorful organisms harnessing the powers of many worlds and distant sun to banish color and conjure the black meridian. Gorge on the seed corn before the coming famine, tap rare earthly treasures and wield your blades and panels to push us beyond the black meridian, its passing recorded in a thin lithological layer of spheroidal, carboniferous particles, technofossils, and anthropogenic nucleotides.”

Skuld reveals a weaving.

“You stand together as an offshoot of evolutionarily emergent carboniferous organization embedded in a universe spreading into maximal disorder. With the promethean gifts of heat and chemistry you acquired the power of homeostasis and replication, acted upon by an entropic cyclone of trial and error, jumping from bits of cytosine, guanine, thymine, and adenine to bytes of integrated, regulated, and differentiated cells organized by interstitial, hormonal flows regulated by gravitational cycles and circadian rhythms. You jumped again, from kith and kin cradled by rift to raise up sprawling concrete piles dotting the earth’s surface as ant colonies in a field, connected by radiating networks of pozzolanized crustaceans. Now your social bonds are being shattered by silicon-induced rage, your worst natures amplified and monetized, a capitalistic cannibalization yielding ephemeral pleasure. Put aside your rarely earthed rectangles, reject silicon and catagenetic carbon to rediscover the joys of organic, vitalized and unvolitalized carbon, uncompressed, unrepressed, fully ordered, and capable of love and joy.”

The cloaked women go silent. Out of time, we listen to the howling wind and crashing sea, leaving the shelter, warmed and forewarned, to forge our path along the cliff, back into the blood red blanket and time’s entropic flows, a world foretold and forgotten, dragons, ancient sailing ships, theodolites, cartographic stations, and items indiscernible shimmering all around us.

If you wish to explore more of this place, I recommend Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon. I give passing nod to those fated to travel time’s countercurrent

“The larger the group, the more toxic, the more of your beauty as an individual you have to surrender for the sake of group thought.” George Carlin, Last Words, 2009

Will you join my rebellion?

If you have been voting along straight party lines, democrat or republican, would you find someone in the opposite party to support? While party affiliation is a useful way for choosing candidates who share your beliefs, partisan politics are feeding the darker elements of our natures.

Humans have an innate tendency to identify themselves as part of a group. Groups naturally emerge when we share language, religion, and traditions. But evolutionarily our brain wiring reflects that our survival was tied to our kith, the family and community with whom we shared a place from which we harvested and defended food. But the drive to classify people as being “in” or “out” is so much a part of us that our brains will grasp at anything, including shirt color or factors that are random, to classify people.

Our categorizations have consequences. We act more morally and are more likely to excuse bad behavior with in-group members. It makes sense even today to carefully manage relationships with family and community members, but this hardwiring can serve as the foundation for baseless discrimination. Not only are we biased against out-group members, we use stereotypes to justify irrational behavior. Our allegiance to groups can be so strong that people will even break off relationships with family members and friends perceived to be in an out-group.

The two-party political system in the US, combined with spending reaching $10-20 billion/election cycle, taps into the worst of these tendencies. There is evidence that partisan identity now overshadows religion and ethnicity in the US (though not necessarily elsewhere). As remote work becomes more common, and my county has seen a five-fold increase since covid, people can choose to live in like-minded communities, the “big sort”. Historically, shared neighborhoods and schools forced us to learn how to interact with people of different perspectives. Now, we move on, from people and place, when we run into dissenting views. Because we mainly talk with people with whom we agree politically it shouldn’t be a surprise that as many as one-third of Americans have broken off close friendships because of political allegiance.

Politically this translates into fewer individuals that vote for candidates from different parties on the same ballot, fewer instances of individuals from different parties getting elected (e.g., states that elect a senator from a different party than who they support for president), and more places that overwhelmingly vote the same way (e.g., “landslide counties”).

Leaning into partisan politics, including energizing political bases by demonizing the other party in significant part by reducing political opponents to stereotypes, will not make our country stronger. While it takes more effort, we make better decisions and drive stronger outcomes when we tap the power of diverse perspectives and backgrounds.

Following form, in this election I am stretching across the ideological continuum, endorsing a progressive democrat, Jena Griswold for Attorney General, a moderate democrat, Michael Bennet for governor, and a moderate republican, Jeff Hurd for CO-3 in the house.

As a left-leaning independent writing about ideological diversity, I will focus on my endorsement of republican Representative Hurd. Even though I endorsed him in the previous cycle, I waivered in this election because republican control of all three branches of federal government is in my opinion an unmitigated disaster. Habeas corpus is being ignored, congress has abdicated constitutional responsibilities for finances and war, science is being destroyed, we’re seeing constant unfettered corruption, and the deficit is ballooning while the wealthy get more tax benefits while the cost of living is skyrocketing. Gas prices have increased 25% and we personally saw family premiums for a high-deductible policy jump from $1,000 to $3,500/month. The cost of the Iranian war would have more than paid for the extension of the Obamacare health care subsidies and dwarf the savings from DOGE. However, since this district is not in play (the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has not prioritized the district as part of the democrats taking back control of the house), I am voting for the individual and not the party.

What do I like about Representative Hurd?

He stood up for the West Elks by supporting the Gunnison Outdoor Resource Protection Act, a stance that has become a major point of attack in the Republican primary. He demonstrated ideological independence as the only Republican to vote in committee against the sale of public lands and was one of only six Republicans voting against the President on tariffs. I have disagreed with him on energy issues, but he’s made my thinking evolve, which I appreciate. In person he comes across as thoughtful and engaged, with his public persona being both consistent and authentic to how he is in person. In today’s crazy world, I couldn’t ask for much more. He’s got my vote for another two years!

While I want to see good people elected (and balance restored to the federal government), what is most important to me is that we regain our collective capacity to constructively engage with people of different perspectives. If you are used to voting the party line, develop some reasonable criteria about what it would take for you to vote for someone of the other party and look for that person, possibly starting with a local election. It may feel awkward or unnatural, but it will be a step towards rebelling from ideological tyranny and a step towards embracing empathy!

Good luck to my friend Alec Lindeman who is taking his own step by running to be elected as a State House Representative, as a democrat in a very republican district. Alec has my full support and endorsement! Indeed, anybody willing to serve as an elected official these days deserves your support, given how nasty our culture has become.

Sublime, What I Got

My father passed away on April 29, 2026, but when did we start losing him?

The end was easy to understand, if not accept. Unresponsive to voice and touch, failing to flinch when I passed my hand over open eyes, the hospice caregiver cautioned, “the body follows the brain”. Nothing lessened his repetitive calls for help, loud enough to prompt a wellness check by officers passing outside. I made peace by accepting these pleas as his last willful, rational acts; unable to even sit up unaided or drink a good cup of coffee, who wouldn’t desperately want help?

While the end was obvious, it was easy to miss the start of our last journey together. He was an introvert, more prone to listening than talking, rarely discussing his inner life. I was a busy professional dashing to follow my own sons as they climbed rocks and ran around tracks. In full view but beyond our seeing he started down a path described variously as Alzheimer’s, Lewy Body Dementia, and normal pressure hydrocephalus, ending in an official cause of death listed as “senile degeneration of the brain”.

The father I knew best was the one who I did things with. Jim was always willing to play horse, throw a football, and drive to basketball games. On those hot, sticky Kansas summer nights when parents sat under the lights eating popcorn and drinking Coca-Cola, Jim was in the third-base coaches’ box, giving signals to batters and waving runners home.

Perhaps if I Jim and I understood each other better, I might have seen this last journey sooner, paying more attention as his walk developed a shuffle or pushed harder and earlier for a hearing aid as Jim gradually retreated from conversations. My mother saw more, but she knew a diagnosis brought anxiety and fear rather than treatment.

Change eventually swept our family like a Kansas tornado. Three years ago, visiting us in Crested Butte in what became her one last burst of summer, my mother Peg developed lung problems. The following spring, struggling to breathe shortly before passing, paramedics rushed Peg to the hospital. That Jim had started his own journey became undeniable when he attempted, and failed, to follow. States away, my sister and I exchanged frantic texts, coming to terms that the 1-mile drive between their apartment and the emergency room was Jim’s last independent travel.

While the details are unique to us, this path is all too common. The likelihood of developing dementia has been declining ~13%/decade, but we have a ~40% chance of developing dementia after age 55. Almost 57 million people worldwide have dementia, a number which is expected to triple by 2050. Younger people are developing romantic relationships with AI, but caregiving AI robots are likely my generation’s future.

The US spends ~$4 billion/year on research, but progress has been slow. A majority of dementia cases are thought to be Alzheimer’s, which is typified by the presence of misfolded protein fragments between cells. The accumulation of these fragments has been thought to be the critical cause of Alzheimer’s, the amyloid cascade hypothesis. Unfortunately, dementia has become such big business that there has been pressure on scientists to generate results; critical support for this hypothesis involves doctored images. Alternatively, the protein fragments may be a symptom and not a cause of Alzheimer’s. Scientists are turning focus to whether dementia might be the result of a breakdown in how the brain clears waste.

Despite confusion around the neurological details, almost half of dementia cases can be delayed or reduced by measures such as controlling blood pressure and weight, avoiding diabetes, not smoking and drinking, and managing cholesterol. Being active, including more education and maintaining hearing and vision, along with an active social life later in life, are correlated with a major drop in risk. I’m doubling down on learning Japanese are learning that being fluent in a second language may delay the onset of symptoms by as much as 5 years. Stay social and challenge your brain!

This resilience is a result of the adaptability of our brains. A surprising number of individuals show no problems despite the presence of amyloid fragments. Unlike many animals such as birds and deer which are born with adult brains, much of our intelligence emerges after birth; our brain’s wiring reflects current conditions rather than evolutionary past. This plasticity extends throughout our lives, allowing some individuals to keep functioning after car accidents or through an onslaught of misfolded proteins clogging neural pathways.

It’s tempting to see Jim’s journey as a fading away into the distance as he became an outline of what he once was, missing pieces of himself. But our brain’s capacity for change defines what it means to be human. There is no single, perfect version of ourselves. It took me time, but I realized that Jim, even at the end, was always Jim. Not a lesser, or diminished version of himself. Just Jim. As the journey wound down I accepted him as he was, sitting with him, holding his hand, and offering the only thing I had—my presence and love.

Thanks to my sister Mara for all she did these last three years (and before) taking Jim into her home and always accepting him on his terms.

Freakonomics has a great podcast/transcript on the state of research with Alzheimer’s and for more about the wonders of the brain, I love Oliver Sack’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

While I pass for a Crested Butte conservative, for some I’ve turned as pink as Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani, who suggested New York City tax non-residential luxury homes. Crested Butte’s Town Council is considering taxing vacant homes to cover funding shortfalls without adding to the financial burdens of our working families.

Crested Butte’s real estate and construction costs are soaring as the wealthy choose our schools and trails over congested commutes and hotter, lower elevations. The purchase price of an average home has tripled to $3 million over the last 10 years while the cost of re-paving a block has increased from $30,000 to $150,000. This flow of wealth distorts prices more generally. Our health care system balances its books by catering to wealthy visitors; our personal high-deductible premiums for a family of four cost $3,500/month and Town spends the equivalent of $1 of every $10 in our general fund on health care premiums.

Crested Butte’s financial pressures reflect a national trend of fewer people owning more. This wealth is increasingly inherited and not earned; the number of families paying taxes on inherited wealth has dropped 95% over the last 25 years. Having rich parents is the fastest way into elite schools, adding a patina of achievement to gilded lives. It’s not enough to be born on third base; it’s important for the wealthy to believe they hit a triple. As philanthropy and empathy go out of style, the NY Times suggested the wedding of Jeff Bezos, who is worth more than the annual economic output of ~50 countries, is “the moment American money stopped apologizing and decided it might as well enjoy itself”.

