“In the ponderosa pine forests of Colorado and the Rocky Mountain
West, the conservation imperative is to improve the condition of the forests,
to sustain biodiversity, and to build resilience to increased likelihood
of uncharacteristic, catastrophic wildfires. Ponderosa pine forests are the
most rich in biodiversity of Colorado’s major forest systems. Because they
occur at lower elevations and mainly along the Front Range, they are also
the most heavily populated by humans. Ponderosa pine forests, particularly
in lower elevations of the Rocky Mountains, developed in the presence of
fire. Low-intensity, frequent fires killed younger trees and helped maintain
an open canopy and a rich understory of grasses and forbs. The past century,
with a combination of intensive logging, followed by grazing, followed
by decades of fire suppression, has left much of the ponderosa pine forests
densely stocked with trees. These forests are much more susceptible to
intense crown fires that can kill all trees and damage forest soils to the point
that recovery can take decades, even centuries. The risk to both the biodiversity
of these forests and the people who live in them from catastrophic
wildfires is greatly elevated from our past lack of stewardship.

With climate change, the risk to these forests and human communities
is even greater. With just the trend in warmer and mostly drier conditions
in forests across the western United States documented in the past two
decades, the frequency, intensity, and size of wildfires has already increased
significantly. In Colorado, the Hayman fire erupted in the unusually hot,
dry summer of 2002, and caused nearly $40 million in damage, burned
133 homes, and forced the evacuation of 5,340 persons. Because conditions
were so dry and the forest so dense, more than 138,000 acres of ponderosa
pine forest were completely lost. Unlike with the fires these forests evolved
with, recovery from the Hayman fire will take centuries. The combination
of unhealthy forest conditions and the kind of climate conditions we face in
the coming years has already taken a toll on Colorado’s Front Range forests
that will be felt for many generations. How many more fires like Hayman
can Colorado endure?”

Several studies have determined that residents of more compact, diverse
areas drive between 25 and 30 percent less than those in more sprawling
areas. For example, residents in King County, Washington, who live in more
walkable neighborhoods drive 26 percent fewer miles per day.  A meta-analysis
of many of these types of studies shows that people living in places
with twice the average density, diversity of uses, accessible destinations, and
interconnected streets drive about 30 percent fewer miles, even when socioeconomic
status and other factors are taken into account.  This reduction
in VMT [Vehicles Miles Traveled] suggests that emissions reductions of 7 to 10 percent from current levels could be achieved by 2050 through land-use changes alone.  By shifting
60 percent of new growth into more compact development patterns, estimates
indicate that up to 79 million metric tons of carbon dioxide could be
saved each year by 2030. This savings is equal to a 28 percent increase in
federal fuel-efficiency standards and one-half of the cumulative savings of the
new thirty-five miles per gallon corporate average fuel economy standards.
Areas that feature the right combination… include many
existing older neighborhoods, as well as newer mixed-use developments,
transit-oriented development, or traditional neighborhood development.
Increasingly, these types of development are given priority by municipalities
because of high livability and corresponding benefits such as public health
and reduction in obesity, and the developments’ improved ability to fund
regional amenities such as parks and transit.

…In a fortunate confluence of the private market and public benefit, communities
that offer choices in terms of housing, those that offer mixed-use
living, and those with shorter commute times to employment are ever more
appealing to consumers. Studies conducted by real estate researchers and
universities have found that about one-third of all homebuyers prefer “smart
growth–style” communities. For the first time, prices of attached units are
higher than detached single-family dwellings. The Brookings Institution
also has discovered that because demand outstrips supply, the price premiums
on homes in mixed-use developments are 40 to 100 percent.

If two-thirds of the 2050-built environment has yet to be built, and if people
are eager to buy or rent the type of homes, offices, and industrial properties
that help reduce VMT and greenhouse gas emissions, we face a tremendous
opportunity to design this new growth with climate change in mind.

What changed? How did cities, which lie at the bottom of the federal/
state/local regulatory chain, come to lead a national trend in green government?
And looking back, what has the green-city movement accomplished?
Is this a genuine change of direction or just a passing trend? What makes a
green-city program successful?

