Scientists at Colorado State University and Western Colorado University collected data from 3,500 wildfires that burned in conifer forests in the American West between 2012 and 2023 and found that fast fires — fueled by a hotter, drier climate — may cause long-term ecological damage. The was published last month in the journal .

Camille Stevens-Rumann, a CSU associate professor and director of the , said Colorado still has a lot of green forest compared to the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California or the Cascade range in eastern Washington and Oregon.

But huge wildfires like 2020’s Cameron Peak and East Troublesome fires are scorching landscapes beyond recovery.

“What’s scary is how many more places could change in Colorado,” Stevens-Rumann said. “You won’t see them be that dense, dark forest again in your lifetime.”

When forest fires burn hot and fast, they can destroy tens of thousands of acres in a single day, leaving no vegetation behind.

Trees such as the ponderosa pine, the Englemann spruce and most firs only regrow when seeds from living trees spread to barren areas, Stevens-Russman said. Those living trees can only spread their seeds for about 100 yards.

“If you’re in the middle of a 10,000-acre path of every tree being dead, it’s really hard to get seeds there,” she said.

The scientists decided to study fast-moving fires’ impact in 2020, when Colorado saw its three largest wildfires in the state’s recorded history. The Cameron Peak fire destroyed 208,913 acres in northern Colorado; the East Troublesome fire burned 193,812 acres near Grand Lake; and the Pine Gulch fire on the Western Slope covered 139,007 acres, according to Colorado historical wildfire records.

The East Troublesome fire exploded in one day, burning more than 100,000 acres in 24 hours.

“We just saw such an increased amount of fast-moving fires that we hadn’t seen in Colorado,” Stevens-Rumann said. “Those are the fires that are killing a lot of trees.”

This summer, the Aspen Acres fire in early July doubled in size within 24 hours, burning 47,953 acres in a matter of days. It is now the seventh-largest wildfire in state history, destroying more than 102,004 acres. It is still burning in remote areas along the Pueblo-Custer county line.

People who lived in Beulah described having less than 30 minutes to leave as the fire came roaring through the valley, destroying homes and the mountain wilderness surrounding them.

Within weeks, bright green shoots of gamble oak were sprouting from the blackened earth. But those trees are not seen as crucial to restoring the forest to what it once was, Stevens-Russman said.

A gamble oak, which is also known as scrub oak, is good for elk and deer to forage, and it can provide habitat for small wildlife. But it will also smother other trees trying to sprout, she said.

“It’s not going to be that big forest again,” Stevens-Russman said. “It can shroud over those little trees that are trying to grow up.”

The fast-moving fires are caused by extremely dry terrain, a result of Colorado’s ongoing drought. The 2026 winter season brought little snow, leading half the state to be in extreme or exceptional drought, the two most severe categories used by the U.S. Drought Monitor.

The drought and dry terrain are increasing because of a warming planet, making conditions favorable for large-scale fire damage, according to , an independent group of scientists who study and report on the impacts of climate change.

“For us as researchers, we’ve been watching wildfires change in the last 20 years. This paper has a lot of data backing up what firefighters have been witnessing and reporting,” Stevens-Rusmann said. “We are going into a world of more fires and more extreme fire conditions.”

Bears are common in Colorado’s high country and the Front Range foothills, but their recent and more frequent appearances in places like Greenwood Village, Littleton and Arvada have led to an unusual start to the 2026-27 school year.

and have each put multiple schools on what is called secure status or perimeter — meaning no one can leave the building — because of nearby bears since classes resumed last week.

“It is highly unusual that we have this many bear sightings. Period,” said Cherry Creek spokeswoman Abbe Smith. “It’s made for an interesting start to the school year.”

The furry beasts are making their way into urban areas in search of food as widespread drought has depleted the berries, acorns and plants they typically feed on at higher elevations.

“We typically don’t expect to see them as far as the metro area and they’re particularly active this year,” said Cassandre Venumiere-Lefebvre, a wildlife biologist at . “They’re particularly desperate because of the drought.”

On Aug. 17, the first day of classes, Cherry Creek Schools placed at least four schools — Campus Middle School, Belleview Elementary, High Plains Elementary and Cottownwood Creek Elementary — on secure status after a bear was spotted at Tommy Davis Park in Greenwood Village.

Then, on Tuesday, Greenwood Elementary kept students inside for recess throughout the day after a bear was reported within two blocks of campus, according to letters Cherry Creek Schools sent to families.

The school system has experienced bear sightings before, but what’s different this year is that the animals are venturing into Centennial and Greenwood Village, Smith said.

“That is not normal,” she said.

The district notifies parents when there is a bear sighting in case it impacts how children arrive and leave school, such as if a student who normally walks home after class needs to be picked up by a parent, she said.

In Jeffco Public Schools, a bear was spotted a block from Sierra Elementary School in Arvada on Friday. A bear also reportedly roamed a neighborhood near Governor’s Ranch Elementary in Littleton, spurring school officials to send a letter to families Tuesday warning them about the potential of a furry visitor.

“They’re not a mountain school and that was something they probably didn’t anticipate seeing,” said district spokeswoman Devra Ashby.

Bears are showing up in denser, more urban areas as they struggle to find food in their natural environment. This time of year, bears also go into a “feeding frenzy” as they prepare to go into hibernation in October or November, Venumiere-Lefebvre said.

Statewide, Coloradans have had almost double the number of bear encounters compared to last year.

Earlier this month, a bear wandered onto school grounds in Aspen, forcing students inside from lunch and recess, according to an alert sent out by the .