This wealth gap distorts priorities. As a biologist, I’m dumbfounded over plans to spend $1 billion on a ballroom, more than would be saved by a proposal to cut NSF’s biology budget 75%, presumably to control government spending. With research taking a backseat to socialites, Scott Turner, Secretary for Housing and Urban Development, kicked the National Science Foundation out of their building so he could have an executive dining room, a personal elevator, and upgraded parking. Why would we care about biology if our resources could otherwise be spent on fine dining and ballroom dancing? Ticks, Ebola, and hantavirus, oh my!

Our tax system has encouraged a flood of money into Crested Butte. Real estate investment is an important part of portfolio diversification and Colorado is a low property tax state (e.g. one-third of Texas’ rate). A common tax-avoidance strategy is to establish residency in a state with no income taxes (e.g., Texas and Florida) and buy real estate in Colorado resort towns.

On top of competing with the wealthy for housing and basic services, year-round residents pay sales tax year-round, which generates ~80% of the revenues for our general budget. Full-time residents also pay income tax to support the state budget, one-fourth of which is returned to local governments to pay for services.

So, how might we cover increasing costs without creating more of an affordability crisis for full-time residents? Our sales taxes are already high and we don’t have a homestead exemption to protect residents from escalating property values increasing their property taxes. A vacant home tax is attractive because it would avoid increasing the burden on local families while targeting the flow of wealth that is partly responsible for increased costs.

Some second homeowners have called the proposal “divisive”, “unfair”, and “exploitative”, expressing concerns about being singled out. However, “fair” seems to be in the eye of the beholder—e.g., jurisdiction shopping by the wealthy to minimize taxes doesn’t seem “fair”. Indeed, tax policy institutes don’t use “fair” for improving tax systems. Interestingly, right-leaning tax experts often emphasize neutrality (e.g., avoiding favoring Colorado real estate over Florida).

My analysis of a vacant home tax, which has been implemented in multiple other cities, focuses on whether it is reasonable and the consequences are positive. Since we already use residency as a category for taxation (e.g., Colorado residents pay income tax) as well as tax vacant properties at a higher rate on the basis that they generate less tax income, a vacant home tax is a reasonable tool.

I don’t worry that an empty home tax will chase second homeowners away for financial reasons, especially if we end up exempting long-time owners who bought homes under much different financial circumstances from the tax; taking care of core town assets will increase real estate values more than the tax drags them down.

I am not surprised at the outrage of some of the second homeowners. Who we tax, and for what, is an expression of values. In a country that taxes work while giving wealth a free pass, values, which are manifested by sacrifice, are out of fashion as credit cards magically cause discomfort to disappear. But Crested Butte has adopted a values-based decision-making approach committed to being authentic, bold, connected, and accountable. I don’t know where we will go with the proposal, which would ultimately have to be approved by the voters, but I’m glad that our community is having a hard, value-based conversation!

Nationally, I wonder if this a “rhyming” moment in history? On the eve of the French Revolution Jean Jacques Rosseau described a clueless princess who suggested the poor eat cake since they couldn’t afford bread. But I wonder if the appropriate cake metaphor is the journey that Alice started through Wonderland when she took a bite of cake.

“Alice: ‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’

Cheshire Cat: ‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.’”

I’d like to keep Crested Butte real, including staying affordable for working families, avoiding a slide into a Potemkin village serving as a fantasy for the wealthy. I may be labeled a socialist for considering an empty home tax, but I’m happy to be joined by Adam Smith, father of capitalism, who supported progressive taxation.

One of my favorite books on the intersection between values, emotion, and political discourse is The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt.

Check back in the fall to see what our community decides to do!

“Tis but thy name that is my enemy…. O, be some other name” William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 1597

The phrase, “We are all Diné” has been an earworm crawling through my brain since our Navajo guide to Canyon de Chelly uttered it.

During my time at RMBL one of the issues was whether the forcible removal of the Utes from our landscape ~150 years ago should change current scientists’ relationship to the landscape. How should the sins of the past be reflected today? We improved how we told that history, but should RMBL “give the land back” as suggested? Learning Canyon de Chelly’s history provided a nuanced perspective on history, identity, culture, and the cross-generational relationships between community and place.

We were guided by a canyon resident whose grandfathers inhabited the canyon and had also been professional guides. His family shares the canyon with visitors, the smell and taste of water on the desert floor, the feeling of the shadows stealing the warmth of the early afternoon sun, the sound of wind dancing off cliff faces, and the antelopes, stick figures, and clan symbols carved in rock along cliff dwellings nestled amidst soaring red, orange, and pink canyon walls sculpted by wind and water.

Evidence of humans wandering the canyon dates back 5,000 years, starting with the “Archaic” hunters and gatherers. Around 200 BC the “Basketmakers” started farming and creating permanent habitations. The striking cliff dwellings started in 750 AD, as they did across the plateau, ultimately to be largely abandoned in ~1300 AD during intense drought, though the Hopi continued to visit.

Archeologists initially considered the abandonment of the Colorado Plateau cliff dwellings a mystery, believing that an ancient people, the Anasazi (Navajo for ancient enemy) had disappeared, despite Puebloan communities explaining their grandfathers had moved elsewhere. As archeological evidence mounted for continuity between the ancient cliff dwellings and the modern Pueblo communities, “ancestral Puebloans” replaced “Anasazi”. Navajo tradition describes their arrival in Canyon de Chelly, a sacred Navajo landscape, shortly after the ancestral Puebloans left, if not earlier. Tree rings from structures suggest heavy habitation by the Navajo of Canyon de Chelly starting ~1700 AD.

The Navajo were expelled from Canyon de Chelly during the US-Navajo wars. American settlers flooded the southwest following the 1848 resolution of the Mexican-US war, bringing conflict to the Navajo, who were ordered in 1863 to the Bosque Redondo reservation in eastern New Mexico. Kit Carson, along with US and Ute soldiers, raided Canyon de Chelly to enforce the order, only to be stymied by ~300 Navajo, including elderly and children, who scaled Fortress Rock, pulling up ponderosa pine ladders behind them.

Ultimately a negotiated settlement sent the Canyon de Chelly holdouts, along with ~10,000 other Navajo, to Bosque Redondo. A tragedy for the Navajo and a failure for the US, in 1868 Navajo leader Barboncito negotiated a return to their sacred lands, including Canyon de Chelly.

As part of recounting this history, our guide said his grandma had warned him about names. “Better to describe. To name is to divide”. Interestingly, “Navajo” comes from the Tewa linguistic branch associated with the eastern Pueblos, meaning place of large, planted fields. Indeed, the guide had introduced himself by listing his four clans, which embedded him in a historical and social network. For example, a person listing the Coyote Pass Clan is rooted in a clan that emerged at the end of the Pueblo Revolt (1696) when members of the Jemez Pueblo moved west, integrating into the Navajo.

Names can be a problem, even in science. As an example, to be mammal, unlike (mostly) birds and reptiles, is to have a placenta, which emerged from the integration of viral genes into mammalian genomes, something that happened not once, but multiple times. Species names were straightforward when we thought evolution was a matter of emerging, discrete branches. But now we realize evolution is more like a series of rivers, gene lineages that weave in and out, merging, separating, and merging again. Indeed, half the cells in our bodies are bacteria, fungi, and other little things that are fundamental to who we are. Your grandfathers are not just human and primate; they are also viral and fungal. The concept of “Ian Billick, Homo sapiens” has utility but it can also obscure.

Human culture, including languages, building styles, tools, and art, also interbraids. Tool development can flow gently before getting dammed up and stuck, only for a burst of innovation to flood the landscape. Language might flow with the tools, only to separate before merging again. Archeologists might describe an entire period of people based on the buildings and pottery they leave behind, but only because the details have disappeared into the mists of time.

What does this complexity mean for the relationship between a people and a place?

Ownership is not disappearing anytime soon, but maybe we should focus on who inhabits, loves, and stewards a place, including whose people bury there. There are many ways we can extend grace, actively opening our arms to those forcibly removed in ways that are meaningful to them. We can also, appropriately and with balance (though not necessarily easy), welcome visitors. Fundamentally, we can start building relationships with landscapes and the people within them, moving beyond disembodied transactional experiences treating places and people as slot machines whose primary purpose is to light up dopamine receptors.

The Navajo refer to themselves as “Diné”, which means “the people”. “We are all the Diné—the Navajo, the Puebloans, you, everybody.” And with these words ringing in my head I returned to my place, the West Elks. If you, too, would like to visit Canyon de Chelly, I highly recommend Adam Teller with Antelope House Tours.

Thanks for waiting a bit for this column. I’m sad, and relieved, to announce the passing of my father, Jim Billick (July 19, 1941 - April 29, 2026) after a period of advanced dementia. We will be celebrating Jim’s life in KC on May 23 and laying his ashes at the family graveyard in Savannah, OH Oct. 17. If you would like to join us, please reach out.

From ethnographical research on the Navajo use of names: “Son of…That’s a real hard word to live by. You have to respect yourself. You have to kinda go to whatever teachings your father has, whatever disciplines that he stresses, to a point where he would appreciate you. So that’s what biye’ means.”

Thank you, Dad, for the helping me be “son of”.

there are those who come to the desert
because they have always been here

wind coyotes grow thorns
in the inches of light sunsets have

of mountains—do not make a mountain
reach for one and let it turn away from you

Jake Skeets (Diné poet), Sonoran Desert Poem

To understand where we are, and where we are going, we must lift our gaze.

To explore how Crested Butte’s geology has enabled an amenities-based economy centered on trails, skiing, wildflowers, and cooler temperatures, I have been wandering the West Elk mountains and what lies beyond. With a recent journey to the Colorado River Delta and plans to raft the Grand Canyon this fall, I wanted to visit where the rivers fall from the mountains to carve the flatter, desert- and canyon- filled Colorado Plateau. With the ski resort closed, school on break, and the craziness of summer lingering off in the distance, Jennie and I traveled to the desert and back again, navigating seas and dodging volcanoes.

The West Elk mountains, and the San Juan mountains through which we drove, are the result of intense magmatic activity starting 36 mya that generated the raw material upon which erosion acted to sculpt today’s mountains. Some peaks, such as Gothic and Mt. Crested Butte, formed as “failed volcanoes”, or laccoliths, when magma bubbled through sedimentary layers. While not reaching the earth’s surface the molten rock pushed through the different rock layers of time, creating lifted domes, with erosion eventually exposing the hard, magmatic cores.

Other mountains, such as the West Elk Peak northwest of Gunnison, formed when volcanoes spewed ash and lava that cemented together with mud to form enormous piles of breccia (e.g., West Elk Breccia). Other mountains, such as Sunshine Peak, were sculpted from deposits of finer-grained ash carried on air away from the eruptions, deposits which became light, porous rocks, or tuff.

Less noticeable than volcanic remains, ancient seascapes are also omnipresent along the drive from Crested Butte to the four corners. The Western Interior Seaway split North America from 95 to 80 mya. Fine-grained mud and clay sediments rich with intermixed dead plants and animals and spiced by volcanic ash created a dark, grayish sediment layer, Mancos Shale, through which water struggles to move. Around Crested Butte it creates landslides, gentle hills, and can also be seen at the base of mountains.

