“Fire,” two toddlers shout, tugging their parents toward the community hearth in the heart of downtown Aspen. Little do these tykes know, as they warm their mittened hands, that these flames represent a burning controversy.
Should the community hearth on the Cooper Avenue mall keep burning fossil fuel, wasting energy and emitting carbons, or should it be snuffed in the interest of doing what’s good for the Earth?
The kids’ father, Benson Childs, is here from New Jersey for an environmental convention and tenders an opinion as he stares into the fire.
“I’m guessing I would probably not be in favor of having natural gas burning out here on the mall,” he said.
“But it’s so nice and toasty,” his wife, Sarah, added.
That is the quandary for officials in a city that has jumped ahead of many green-leaning communities with municipal hydropower, free mass transit, solar parking meters, a carbon tax and a bike- riding mayor. Even the city Christmas lights twinkling in the trees downtown have been replaced this year with energy-efficient LED lights.
The hearth — or “fire pit,” as locals call it — was built two years ago to provide what the consultants who recommended it called “dwell time.” The idea was that people would be drawn to the flame like proverbial moths. Its cozy warmth would make them feel part of the community and maybe spur them to hang out longer downtown.
Tourists, school kids, the homeless, the famous, the inebriated and the shivering do gravitate here to sit around what looks like a rock-and-metal spaceship. And Aspen Times newspaper readers this year named it one of the best places in town to find a one-night-stand.
“I just saw it and sat down here and I think it’s great,” said California retiree Mike Scanell. His wife, Victoria, said the only thing that would make it better would be marshmallows and a stick.
A weighty load of symbolism
Wasting natural gas is the last thing on many minds at the hearth that sends 9 1/2 pounds of carbon a year into the skies over Aspen. That’s a minuscule amount compared to the gargantuan, mostly empty, mansions that are heated year- round — or the Gulfstream and Lear jets that flit in and out of the airport and puts the biggest pollution load into the atmosphere here.
The average vacation manse pumps out 606 pounds of carbon dioxide annually. Air travel accounts for more than 300,000 tons of carbon emissions each year.
The fire’s relatively low number is beside the point to Aspen Mayor Mick Ireland, who would like to see it extinguished. The hearth is a symbol, and he thinks it sends the wrong message in a town trying so hard to do its bit to temper global warming through what is called The Canary Initiative. The goal of that initiative is to lessen Aspen’s carbon emissions more than 80 percent by 2050.
Ireland said he thinks it’s insensitive to burn natural gas when nearby areas like the Roan Plateau are threatened with devastation from oil and gas drilling.
Ireland pushed to extinguish the hearth during his campaign last spring. And a week ago he called for a vote to do the same. It failed, three to two.
“This isn’t Arlington National Cemetery. It’s not the eternal flame,” Ireland said. “It’s a symbol like if the mayor were to run around in a Range Rover.”
The failed vote means city workers will go back to their drawing boards to try to find ways to make the hearth more environmentally acceptable.
The Aspen City Council held a “Burning with Creativity” contest last spring to come up with a greener way to keep the hearth burning. But there were no winners.
Biofuel would use too much energy in development and delivery. Cooking grease was deemed not practical. Christmas trees and wood fuel would emit too many particulates. An electric flame was nixed as too fake.
And copying the city of San Francisco’s efforts to make power from dog poo had too high a yuck factor.
Seeing a lesson in the flames
Council member Jack Johnson would like to see the hearth become a sort of educational display. He is advocating that the city put up a plaque admitting that the hearth is wasteful — and explaining why.
“People could learn from it being on,” Johnson said. “It’s rather fascinating, in the way the hearth localizes competing efforts to do the right thing.”
Calla Ostrander, Aspen’s global warming project coordinator, said she also thinks the hearth can serve as a “broken window” that will get people thinking about global warming in a larger way.
The council has directed her department to continue to study alternative fuels and come up with the best way to make the hearth educational.
Part of that might be teaching fire-pit sitters about what Aspen is doing in a larger sense to go green.
Voters here just approved a measure to increase Aspen’s use of hydropower to 81 percent. The city monitors water quality from runoff, has low-flow toilets in city hall, uses compost in parks, recycles computers, hooks up carpoolers and urges residents to eat local and organic and to turn down the heat when they go to bed.
The city taxes owners of monster homes for their energy-gobbling outdoor spas, heated driveways and multiple fireplaces. It provides an emission counter on its website so homeowners can calculate their contributions to the global warming that studies say is responsible for increasing the temperature here 3 degrees in the past 25 years.
While all that goes on, the fire burns. A construction worker leans over it to light a cigarette. A skier plunks down for a view across the flames of the Super 8 ski run. Cadillac Escalades and Hummers rumble by. A herd of backward-running paparazzi trip over the hearth chairs in their effort to photograph supermodel Heidi Klum as she pauses by the fire.
And in the nearby Roots store, sales associate Kate Kelly makes an observation.
“Al Gore,” she says, “wouldn’t be too happy about this.”
Nancy Lofholm: 970-256-1957 or nlofholm@denverpost.com