The has also had several bear sightings near its campuses, including near Casey Middle School in Boulder on Wednesday, said spokesman Randy Barber.

Bears are not unusual visitors in Boulder, but when the animals start venturing farther east, such as into Broomfield or Lafayette, then it’s normally a sign they are extra hungry, Barber said. 

A bear was spotted near Heatherwood Elementary in Boulder’s Gunbarrel neighborhood last week, which is farther east in the district, Barber said.

“We’re definitely seeing bears,” he said.

School just started in Denver this week and, so far, no schools in the city have had to secure their perimeter because of wandering wildlife, said Denver Public Schools spokesman Scott Pribble.

But on Sunday, a roughly 18-month-old bear hung out in a tree at Denver’s Platt Park, near

Bear encounters have happened elsewhere this month, including when one attacked and injured a fisherman in Jefferson County last week.

A bruin wandered onto Colorado State University’s campus in Fort Collins, and another bear attacked a man outside a laundry room in EagleVail. A bear also entered a home in Mount Crested Butte and sparked a fire. Another bear bit a man sleeping in an Aspen park. And yet another bruin stole M&Ms from a hotel in Breckenridge.

Re: “A big test for state’s insurance reforms,” August 16 news story.

Coloradans living in the mountains, and most others, continue to rearrange the deck chairs on their burning ship. Instead of addressing the root cause of human-caused climate change – greenhouse gases – they look for an insurance solution. They will not find one.

Private insurance companies exist to make money. The actuaries they employ to calculate premiums deal in cold, hard numbers. The more buildings that burn, the higher premiums will go until few, if any, will be able to afford insurance.

Colorado has instituted its FAIR insurance program for properties that are uninsurable. The FAIR plan only covers the actual cash value of a home. This is replacement cost minus depreciation.

General accounting practices assign a useful life to a property’s assets of between 20 years and 50 years. So, if a person builds a $750k house in a forest, insures it with the FAIR plan, and it burns 10 years later, the payout would be replacement cost minus 36.4%, not to exceed $750,000 under any circumstances.

So, the choices are not good for mountain property owners. Either “go naked” (no insurance) or pay for the FAIR plan, which is designed not to cover actual replacement costs.

But these are deck chair issues. The northern hemisphere is literally on fire this summer. Since humans like to avoid uncomfortable actions to correct problems of their own making, there will be years of disasters before meaningful action is taken to reduce greenhouse gases, and the costs associated with this will only increase the longer we wait.

Guy Wroble, Denver

Didn’t build fire-resistant? Here’s the next best thing

Re: “Colorado communities should use new tools to protect themselves from wildfire,” August 15 guest commentary.

I read the guest commentary on August 15 by Ryan Maye Handy about Colorado’s new mandatory wildfire building code, requiring new homes in high-risk areas to be built with materials that resist flames and wind-blown embers. She acknowledges that older homes did not use the new mandatory codes.

There are important measures current homeowners can take to reduce fire risk by using landscape design with defensible space, best practices and ignition-resistant plants. Did you know that our ubiquitous juniper bushes that you see in so many communities are high in resins that ignite quickly?

Colorado State University Extension has information about choosing low-ignition plants. They also have a low-flammability demonstration garden at the Lookout Mountain Nature Center and Preserve in Golden. Colorado State Forest Service field offices have wildfire mitigation recommendations for creating space between potential fuel sources and structures.

So, even if you own a house built before these new codes are enacted, you can take measures to reduce your fire risk by using some of these guides.

Nancy Shepard, Westminster

Protect our lands from literal and figurative arsonists

Re: “Fed job cuts are making wildfires harder to fight”, August 15 news story.

Since last year, the Trump administration has cut 5,800 Forest Service jobs, making it harder to prepare for and respond to this year’s intense wildfire season. While we don’t yet know what the toll will be in lives lost, homes and businesses destroyed, and forests turned into moonscapes, we should be asking elected federal officials and candidates for federal office what they will do to hold the perpetrators accountable.

Federal job cuts, the rollback of programs addressing the climate crisis, and the continued expansion of the fossil fuel and artificial intelligence industries have all contributed to the devastation from fires we see and read about in the news every day.

The people responsible have names like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Russell Vought, Chris Wright, Darren Woods, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman. We try, convict, fine, and imprison arsonists. We need to do the same with these arsonists of our public lands and communities.

J. Kevin Cross, Fort Collins

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CSU officials first but were unable to find the animal until Tuesday morning, when someone saw it near Eddy Hall, an academic building, at 8:40 a.m.

The bear was safely secured and was in the process of being removed from campus by 10:40 a.m., CSU officials said.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife has received almost double the number of bear sightings and conflicts in the first eight months of 2026 compared to the same period last year — 6,129 as of Aug. 13, compared to 3,115 in 2025.

Colorado bear encounters have nearly doubled over 2025

State officials say bears are wandering farther into residential areas this year to search for food because widespread drought has resulted in fewer natural food sources like berries, acorns and plants.

Colorado is home to an estimated 17,000 to 20,000 black bears, and CPW's include never feeding or approaching bears; securing food, garbage and recycling; removing bird feeders when bears are active; never leaving pet food outside; cleaning and storing grills; and alerting neighbors to bear activity.

In a , the Republican candidate for Colorado governor said he would “sit down and talk about (his past) one final time,” though it was “kind of silly we gotta answer questions.” After turned into a back-and-forth about Marx’s life, Marx wrote on social media that he’d wanted to talk about his campaign — but instead “much of the interview focused on old narratives and repeated accusations that have already been addressed.”