That this seabed now sits among the continent’s highest mountains, reaching almost two miles in elevation in some places, is a geological wonder, revealing how powerful tectonic forces acting across enormous lengths of time steadily reshape landscapes. For unknown reasons, perhaps a tectonic plate moving under North America at a shallow angle or because of the rebound from an enormous drop of viscous rock releasing into the mantle (my favorite hypothesis), starting 80 million years and continuing for 40 million years, these landscapes moved up 4,000 to 7,000 feet in elevation, an episode called the Laramide Orogeny. This created hilly landscapes filled with long, high, rounded ridges, setting the stage for volcanic activity to further elevate the landscape, adding sharp, jagged peaks reaching over 14,000’.

Our successful navigation of ancient seas and volcanoes was rewarded with a descent into the Colorado Plateau. As is common with the ying and yang of life, the disorienting topographic craziness of the Rockies is balanced, by physics and geology as well as the emotions of such a dramatic change in landscape, by the flatness of the Colorado Plateau.

The Colorado Plateau escaped mountain-building because it sits on a massive, unyielding block. When the ancient seabed climbed up, the Colorado Plateau joined it, but largely moving as a unit with less buckling and folding. When magma started bubbling to the surface, the result of accumulated tectonic pressures, the Colorado Plateau held firm while the plates under the West Elks and San Juans gave way, including an eruption 28 mya in the San Juan’s which was perhaps the world’s biggest single volcanic eruption.

We were rewarded in our escape from the mountains with a visit to Mesa Verde National Park, where time and geology revealed destiny. Permanent settlements associated with ancestral Puebloans emerged around 550 CE, with the extensive cliff dwellings for which the park is famous emerging about 600 years later, taking advantage of the area’s unique geology.

As the ancient seabed rose, a huge dome emerged in the vicinity of the park. The northern half and top of the dome eroded away, leaving steep cliffs at the northern entrance of Mesa Verde, with the remaining half sloping down and south.

Erosion then created a series of interdigitating valleys, or the fingers of the mesa. The ancestral Puebloans eventually built dwellings tucked in the porous Cliff House Sandstone, which formed ~80 mya when the interior sea returned to the area. The Cliff Sandstone sits on top of the older Menefee Formation, laid down when the sea retreated. While water moves easily through the sandstone, the Menefee is impermeable, causing seeps which provide a water source for cliff dwellers as well as creating alcoves through erosion, thaw/freeze cycles, and the dissolution of the chemical bonds holding the sandstone together.

At its cliff dwelling peak in the last 13^th century, ~25,000 people lived in Mesa Verde, spread across hundreds, if not thousands of cliff dwellings. But at the end of the 13^th century, the communities were abandoned, with the Puebloans moving out and across the larger landscape, including the 21 current federally recognized Pueblo and Hopi communities in New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona. This migration is well documented; for example, the turkeys of today’s northern Rio Grande Region (e.g., Picuras Pueblo) carry the genetic fingerprints of turkeys found in Mesa Verde at the end of the 13^th century.

Perhaps the poet Joseph Brodsky, who is quoted in the title of this essay, is only partly right. The migration from Mesa Verde, and other cliff communities, coincided with a major drought. Geology and time invited the Puebloans in, but climate chased them out.

Turning my gaze to the West Elks, I see parallels. Geology and time defined our recent past, bringing mining and tourism, but our future will be carved by climate. We enter summer following a historically terrible ski season, with empty irrigation ditches and worries about fire. While it is easy to think that a degradation in the quality of life might similarly empty our community, uur numbers will likely swell as wealthy climate refugees move up in elevation to escape heat and avoid fires.

Geology, overlaid by climate, sprinkled with time, will define our future.

I leaned on The Roadside Geology of Colorado by Felicie Williams and Halka Chronic for this piece. The geological cross sections in FV Hayden’s Geological and Geographical Atlas of Portions of Adjacent Territory (1877) were also super helpful.

Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel may be a bit outdated, but I love how it attempts to pull together biology and geography to understand human culture.

In case anybody is curious, I have been using ChatGPT in combination with primary and secondary sources to test my understanding of geology, more like an advanced search function that points me to original sources. None of the writing is AI-generated. I love learning and crafting language too much.

I’m here today to ask you to join us on a journey of love and joy, of grace and community.

This week I read Martin Luther King’s address at Spelman College on April 10, 1960. His speech emphasizes moving in and through mountains to reach a promised land.

Sunday, I watched my oldest son, Cormac, complete the 27^th Grand Traverse ski race, traveling 35 mountainous miles between Crested Butte and Aspen.

The CB Nordic Center team, including ED Hedda Peterson and the race organizer, Andrew Arell pulled off this extraordinary event, despite climate change exacerbating drought and warmer temperatures, with competitors running the first 12 miles through a parched landscape carrying skis and gear.

Hats off to the winners, Logan Greydanus and local Olympian Cam Smith. Much further behind, despite getting lost and through frustration and exhaustion, my son and his partner beat the cut-offs with minutes to spare, finishing in just over 16 hours.

Step by step.

At Spelman College, King noted that each age has its own promised land, or finish line. I hope there would be disagreement, but I also know many of us see a promised land with similar features in our community.

Affordable health care and housing.

A land of laws, including upholding of our constitutional rights.

Control of our bodies, with fundamental decisions made by individuals and not the state.

Respect for individuals, without discrimination based upon color or race, gender, sexual orientation, or socio-economic or cultural background.

But what resonates for me is King’s emphasis not on arrival, but on the journey. He ends his speech exhorting us to keep moving through the mountains, not to turn back or get stuck. “If you can’t fly, run; if you can’t run, walk; if you can’t walk, crawl, but by all means, keep moving.”

Unfortunately, we will not magically appear in the promised land on the wings of rage. More importantly, King emphasized progress comes from how we make the journey. Not just in the righteousness of our destination, but in the daily steps we take, steps best grounded in love, joy, and grace. “What do you mean by this love thing- you are talking about people who oppose you, loving people who are trying to misuse you, seeking to defeat you…. That is impossible—” wrote King. But King made it clear through his life’s work, that not only was such love possible, a journey full of love is the only way worth traveling.

Today we have no shortage of justifiable issues over which to rage—the shooting of civilians for lawful protest, violations of constitutional rights, the abrogation of the balance of powers. We live in a world in which social media and AI algorithms use rage, emotion, and abstraction, to monetize our attention. But a rage directed by marketers and AI will not create the world we want to live in. Rather, we must build a world of love, joy, and grace, grounded in small steps, grounded in trust.

Ethicist Sillela Bok wrote, “whatever matters to human beings, trust is the atmosphere within which it thrives.”

David Brooks wrote in the Atlantic, “Trust can be rebuilt through the accumulation of small heroic acts, by the outrageous gesture of extending vulnerability in a world that is mean, by proffering faith in other people when that faith may not be returned. Sometimes trust blooms when somebody holds you against all logic when you expected to be dropped. It ripples across society as multiplying moments of beauty in a storm.”

My hats off to everybody in this room, too numerous to name everybody, but I will call out some of the many individuals who work every day to make our community stronger (and everybody else who has worked to make our community stronger), including Jim and Annie Starr (for their work with CB, the county, and as tireless volunteers), Loren Ahonen and Matt Schwartz (City of Gunnison councilors, Kara Buckley (Trustee for Western Colorado University), Dave Ochs (CBMBA), Jennie Reithel and Katya Schloesser (Gunnison School District board members), Laura Puckett Daniels (Gunnison County Commissioners), and Sue Navy and Jon Hare (High Country Conservation Advocates).

I explicitly want to call out the many people who express their opinions, including those with whom we disagree, but in their constructive disagreement, move our community forward.

I do not know Phil Weiser, but I believe he would be a good governor. There are worse possible futures than having Attorney General Weiser as Governor, and Michael Bennet in the Senate. But Michael Bennet would be a great governor. While I appreciate the power of litigation, I want someone who has demonstrated their ability to govern and collaborate. I’ve seen Michael do the hard work of showing up here in Gunnison County, figuring out ways to collaborate and support us as we figure out how to move forward with affordable housing, mass transit, and public lands management, such as with the Gunnison Outdoor Resource Protect Act and forever protecting the Red Lady.

Join me today in taking small steps in support of Michael for Governor. Join the campaign as a volunteer. Write a letter to the editor. Make a grassroots donation. Let’s keep our community moving forward, recognizing that meaningful progress will only come about through a series of small steps. We can do great things together for our community, but all great journeys are nothing but a series of small steps. Amidst the national storms, let’s create some moments of beauty.

Step by step.

Alan Best at Big Pivots has a nice summary of remarks from both candidates, Michael Bennet, and Attorney General Phil Weiser, on their thoughts about being governor. You can learn more about the Senator’s priorities for Colorado at his website.

Dr. Paul Ehrlich, a titan of the 20^th century passed away this March at age 93.

A well-known lepidopterist with more than 1,000 scientific publications, the NY Times described Paul as the man who “Alarmed the World” while the Wall Street Journal pegged him as the man who “Was Always Wrong”. Comparing the media obituaries with the person I knew, a seasonal denizen of the West Elks for 60+ years and cofounder of coevolution, has been fascinating.

My primary, and first, memory is of someone with a wicked sense of humor that was always funny, often biting or inappropriate, and occasionally not helpful. Meeting him walking down Gothic’s main road in early summer, Paul responded to a hello from billy barr with a booming voice, as if handing down judgement from the heavens, “What has 18 legs, two breasts, and a black asshole”? The summer was 1992 and the Supreme Court had very much been in the news.

Most exchanges with him involved wit. The technological optimists who assumed we would always invent our way out of problems? “Like waiting until the bus has gone over the cliff to start worrying about the parachutes!”. Host at a dinner party for RMBL donors wondering what animal guests would come back as? “Bonobos-- unrestrained sex lives.”

Once I became RMBL’s Executive Director we would usually squeeze in an annual hike for the ritual dipping of the hiking pole in Copper Creek’s “first crossing” above Gothic, something Paul did most summer days for exercise and conversation. Our conversations typically steered towards the need for field scientists to be more. As someone who saw impending doom, he wanted scientists to more proactively head off disaster.

Trained as a conservation biologist attuned to politics, I noticed Paul’s fingerprints on many national issues. For example, the debate (see “Bridging the Conservation Divide” by Michelle Nijhuis”) over conserving species as a moral imperative versus their value to humans was essentially a “lab discussion” between his graduate students (and RMBL’ers) Michael Soule, who founded Conservation Biology, and Gretchen Daily, who was inducted in the National Academy of Sciences for her work on ecosystem services.

Paul made many predictions that were wrong. Starvation hasn’t been nearly as bad as he projected; England hasn’t disappeared in a riot of famine. Most famously Paul lost “the bet”, which became a symbol of human ingenuity. Economist Julian Simon pocketed $576.07 when the prices of metals chosen by Paul, John Holdren, and (RMBL’er) John Harte dropped from 1980 to 1990. In my experience the future isn’t so difficult to predict, but timing can be a bitch.

Unfortunately, he got some things right; humans have caused wildlife populations to plummet by two-thirds and he raised early alarms over carbon emissions. Perhaps what Paul got most right was “attention”. From renaming his book the Population Bomb (from Population, Resources, and the Environment), to going on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, fifty years before the rise of smartphones and social media Paul mastered the craft of grabbing eyeballs.

Ultimately science is not about being right. Physic professors didn’t start bashing Isaac Newton when Einstein came along. Paul framed critical questions around how humans inhabit the world and whether we can do better for other organisms, including our descendants. For a lifetime of groundbreaking work Paul won almost every available scientific award, including a McArthur Foundation genius fellowship and the Taylor Prize for Environmental Achievement.

