Author Archives: rporath

Disappointment

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It is disappointing that the editorial boards of both the Daily Camera and the Boulder Weekly have ignored the reality of global warming and climate change and chosen to believe in the competence of the City’s flood plan and that there are benevolent intentions in the University’s South Boulder expansion. It has long been an American ethic that the Earth exists for man to use and abuse for profit. The proposed “South Campus” site thus is seen as a wasteland awaiting development which will result in a net gain for the people of Boulder, despite the resulting increase of neighborhood traffic, during and after construction, and the loss of free access to a truly unique and irreplaceable piece of the natural world.

The truth that the proposed flood plan, paid for by all of Boulder, protects only a fraction of the homes impacted by the 2013 flood and that the real beneficiary is the University’s corporate business model, a massive rental empire allowed to operate largely tax-free, goes unnoted.

The net loss is heartbreaking for anyone truly caring for both the environment and the soul of mankind.

Vote Yes on 2F. For photos from the area, please visit notesfromtheprovinces.com/photography/ 

Town and Gown

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To the Editor:

Boulder has been a college town since first landing the University of Colorado. As the University grew, the city benefited and grew around it as a symbiotic partner. Under Bruce Benson and a Republican Board of Regents, tired of having to go hat-in-hand to an increasingly tight-fisted State Legislature for funding, CU adopted a pro-growth corporate real estate business model–bigger is better and more is more money. The University is run as a business operation, with generous tax benefits. Similarly, the City Council has joined the growth and development bandwagon and, for some unknown reason, so has the local Indian Peaks Chapter of the Sierra Club. How this has fared for Boulder residents is where problems arise. Housing has not kept pace with business development and thousands of cars commute into and drive around town every day, resulting in constantly increasing traffic congestion and ozone pollution. It is impossible to find practical benefit for residents and neighborhoods from the Google invitation, the University’s Limelight (hogging) Hotel on the Hill, or the proposed South Campus expansion on a site that is a natural open wonder as it stands “as is”. CU, the City Council, and the Sierra Club have each chosen to ignore the impact of the project on its carbon footprint and utilities use despite the reality of climate change, global warming, and the West’s continuing drought. In the coming election, the people of Boulder have an opportunity to make a clear statement for the environment and for themselves. Vote Yes to Repeal.

RP

Development

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To the Editor:

While pointedly a Boulder bubble issue, the referendum to repeal an annexation agreement between CU and the City which allows the University to build another campus on a former riparian wetland/floodplain on the south end of town has ramifications beyond residents’ concerns about potential flooding and local traffic congestion and pollution. There are bigger issues at stake. Global warming, the extended drought across the West, and increasingly strong weather events are the direct result of our pumping long dormant fossil carbon into the atmosphere. Climate change is global, and the Earth is becoming far less accommodating of our life on it. Conserving water and reducing, not increasing, our natural gas use and overall carbon footprint are regularly ignored. The University of Colorado is a public institution and its governing Board of Regents is elected statewide. As a major rental developer in Boulder, it should be acting more for the overall public good rather than its narrow self interest. Such environmental consideration should be applied to development projects all along the Front Range.

RP

CU South/Just Undo It

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To the Editor:

An echinacea tea bag tag has a Vincent Van Gogh quote, “If one truly loves nature, one finds beauty everywhere.” As the area stands today, there are a thousand paintings, poems, and photographs waiting in the former wet land/gravel pit flood plain that the University wishes to develop as its “South Campus”. It is my wish everyone in Boulder, looking with Vincent’s eye, visits this site to see what will be destroyed should this project go forward. It will never be the same again. Intrinsic to its natural wonder is its open accessibility and availability of multiple footpaths to navigate the area. Again, all this will disappear if the University and the City Council have their way. Construction traffic of out-of-town workers will further clog rush hour traffic, and needed parking will consume acres of the site, And public access will disappear completely during the City’s flood mitigation efforts (which have yet to meet federal standards). Mitigating flooding of houses built on a historic flood plain may well prove to be a fool’s endeavor. My crawlspace in Martin Acres flooded not from Skunk Creek overflowing its banks, but from soil saturation and ground water rise. Rather than seeing the natural world as a source of beauty, the vision of the University and of the City seem clouded with consumer dollar signs. We must stop eating the Earth. CU South/ Just Undo It. 

RP

Self Help Manual

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To the Editor:
Solving the problems of homelessness, the concentration of wealth, racial injustice, healthcare, and climate change will require a seismic, systemic cultural shift that few view as a feasible option, but until that change is undertaken America (and the rest of the world) will continue to wallow in stubborn short-sightedness. Self sufficiency and enterprise are fine values, but when independence and freedom fail to recognize that the success of humankind in the long run rests on cooperative effort and cohesion, we land in a power hungry world of individual and environmental exploitation, increasingly divided and at odds with itself. Such is the slippery slope of capitalist theory. What is needed is an economic theory based not on banking values, but rather on humanitarian ideals.