“I never had anyone dig into the darkest chapter of my childhood until I ran for governor,” he wrote of the interview, after Morgan had questioned stories that Marx’s stepfather had allegedly forced Marx to behead a cat and, later, fatally shoot a man. “That����ap just the reality of politics today.”

As a nonprofit leader, Marx’s backstory was an asset to his ministry. He told a story of redemption over child abuse, a Marine turned born-again Christian who’d reconciled with estranged parents and launched a nonprofit to help traumatized people. He’d shared that story across two books, a documentary, media interviews and speeches at juvenile prisons and in front of Christian congregations. It sent Marx and his family into high-profile conflict zones and helped propel his nonprofit to multimillion-dollar fundraising hauls.

It also, in part, set the foundation for the insurgent campaign that saw him turn from political newcomer to Colorado Republicans’ standard-bearer: In a June interview with The Denver Post, Marx said he was qualified to be governor in part because of all he’d achieved and overcome in his personal life.

But what was an asset for a Christian nonprofit may prove to be an albatross for a long-shot gubernatorial bid in Colorado, and stories of overseas rescues, expelling demons and job offers from the leader of the Beach Boys will draw far more scrutiny and skepticism on the campaign trail than they may have on the ministry circuit.

Marx’s scant history outside of that ministry means that his onion-like backstory — his two books alone layer incredible story atop incredible story — is the primary basis for voters, reporters, supporters and opponents to understand him, what sparked his political ambitions and how he would govern should he pull off an upset in November.

“If it was Barb (Kirkmeyer) or if it was some other candidate that had a legislative record or had a record in other areas of public service, you could tell, this is who Victor Marx is,” said Ken Buck, a former Republican congressman who served as chair of the Colorado Republican Party between 2019 and 2021. A veteran state senator, Kirkmeyer was one of Marx’s opponents for the GOP gubernatorial nomination.

“The only thing that defines him,” Buck continued, “are the stories that you’re talking about.”

Marx must now find a way to pivot from his past and toward his own talking points, while avoiding the sort of tree roots that his fledgling general election campaign has already tripped over. It will be a tough road: Marx wants to talk about affordability, Democratic governance and public safety. And while voters are concerned with both the cost of living and the Democratic Party, the state’s highly educated and relatively affluent voting base was still one of the few to buck the GOP red wave in 2024.

Indeed, no Republican has won statewide office in Colorado since the end of the Obama administration. The last Republican to do so, Heidi Ganahl, was then crushed in the 2022 gubernatorial race by more than 19 percentage points.

Campaign manager Buddy Jericho declined The Post’s request to interview Marx for this story. Marx told the newspaper in June that he welcomed questions about his background and that voters “will determine if I’m a vetted candidate or not.”

Since his victory a month ago, Marx has tried to pivot, said Kristi Burton Brown, another former state GOP chair. He’s continued to hold rallies, unveiled a unified campaign platform with other GOP candidates and has held several Zoom meetings with county Republican officials.

Whether he can stop talking about his past isn’t entirely up to him, she argued.

“I think a lot of that is based on the questions that he’s asked,” she said. “I would say at this point, he’s certainly answered a lot of them, if not all of them. I don’t know if his answer makes everyone happy. I would put that on some TV hosts who keep harping on the same thing over and over.”

Kyle Saunders, a political science professor at Colorado State University, said reporters and voters were right to dig into Marx’s past, which is effectively “his only credential.”

“He’s never held office,” he said. “There’s no voting record, no budget, no administration to point to. When he says ‘let’s move on to the issues,’ he’s asking to be evaluated on things he’s never done, using the credibility of a story he no longer wants examined.”

After he won the primary campaign, Marx drew critical headlines from the opinion pages of the , and . 9News has reported on campaign finance concerns related to Marx’s merchandise sales and about . Morgan pressed the candidate on his childhood and stories about calling out demons.

The stories keep popping up from the large back catalog of previous media appearances and publications. In his books, he writes about befriending the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, a miraculous near-miss with a helicopter crash, and repeatedly using prayer to expel demons. He describes himself as a state champion trumpeter so adept with a butterfly knife that he wowed a group of “gang bangers” he confronted in a parking lot in Colorado Springs.

The questions and stories have not bothered his supporters.

Jeff Hunt, a conservative radio host, told The Post earlier this summer that Marx was just “brutally honest” — albeit perhaps more so than a political strategist would recommend. Rich Wyatt, the chair of the Jefferson County GOP, said everyone had parts of their history they’d prefer not to talk about. That includes himself, he said — Wyatt was sentenced to prison for conspiracy and tax violations.

He likened Marx to Donald Trump, another outsider candidate with a lengthy backstory who rode a longshot bid to the White House.

“I do think people are going to move past it,” he said of Marx’s backstory. “People are tired of career politicians like Barb Kirkmeyer.”

Marx’s victory over Kirkmeyer was significant: A first-timer candidate had raised nearly $3 million and edged out one of the most prominent Republicans in the state. But if he wants to upset Democratic Attorney General Phil Weiser, Marx will need to win over a large swath of unaffiliated voters who have backed Democrats and largely did not turn toward Trump in the red-wave 2024 election.

He’ll also need a united Republican Party behind him — including the 60% of primary voters who backed Kirkmeyer or the third-place primary finisher, Rep. Scott Bottoms. Both Kirkmeyer and Bottoms refused to endorse Marx. What’s more, former Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Lopez has qualified for the ballot and will mount an unaffiliated run for the governor’s office, further complicating Marx’s path.