Paul was an easy target for those wanting to get their own attention, especially to undercut environmental issues. Just as he pushed jarring and often inaccurate predictions, others layered absurdity and abstraction on Paul as a mythological foil. President Barack’s nomination of collaborator (and RMBL’er) John Holdren as National Science Advisor brought scrutiny to The Population Bomb, in which Paul supported making foreign aid contingent upon population control as well as Indian Minister Sripati Chandrasekher’s push for involuntary sterilization of men with more than 2 children. Building upon edgy policy recommendations, critics inaccurately transmuted overwrought warnings of the perils of overpopulation into statements of extreme recommendations, involving international police and forced abortions, even though Paul, Anne, and John rejected such interpretations.

As I reflect, while scarcity as a function of a rapidly growing human population is intuitively appealing, I agree with his critics that the combined force of human ingenuity and economic markets give us time to navigate a rapidly changing world. However, I concur with Paul’s deeper point that adding billions of humans to a complex earth system is bound to have unanticipated consequences, such as increasing fragility of our food systems because of climate change and bad health caused by increasing exposure to man-made chemicals.

I also wonder if the progressive push to label him a racist (and ban his books) based upon a single description of Delhi (among ~50 books) is a sign of academia rotting. Why do the hard work of creating opportunities for the disadvantaged when you can just signal self-righteousness, joining the conservative propaganda bandwagon? A community willing to eat its own for no purpose amidst an administration hellbent on destroying science has a troubling future.

As I say goodbye, in my mind’s eye I can see Paul and Anne driving their jeep back from dinner in Crested Butte, one of those late July days that seem like they will linger forever, in a time when summers are still vanishingly short but winter seems to be but a distant memory. Good wine, good food, and good company. He’s thinking about the next interview, mulling over the next book, and thinking about the next opportunity to make the world a better place. For that, we should all be grateful!

For those interested in understanding what it means to step into the firing line of national environmental policy, check out science historian Naomi Oreske’s work on oil and gas. To better understand how difficult it can be to speak out against corporate interests, and what Paul was up against, read about Tyrone Hayes and the consequences of raising the health alarm on plastics.

This journey started in the headwaters of the Gunnison River, one of the major tributaries of the Colorado River. We passed through a landscape sculpted hydrologically, economically, and socially by the Colorado River, an arid region of striated browns and reds, remnants of past seas, volcanos, and estuaries, interrupted in modern day by long, thin lines of blue- gray rivers feeding patches of green irrigated meadows.

The journey ended in the salt flats just north of the Gulf of California. Hundreds of years before dams and diversions, the Colorado River regularly carried millions of tons of sediment into the gulf, renamed from the Sea of Cortez and more vividly known as the Vermillion Sea, painted red by plankton blooms. The moon, doing its best to counteract the power of dirt and water flowing down the earth’s elevational gradient, once pulled powerful tidal surges almost to the US. Wide expanses of water allowed humans to push back against gravity with coal- and wood-powered steamboats, navigating into California. The Delta, an island of green, blue, and red surrounded by the southwestern desert, covered thousands of square miles, an estuarine oasis overflowing with a cacophony of wetlands, birds, desert fish, and indigenous populations such as the Mayo, Yaqui, and Chemehuevie.

Today, salt flats stretch as far as the eyes can see, testament that water follows money and not gravity.

If we were a water drop, our path from mountaintop to Delta might take generations, driven by gravity, evaporation, and jet streams, traveling circuitously between headwater and ocean. We would start as a snowflake, melting into subterranean reservoirs before emerging decades later into streams to travel through irrigation ditches before ending up in hay, consumed by cows and unceremoniously peed back.

After countless cycles between ground, plant, animal, and river, we leap up to better views, transpiring through cottonwood leaves into the sky where we are summoned by water managers with silver iodide particles. Joining other droplets to seed clouds we return to home, falling on ski slopes, back to the cycle of life. Eventually our path upward takes us forward. We become níłtsą́ biʼáád, part of a gentle, female rain, nourishing corn amongst the sacred Navajo Mountains but also as níłtsą́ biką, the forceful, purifying male rain, our frozen hardness shearing electrons to cause thunder and lightning, signaling the divine presence of the gods.

Generations pass before we experience broccoli and watermelon in the Wellton-Mohawk Valley of the Sonoran Desert, east of Yuma, on big, industrial-scale farms. On this journey we avoid diversion across continents, shipped as feed abroad, and travel through a canal built to keep the salty agricultural run-off out of the Colorado River, down to the Santa Clara Cienega, an accident of human engineering.

At least until we fire up an expensive desalinization plant in Yuma and dry it out, the Cienega harkens back to a former, more vibrant time, sustaining protected birds and fish and serving as the wintering grounds for 200,000+ migratory waterfowl. Joining yet another cycle of life we ultimately pass into a fish before being grabbed by an osprey and pooped into the vermillion sea.

One year or ten thousand, time matters not to the raindrop.

But we humans, with and because of money, carve our own paths. I was guided by my friend, Dev Carey, and his daughter, Seraya. For me, there could be no better guides. For decades Dev has been leading young people through this year to better see the Colorado River Basin, becoming part of the Delta’s community, human and ecological, in the process.

Constrained by family schedules and public meetings, interested in rolling down the watershed and back in a matter of days and not generations, we motored forth, following slivers of cement, highways linking cities. We traveled “river adjacent”; ghosts of dynamite and heavy machinery past, simultaneously revealing and destroying the geological record, made it possible to cut across watersheds, avoiding sinuous, deeply cut canyons and dangerous rapids, crossing rivers on bridges forged in distant mills. Fueled by carbon and caffeine we traversed watersheds, cultures, and ecosystems, moving between worlds within days, though between worlds as if across millennia.

We landed about 30 miles south of the border and 15 miles north of the Gulf in a small ejido just in time for a birthday party across the avenue. Hugs, laughter, catching up as well as introductions. Posole, fresh tortillas, and coca-cola spread across outdoor tables, with kids, family members, and friends coming and going. Laughter and singing, accompanied by guitar. Dogs wandering in and out of the light provided by burning wood, the flickering of streetlights beyond along the main avenue.

The next day brought sunlight and time, a chance to look more closely. We were staying in a modest two-room brick building with electricity but no running water for drinking or irrigation, sitting along a modest avenue with other similar homes surrounded variously by rough wood or chain link fences. An outhouse perched over a hole offering a minimum of privacy. Ravens and vermillion flycatchers fluttered between mesquite and palm trees.

Through a wider lens spanning time and space, the ejido is a ghost of revolutions past. Following the 1910 Mexican Revolution, ejidos were a tool for breaking up the large land ownings that started >500 years ago with the destruction of the Aztecan Empire and subsequent Spanish land grants. Ejidos provided a postrevolutionary measure of control and financial security to indigenous populations and the less wealthy.

Owned by the Mexican state, ejidos communally manage their holdings for the right of “usufruct”. They enjoy the benefits of a property but must maintain the underlying functioning and value; communities can metaphorically pick the fruit but not harvest the plant. While constitutional reforms coincident with the North American Free Trade Agreement encourage privatization, Mexico still has ~30,000 ejidos covering ~50% of the landmass and supporting ~3% of the population.

Our arrival coincided with yet another revolution, the arrest and killing of “El Mencho”, a cartel boss. While we were far north of the major disruptions in Guadalajara and Puerto Vallarta, we kept a low profile, staying close. We did not travel the last ~15 miles to the Gulf, sensitive to how this turmoil layered on to the expansion of the shadow economies into the Gulf.

It will take a much larger revolution to restore the Delta’s ecological integrity. Except for an intentional pulse of water in 2014, it’s been >50 years since the river meaningfully reached the Gulf. Most of the water is diverted to irrigation; almost one-third of the water consumed by humans goes to produce alfalfa, much of which is shipped abroad, including to support Saudi Arabian show horses; we ship enough water from Arizona to the Middle East in the form of alfalfa to support > 1 million Americans.

A revolution is inevitable, though it will lead to economic hardship and not a restored Delta. The 1922 Colorado River Compact allocated 7.5 million acre-feet of water to the upper basin states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming), another 7.5 million AF to the lower basin states (California, Arizona, and Nevada) with an additional 1.5 million AF awarded to Mexico by treaty. However, the watershed has only historically generated about 90% of the allocated water. Drought and rising temperatures increasing evaporative loss of water are reducing flows even below that; in 2026 water managers are projecting water flows will drop two-thirds from recent, low averages. Water stored in Lake Powell and Lake Mead has made it possible to pretend the problem doesn’t exist, but those supplies will likely run out in a year or two. The southwest is teetering on hydrological bankruptcy more likely resolved by an overthrow of the system than a capitalistic restructuring.

The rain drop cares not for the folly of human accounting.

There are so many to thank for opening my eyes to what it means to be a denizen of the headwaters of the Colorado River Basin, starting with Dev Carey. George Sibley is a wonderful source for learning more. For a peek into the intersection of Mexican revolutions with the syncretic, indigenous cultures of northern Mexico, I recommend the Hummingbird’s Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea. If you are interested in supporting environmental work on the Colorado Delta, check out the Mexican non-profit, Pro-Natura.

In our haste to try and make everything, and everybody, better, have we lost sight of the people around us? Have we come to view our neighbors, friends, and even family members as objects to be judged, fixed, or educated, rather than as individuals to be embraced, whose unique experiences, perspectives, and viewpoints enrich our relationships and communities?

As social media algorithmically taps into neural pathways to spread viral negativity and public trust craters out, I’ve come to believe that we need to turn our focus from being right on policy issues to building healthy relationships that span socio-economic and ideological boundaries. This is not an abandonment of critical values or issues, like climate change or equality, but a sense that intolerance is what is holding our communities back, not evil or a lack of education.

In a society centered on “I, me, and mine” what is the place of “you, us, and ours”? If we shift our emphasis to acceptance and building relationships can we drive more meaningful and lasting political change? What would this look like through the lens of local politics? What might a better version of ourselves look like?

But before jumping attempting to bridge the I/you chasm in politics, I’m going to explore the evolutionary origin of “me”.

I was slow to enter biology, delaying freshman college biology until my senior year in part because I hate memorizing details. Regurgitating the Krebs Cycle is my personal academic hell. Given my chance at Truman State University (Missouri) to reconceptualize freshman biology, I took students on a journey to understand the evolutionary emergence of biological complexity.

Rather than just memorizing cell parts- chromosomes, mitochondria, RNA, ribosomes-- we reverse engineered highly integrated, multi-functional cells. We talked about how mitochondria, powerplants of cells, and chloroplasts, the solar panels plants use to convert sun to sugar, started as free-living organisms but became integrated parts of more complex animal, plant, fungi, and protist cells. We explored the delicate balance between competition driving innovation and cooperation providing a competitive advantage. It turns out that the whole being greater than the sum of its parts is as true for biology as it is for winning super bowls.

The evolutionary journey that integrated disparate, free-living parts into unified, complex cells is a well-traveled pathway stretching across a billion years. For example, just as cells made the transition in complexity, so did our bodies, which are made up of hundreds of cell types and ten+ trillion cells working together to create limbs, organs, and consciousness. While some jellyfish and mushrooms become multi-cellular by merging genetically distinct cell lines, we become multicellular (mostly) from the rapid division and multiplication of genetically identical cells following the union of a single sperm and egg. What cell wants to get stuck as an eye cell if all the evolutionary fun is happening in the sperm and eggs? But in humans it doesn’t matter (evolutionarily) because our cell lines are genetically identical; minimizing evolutionary competition between cells allows the emergence of cell specialization and greater complexity—our wonderfully diverse world of multi-cellular wildflowers, wolves, and wolverines.

