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West Slope’s Conscience v. Denver’s Memory
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West Slope’s Conscience v. Denver’s Memory

By Greg Walcher | Commentary, GregWalcher.com Washington Evening Star humorist Philander Chase Johnson created a great character named Senator Sorghum. A 1902 piece called “A Delicate Distinction” had one character saying, “That friend of yours seems to have a clear conscience.” Senator Sorghum answered, “No, not a clear conscience; merely a bad memory.” A convenient memory is common in politics. And current negotiations regarding the Colorado River District’s attempt to purchase the Shoshone water rights from Excel Energy provide a perfect example. Water providers up and down the Front Range, and especially Denver Water, seem to be conveniently forgetting the agreement made more than a decade ago – to support the purchase, and even help finance it. No water rights question i...
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Feds Need Different Approach to Colorado River
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GregWalcher.com, Approved, Commentary, State

Feds Need Different Approach to Colorado River

By Greg Walcher | Commentary, GregWalcher.com This month’s withdrawal of President Trump’s nominee to head the Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) provides an opportunity, not just for a new nominee but for a new approach to the whole Colorado River management mess. It is an opportunity the White House and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum should take very seriously. The nominee’s withdrawal, due to the skepticism of Upper Basin senators, highlighted the deteriorating relationship between BOR and the states. In fact, BOR under Trump has thus far taken essentially the same tack as under Presidents Obama and Biden, namely threatening the states – including those in the Upper Basin – with a federal takeover if they don’t produce an “acceptable” plan to reduce their use of water. As negotiations...
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Do your rights end at my property—or has Colorado left public access unclear?
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GregWalcher.com, Approved, Commentary, State

Do your rights end at my property—or has Colorado left public access unclear?

By Greg Walcher | Commentary, GregWalcher.com John B. Finch, a 19th Century prohibition activist, originated the expression, “your right to swing your arm ends just where my nose begins.” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes often used similar analogies to argue that personal freedoms do not extend to injuring the safety or property of others. Yet he also upheld limitations on property rights when their exercise would harm the community. That legal dichotomy is at the heart of a long-simmering Colorado dispute, whether one has the right to float on streams that cross private property. It is the subject of “Public Resources on Private Property: Why the right to float is complicated and how Colorado addresses it,” a new report from the Common Sense Institute, which I co-authored with one of m...
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The push to redefine beneficial use ignores 100 years of western water law
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The push to redefine beneficial use ignores 100 years of western water law

By Greg Walcher | Commentary, GregWalcher.com Last week when some marauding teens bashed a mailbox with a bat, angry neighbors posted on nextdoor.com, “there needs to be a law against that.” Is that just an impulse reaction, or do they really not know there is a law against that. Since 1909, it has been a federal offense to tamper with, vandalize, deface, or destroy mailboxes, under penalty of three years in prison and a $250,000 fine. People often think things ought to be illegal that already are, that we should regulate things we already do, even that things ought to be defined that already are. I couldn’t help wondering how serious recent headlines were, announcing that several environmental industry groups had petitioned the Bureau of Reclamation to stop allowing water to be wast...
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State school trust lands were meant to fund education, not environmental agendas
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GregWalcher.com, Approved, Commentary, State

State school trust lands were meant to fund education, not environmental agendas

By Greg Walcher | GregWalcher.com A land ownership checkerboard exists in nearly every state because of an oddity called “state school trust lands.” The federal government granted those lands at the time of statehood, under the Land Ordinance of 1785. Thomas Jefferson’s system divides and records land into townships, each with 36 one-square-mile sections. New states entering the union were each given 2 sections per township, to be held in trust to fund public schools. State Land Boards were created to manage those lands – in my state of Colorado it’s 4 million acres. The Board was charged with administering the lands “in such a manner as will secure the maximum possible amount” for the school fund. The Lincoln Institute of Public Lands explains, “That singularity of purpose continues...
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Walcher: Breaking China’s grip on rare earth minerals begins with real mining at home
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Walcher: Breaking China’s grip on rare earth minerals begins with real mining at home