Wyatt and Burton Brown, the former state party chair, said Marx had taken steps to knit the party together. He appeared with other GOP candidates for an event hosted by the state party, announcing their unified platform for the fall election.

“He’s had several Zoom meetings with the county chairs, trying to get everybody on board because there are people who are fractured,” Wyatt said.

But Wyatt noted that the state GOP, which did not return a message seeking comment, was broke and struggling after years of infighting and accusations of mismanagement. Marx will also have to rebuild and retool his own campaign for a general election. Like Weiser, Marx spent most of his campaign cash during the primary race. Unlike Weiser, Marx’s first general election campaign finance report shows he’d since spent more than he raised last month. He has just under $137,000 in the bank, against Weiser’s $369,000.

He’s also drawn more scrutiny for accepting nearly $80,000 in improper campaign donations, and his campaign has also filed an uncommon request to refile most of its finance reports for the year. Last month, Marx also claimed, incorrectly, that he was set to be endorsed by former Gov. Bill Owens, the last Republican to occupy the governor’s mansion.

“Any one of those is survivable,” Saunders said of Marx’s early-campaign stumbles. “Together, they read as a campaign that never built the boring infrastructure (compliance, vetting, a finance operation) because a celebrity social-media campaign doesn’t need it to win a primary.”

In his interview with his wife, Marx said he took responsibility for the campaign finance issues, but that it was an honest mistake and a “nothing burger.” He said that he and his campaign didn’t know that individual supporters were limited to $1,450 in total donations. He now faces a new campaign finance complaint related to his merchandise sales.

Those missteps have drawn more media attention. Marx needs coverage to help get his message out, said Buck, the former congressman. That will likely include more “uncomfortable” questions about his background.

Marx has also said he won’t participate in traditional, moderated debates against Weiser — an apparent nod to the sharp questions he faced during a 9News debate in June.

But he may need those debates, too, Buck argued, “to show gravitas on a stage with opposing candidates (and) to earn the kind of free media that he will need to break through.”

“People have such negative feelings about AI. They’re becoming resisters — conscientious objectors,” said Wright, a graduate student.

An expanding pool of research on AI’s impact on education exists, but Wright said she couldn’t find much literature about holdout college students avoiding the pull of popular generative AI tools like

“The assumption is people want to adopt it, and maybe they don’t know how to use it, but they’re going to at some point,” Wright said. “I had been seeing something different in my peers. I have a lot of friends who do not like AI. I wanted to understand where that was coming from.”

Now, the 25-year-old Wright is on the front lines, researching growing tensions between students who reject generative AI and their universities, some of which are spending millions to partner with AI companies to roll out their technologies to students and faculty en masse.

In a small sampling of CU students who described themselves as AI-avoidant, Wright documented an array of reasons for abstention: environmental hangups over the tech’s , , objections to the way AI and fears about a self-described they experienced while using it.

“The majority of my participants flat out don’t think AI has a place in education,” Wright said. “Most said something like the university is supposed to foster intellectualism and debate and analysis, and that AI is the complete opposite to that, so there’s a lot of tension there.”

That strain is coming to a head as some Colorado students question why their institutions of higher education are aligning themselves with big AI companies.

During the last academic year, the University of Colorado system announced to roll out a CU-specific ChatGPT. Colorado State University in Fort Collins made its own deal to create a CSU version of ChatGPT.

CU pitched its partnership as a way to provide equitable tools for everyone on campus to engage with AI technology in a more secure way. If tens of thousands of students are already using AI, CU Vice President of Communications Michele Ames said, at least this way, the university can teach them how to use it responsibly and prepare them for AI in the workforce.

By March, more than 28,000 people at CU Boulder already had standard ChatGPT accounts linked to their university email addresses, including more than 3,000 faculty and staff, the university said. Nearly 39,000 students are enrolled at CU Boulder.

“It’s better for us to be in a position to help students learn how to work with the technology and build up their critical thinking skills and deal with this honestly,” Ames said. “To pretend AI doesn’t exist, that it won’t exist in the workplaces they’re going into… would be doing them a disservice.”

With generative AI platforms like ChatGPT, users can pose questions or give prompts, and the chatbots draw information gathered from the internet or programmed into their networks to create text responses, images and sounds to fulfill the queries. (The Denver Post and other newspapers have sued ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging the companies illegally harvested copyrighted articles to create their generative AI systems.)

‘You can’t write an email on your own?’

CU information science professor , one of Wright’s professors, said she’s seen young people’s feelings about AI come full circle. The revolutionary tech is considered “cringe” in some circles, said Fiesler, who studies AI ethics.

“They’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s all this AI slop and my parents keep telling me that AI is the future and I have to learn it, yuck.'” Fiesler said. “I’ve seen students in my class sort of poke at each other a little bit being like, ‘Seriously, dude, you can’t write an email on your own?'”

Communications major Nate Wasylik stood before the CU Board of Regents during an April meeting, pleading with the university’s governing body to stop CU from turning over student data to ChatGPT creator OpenAI.

“I am asking you to protect us,” Wasylik said during the meeting. “I am horrified at this board’s handling of the OpenAI contract.”

In an interview, Wasylik said he is tired of academics and older adults pushing AI onto students to prepare them for the workforce. He said he wants CU to end its contract with “the giant plagiarism machine.”