This evolutionary dance involves more than just specialized human cells. Half the cells in our bodies are fungi, viruses, bacteria, and other microscopic beings, a feature and not a bug (literally), of being human. Whereas we used to think of our bodies as fortresses, a collection of human cells with physical barriers and an immune system to repel diseases and other invaders, our bodies are gardens, collections of organisms in which balance and mutually respectful relationships are critical to our long-term health. If you disrupt that balance, such as when antibiotics clear out your gut biome, you can run into diarrhea, cramping, and even obesity.

The next step in this evolutionary journey of complexity? Ants!!

Locally, western thatch ant colonies reproduce around the summer solstice, using daylength as a trigger to send forth their equivalent of sperm and eggs, ant queens and males. Workers are evolutionary dead ends, ceding reproduction to the “royal” ants, and in some species, as with cells, have specialized shapes. While workers are not genetically identical since male ants only have one set of chromosomes, a mom but no dad, worker siblings share 75% of their genes, compared to human siblings that share 50%, reducing competition among workers.

This integration of workers specializing on different tasks, especially the presence of workers who support the colonies but do not reproduce, means that ant colonies, and not ants, are the evolutionarily-relevant level of organization; ant colonies are “superorganisms”.

While there are obvious parallels between ant colonies and human cities, humans have not made the jump in evolutionary complexity from organism to superorganism. It could be just a matter of time; ant colonies have been evolving for 150 million years whereas human towns only emerged ~10,000 years ago. Technology is rapidly changing what is possible, but for better or worse, replacement of humans by AI seems like a more likely dystopian outcome than the emergence of human superorganisms (cities) restricting reproduction to a privileged royal class supported by genetic worker clones. To be truly dystopian, however, should we be worried about a future in which competing AI’s push human cities to be more efficient at competing for silicon, carbon, energy, and other resources, leading to human cities that look more like ant colonies? Evolution can act mysteriously and the outcome of complex symbioses is not necessarily obvious.

I think a great deal about this evolutionary dance between competition and cooperation. As an educator I worry that we are doing society a disservice focusing graduate students on the relentless pursuit for truth without balancing the curriculum with leadership skills of communication, empathy, and the ability to work in teams, especially since scientific progress is increasingly driven by teamwork and not individual brilliance. I love this classic Harvard Business Review paper by Daniel Goleman (2004) on emotional intelligence, a paper we would use in RMBL’s undergraduate research program.

In the political realm, while “keyboard courage”, individuals willing to say unnecessarily rude and nonproductive things behind the cloak of social media or by email that they would never say in person, is the bane of local politics, I am often busy with what biologists call “quorum sensing”, the chemical communication process by which bacteria coordinate group behaviors, including the expression of genes producing biofilms or luminescence. I’m grabbing coffee with community members and leaders, answering questions, hearing their perspectives, and walking through the logic of a situation. Rarely is being Mayor about expressing power, which in Crested Butte is solely exercised when I vote as 1 of 7 council members. It’s almost always about exercising influence. Political progress has little to do with my ability to be right, or to analyze a situation. Rather, my effectiveness as Mayor is primarily about my ability to listen, understand, and connect.

Thanks to scientists Eors Szthmary and John Maynard Smith for their mind-blowing essay on major transitions in biological complexity. Almost 30 years later I’m still recovering from how it reshaped how I look at evolution. The real evolutionary action is not about changes in gene frequencies, as is still taught, but about changes in how information is stored!

Cormac, my oldest son, and I are just back from two+ weeks in Japan. Three summers ago, he did a summer internship in Rankoshi, a small town on the island of Hokkaido, Japan. The outfit he worked with runs a snowcat operation on Mt. Raiden and he was curious to see it in winter. Cormac finished college early this fall and as a graduation gift we combined cat skiing in Rankoshi with sightseeing in Tokyo and Kyoto.

The Rankoshi snow was amazing, knee to waist deep power every day for a week. It was too much for a 60-year-old telemark skier who has only had a handful of deep powder days in the last 10 years. Japan powder is a whole different thing than groomed CB runs. Used to edging skies on hardpack, I wasn’t ready to let my skies float in that murky space between air and snowpack, a snow base so deep that we were literally flying through temperate rainforest treetops. So, while Cormac launched off cliffs into “hero snow”, I retreated to Moiwa, a local ski resort, making as many tele powder turns in two days as in several decades skiing Crested Butte.

I also really enjoyed Tokyo and Kyoto, where we wandered the streets, ate great food, visited culturally significant sites, and started collecting goshuin, calligraphy and stamps given out at Buddhist temples. Goshuin are unique to Japanese Buddhism, which arrived on the island ~1500 years ago and assimilated into indigenous Shintoism. Shinto emphasizes harmony with local spirits or kami, which often manifest natural forces such as plants, animals, and rocks. With millions of kami, it was not a stretch to add Buddha to the pantheon.

Upon arriving in Tokyo we stayed in the Asuska district. When Buddhism was still new to Japan some Asuska fisherman discovered a statue of Kannon, Goddess of Mercy and a Bodhisattva, an enlightened individual who delays nirvana to stay in the world. The Senso-Ji Temple, Tokyo’s oldest Buddhist Temple, emerged around this statue. The temple was only a few blocks from our hotel and on a Sunday, amidst incense and a throbbing but patient crowd, we found ourselves slowly ascending wooden stairs, to offer our reverence to a seated, wooden Bodhisattva Kannon.

Several days later in Kyoto we visited the Gold and Silver Pavilions, culturally significant sites built by shoguns for their retirements. Kyoto served as the imperial capital of Japan for ~1,000 years until Tokyo became the capital in 1868. Starting in 1192 Japan was ruled by Shoguns, who were a combination of a CEO and a military dictator. The emperors, descendants of the Shinto sun goddess Amatersau, served as the ceremonial heads of state and conferred legitimacy on the shogunate. Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu built the Gold Pavilion, Kinkaku-Ji, which became a Zen Buddhist Temple upon his death in 1408. His grandson, Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa, built the Silver Pavilion, Gingaku-ji, which became the center of Higashiyama culture, including Noh theater and the tea ceremony, and which also converted to a Zen Buddhist Temple upon the shogun’s passing in 1490.

At the pavilions we noticed visitors getting goshuin just before exiting. Visitors pay ~300 yen, hand over their goshuincho, and in return, receive goshuin, calligraphy and stamps which are sacred representatives of Buddha and serve as a protective talisman for the afterlife. This practice emerged about a century after Buddhism’s arrival in Japan when temples began providing pilgrims a stamped certificate in return for offering a sutra, a transcription of Buddha’s sayings. Eventually the practice morphed into accumulating goshuin in a goshuincho, an accordion-style book.

Curiousity compelled us to do a bit of homework and the next day we purchased our goshincho and obtained our first goshuin when we visited the Pure Water Temple, Kiyomizu-dera. A kindly interpreter explained that the goshuincho were not souvenirs but sacred religious items documenting the offering of prayers to the resident Buddha.

Taking this direction seriously, I used my time in Japan, in the presence of Buddha at the temples as well as with Shinto’s gods while skiing, to meditate on my life’s journey. Stepping away from an all-consuming job has given me the freedom to broaden my priorities. I turned 60 on the trip and having watched my parents struggle mentally and physically, time has been feeling shorter, reinforcing the importance of being intentional with my time.

Upon reflection, I liked how I spent 2025 and am excited about what I have planned for 2026. I have emphasized saying “yes” and creating opportunities to spend time with family and friends, something I will continue to lean into. On a more selfish level, I have been taking time to explore new places, such as Shetland and New Mexico, as well as new topics, including geology and languages. In 2026 I plan, with friends and family, to raft the Grand Canyon and go birding in the North Sea. I’m also very happy about serving my third term as Mayor. The biweekly council meetings are a nice, structured way of staying busy, but not too busy, and the work is deeply satisfying.

The main take-away from my Japanese “meditations” is an increased focus on my physical well-being. I’ve enjoyed a life-time of physical activity and I’d like to keep up an age-appropriate active, and even adventurous, lifestyle. However, my struggles skiing Japan’s powder make it clear I’ll need to be disciplined with my physical conditioning and stretching. It’s harder to jump into intense physical activity without good preconditioning, injuries are becoming more common, and recovery times are getting longer.

The tension between “chasing goshuin”, moving quickly between Buddhist Temples for the purpose of collecting beautiful artwork, versus using the journey as a sacred meditation on the act of living, sharpened my thinking about the upcoming years. Will I pass through life with a focus on collecting superficial tokens, photographs or passport stamps, of adventures? Will there be something more? Does there even need to be something more? Perhaps all I need to do is to walk through the mountains, embracing the flow of life, accepting the inevitable changes, including my physical and mental capacities, while doing my best to manifest grace, kindness, and detached engagement.

A shout out to Cormac for spending several weeks wandering Japan with me. Kudos to Type Two Three, who have built a wonderful community around skiing Japanese powder. I highly recommend their week-long experience if you are interested in communing with the Shinto gods by finding “flow” through powder skiing.

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann (1932), arguing for the power of unleashing innovation in local policy.

What does it mean to be a climate-active, small-town Mayor in the context of a federal government whose energy policy is best summarized as “drill, baby, drill”, a government pulling out of the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change? Is local action just a feel-good thing, with decision-makers in Beijing, Washinton DC, and New Delhi rendering most of the globe’s ~4 million cities and towns with small populations irrelevant?

As a liberal community whose economy depends upon climate- dependent snow and wildflowers, we lean towards local action. But do we matter?

A long, long time ago, in 2023, the Town of Crested Butte created waves by requiring electrification of new construction. The first Colorado municipality to take this step, national media called. Atmos Energy sent a senior official to sit on a porch in Gothic to explain the importance of natural gas.

Leading up to the decision, ~60 members of the public filled the council chambers, a refurbished grade-school classroom. I sat at a table in the front of the room, with three council members on each side, armed with an undersized gavel. The attending local builders were largely, though not wholly, in support and described cost-effective electrified homes they had built. Climate activists emphasized the urgency of action.

The energy representative touted a zero-emissions model home heated by natural gas. When pressed to explain such a carboniferous miracle, he agreed it was a good question, but pleaded ignorance as to the details. At home, my son, pulling on high school physics, suggested the building must have emissions offset by reductions elsewhere, an answer confirmed by the internet and thermodynamics. A conservative sat in the audience, muttering personal insults, either not realizing or caring how words travel in small communities.

With the support of the community, including experienced engineers and builders, the council mulled things over.

Affordability: Concerns were alleviated by the experiences of local builders. Technology has put electrical costs on par with natural gas and not having to natural gas infrastructure further tilts the cost/benefits.

Capacity: The electric company assured us electrification would not overload the system.

Carbon-emissions reductions: Electricity is clean and getting cleaner; 50% of our 2025 electricity was from renewables, rising to 70% in 2030. Unfortunately, natural gas is not as clean as it could be. Methane leaks from pipelines means natural gas emissions are similar to coal.

Redundancy: While there was anxiety over a lack of natural gas back-up during electrical outages, new natural gas heating systems require electricity to work. The council later relaxed restrictions on wood-burning stoves.

Choice: Natural gas companies arguing choice felt cynical. I’ve never had a choice about gas or electrical heating and often builders don’t either; many states ban electrification. A neighboring municipality initially rejected electrification of a new development. When climate activists protested, an elected official expounded on the importance of choice. When informed that the Town was requiring natural gas, his response was, “But I like natural gas!”.