My Experience in Denver
My experience with these questions is firsthand. As a special assistant to
Denver mayor John Hickenlooper from 2003 to 2004, I helped the mayor
develop policy positions on issues related to parks, planning, public works,
and water. In late 2004 and 2005, inspired by a conversation with Portland’s
sustainability chief Susan Anderson, I worked with Mayor Hickenlooper and
Chief of Staff Michael Bennet to design and develop the mayor’s Greenprint
Denver program. I begged, borrowed, and stole ideas from a close group of
peers in other cities across the country, all developing fledgling programs
at a time when there was a collective sense of great new potential, as well
as fierce competition driven by new national-city rankings by groups like
SustainLane and The Green Guide. From 2005 to 2007, I built Greenprint
Denver into a citywide program and worked with city staff, scientists, and a
high-level community advisory group to develop a climate action plan that
aims to reduce the city’s greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent of 2005
levels by the year 2020.

Greenprint Denver is now among the largest initiatives in the mayor’s
office, with a permanent and borrowed staff of nine city employees and a
combined annual budget of millions (in grants of state and federal dollars
primarily). Solar America City grants, as well as stimulus funds, including
new Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grants (EECBG) created by
the Barack Obama administration, have helped fuel a new generation of
related programs at the city level at a time when they are badly needed.

Sustainable living can seem straightforward: buy a hybrid. Install some solar
panels. Shop locally. Travel less. And don’t forget the organic cotton sheets.
All those actions are worthy, but, of course, they’re just the beginning. How
do you live green without busting your personal budget? How do you design
a career that’s rewarding, but still allows you the time to live your values by,
say, biking to work? How do you find—and live responsibly within—a community
that helps, rather than hinders, your efforts to live more lightly? We
wanted to get our students thinking about these questions; we wanted their
quest for answers to be our next big adventure.
We had some experience with living lightly. When we first moved to
the small town of Paonia, Colorado, to teach at an independent community
school, we were in our late twenties—a couple of idealistic bachelors. Our
tiny paychecks inspired us to make a game out of living on less than $150 a
month. We biked everywhere, year-round; traded work on a local elk ranch
for our rent; picked apples; and socialized at potlucks instead of restaurants.
After a few years, we teamed up with three families to buy a piece of land
and built a six-sided house out of scavenged materials for less than $900.
(It’s still in use today.)
People often assumed we were either miserably uncomfortable or supported
by a family trust fund, but the truth was neither: we were supporting
ourselves and having a great time doing it. In fact, our lives were a lot like
one of our wilderness trips. We helped each other take risks, learned from
one another, and enjoyed the satisfaction of reaching our goals together.
With those experiences in mind, we founded the High Desert Center
for Sustainable Studies on our land in 2005.

Excerpt:

“What’s past is prologue.”
—From The Tempest by William Shakespeare
The Colorado Rocky Mountain region is already warming. The big wild card is
whether it will get wetter or drier. A wetter climate would be welcome news for
water utilities struggling to meet the water-supply needs of the region’s booming
population growth, whereas drier weather would bring serious new watersupply
problems. Water utilities, challenged with planning for future water
needs, are concerned about the uncertainties surrounding climate change. But
there is hope. Although climate change presents a variety of threats to water
utilities, there are promising new planning methods for reducing those threats.
Our region’s water systems have turned our highly variable and often
scarce amount of precipitation into a reliable water supply for millions of
people, their industries, businesses, and farms, while preserving much of the
environmental and recreational amenities that make the area such a great place
in which to live. Doing so required water utilities to develop vast networks of
water systems throughout the region. Typically, utilities planned these water
systems to provide reliable water delivery through the worst drought conditions
that had been recorded, going back fifty to 100 years, and usually added
a small safety factor to deal with unexpected or changing conditions.
In essence, most water systems in the Colorado Rocky Mountain region
were planned with the expectation that weather and supply conditions in
the future would not be much different than those experienced in the past.
Climate change now is threatening this fundamental planning assumption,
and we are a long way from knowing what will happen to our region’s water
supplies. What types of shortages could be created, and what can we do
now to lessen the impacts? How will we continue to provide water for our
booming population, and how will we maintain the environmental and recreational
amenities of our rivers?