“I didn’t think education was about any of that,” Wasylik said. “AI is adverse to the idea of learning. An educational institution should be focused more on teaching us than making us ready for a job. I’m not measuring my success on a billionaire’s mindset. I want education for the sake of education. I want to learn.”

Elizabeth McKinnie, a 28-year-old Ph.D. student in CU Boulder’s information science department, was formerly a software engineer at Microsoft.

McKinnie had early access to ChatGPT through Microsoft. If she hadn’t already been leaving the company to pursue graduate school, the technology would have pushed her to quit with “no intention of returning to software engineering.”

On Feb. 10, McKinnie was at CU Boulder listening to computer scientist Timnit Gebru — former co-lead of Google’s ethical AI research team — give a talk about the harms of generative AI and the movements working to stop those harms.

“That talk made me feel really inspired and hopeful about the future,” McKinnie said.

Hours later, McKinnie was dumbfounded to receive an email from CU announcing its partnership with the controversial OpenAI. linked OpenAI usage to Israeli military operations and the company has an

“Aligning yourself with a company doing terrible things is not a good thing,” McKinnie said. “For a while I thought, ‘Maybe I’m just being a Luddite,’ because I don’t think AI should be in the classroom. What I’ve settled on more is that I really think there is a difference in its use when you are learning something vs. when you are already skilled at something. You don’t really learn something until you do it yourself.”

Students were supposed to gain access to the CU-sanctioned technology in March, but the announcement drew so much backlash from students and faculty who said they felt blindsided by the deal and worried about data privacy concerns that the university pushed back access until later this summer.

Students on the Boulder campus will get access to CU’s version of ChatGPT beginning Saturday.

Nearly 800 CU researchers, students and professors from departments spanning computer science to creative writing to business about the partnership.

“The ,” CU’s Ames said. “They are acknowledged.”

In response, Ames said there are working groups including students, staff and faculty looking at different policies surrounding the partnership. Because of the backlash, Ames said students will be before using the CU AI program.

And to address privacy concerns, the university also made amendments to the original contract between OpenAI and CU to “make it crystal clear” that CU’s ChatGPT could not train its large language model using the campus’ data, Ames said.

‘This is a major phenomenon in our lifetime’

Teresa Nugent, a CU Boulder English professor, is among the faculty members charged with crafting the student training.

Nugent is uniquely qualified for the role. The professor is a teacher of both Shakespeare and science fiction. She’s familiar with how the printing press changed the world, but also knows her way around “Black Mirror,” the dystopian science fiction show often featuring plots about technology gone wrong.

Some of her English students come in over-reliant on ChatGPT, convinced they are using it responsibly, while others are fearful of the technology and refuse to touch it, she said.

“I’m trying to help the ones who are overly confident be more critical about what they’re doing and show them how it works, and the ones who are really scared of it to create a space where they’ll be a little more open minded, test it out and get a better sense of what it����ap doing, how it works, what are some of the potential good uses of it for society but also validate their concerns and get them all involved in being informed citizens,” Nugent said.

Nugent developed a course she teaches about writing in the age of AI. Students are asked to interrogate AI, feeding it texts they’ve already read to determine how well it summarizes information, see what it gets wrong, what it does well and where there might be biases, Nugent said.

Students watch movies like “Her,” in which a man develops a relationship with an artificial intelligence system, and “Black Mirror” episodes. They are tasked with learning how generative AI is used in their field of study. Then, with the help of AI, they research and write an opinion piece on whether the technology belongs in their discipline.

Nugent is using her approach in the classroom to guide the creation of training material for students, which will be required if they choose to use CU’s ChatGPT. The training largely focuses on AI literacy, she said.

“This is a major phenomenon in our lifetime, and it����ap good that we’re paying attention and trying to figure out the most sensible way of responding to it, managing it and learning what����ap going on here and informing and educating as many people as we can about how to interact with it,” Nugent said.

‘It’s a hard time to be a college student’

You will not catch 21-year-old CSU journalism major Aubree Miller using ChatGPT.

“It����ap a little bit scary that universities are so immediately hopping on an AI bandwagon without knowing what these programs will actually do, how people will use them,” Miller said. “It’s a little antithetical to the goals of higher education. If you’re not paying for something, you’re the product.”

Miller knows her peers regularly use generative AI to do their coursework.

“How many people that I’m graduating with have actually done their own stuff and learned from it?” Miller said. “What����ap the point of going to college and getting a degree if you’re not there to learn and do something with that knowledge?”

At CU Boulder, Fiesler and Wright said they’ve heard from students who admitted their use of ChatGPT took a noticeable toll on their ability to learn.

A computer science student told Fiesler they had to cut themselves off from AI because they had lost the ability to code by themselves.

Fiesler that found generative AI without guardrails can harm learning. However, students in the study who used AI with guardrails — like an AI tutor providing teacher-designed hints instead of just giving out the right answer — mitigated the negative learning effects.

“It����ap a hard time to be a college student,” Fiesler said. “People who have been out of college for a long time are telling students that everyone needs to use AI, but those people already know how to do things. They learned how to do them without AI. If people are using ChatGPT to do things for them from the very beginning, then they will never learn how to do those things.”

Wright hopes her research continues to grow and provides a solid base from which academics can base their AI policies.

“Does that look like the university getting some sort of exemption for students who don’t want to use it or working with professors to do that?” Wright asked. “Does it look like, for students that want to use it, creating a contract between students and professors at the beginning of the semester?

“What I’m hearing is if there is going to be AI education, it needs to be more deliberate and critical.”