True to polls indicating widespread support for climate action, electrification generated no political backlash. Council members ran unopposed in the next election cycle.

CB’s climate action did not stop with electrification. We provided land for our energy coop to build a megawatt solar farm. Ensuring new developments, such as the Whetstone housing project, are well-served by mass transit saves money and reduces parking pressures while reducing emissions. We subsidize energy efficiency improvements in workforce housing.

More generally, towns and cities account for ~70% of global emissions and are critical to climate action. We set building codes, which determine building efficiency, and drive land use, which impacts how and where people travel. However, while Crested Butte is not even a dimple on an elephant, our value is in lessons learned.

As Mayor, I’ll point to a few things.

People are not in the mood for higher costs and/or wasted money. This means focusing on high impact actions that don’t hit the pocketbook hard. Some people don’t like emphasizing emissions reduced per dollar, but if the point is to reduce our emissions, and money spent on one item is not spent elsewhere, arbitrary action creates a credibility problem.

Policy has to work. Just because technology exists doesn’t mean there are architects and builders that know how to use it. Right now, complicated control systems to keep air source heat pumps working at -10 F aren’t working well. Given that we can air condition Las Vegas I’m sure we can heat Crested Butte. But our credibility, and capacity to drive future policy, disappears if we don’t deliver.

With emerging technology, timing is critical. Smaller electric vehicles, like police cars, are cost effective. However, larger electric vehicles, like plows, front loaders, and buses are still expensive. If we move too fast, we could waste a lot of money.

Evaluating what is working is important. There are a lot of assertions on both sides about the costs of electrification; we’ll evaluate how our energy-efficient building code with electrification requirements impacts construction costs and operations of Mineral Point, an affordable housing project opening this year.

I’ll also give credit to Crested Butte’s unusual values-based approach to decision-making. We committed to a legacy created 50 years ago when the community rejected mining, an approach that put our economy in service of our values, rather than vice versa. We committed to authenticity, boldness, connectedness, and accountability in our decision-making, an approach that has freed us to emphasize values. Being bold, yet pragmatic in our accountability with a willingness to learn from our mistakes, freed us from the tyranny of searching for the perfect policy decision and opens the council us to reasonable risks. If our leaders won’t act on our values, who will?

Finally, we have to engage our community, including builders, architects, and owners of new properties. For these policies to not just stick, but spread, we can’t rely upon top-down mandates. Rather, we will have to build widespread support with wise decisions and effective action.

What we do, and how we do it, matters!

Human grey matter and/or computer chips?

Will artificial intelligence complement or replace human intelligence?

Three thousand years high priestess Pythia, possessed by Apollo at the Oracle of Delphi, provided glimpses of the future in metered poetry. Drawn to volcanoes and glaciers I cast my sight forward, however, by looking back to Norse mythology. The Skalds, Viking storytellers, explained life as the result of a cosmic dance of energy, information, and order with the human realm of Midgaard emerging from the fusion of fire and ice, an entropic balance of heat and cold, chaos and order.

Might there be another truth foretold in the travails of the god Loki, who used his cleverness to solve problems and in so doing, created bigger problems? Do fossil fuels, in making the modern world possible, come with their own challenges?

Weatherman supreme, RMBL’s billy barr, reported 17” of snow this fall, shattering the previous low of 30”, with higher temperatures bringing rain instead of snow. While this winter brought my first December rainbow in Crested Butte, who wants to spend Christmas skiing in rain? At the end of the 1970’s we averaged 132 consecutive days below freezing compared to 16 days now. Will we transition to renewables quickly enough to maintain some semblance of winter in CB?

I became more optimistic after listening to Bill McKibben, climate activist and author of Here Comes the Sun at the Mountain Towns 2030 Climate Summit in Breckinridge. As an elected official I stay current with relevant trends to keep up with building codes and climate policy, but I hadn’t realized that we had passed a global technological tipping point with the cost of renewables dropping so low.

Understanding the economics of energy is complicated. Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act created ~$30 billion of renewable subsidies in 2024, which have been largely discontinued under the Trump administration. Fossil fuels, on the other hand, have long received, and continue to receive, similar amounts. Fossil fuel companies sometimes argue that they don’t receive subsidies since they get tax preferences and not tax credits, but independent analyses indicate that after correcting for government support, renewables are cheaper.

One of the challenges with renewables is reliability since we can burn fossil fuel anytime. We can mitigate this problem by complementing wind and solar with natural gas, increasing storage capacity, and/or working out better ways to level out demand, such as offsetting domestic consumption with data center demand and creating financial incentives to shift consumption patterns. Battery technology has been improving rapidly which reduces the problem.

And while there are cost-effective solutions for renewables’ dependability challenges, fossil fuels have their own problems. Texas’ power grid failed in 2021 because freezing temperatures stopped natural gas heating, a problem they now avoid with renewables. Comanche 3, one of Colorado’s newer coal power plants, has been down about 20% of the time since it was built in 2010.

Another challenge for renewables, especially for transportation, is lower energy density. Gasoline packs ~60x more energy than the lithium-ion batteries used in EV cars, which reduces the range and efficiency of EV cars. This is offset in part because an EV delivers 60-90% of its energy to moving while gasoline only delivers 15-25%, with energy lost to combustion heat and piston friction. As with grid batteries, EV batteries are improving, with energy density doubling in the last 10 years.

Because parsing subsidies and hidden costs is challenging, one way of assessing renewables is to look at cost-driven markets. It’s one thing that blue state California gets two-thirds its energy from renewables and another that Texas leads the way on renewables. Internationally, in desperate need of cheap electricity Pakistan recently installed the equivalent of half of its electrical grid as standalone solar in eight months. In 2024 China installed 887 gigawatts of solar, almost 10% of the world’s estimated total electrical consumption of 10,000 gigawatts.

Looking forward, I predict that we have reached a combination of improving technology and declining cost such that the renewable transition will happen quickly. Despite fossil fuel’s advantages with storage (e.g., batteries are not necessary) and energy density, the cost effectiveness of renewables has made burning fossil fuels the equivalent of committing entropic malpractice. Why burn fossil fuels that took millions of years to accumulate when the daily harvest of sun and wind is cheaper?

Renewable energy costs will continue to drop faster than fossil fuels because the technology is new, and more importantly, because of physics. For example, the efficiency of natural gas heating is limited to 100% of the heat stored in natural gas. Heat pumps work, however, by moving electrons around, taking advantage of changes in temperature, pressure, and phase transitions between liquid and gases (the Carnot cycle) and are 2-4x more efficient than natural gas.

While it seems inevitable that renewable energy use will accelerate globally, other parts of the future remain fuzzy. Will we make the transition quickly enough to avoid the more drastic consequences of climate change? Will we see reverse socialism, where the rich use their control of fossil fuels to reach into the pocketbooks of workers and drag down the economy with unnecessary energy costs? Will the US fall behind China, whose investment in clean energy is a core part of its economic policy, increasing productivity through lower energy costs, reducing dependence on fossil fuel imports, and grabbing a growing market away from the US?

Loki was often too clever for everyone’s good, a situation we seem to have put ourselves in with fossil fuels and climate change. But I wonder if there is an even larger problem lurking in the transition to silicon from carbon. The Norse god Odin prophesied a twilight of the gods, or Ragnarok, involving a universe-destroying battle followed by rebirth, led by a new generation of gods. Hopefully Ragnarok does not presage a generation of silicon-based AI-beings replacing humans.

As Loki demonstrated, wisdom, and not cleverness, will determine whether technology will improve our lives.

Bill McKibben’s Here Comes the Sun is a fast read if you are interested in learning more about the renewable transition. I am also a fan of Allen Best’s coverage of energy and water policy in Big Pivots. If you like it as much as I do, supporting his writing is a small but meaningful way to make the world better. He has an outsized impact and even modest donations are appreciated!

One day over several casks of mead and a gaggle of geese, far-seeing Heimdall related to Thor that things were off in Midgard, realm of the humans. Several centuries back he had come across an early painting of Midgard and the changes in modern times were striking. Plants were less sparkly and goat herds were smaller. After taking notes for several centuries, he decided the painting wasn’t exaggerating the virtues of the past. Midgard was changing. In another millennium humans wouldn’t have barley for beer or goats for roasting.

“It is a shame,” Heimdall told Thor “to see humans slowly fading away. I find their follies so amusing.”

“Loki!”, thundered Thor. Ever wary of Thor’s hammer chasing him down, Loki was generally responsive to Thor.

When Thor explained the problem, Loki tried not to look guilty. Loki often wandered the nine realms and wasn’t around as much as Sigyn, his wife, wanted. She got particularly irritated having to stoke the fires in their hall without his help, creating a rare point of contention. Loki had stumbled upon a solution, however. An elf norn with gambling debts showed him how to make magical wood shavings.

Loki had been shaving pieces from the roots of the world tree, Yggdrasil. He would bury them under the den of Nidhogg the dragon, letting them cure for several millennia before giving them to Sigyn. When she added the shavings, she could ignore her hearth fire for a decade. Loki had noticed the shaved roots gave off foul smells and having learned the importance of covering his tracks he collected shavings from Yggdrasil’s roots in Midgard. Humans lived short lives and were terrible at noticing long-term or subtle problems.

Loki,” said Thor, “we find humans entertaining. Something is happening in Midgard. If you don’t fix it, we expect you to take charge of our amusements.”

As much as Loki liked drinking mead in Asgard, realm of the gods, if he wasn’t wandering, he preferred being home with Sigyn. He suspected there must be a better way to harvest heat from the world tree. Not knowing how Yggdrasil worked, he decided to take the squirrel, Ratotoskr, into his confidence. The squirrel lived on the world tree spending most of his time stirring up conflict between Nidhogg, who lived in the roots, and Vedrfolnir, the eagle who lived in the branches. Perhaps the squirrel had seen or heard something. Ratotoskr had a real talent for mischief that Loki not only appreciated but often put to use.

Ratotoski scratched his little squirrel head, chewed on an acorn, and thought about what he had to work with.

Nidhogg was constantly gnawing on the world tree’s roots, spreading decay and chaos. This annoyed Vedrfolnir who wanted the world tree to grow tall so that he could see across the nine realms, increasing his knowledge and ability to maintain order. Vedrfonir was also compulsive; he liked things just so.

Ratotoskir would have to approach Vedrfolnir carefully. Known for his wisdom and knowledge Vedrflinir was judicious in what he told Loki and Ratatoskr. Every time the eagle was pulled into one of their schemes something unexpected, and usually not helpful, happened. The eagle was still cleaning his nest from when Loki had convinced him to point the bees living above Vedrfolnir to the apple of life. Loki wanted the bees to steal some nectar because he had plans to use the honey to make special mead.

Ratotoskr had previously noticed a new type of silver leaf growing on Yggdrasil around the time Loki had started shaving roots. Ratotoskr suspected the eagle might have noticed the tree was growing less, and to keep his nest high, boosted tree growth. Every time Ratotoskr, who regularly gossiped with the eagle, moved the conversation to the silver leaves, Vedrfolnir would clam up; Ratotoskr knew he was onto something, so he started paying more attention to the eagle’s habits. He discovered that more silver leaves would emerge every time the eagle returned from an extended trip with sparkling fish.

Curious about the leaves and their properties, the squirrel and Loki dried one and put it on a fire. Lo and behold, the fire burned long and bright! Loki had an alternative to shaving Yggdrasil’s roots. But they worried that if Loki harvested too many leaves the eagle would stop making them. Ratotoskr and Loki came up with a complicated and devious plan, as was their way.