Excerpt:

In a drought year, by late June or early July the creek is already showing
its bones. Fallen trees, which usually sift a swift current, lie resting out
of water, propped up on dry rocks. Gravel bars split the bends. The rapids
channel, exposing wastes of rounded stones. The current slows and warms.
The mullein is crumbly dry, the willows slack. I wade in ankle-deep riffles
and it’s easier and sadder to fish, because the trout are concentrated into the
few deep pools and are hungry. They must be stressed by the rising temperature
as well. They don’t fight with the vigor or confidence of the ice-water
evenings when the canyon was pumping. They give up.

I notice more elk and deer tracks in the silt along water’s edge—they
must be stressed too, having to drop down farther to drink. The wind still
stirs downstream after dusk and still carries the pungent scent of the forest,
but it is a warmer fragrance, dryer, not fresh, and I miss the scent of cold
stone. It’s as if the country is gasping for a deluge. In those seasons, I put up
my rod earlier and pray most of the fish will make it and hope for fall rain.

The scientists say that these summers, and ones like the drought of
1988, will become more frequent and more severe. The climate models for
the West in the coming decades are not sanguine. I think how the high
snowpack is the heart of this country, how it fills and pumps the networks
of rivers and creeks that cascade out of the hills and nourish everything.
How one doesn’t really need models and statistics; it’s clear that the warmer
winters and earlier springs don’t bode well. I can hardly bear the thought of
the watersheds drying up.

Excerpt:

…Rebecca Solnit, author of Hope in the Dark, reports that, within the deindustrialized
ruins of Detroit, a landscape she describes as “not quite postapocalyptic
but…post-American,” people are homesteading abandoned lots, growing
their own produce, raising farm animals, and planting orchards. In that
depopulated city, some have been clawing (or perhaps hoeing) their way back
to a semblance of food security. They have done so because they had to, and
their reward has been harvests that would be the envy of any organic farmer.
The catastrophe that is Detroit didn’t happen with a Hurricane Katrina–style
bang, but as a slow, grinding bust—and a possibly haunting preview of what
many American municipalities may experience postcrash. Solnit claims, however,
that the greening of Detroit under the pressure of economic adversity is
not just a strategy for survival, but a possible path to renewal. It’s also a living
guidebook to possibilities for our new Department of Homegrown Security
when it considers where it might most advantageously put some of its financial
muscle while creating a more secure—and resilient—America.

As chef and author Alice Waters has demonstrated so practically, schools
can start “edible schoolyard” gardens that cut lunch-program costs, provide
healthy foods for students, and teach the principles of ecology. The foodgrowing
skills and knowledge that many of our great-grandparents took for
granted growing up in a more rural America have long since been lost in our
migration into cities and suburbs. Relearning those lost arts could be a key
to survival if the trucks stop arriving at the Big Box down the street.

The present Department of Homeland Security has produced reams of
literature on detecting and handling chemical weapons and managing casualties
after terrorist attacks. Fine, we needed to know that. Now, how about
some instructive materials on composting soil, rotating crops to control
pests and restore soil nutrients, and canning and drying all that seasonal
bounty so it can be eaten next winter?

It’s not just about increasing the local food supply, of course. Community
gardens provide a safe place for neighbors to cooperate, socialize, bond,
share, celebrate, and learn from one another. The self-reliant networks that
are created when citizens engage in such projects can be activated in an
emergency. The capacity of a community to self-organize can be critically
important when a crisis is confronted. Such collective efforts have been
called community greening or civic ecology, but the traditional name grassroots
democracy fits no less well.

Here’s the interesting thing: without federal aid or direction, the first
glimmer of a green approach to homeland security is already appearing. It
goes by the moniker relocalization, and if that’s a bit of an awkward mouthful
for you, it really means that your most basic security is in the hands
not of distant officials in Washington but of neighbors who believe that
self-reliance is safer than dependence. In this emerging age of chaos, pooled
resources and coordinated responses will, this new movement believes, be
more effective than thousands of individuals breaking out their survival kits
alone or waiting for the helicopters to land.

Actually, relocalization is an international movement and, as usual
when it comes to the greening of modern society, the Europeans are way
ahead of us. There are now hundreds of local groups in at least a dozen
countries that are convening local meetings as part of the Relocalization
Network to “make other arrangements for the post-carbon future” of their
communities. In Great Britain, an allied Transition Towns movement has
sprung up in an effort to spark ideas about, and focus energies on, how to
wean whole communities off imported energy, food, and material goods.
With a rising sea at its front door, the Netherlands has taken a further step.
Its national security plan actually makes sustainability and environmental
recovery key priorities.

