by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow
The Daily Sentinel
In a popular Substack publication called Asterisk Magazine, a California physicist named Casey Handmer wrote a great piece titled “It’s 2024 and Drought is Optional,” about desalination technology. But he also touched on an even more fundamental point about how people don’t want to think about the importance of infrastructure.
“The past century of prosperity has produced a culture happily ignorant of this weight-bearing infrastructure — a culture foreign to, if not hostile toward, the idea that humans can positively improve the natural environment.”
Indeed, mankind is the only species that not only can improve the environment, but regularly does so, on purpose. That’s because people believe nature has its own intrinsic value, completely apart from their need for food and shelter. Nor has any nation ever done more to improve the environment than ours.
I was reminded of how much one state has done to recover various species, for example, when Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) transplanted 26 Columbian sharp-tail grouse into Grand County. Officials highlighted 25 years of work in restoring the once-threatened species, work with which I was proud to be associated at the time. During the administration of Gov. Bill Owens, the state worked to recover and restore many endangered species, including Canada lynx, desert bighorn sheep, moose, river otters, black-footed ferrets, boreal toads, greater prairie chickens, and a dozen species of fish. The Columbian sharp-tail grouse was one of the nation’s top conservation success stories, growing from near eradication to an estimated population of 10,000 on the Western Slope today, no longer listed as threatened and easily sustaining a regular hunting season. CPW has continued for years to relocate and establish new populations, such as in Middle Park, Eagle County, and Dolores, with impressive success. The Grand County population appears to be adapting well and within a few years will be thriving.