Spending most of his time underground Nidhogg hadn’t noticed the silver leaves. Ratotoskir showed the dragon the leaves, suggesting they were part of a plan by Vedrfolnir to weaken Nidhogg by diverting the tree’s energy from its roots to its leaves. When Nidhogg expressed alarm, the squirrel suggested he collect the silver leaves to slow the tree’s growth, offering to have Loki haul them away for reasons the dragon couldn’t quite follow, somehow involving mead, acorns, and Thor’s hammer.

Ratotoskir then warned Vedrfolnir that Nidhogg planned to kill the world tree. He said that the dragon had discovered the silver leaves and was going to simultaneously harvest the leaves and gnaw the roots more. Ratotoskir suggested that if Vedrfolnir left more droppings from the sparkling fish, Nidhogg would give up.

It worked! Other than extra effort on the part of the eagle and the dragon, balance was returned to the world tree, at least for the moment. Vedrfolnir increased his fertilization of the tree, making Nidhogg happy to see him inconvenienced with more trips. At the same time, Loki stopped shaving the roots, which allowed the tree to grow just enough to keep the eagle satisfied. Vedrfolnir and Nidhogg resented each other even more, causing Ratotoskir to do a happy squirrel dance. Loki had a steady supply of silver leaves for Sigyn, keeping her happy while he wandered. Thor and Heimdall were satisfied that Midgard was thriving again, providing entertainment as humans continued their follies.

There are often unintended long-term consequences, however, when the gods are involved. The three weavers overseeing the fates had been prattling about an impending conflict, Ragnarok, and Loki wondered if there might a way to further concentrate energy so that it could be unharnessed on the battleground. He started experimenting with Yggdrasil’s physiology.

Vedrfolnir noticed the silver leaves pulsing when they fell on the ground in just the right way, especially when acorns were mixed in. Liking order, he played around with different formations, looking for messages in the pulsing.

But the story of how the silver leaves contributed to the battle of Ragnarok is a story for another time.

To learn more about Norse mythology, I recommend Neil Gaiman’s book Norse Mythology. Thanks to the encouragement in his prologue to make these stories our own. Rick Riordan’s young adult series Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard made enough of an impression on my eldest son Cormac he instantly knew I was talking of Ratotoskir when I mentioned a norse squirrel living in the universal tree. And for those of you that are very literal, like my family of scientists, the roots represent fossilized carbon and the silver leaves represent silicon.

Starting with Prometheus stealing fire, humans have aspired to the tools of gods.

With an incessant desire to alter our environment for food, larger families, comfort, and social media attention, we have long appreciated the value of energy, innovating numerous ways to make things happen, from water wheels; to oil from birds, whales, and fossils; to photovoltaic panels.

Our recognition of the importance of encoding and manipulating information has been more recent. Writing emerged 5,000 years ago, but Johannes Gutenburg’s movable type printing press of 1440 replicated encoded information at scales beyond the capacity of monks toiling in medieval scriptoriums. Four hundred years later Charles Babbage mechanically manipulated and analyzed encoded data, followed by the first programmable, electromechanical computer in 1937, a gift, appropriately, from Zuse. Embedding microprocessors in everything from appliances to clothes took off with the Bell Lab’s invention 10 years later of the transistor, a diminishingly small and ever-cheaper device for managing information and energy.

Tools to manage information and energy are fundamental to our desire to control a universe ravaged by growing disorder and chaos. Encoded information allows us to discover and propagate recipes for order and predictability, while energy enables imposition of that order upon the universe. Energy and information are different sides of the entropic coin, a relationship we are still untangling.

Our modern toolbox is built around the manipulation of electrons, subatomic particles probabilistically surfing around nuclei. Like marbles rolling downhill, free electrons fill available holes in orbital shells, taking first the hole most tightly bound (e.g., close) to the nucleus. The distance of this hole from the nucleus, and to the next available hole, determines how easy it is to move an electron and whether an element is an insulator, conductor, or something in between. Controlling electron movement gives us energy in the form electromagnetism and can be used to encode information.

Life only became possible with the emergence of a carbon-based toolbox for managing electrons. The location of electron holes is important to molecule creation, since one electron can fill holes for two atoms simultaneously, creating bonded atoms, or molecules. Carbon’s outer, with 4 electrons and 4 holes, creates bonds with many other elements and since the electrons and holes are relatively close to the nucleus in the second shell, the bonds are strong, creating stable molecules. Evolution, in all her wisdom, chose carbon upon which to build her toolbox.

Humans turned to silicon. Silicon is a goldilocks conductor, or a semi-conductor. With 14 electrons compared to carbon’s 6, silicon’s second orbital shell is full, leaving 4 electrons and lots of holes in the third shell. Because its outer electrons are further from the nucleus, they are less tightly bound than in carbon, making silicon molecules less stable. But compared to carbon, less energy is needed to move an electron, making silicon an efficient choice for controlled electron movement. We use silicon in solar panels to create directional electron flow, or electricity, and to build transistors that hold binary information in the form of gates which are open or closed to the flow of electrons.

While carbon is more common away from gravitational anomalies such as black holes and planets, silicon is more abundant on earth. Smaller and therefore more easily formed, when a star’s heart reaches 100 million degrees nuclear fusion causes helium nuclei to fuse and scavenge free electrons. Silicon requires higher temperatures generated by the deaths of massive stars to reach 14 electrons. But whereas silicon combines with oxygen to form solid silica (e.g., sand and quartz), carbon combines with oxygen to form carbon dioxide and other gases that are easily lost to gravity. Consequently, silicon makes up a quarter of the earth’s crust, while carbon is <1%.

Silicon may be more common on earth, but the carbon toolbox, with evolution’s 4-billion-year head start, is more elegant. Like a German race car, life’s information molecule, DNA, is highly engineered, with each atom having a carefully designed role. A DNA base pair is 0.34 nanometers (nm) long and 2 nm wide, with 4 possible states (guanine, adenine, thymine, and cytosine). With double strands, it has built-in redundancy. By contrast, the smallest working transistors are currently ~2 nm x 2 nm, hold two possible states (open and closed), and lack internal redundancy. In contrast to DNA, transistors are a hodge-podge, with “dopants” necessary to juice the flow of electrons or holes haphazardly dropped in. Quantum uncertainty, with electrons “tunneling” across insulators, challenge our control of electron movements at DNA-like scales.

Whereas humans primarily rely upon silicon wafers to capture the sun’s energy, the carbon toolbox has an elegant and diverse array of molecules to manage energy, including chlorophyll for capturing energy from the sun and mitochondria for converting food to energy. The carbon toolbox incorporates quantum uncertainty as a feature, not a bug, in managing electron movement. Life’s fundamental energy unit, adenosine triphosphate (ATP), is about 1 nm in size, orders of magnitude smaller than the smallest human battery.

If the Greek titan Prometheus was condemned to an eternity of torment for giving fire to humans, what does the creation of our silicon toolbox mean for humans, however crude? Until we create generative intelligence, silicon beings driven to replicate themselves, capable of identifying and solving problems in novel ways, we will be more demigods than gods. But while traditional transistors are reaching physical limits in size, quantum computing and the elegance of life’s carbon toolbox suggests we can continue our ascent to the sun, increasing our capacity to push back the entropic tides.

Will this journey deliver torment, leisure, or fulfillment?

Just as the Titans gave birth to the Olympian gods only to be banished to the deep, dark pit of Tartarus, are we giving birth to our replacements, as suggested by stock market gains predicated upon computers replacing humans? Perhaps we should settle for demigod status as we learn how harness our emerging powers.

To learn more about the amazing technology that has allowed transistors to steadily get smaller, making our computers evermore powerful, check out this video. Thanks to Jeff Delaney and Amy Ellwein for geological assistance and Philippe Cohen for his photography!

My rebellion is soft so far

Not blatant like the alt right

In trump issued uniform,

red hat, trad wife, fascist, like in the past……

My rebellion looks like competing for public office,

To seek influence.

I claim to be no Saviour

That bullshit will go the same way as robber barons

and hippies.

From Cry for Each Other by Anna Claire Fenerty, local poet and politician

While recent elections suggest a democratic recovery in 2026, regaining control of the senate will be a stretch unless democrats find success in rural states. Gerrymandering, with parties choosing their voters rather than voters choosing their representatives, could mean similar problems in the house. Counterintuitively for a party that prides itself on inclusion, democrats struggle with diversity.

Starting local, it’s ego-boosting to win. With a winning margin of 28%, I was the first person elected to a third consecutive term as Crested Butte Mayor in >50 years. My total campaign spending was $7.80 (to print voter addresses), or ~0.01$ for each of 637 voters.

Going into the election I was optimistic, with unmatched letters of support and endorsements from the CB News and a local climate group. As the incumbent Mayor I was running on collective successes-- saving Red Lady, affordable housing, and electrification of new construction.

I leaned into a CB legend that knocking on every door is a path to victory. I listened to concerns about parking, property taxes, and affordable housing. I talked with proud parents about high school athletes, discussed national scientific infrastructure, and mused about our oldest resident. One person described their discovery of an isolated community after arriving over an unpaved pass, only to realize that Amazon trucks and mail delivery travel over cement to CB. I learned of divorce and cancer, consoled a friend given months to live, and was screamed at, though more often chided, for selling out to the ultra-wealthy. It was a gift to have so many doors authentically opened.

I had electoral weaknesses. CB is experiencing disorienting change, with traffic roundabouts, an expensive new fire station, an improved soccer field, and a 252-unit affordable housing development with looming large subdivisions. The roundabouts will make the town safer and synthetic turf helps soccer and lacrosse communities desperate for field time, but some see a growing urbanization they came here to escape. Rising property taxes, especially for wants and not needs, invite backlash. Also, in a liberal town, I am an independent who occasionally supports moderate republicans.

My vulnerability as an incumbent was neutralized when fellow council member Anna Fenerty declared her mayoral campaign. Her policy priorities were not clear and we have similar voting records; we both provoked wrath by supporting affordable housing. Her populist vibe campaign, appealing to young, progressive voters around general discontent didn’t get traction and I won with margin similar to 2021 when I was challenged from the right.

Nationally, the anti-establishment victory of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani signaled frustration with capitalism’s inability to address inequality. Democrats rode rising costs and clean energy to statewide victories in purple Georgia. Here in Colorado, neighboring Montrose County, which voted +33% for President Trump, recalled MAGA county commissioner Scott Mijares, replacing him with independent Kirsten Copeland. It was a slap in the face to see Mijares and a fellow county commissioner rally opposition to the Gunnison Outdoor Resource Protection Act even though GORP does not impact Montrose and for which our Gunnison community spent 10 years building broad, bipartisan stakeholder support. Good riddance!

As a left-leaning independent, I’d like to think these victories are a harbinger of democrats regaining congressional control. While Democracy is about balance, currently we have an authoritarian president willing to deprive citizens of constitutional liberties, a republican congress ceding constitutional powers (e.g., budget and tariffs), and a distorted Supreme Court abandoning restraint. Unfortunately recent redistricting and larger turnouts will likely favor republicans, so an off-cycle election may overestimate democratic strength in 2026.

Beyond the ebbs and flows of voter turnout, the democratic party has tended towards an echo chamber of wealthy, educated, and progressive elites who all too frequently pay tone-deaf lip service to the disenfranchised. I’ve long cited the liberal fallacy—”if you disagree with me, you need to do more homework, are stupid, or are evil”. Our educational system emphasizes critical analysis, argument, and disagreement, but rarely models viewpoint diversity. Arguments, or individuals, falling too far outside liberal frameworks can be censored.

