Risk public lands in the budget amendment
An amendment to the buried Senate in the last budget reconciliation bill threatens to sell large expanses of our public lands – including in the county of Garfield – under the banner of affordable housing and energy development. You can see what is at risk on this card: https://wilderness.maps.arcgis.com/apps/instant/basic/index.html?appid=821970f0212d46d7aa854718aac42310
Let’s be real: it is not a question of helping working families or building energy infrastructure. These lands are among the furthest, robust and infrastructure in the West terrains. We know them. We camp, hunt, hike and raise our children in these wild spaces. They are our backyard.
Now, they are visible for a private sale – without real plan, without feasibility studies and no proof of real energy potential. If there are serious intentions to develop energy on these plots, where are the data? Where is the evaluation?
Using history as our biggest guide, we remember the black Sunday of Exxon in 1982, when the dreams of petroleum salirs evaporated overnight, leaving our region in economic ruins. Companies come and go. The earth and the communities that surround it are left by holding the bag.
Build anything on these distant plots – houses or boreholes – means transporting water, energy, roads, cellular towers and fire protection. Who pays for that? Because it will certainly not be investors outside the state who collect this land at auction.
This bill is disguised as progress, but it walks and speaks as a public land. Once they are sold, they left – no intrusion panel increases and our common landscape becomes a private property. And the character of our region – which makes Garfield County what it is – changes forever.
I am not against housing or energy independence. But this plan is reckless, precipitated and bad for our communities. We deserve better than in short legislation that sells our future.
Let us ensure that our elected officials hear this strong and clear.
Alicia Gresley, rifle
The American immune system retaliated
America is like a human body. Complex, interconnected and surprisingly resilient – but not invincible.
With the rise of Trump and the Maga movement, it is as if we had deliberately injected a rapid movement virus – Ebola. It is not a slow disease that we can ignore, but a brutal invader that targets our most vital organs from the start.
This strain is not only spread through the rear channels. He attacks the brain – our university and our shared knowledge. He overwhelms the lungs – our justice system, which is now struggling to breathe. He attacks the heart – our democratic institutions, our voting rights and the public confidence that binds them. He sabotes the immune system itself – our checks and counterweights, the independent press and the rule of law.
And yet, in recent days, there are signs that the immune system responds. The “No Kings” rally, and others like this, feel like antibodies forming – a signal that the country remembers how to fight authoritarian infection. We see people to wake up, name the disease of what it is and try to save what remains of the political body.
But Ebola moves quickly. We cannot afford to wait and see. Either we mobilize each cell of the immune system – our voices, our votes, our vigilance – or we allow the disease to take its course.
And the story tells us: without control, it’s always fatal.
Kevin Ward, snowmass
Detecting decrees for execution may require a wrist splint
It is not a secret for anyone that the presidency of Donald Trump was marked by a burst of executive actions – more than 200 decrees in total, going through immigration, environmental policy, education, health care and the economy. If the next Democrat to hold the presidency intends to reverse the inheritance of the Trump era with a pen, he may want to invest in a good wrist splint.
Decrees are one of the fastest for a president to implement their program – and also one of the easiest to cancel. Just as Trump has back up dozens of directives from Barack Obama, a democratic successor will probably do the same with that of Trump. But with the volume of policy changes adopted by Trump by executive action, the next Democratic president could find himself signing rollbacks at such a rate that their hand could be numb.
Imagine a symbolic first 100 days not filled with new radical programs, but with endless documents of the climate cancellation, the dismantling of deregulation orders, the reintegration of protections for immigrants and marginalized communities and the cleaning of federal directives of the fingerprints “America First”. This type of political cleaning takes time, political capital – and many signatures.
Of course, not all decrees are easily deleted. Some are integrated into regulatory processes that require months, even years, of bureaucratic relaxation. But the visual of a new president signing stacks of revocations one after the other could become a decisive image – a metaphor for the institutional Whiplash America that power changes hands.
So, although it is ironic to suggest carpal tunnel syndrome, it is not far from saying that the next Democratic president may need endurance, strategy and yes, physical endurance to relax Trump’s imprint on the federal government.
This is what happens when you have a dysfunctional government that cannot transmit normal bills. Welcome to the United States roller coaster government.
Douglas Brown, new castle