Colorado Springs officials announced this week that the emerald ash borer has been confirmed within city limits, a “significant milestone” city leaders were already preparing to tackle.

The is an invasive beetle that lays its eggs in the bark crevices of ash trees, and the larvae burrow into the wood to feed, damaging the trees. Emerald ash borers have killed millions of North American ash trees since the insect was first identified in the 1990s.

“While this confirmation is not unexpected, it is an important reminder that protecting our community’s tree canopy will require a coordinated effort,” City Forester Matthew Puckett said in a statement.

The bug was first found in Colorado in 2003 and has since spread to cities across metro Denver and Fort Collins. According to , Colorado Springs is the farthest south the insect has been detected on the Front Range.

City officials are launching a public awareness campaign to help residents learn about the emerald ash borer, including how to identify ash trees, recognize infestation and take steps to protect trees.

About 20% of the trees in Colorado Springs are ash trees, and left untreated the borer could kill every ash tree within 15 years, city officials said.

City crews will monitor trees on public property, but property owners are responsible for trees on private property, officials said in a news release.

From his home a few hundred yards away, the past president of the saw the privately owned reservoir shrink into a patchwork of isolated pools as places that had held water earlier in the summer gradually became mud flats.

So he wasn’t exactly surprised when the lake’s fish began dying and floating through the inlet to Boyd Lake last weekend.

“The lake is essentially emptied,” he said. “And that����ap when the die-off really took hold.”

What followed was dramatic, but not entirely unexpected in a summer marked by prolonged heat and dwindling water supplies.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials estimate that thousands of fish died in Horseshoe before entering the channel, creating a startling — and increasingly unpleasant — scene that quickly spread across social media. Most of the dead fish were common carp, with smaller numbers of walleye, white bass, shad and catfish.

Because Horseshoe Lake is privately owned, CPW does not manage or stock its fishery and did not investigate the conditions that caused the die-off. The manages water levels within the irrigation system that connects Horseshoe and Boyd lakes. The ditch company could not immediately be reached for comment.

AJ Macdonald, president of the Horseshoe Lake homeowners association board, provided an email that he said was sent to residents within the HOA. The email said the board reached out for help in saving the fish population after learning that the irrigation company “intended to draw the lake to such a low level.”

After contacting the ditch company and Colorado Parks and Wildlife, and learning “saving our fish was not a high priority,” the board reached out to the fish farm that stocked Horseshoe Lake and came up with a plan to save the fish by relocating them and then restocking them the following year, according to the email. They applied for a permit from the state to do so legally.

“The owner of the fish farm was assured by the state that our permit would be approved last week and that they could start moving fish immediately,” according to the email. “No action has been taken as our permit has still not been issued. Unfortunately, now all our fish have died. “

CPW crews were able to salvage some fish that were still alive in the inlet and relocate them to another body of water that already contained carp. The remaining carcasses will largely be left in place.

The agency also emphasized that the fish did not die in Boyd Lake and that the lake’s existing fishery has not been affected.

“There’s just dead fish that flowed into the inlet,” CPW Public Information Officer Kara Van Hoose said. “There’s not a lot you can really do.”

Although the exact cause of the Horseshoe Lake fish kill has not been determined, experts say prolonged heat and shrinking water supplies have created conditions that make fish kills more likely across Colorado.

“The hotter the water is, the less oxygen it naturally holds, and, at the same time, the hotter the water is, the more oxygen fish use,” said Chris Myrick, a Colorado State University professor of fisheries and aquatic sciences. “So it����ap a double whammy.”

When a lake shrinks, fish can also become concentrated into a smaller volume of water, further increasing demand on a limited oxygen supply.

“You have a limited amount of water, limited amount of oxygen, fish that are using a lot of oxygen even when they’re resting,” Myrick said. “Then you just run out of oxygen.”

Myrick did not inspect Horseshoe Lake and cautioned that confirming the cause of a fish kill normally requires water-temperature and dissolved-oxygen measurements taken at the site. Investigators may also test for chemicals, toxic algae or other possible causes.

Still, he said the frequency of fish kills and emergency fish salvages around Colorado this summer is not surprising.

“I think this year it����ap been exacerbated by starting off with relatively low water levels in some of the reservoirs,” he said. “And then high temperatures just make it worse.”

The dead fish themselves are unlikely to pose a danger to Boyd Lake’s surviving fish or to wildlife, Myrick said. Unless a toxic substance caused the deaths, carcasses are commonly left in place, where scavengers consume them or they decompose and return nutrients to the ecosystem.

That natural process has not made the inlet a pleasant place to visit, according to Prater.

Dead fish have collected in the shallow water and along the exposed lakebed, where some remaining fish could still be seen swimming among the carcasses earlier this week. As decomposition set in, the piles produced an increasingly foul smell, Prater said.

They have also attracted an array of hungry birds, like herons and gulls, taking advantage of the abundant food.

“If you’re a birder, you’ll be able to see all kinds of them,” he said.

Prater also said he has noticed signs of stress among fish in local fishing spots and worries that additional lakes could become vulnerable if temperatures climb again.

“This might not be the end of it,” he said.

Boulder has traditionally had restrictive rules around short-term rentals. The city responded to the lodging pressure by in April 2026 that temporarily expands who can offer short-term lodging during the event.

By allowing second homes and tenant-occupied properties to enter the lodging market, the policy could broaden who earns lodging income and spread visitor spending across more Boulder neighborhoods.

As an , I study housing policy and local public finance. I am particularly interested in how local governments serve as laboratories of democracy – and who benefits and bears the costs of their policy experiments.