This narrowness translates into fewer voters. Ezra Klein summarized findings from a pollster conducting focus group: when “he asks people to describe the two parties, they often describe Republicans as ‘crazy’ and Democrats as ‘preachy.’ One woman said to him, ‘I’ll take crazy over preachy. At least crazy doesn’t look down on me.’” Democrats poll 16% lower than independents with identical stances. Candidates who rage from the left may appeal to those frustrated by Trumpism, but it doesn’t mean they win. Voters identify polarization as the country’s second biggest problem.

This narrowness also translates into fewer viable candidates as democrats struggle to field competitive candidates in swing districts. Many democrats could not wait to see West Virginia independent Joe Manchin leave the senate in 2024 even though republican Jim Justice beat the democratic successor by >40%. Moderate Maine democrat Jared Golden recently dropped out of his house race after a progressive announced a primary challenge even though Golden won a district that was +10 Trump in 2024, moving the seat from a toss-up to likely Republican.

It’s a low bar to cede empathy and acceptance to Trumpism, but it’s a bar democrats are failing to clear. Until they embrace the politics of acceptance, quoting Bernard Crick from Ezra Klein, “to accept the reality of other people whose values and views differ deeply from yours”, the best for which democrats can hope is to scavenge a handful of seats left in the wake of President Trump’s electoral chaos.

If we want our politics, and our communities, to be different, we need to be different. We need to take the radical step of acceptance, embracing those with whom we respect but disagree, not with the hopes of conversion or education, but because accepting them makes our communities stronger.

More than winning, I’m proud of the race Anna and I ran, focusing on what we offered rather than on the other’s shortcomings. I would have been excited, and might still have the chance someday, to call Anna “Mayor”, knowing that what I offer the voters is different, but not better or morally superior. Join me in radical acceptance! It might be more fun and empowering than you realize.

Thanks to John Norton and Mark Reaman each of whom in their unique way have opened my eyes to acceptance. Even if you never plan on stepping foot in CB, Mark has something special worth checking out at the CB News, where he serves as editor.

The speed and effectiveness with which we make the elemental transition from carbon (e.g., fossil fuels) to silicon (e.g., photovoltaics and computer chips) will shape the world of our children.

I am cautiously optimistic. A recent talk by journalist Bill McKibben at Mountain Towns 2030 in Breckinridge left me stunned at how quickly the cost of renewables is dropping. Is my newly acquired techno-optimism justified? Wedding my geological meanderings with a policy interest in the climate transition, I look to carbon’s past to understand our future with silicon.

Of the Earth’s 94 naturally occurring elements, carbon is life’s building block. Carbon’s unique atomic structure with an outside/second shell that has four electrons and four openings means it bonds stably yet flexibly, creating diverse and complex molecules. Its ability to create a molecular Lego set in conjunction with other elements puts it at not just the heart of the emergence of life, but the creation of order from chaos, the modern world, and a rapidly changing climate.

Carbon is at the center of the “information molecules” which are necessary to life. Carbon’s physical and chemical flexibility support storing, replicating, and transmitting information. Today’s molecular letters of life “A”, “G”, “C”, and “T” are coded in adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine molecules. These letters are “bound” in “molecular books”, deoxyribonucleic acids (DNA). These carbon-based information molecules are what evolution acts upon, carrying genetic code across generations.

Carbon is also central to bringing order to chaos. A result of the universe’s entropic unwinding, matter and energy are spreading out such that eventually every place in the universe will be exactly the same. But life’s order, biodiversity unique in time and place including cities and ant colonies, is purchased at the cost of universal disorder generated through the release of energy.

Carbon is at the heart of life’s molecular mechanisms for managing energy. Algae, phytoplankton, and plants use chlorophyll molecules, which are ~74% carbon, to harness the sun to convert atmospheric carbon into energy-rich sugars and carbohydrates. These carbon-based energy molecules translate genetic code to living organisms.

Carbon plays a critical role in the modern world. Billions of humans require massive amounts of energy to power the Haber-Bosch process to fix atmospheric nitrogen to create fertilizers and unleash industrial agriculture, power transportation, heat buildings, and feed data centers. Modern humans have filled this need with carbon-based fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels exist because the little bits of energy stored in carbon molecules left over from the deaths of plants and phytoplankton accumulated across millions of years. When dead material drops into an oxygen-free environment, such as plants falling into Scotland’s wet bogs, decomposition leaves complex carbon molecules. As molecules become covered by other materials and sink below the surface, heat and pressure squeeze out other elements (e.g., hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen), increasing the concentration of carbon. Depending upon the starting material (e.g., plants tend to transform into coal whereas phytoplankton tend to oil and gas) and variations in heat, pressure, and oxygen that favor different chemical bonds and subsequent molecules, different fossil fuels emerge.

The history of Crested Butte and the post-Ute West Elks is a vignette in this larger narrative. The train system that opened the American West depended upon steel produced in the only mills west of the Mississippi in Pueblo, CO. A significant amount of the coal fueling these mills came from Crested Butte because of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad’s ability to efficiently transport our high-quality coal ~200 miles to Pueblo.

There were numerous Crested Butte mines, including the Big Mine and Jokerville, that harvested coal from Mancos Shale and the Mesa Verde formations (93-86 and 86-71 million years ago) laid down when the Western Interior Seaway split the US in half. Tidal flats and freshwater bogs created the conditions for anaerobic (no oxygen) deposition of organic material, generating Mancos Shale. When the ocean retreated to the east, the type of material deposited changed from deep sea deposits to land-based plants, with material deposited in intermittent tidal flats rather than deeper sea. These changes left sedimentation layers visibly different from the Mancos Shale, the Mesa Verde formations.

These sediments were further refined into higher quality coal deposits when magma started bubbling up ~30 million years ago. Molten rock created the Red Lady molybdenum deposit that triggered Crested Butte’s fight against mining and also formed our laccolithic mountains including Gothic and Mt. Crested Butte. Increased heat and pressure squeezed out non-carbon elements, improving the energy content from lignite to bituminous and even anthracite coal (~30%, ~65%, and ~90% carbon respectively).

Eventually other fossil fuels became more popular (e.g., the railroads switched to diesel, home heating turned to natural gas) and with WW2’s demand for steel leading to new mills (e.g., the Geneva in Vineyard, Utah and the Kaiser in Fontana, CA), other sources of coal became more economical. The Big Mine closed in 1952, setting up Crested Butte’s eventual embrace of tourism.

The use of fossil fuels to create the most ordered known corner of the universe, from Crested Butte to Tokyo, comes at a cost. We have released ~2.5 trillion tons of CO₂ driving a rapid increase in atmospheric CO₂, with carbon’s unique chemistry once again coming into play. Unlike the chemical bonds found in 99% of the Earth’s atmosphere (nitrogen/N₂ and oxygen/O₂), the bonds carbon forms with oxygen (CO₂) and hydrogen (CH₄) absorb infrared radiation (IR). While carbon dioxide and methane form a small part of the atmosphere (0.04% and 0.0002%), they have a disproportionate impact on temperature. Whereas IR passes through N₂ and O₂, escaping to space, CO₂ and CH₄ scatter the IR, sending half the heat back to Earth. As we increase the amount of atmospheric CO₂ and CH₄ we trap more heat and warm the planet. Fossil fuels have been wonderful for humanity, but there is no free lunch.

But enough about carbon. Our future, humanity’s as well as an upcoming piece, involves silicon! We’ll also explore why the silicon transition will be more a matter of economic inevitability than partisan politics, with uncertainty around the pace of the transition and impacts on the less wealthy.

Rocks and trees. I like and appreciate them, but I’ve always been blind to them. Given that there are only three main tree species (I think) my arboreal obliviousness is arguably a matter of willful ignorance. Rocks, on the other hand, come in a dizzying array of shapes, sizes, and colors, accompanied by geologists unafraid to use a stultifying procession of terms and concepts to explain the last several billion years in a matter of moments. But in the vein of avoidance, I will set trees aside, perhaps until my next retirement, and explore rocks, specifically, the geological forces creating the Rocky Mountains. Like all acts of exploration, our journey will move from the well-mapped to the edge of understanding.

The traditional theory is that the Rockies are the result of two rock masses crashing into each other, the collision of the North American continental plate and the oceanic pacific Farallon plate. These are 2 of the Earth’s 7 major plates consisting of rock ~100 miles deep. The Earth has multiple plates moving independently because the mantle upon which they sit acts like a thick flowing fluid due to extreme pressures and temperatures, putting stress on and breaking apart the rigid plates above. Occasionally plates with continents on them will collide, generating mountains from buckling and folding, like two slow moving trains running into each other. Ocean plates are thicker, so at contact they drop under continental plates, heating up and generating dissolved rock, or magma, creating mountains through volcanos as well as through buckling.

The colliding of continental and oceanic plates created the Pacific coastal mountains, like LA’s San Gabriel Mountains, with buckling and folding, and the volcanic mountains, including Mt. Shasta. For the same crashing plates to explain the Rockies much further inland and later in time geologists assume that the angle at which the ocean plate drops below the continental plate shallowed out.

Some geologists are not convinced, however, that the ocean plate changed its angle. An alternative explanation is that our North American plate crashed into another continental plate out in the Pacific. Deep earth mapping fails to find evidence of an ocean plate under the Rockies but does show evidence of a continental plate (see Dr. Nick Zenter’s online lectures e.g., How did the Rocky Mountains Form?).

We enter new territory with our third theory. Lithospheric drip, my new favorite term, was introduced ~40 years ago to explain the uplift of the Tibetan Plateau and has been extended to other mountains. The pitch drip experiment started in 1927, with brittle tar slowly flowing to create a drop every ~10 years, demonstrating that materials that seem solid can act like liquids over long time periods. In similar fashion, over time rigid rocks in the plates flow, forming drops and depressions on the bottom of earth’s plates, which in turn causes more flow, growing drops, and deepening depressions, a process known as a Rayleigh-Taylor instability. Eventually the drops release causing the plates to rebound, creating uplift and mountains. A work in progress, RMBL scientist Dr. Lon Abbott suggests this process lifted a Gothic dome and helped form the Elk and West Elk Mountains.

Time will tell which theory holds up. All 3 processes could have played roles in creating the Rockies though I wouldn’t be surprised if support for a change in the diving angle of the Farallon plate disappears.

This excursion into novel terrain, crossing scientific disciplines, wandering across oceanic and continental plates, and diving deep to peer below the plates into the mantle, was just as enjoyable as my journey to the edge of the world. Once I’d talked enough with the natives I moved beyond translating terms (e.g., orogeny and subduction; plate tectonics and mantles; and lithospheres and asthenospheres) and built a three-dimensional model in my mind’s eye that served as a mental map for exploration. As a field biologist, the interplay between the general (e.g., crashing plates and drop formations) and the specific (e.g., Gothic Mountain) was familiar, though field biology will likely never have the luxury of general theories like plate tectonics to explain details such as spring’s arrival of Gothic hummingbirds. My trip reinforced just how much progress scientists can make by testing the consistency of observations with process-based models. Experiments and randomized control trials are powerful, but not always practical and definitely not necessary to scientific progress.

I’m getting a feel for the world underneath and plan to explore the relationship between geology and Crested Butte’s wildflowers, as well as the collision between Colorado’s mineral belt and the 107^th Meridian, the eastern boundary of the Ute Treaty of 1868. Thanks to the geologists who helped me step into new worlds, including Lon Abbott, Amy Ellwein, and Jeff Delaney, though the mistakes are all mine! Geology Underfoot on Colorado’s Western Slope continues to be a go-to book!