Add Denver’s most penetrating voice to those who speak for preservation of Colorado’s remaining roadless areas.
“This has much to do not only with how the natural world looks to us, but how we look at ourselves,” Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper told members of the Colorado Roadless Areas Task Force on Friday.
“I think that access to wild places allows individuals not just to recreate, to hike or fish, but to really get free of all the rigid structures in the mind.”
Hickenlooper cast his vote – and presumably that of most of his constituents – for maintaining the 4.4 million National Forest acres set aside in a 2001 executive order from the Clinton White House. While public comment in this months-long Colorado process stacks heavily in favor of maintaining the roadless designation, Friday’s testimony raced through a gamut of conflicting opinion and purported fact.
So what else is new?
When five hours of presentations by 13 panelists and a flurry of public testimony finally ended, very little had changed.
Delegates from organizations such as Trout Unlimited, Nature Conservancy, Outdoor Industry Association and Colorado Conservation Trust spoke fervently about wildlife and wilderness values. The Division of Wildlife detailed at length how roadless areas benefited game and fish, including those endangered or threatened.
Representatives of wool growing, off-road vehicles, forest products, water providers and extractive industries such as oil, gas and mining gave voice to keeping the door open to development.
When all the words settled, it’s doubtful anything altered the convictions of the 10 task force delegates, all of whom came to the process with similar labels and preconceptions. An observer got the impression that another couple dozen such meetings wouldn’t change a thing.
Where and when all this ends is anyone’s guess. Colorado must make its recommendation to Washington in September; no one can be quite certain what the George W. Bush administration will do.
But Friday’s session at the Adam’s Mark Hotel made great theater for Hickenlooper, who said he spoke not just for Denver but every place in the state that values wild places as a cornerstone of quality of life.
“When I recruit businesses to Denver and Colorado, they want to know about things such as schools and traffic, but they also ask about the mountains, how things are holding up,” Hickenlooper said, campaigning on the side of caution. “Once roads go through, we never can go back.”
Charlie Meyers can be reached at 303-820-1609 or cmeyers@denverpost.com.