Lodging policy for a predictable demand spike

Sundance is an that showcases independent storytelling by featuring dramatic and documentary films, shorts, premieres and filmmaker discussions. After more than four decades in Utah, .

In Utah in 2025, 85,472 in-person attendees, including nearly 28,000 visitors from outside the state. Not all attendees require lodging or visit at the same time. Even so, that scale is large relative to ���dzܱ�����’s existing lodging capacity.

According to , there are roughly 2,900 hotel rooms and 685 standard short-term rental licenses in Boulder.

Hotels are generally built to accommodate demand that persists throughout the year or recurs predictably across seasons. Constructing enough hotel rooms to accommodate the Sundance peak would leave many rooms empty the rest of the year. However, homes and spare bedrooms can enter the lodging market temporarily, then return to residential use.

���dzܱ�����’s require a dwelling to be the owner’s principal residence, meaning an owner must occupy the dwelling for more than half the year. Those restrictions are intended to prevent homes from being converted into full-time tourist accommodations.

The new , designed specifically for Sundance, expands the preexisting rules. Any property ownership type may qualify, including nonprimary residences, such as second homes and long-term rentals. Hosts may rent an entire home, a single room or a smaller secondary living space on the property, such as a backyard cottage or an in-law suite.

Festival rentals are capped at 29 total days per year. They can operate only during a city-approved window covering the 10 days before and the nine days after the festival.

The new policy is intended to support ���dzܱ�����’s economy and reduce traffic and emissions from people staying outside the city, all while preserving most homes primarily for residents.

City officials have estimated that the policy could add , on top of existing short-term rental licenses. Actual participation will depend on myriad factors like rental prices, owner consent, homeowners’ association rules and residents’ willingness to leave or share their homes.

Who benefits from the festival

Sundance’s move to Boulder was supported by substantial public incentives. For example, a recent Colorado law makes a qualifying global film festival eligible for up to from 2027 to 2036. This tax credit . Because the credits reduce state resources, the economic case depends partly on whether Sundance generates enough new wages, business income and tax revenue in Colorado to justify that public cost.

Sundance’s commissioned 2025 report estimated that out-of-state visitors spent over . As , gross spending merely indicates the scale of economic activity – and not how much the host city benefits.

In this context, local benefits would include additional wages earned by local workers, profits retained by locally owned businesses, and tax revenue received by local governments. Not every visitor dollar produces such benefits. Some revenue ultimately flows to nonlocal suppliers. Festival-related sales can also be offset if visitors displace tourists who otherwise would have come, or if residents avoid crowded areas and to another time or place.

Two studies show that short-term rentals can be especially valuable to consumers and hosts when major events strain hotel capacity. One found that Airbnb created its largest economic benefits to visitors and hosts when hotels were close to full, such as . Another documented a similar effect around Austin, Texas’ when additional home-sharing listings . By providing places to stay precisely when demand surges, short-term rentals cause hotel prices to rise less than they otherwise would.

The most direct beneficiaries of ���dzܱ�����’s new short-term rental policy will be hosts. Hotels would ordinarily capture much of the income generated by scarce lodging. ���dzܱ�����’s policy opens some of that opportunity to homeowners, second-home owners and, with the owner’s permission, tenants.

Festival benefits can extend beyond lodging to the local business community. A study in New York City found that greater Airbnb activity , likely because guests spent money near where they stayed. That suggests festival rentals could spread festival attendees throughout the Boulder area and not just near existing hotels and festival screening venues.

Do policy guardrails matter?

The same short-term rentals that add lodging during a demand spike can create housing problems if homes remain in the tourist market afterward. National research suggests that Airbnb growth can , contributing to .

There is also that even temporary increases in demand for short-term rentals can result in a persistent increase in local Airbnb listings. However, the restrictions on ���dzܱ�����’s new limit this risk by restricting rentals to a city-approved event window.

After the 2027 festival, Boulder officials can begin evaluating the policy on three dimensions: Did it add meaningful lodging capacity? Were the economic benefits shared among tenants, workers, businesses and neighborhoods? And did it protect the long-term housing supply?

If Boulder were to publish comprehensive data, it could help other jurisdictions confronting similar short-term demand surges.

Tim Komarek is an associate professor of economics at Colorado State University. This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

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The study, published in May 2025, sounded an alarm for communities surrounding well sites, and it got the attention of the , the state body that regulates the oil and gas industry.

The commission assembled a panel to review that report along with two others that looked at how exposure to oil and gas fracking impacted the people who live near well sites. They spent eight months reviewing and released in June.

However, the report did not reach any conclusions as to whether Colorado’s rule requiring oil and gas sites to be at least 2,000 feet from the nearest home is sufficient to protect people’s health. Nor did it make any policy recommendations, leaving the commission’s critics to wonder just how much evidence is needed to effect change.

“It����ap a good first step. But what’s missing here is what is the action that will come from these findings and from putting time into this work,” said Guadalupe Solis, who served on the commission’s panel and is director of public health and advocacy at , a community health nonprofit that is active in Adams County.

Meanwhile, oil and gas industry representatives welcomed the review, saying it is important for Colorado regulators to follow science.

Carly West, executive director of the , said the review reinforced confidence in the state’s 2,000-foot setback rule.

“The evidence doesn’t support changing Colorado’s existing regulatory framework at this time,” she said.