By Greg Walcher | Commentary, GregWalcher.com Energy Secretary Chris Wright went to Wyoming last week to cut the ribbon on the first new rare earth mine in the U.S. since the 1950s. Telling the assembled guests and reporters that the “Brook Mine” is critical to breaking China’s “stranglehold on rare earth processing,” he hinted that it might be the first of several. It should be. A few years ago, I visited Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar and when discussing the need for domestic production of vital minerals, he picked up a dark brown rock from the Mojave Desert, explaining that it was mostly composed of a “rare earth” element. He said millions of such rocks littered the desert in his district, yet the United States imported 100 percent of the mineral it contains. That situation has no...
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Walcher: How the ‘Roadless Rule’ fuels forest destruction
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Walcher: How the ‘Roadless Rule’ fuels forest destruction

By Greg Walcher | Commentary, GregWalcher.com Gertrude Stein wrote her oft-repeated line “A rose is a rose is a rose…” in a 1913 poem. She explained it as meaning “things are what they are.” But what if it’s called something else? That was Juliet’s question to Romeo: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.” Shakespeare argued that whatever we call something, it is still what it is. Would that such common sense had been applied during 30 years of political arguments over which national forest lands were “roadless.” And what exactly should be considered a road. Anyone who thought that issue long since resolved got a wakeup call with this year’s catastrophic California wildfires that killed 24 people, destroyed 1,400 homes, and refocused ...
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Walcher: Colorado River drought studies blame climate change, not federal land mismanagement
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GregWalcher.com

Walcher: Colorado River drought studies blame climate change, not federal land mismanagement

By Greg Walcher | Commentary, GregWalcher.com Here is a late-breaking flash from a new study released last month at the University of Arizona: westerners use too much water. Pete Seeger’s 1960s folk standard, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” is in the Grammy Hall of Fame, made a genuine classic through cover versions by the Kingston Trio; Peter, Paul and Mary; Joan Baez; and at least 50 others. It is often quoted, generally out of context, as will be the case here, because of the line closing each stanza, “When will they ever learn.” I hear it occasionally in arguments about endangered species, as in, “Where have all the flowers gone, young girls picked them, every one.” I think of it more in connection with these never-ending “studies” about the Colorado River, how much more wa...
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Walcher: Supreme Court ruling is a first step in restoring balance to NEPA
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Walcher: Supreme Court ruling is a first step in restoring balance to NEPA

By Greg Walcher | Commentary, GregWalcher.com Supreme Court decisions occasionally have far-reaching impacts, but the recent ruling in Utah’s Uintah Basin Railway case was a Doozy, in which the Justices unanimously hinted that Eagle County, Colorado should mind its own business. County Commissioners there had challenged the Surface Transportation Board’s approval of the 88-mile rail line, proposed by seven Utah counties as a vital transportation connection from the oil-rich region to the national rail network. Eagle County joined several environmental industry groups fighting the rail line, marginally suggesting it could impact traffic in Eagle County, which the oil trains might pass through on their way to Denver. But the real objection, highlighted in all the opponents’ legal filin...
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Walcher: Who decides what species come back from extinction?
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Walcher: Who decides what species come back from extinction?

By Greg Walcher | Commentary, GregWalcher.com A British biologist named John Gurdon won a Nobel Prize for discovering that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become “pluripotent.” That means mature cells can be converted into stem cells, so brain cells can be changed into heart, foot, or skin cells. That enabled Gurdon in 1962 to clone the first vertebrate in his lab, an African clawed frog, now considered an invasive species in most of Europe, China, and the U.S. This was interesting mainly to scientists until 1996 when a Scottish lab cloned the first mammal, a sheep named Dolly, an overnight global media sensation. It proved that the nucleus from an adult cell, transferred into an unfertilized egg, can divide and develop in the same mysterious way it does in a real womb. ...
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