RP

Foretold

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The jealous anger of Zeus
Had no bounds yet
There was wisdom too shown
When Prometheus was bound
To endless disembowelment
For revealing the power
Of fire to humankind,
Perhaps prophesy as well,
The outcome foreknown.

As the gods, in their day
Rose against the Titans,
In turn mankind rose
Against the gods.
With the gods and godless
Fallen into war and ruin
The earthbound Titans
Again hold sway.

Rush to Judgement

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It is a miracle that not one Republican Senator has been trampled in the rush behind Mitch McConnell to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court with yet another Federalist Society approved Conservative Justice. They are an orderly, lockstep group. Overturning Roe v. Wade is a hot-button issue Republicans have used for decades to court anti-abortion voters, but the 2020 elections have wider concerns. In the minority, RBG’s dissent on removing protections for voter rights was plain and simple–In a rainstorm, don’t put your umbrella away because you are not getting wet. With a 6-3 majority, we can look forward to more Court-sanctioned voter suppression, and in decision after decision, including Citizens United, the Conservative Justices have ruled in the favor of corporate and monied interests over those of everyday Americans. The Republican Party first and foremost uses the Court to be its voice for big money

-RP

Church and State

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To the editor:

Christianity, and religion in general, has a complex and checkered history in America. Many among the first settlers were religious refugees fleeing persecution by the Church of England and seeking freedom to practice their beliefs, which included the fanatical Puritan Salem Witch Trials. The separation of Church and State was the caveat then applied to freedom of religion when both were enshrined in the Constitution.

The result is that America today is a virtual patchwork, jigsaw puzzle of religious beliefs and places of worship, all living in a relative state of accepted coexistence, albeit not without longstanding tensions between Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and now Islamic believers. There have been noteworthy crossovers between the two sectors. The Church of Latter-day Saints was forced to disavow polygamy to allow statehood for Utah and black Southern Baptist churches have been the target of White Supremacists after the passage of voting rights legislation, but peyote is now recognized as a legal sacrament for the Native American Church and we have had both a Catholic and a Black President, although JFK had to state his Catholic beliefs would not intrude into office, and Barack Obama was caught continually in America’s Black/White divide. Christianity itself, be it Protestant or Catholic, seems deeply divided over a preference for Old Testament or New Testament values, and currently the separation of Church and State is under constant attack.

Betsy DeVos, as Secretary of Education, is pushing for public funding of religious schools, and the opposition to contraception, abortion, and same-sex sexuality as interpreted in the Bible is being pressed into federal and state legislation. Catholics on the Supreme Court appear poised to upturn earlier decisions on these issues. Clearly a line esteemed by the Founding Fathers is being crossed and should be patriotically resisted. 

RP

Social Distancing

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To the Editor:
The last time the air was so clear and silent and the sun so intense was in the days America shut down in shock over the attack on the World Trade Center. What distinguishes today’s shut down is that we have awakened simultaneously to a health crisis, an economic crisis, and the climate crisis of global warming. The common thread running through these is that capitalism went globally viral after the fall of the Soviet Union. Rather than promoting a communal sharing of the resources of the earth, both natural and human, the economic modus operandi has been “grab as much as you can”. Social distancing may hold the key to reining in the COVID-19 pandemic, but throughout history mankind has been relentlessly practicing social distance and economic isolation from poverty, hunger, homelessness, mental illness, and the casualties of war, and the wealthy of the world are its most adept. Perhaps this is just “human nature”. One hopes not. Whether we call this a social crisis, an existential crisis, or a crisis of the soul, this is the reality staring us in the face today. – RP  

Futures

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To the Editor:
As we sit around wondering how to fill our socially distanced days, this seems an excellent time to imagine how we might like our post-Corvid-19 life to be. Ingrained ways die hard, but there is hope that a better world can arise from the ashes of yet another failed global economy. A viral pandemic presents a far different dynamic than the 2008 financial collapse caused by the precipitous capital greed and mismanagement of the banking industries. Rather than having just one leg of the three-legged economic stool, capital. labor, and consumer, collapse, two legs have been knocked out. There are many, particularly among those nations and people who prospered most, who hope this collapsed structure of exchange can and will be rebuilt, but perhaps this is instead a golden opportunity to seek other answers to the global concentration of wealth and power in elitist classes and nations. Perhaps the Corvid-19 pandemic is not a signal of the coming End Times, but one of a new beginning for humankind. 

RP