While no policy changes will be forthcoming, the ECMC is accepting on its Public Health Studies Review until Aug. 7. Comments may be submitted online at

The commission’s review reflects the nature of scientific research and how different parties can interpret results differently, based on their interests. Long-term studies are complicated and nuanced, rarely producing definitive conclusions. And that can make it hard for policymakers to enact change even as critics grow antsy over increasing public-health concerns.

Energy and Carbon Management commissioner Trisha Oeth said during a Tuesday night public meeting that she convened the panel after seeing the reports and hearing from the community.

She recruited 14 people, including medical doctors, scientists, state regulators, an industry representative and public health experts from the community, to meet with the researchers and ask questions.

She wanted the commission to understand the science, but she never intended for the group to make policy recommendations.

“It does not change ECMC rules,” Oeth said. “It doesn’t make permit decisions, and it does not say that every health question has been answered. We certainly did not take that on.”

Instead, the panel recommended further study of the cumulative risks of oil and gas development and what it means for people who live near multiple well sites.

And that frustrated those who live near the sites and have been fighting for better public health protections.

‘We need to keep paying attention’

Laurie Anderson, a Colorado field organizer for , said she believes that Oeth had the right intentions when she called for a panel to review the three studies.

But Anderson said the commission, the oil and gas industry and the public are looking for a definitive study that will answer everyone’s questions as to how far apart oil and gas development and neighborhoods should be.

“They just so badly want to justify that 2,000-foot setback and that everything is going to be OK,” Anderson said.

Anderson started fighting oil and gas development after moving to Broomfield in 2015, and she said there is mounting evidence that fracking operations cause illnesses, both long-term and short-term.

She is growing tired of various government agencies waiting on a definitive study while continuing to issue drilling permits.

“They just continue to permit,” Anderson said. “Pretty much they’re going to frack anything in this area before they get the study that says, ‘Whoops, we weren’t as protective as we should have been.'”

During Tuesday night’s informational session on the health panel’s findings, Dr. Jacob Fox, a pulmonologist at UCHealth who studies respiratory disease and climate change, said the leukemia research was an “excellent study.” It showed an association between childhood leukemia and fracking, and it adds to a growing body of evidence that fracking emissions are associated with childhood cancer.

Still, it did not determine a safe distance for families with children, Fox said.

“It����ap something as community members we need to keep paying attention to,” he said.

William Allshouse, one of the paper’s authors, said it’s nearly impossible to make a definitive link between fracking and acute lymphoblastic leukemia, which mainly affects children between the ages of 2 and 5. That’s because the scientists were not measuring the actual pollutants the children were exposed to.

That would require more air monitors and more money, he said.

“This is the best we can do with the available information to build that body of evidence,” Allshouse said. “We can’t say this pollutant is causing this cancer at this distance. If we’re going to continue to drill these large sites, they should be monitored to see what’s coming off the well pad to protect the people that live near them.”

Still, Allshouse said he was glad to see the ECMC look at the study.

“Obviously I would like to see things happen more quickly, but I’m glad it����ap not getting lost either,” he said.

Examining three studies

The leukemia paper was one of three 2025 studies reviewed by the panel.

A by the Environmental Defense Fund and Colorado State University looked at the cumulative health risk of the Front Range’s ozone pollution and volatile organic compounds released by oil and gas sites. That study found acute health risks persist even when best management practices exist, and recommended that drilling and well construction stop during the summer ozone season, which stretches from June 1 to Aug. 31.

“There are limits to how broadly we can apply this finding,” Oeth said. “The sites studied had specific practices, and oil and gas practices were changing during the study period, which is very common in research. So ultimately this study helps us understand risk, but it certainly doesn’t answer every question for every site. No study can do that.”

A study by a CSU researcher measured air pollution and noise exposure at oil and gas development in northeastern Colorado’s . It was funded by the Health Effects Institute.

That study found that noise around wells is a concern and that benzene is the greatest air pollutant risk, but it did not identify any chronic health hazards during operations at the tested sites.

That result bolstered the industry’s arguments that a 2,000-foot setback is enough to protect nearby residents.

“One of the things the review reinforced was confidence in Colorado’s setback requirements,” said West, of the American Petroleum Institute. “The hope is always that the regulations you put into place achieve what you want to achieve.”

Oeth repeatedly reminded the audience at Tuesday’s meeting that the commission’s review did not settle every scientific question.

“It’s meant to help the public, help the ECMC as an agency and help our partner agencies better understand what these studies found, what they did not prove and where more work is needed,” she said.

Colorado needs to follow California’s lead and take a more comprehensive look at research that studies the connection between oil and gas drilling and public health, said Dr. Sara Carpenter, executive director of .

“What concerns me the most about the ECMC report is it����ap not that thorough,” Carpenter said. “I think it was a great idea to convene a panel and say, ‘Let����ap look at this.’ But it����ap only three studies.”

In 2024, the California Geologic Energy Management Division released after a 15-member panel it commissioned reviewed thousands of studies on oil and gas production’s impact on public health and then picked 72 from across the United States and Canada to focus on.

The panel concluded that enough evidence existed to show that oil and gas operations cause respiratory diseases such as asthma and perinatal health problems such as low birthweights, preterm births and congenital abnormalities, Carpenter said. And California clearly stated that its findings would be used to make policy decisions. It reinforced the state’s 2022 decision to make setbacks a minimum of 3,200 feet.

More research has been conducted since that paper was released, and Colorado could have picked up the torch and added to the body of work, she said.

“If this bleeds into inaction at a policy level, that����ap a problem,” Carpenter said. “Why reinvent the wheel? I think these guys reinvented a spoke.”