Progress Now Action

Senator McCain thinks the effort to preserve our horticultural record and a potential treasure trove for medicinal science is a waste of money.

This morning, I went to Senator McCain’s town hall meeting at the Jewish Community Center in Denver. The Rocky Mountain News made it sound as if I was part of some sneaky infiltration:

"The mainstream media has basically given McCain a free ride so far by not asking him tough questions," wrote Michael Huttner, president of ProgressNow. "So it’s important for citizens to ask those questions ourselves."

The group became concerned, however, when the McCain campaign switched from an online reservation system to one that required people to RSVP by telephone.

Alan Franklin, a ProgressNow member, made reservations first online and then called to make sure he and his wife and a friend were on the list. [link and emphasis added]

Franklin discovered that the online system had been taken down. When he asked why, he said he was told there was a concern about "some group."

But, actually, I wasn’t there with "some group"--on the other hand, I went in as a swing voter. I honestly felt that I could go either way in this election. While I didn’t agree with all of his platform, I sort of liked McCain. He was moderate and charming. I’d heard Obama and Clinton each speak last summer, and while they were likable, they hadn’t necessarily won me over. I was keeping an open mind.

I’d seen McCain speak, once before, too. That was when he made such a charming impression on me. "Colorado, I’ve come for your water!" he declared as he came on stage. The crowd roared with an amused chorus of boos. Of course, that time, he spoke in between Ann Coulter and George W. Bush; most likely anyone would have sounded charming placed in between the Wicked Witch of the East and Mr. Nuk-yuh-ler.

So I was a bit tickled this morning when the senator from arid Arizona started off by joking about the water again. This time, he was a little more gracious. "Thank you for the water," he said, "thank you, thank you thank you." Then he complained that California had been stealing some. It was a good opener... it brought a good chuckle, and showed concern about preserving our precious liquid resources.

Then he blew it for me.   Read More »

The snow finally came down from the mountains and blanketed the Front Range. Several inches fell over the whole Denver Metro area. It is a beautiful thing, as long as you aren't on the roads.

“Oh it snowed last night,
Oh it snowed last night,
The snow bears had a pillow fight…”
–A rhyme Mom used to sing when I was a child.

I wonder what this means for my premature blooming lotus.

Meanwhile, up in the hills…

One of my favorite towns in Colorado, Glenwood Springs, was given a "Preserve America Designation." According to the town paper:

Cindy Cochran, director of the Frontier Historical Museum in Glenwood Springs, said the designation is significant, and she hopes it will lead to other benefits for the town.

“It points to the fact that we have a lot of history here and we really have made an effort to try to preserve it,” she said.

The existence of two museums - the other being the Glenwood Railroad Museum - helped the city earn the designation. Other key factors include the existence of the Frontier Historical Society and the Historical Preservation Commission, City Council’s passage of a historical preservation ordinance, and the completion of an architectural survey involving more than 100 historic structures downtown.

Glenwood Springs' Post Independent believes this will be a boost to the town's tourism:

Heritage tourism is the fastest-growing segment of the tourism industry, Milhans said. People interested in local history “tend to be folks who stay longer and spend more money than other classes of tourists,” he said.

Glenwood may be particularly well-positioned to take advantage of this trend. Its tourism and history are intricately intertwined. Some of its biggest tourist attractions - the Hot Springs Pool, the Hotel Colorado and the cemetery where Doc Holliday is thought to be buried - date back to before 1900. And tourism remains a chief industry for the town today.

I know my husband and I will keep coming back to Glenwood. We've hiked up to Doc Holliday's grave--the view is incredible--and spent countless hours soaking in the hot springs. We even spent our honeymoon there. (That is, at the hot springs, not the cemetery.)

It is a good feeling to know our favorite places will be preserved for years to come.

A note: These photos are from a trip we took on spring break in 2004. I'm considering going up there for my (un)birthday at the end of this month. (Yes, I'm a "leap year baby".) I hope to post some wintertime pictures then.

It always sounds like a good idea to begin with: you have something stuck in the rock, so, rather than spend the money to drill it out carefully, just blow it up. It's got to be a good idea, right?

To begin, let's go back to 1968, when engineers in Rifle, Colorado found some natural gas in the sandstone, and came up with this clever plan to get it out. This news clip explains. Might the engineers have waited for a less destructive plan? In this case, they didn't. But I'll come back to Project Rulison in a moment.

Sometimes, it can be a good idea to wait for a less destructive way, even at some expense. I'll admit, it's frustrating. I've been there. As a rock hound, I've come across items which I was unable to retrieve without significant damage. (For instance, finding a spectacular gem in the volcanic rock on Sunstone Knoll in Utah, but having to settle for smaller pieces already loosened from the rock. Ever tried to break open basalt? It has about as much give as the Bush administration on stem cell research.) I've always felt humble in those moments, but assured that someone more knowledgeable and better equipped would come along, some day, and carefully retrieve the elusive specimen.

I'd imagine archaeologists sometimes encounter the same feeling. Lately, some groups have been using new technology to understand what is beneath the surface of a site without digging. Many artifacts that have been carelessly dug up and put on display are now facing rapid decay. Imagine a beautiful wood carving, laying protected beneath layers of peat moss for thousands of years, undisturbed, until dug up by a modern archaeologist. What endured for so long will soon begin to decay in our oxygen-rich atmosphere. Why not wait for a way to extract and preserve it safely?

So, it seems like healthy logic to me: if you can't study something without making a mess, then wait for someone who can. Why do it, if you can be fairly certain that someone in the future will look back and cringe at your recklessness? Now, could someone please explain this to NASA?

Here's the latest plan: If you want to know what is beneath the surface of Mars, shoot it! According to a Nature article, scientists are considering using the technology used in the Deep Impact project to probe the surface of the Red Planet. In other words, they want to hit it with a giant chunk of metal, and see what gets stirred up.

Christensen estimates that the impactor should be about 100 kilograms or so, and hit the planet at more than 15,000 kilometres per hour. It is hoped this would make a crater roughly 50 metres in diameter, and up to 25 metres deep.

Ok, that makes my chipping away at the basalt on Sunstone Knoll look pretty weak. In fact, I'm pretty sure that 50m x 25m would cover most of the Knoll. But these guys are sure that they're doing the right thing. Not only is blowing a giant hole in Mars easier than sending a robot to carefully drill bores in the rock, it is safer, because this method is "self-sterilizing":

Moreover, exploring icy parts of the surface by rover carries the risk that a robot may accidentally seed a site with earthly life. Such a craft could generate enough heat to melt the ice, providing a miniature habitat for microbes.

An explosion of copper is so violent that it neatly avoids that risk, explains Christensen: "It's completely self-sterilizing."

Uh-huh. So, if by some off chance, there are microbes living under the surface of Mars, wouldn't we be sterilizing them, as well?

In case there is any doubt of how blowing things up to get them out can be a bad idea, let's return to Project Rulison.

It turns out, using a 47-kiloton nuclear device to drill for natural gas was sort of a bad idea. The gas, which subsequently bubbled to the surface in nearby West Divide Creek, was radioactive and completely unusable. The cleanup took about 20 years and cost millions of dollars.

Of course, we're not planting a nuke in Mars to extract gas, we're just going to bomb it from above, at high velocities with a giant chunk of metal in the hopes of extracting organic material. Yup.

I'm sure, as the future Martian tourists cringe at the giant man-made crater, they'll understand that we were just trying to do things the quick and easy way... right?