In the United States, post-carbon working groups are beginning to sprout
across the country. In my backyard, right in the heart of red-state Utah, a
diverse group of citizens calling themselves the Canyonlands Sustainable
Solutions have come together to generate practical plans for insulating the
remote town of Moab, 200 miles from the trade and transport hub of Salt
Lake City, from future food and energy price shocks and supply interruptions.
Such local groups are often loosely allied with one another, especially
regionally, through websites and blogs that report on the progress of diverse
projects, trade ideas as well as information, and offer lots of feedback.

The citizens engaged in relocalization projects have largely given up on
federal aid and are going it alone. Still, think how much farther they could
go if only a fraction of the $27 billion directed at state and local governments
to enhance “emergency preparedness” in the 2009 Department of Homeland
Security budget were given in grants to their projects. If we can afford to
hand rural Craighead County in Arkansas $600,000 for hazmat suits and
other antiterror paraphernalia to defend cotton and soybean farmers from
attack, surely we could provide grants for urban homesteaders in Detroit.

Food security, of course, is just one aspect of a green vision of homegrown
security. Other obvious elements like energy and water security
could also be reimagined, if only official Washington weren’t so stuck in
the obvious. No doubt, somewhere out there on the Titanic this planet is
becoming, the go-it-aloners, with no Department of Homegrown Security
to back them, are already doing so—and helping prepare us all as best they
can for the realization that, right now, there are not enough lifeboats to carry
us to safety.

Perhaps it’s not so unrealistic to expect that someday, as a homegrown
security movement builds and matures, it can capture a share of the federal
funds that now go to such dubious measures as closed-circuit televisions
and crash-proof barriers at sports stadiums, including $345,000 for Razorback
Stadium in Arkansas.

In the meanwhile, let’s encourage projects that are building resilience in
communities as small as Moab and as large as New York City, while revitalizing
local culture with a dose of grassroots engagement. Seed it and feed it,
and it will bloom. Along the way we will learn that when it comes to home,
or land, or security, living in an open, inclusive, and robust democracy is
not an impediment to defense but a deep advantage. Democracy, if only we
nurture it, is the very soil of our resilience.

Excerpt:

By 2006, close to 150,000 acres of Colorado aspen were dead or damaged,
according to aerial surveys. By the following year, the grim phenomenon
had a name—sudden aspen decline, or SAD—and by 2008, the damaged
areas had exceeded half a million acres, with 17 percent of the state’s
aspen showing declines. In many places, patches of bare and dying treetops
are as noticeable as missing teeth, and some sickly areas stretch for miles.
Aspen declines are also underway in Wyoming, Utah, and elsewhere in the
Rockies. Surveys of two national forests in Arizona showed that from 2000
to 2007, lower-elevation areas lost 90 percent of their aspen.

Aspen grow in clones, or groups of genetically identical trunks. Some
clones are thousands of years old, although individual trees live 150 years
at most. One especially large stand in Utah, known as Pando, after the Latin
for “I spread,” was recently confirmed by geneticists to cover 108 acres. It is
variously said to be the world’s heaviest, largest, or oldest organism. Disturbances such as wildfires or disease usually prompt clones to send up a slew of fresh sprouts, but new growth is rare in SAD-affected stands.

….The most extensive SAD is in the hottest and driest areas—low-lying,
south-facing slopes. The pattern suggests that the region’s extreme drought
and high temperatures—both possible symptoms of global warming—have
weakened the trees, allowing more disease and insect attacks.
It seems that new stems aren’t growing back after trees die because
drought and heat have stressed the trees. During drought, aspen close off
microscopic openings in their leaves, a survival measure that slows water
loss but also slows the uptake of carbon dioxide, required for photosynthesis.
As a result, the trees can’t convert as much sunlight into sugar. Worrall
speculates that the trees absorb stored energy from their own roots, eventually
killing the roots and preventing the rise of new aspen sprouts. “They
basically starve to death,” he says.

The drought here has lasted nearly a decade, and climate scientists predict
that severe droughts will strike even more often in parts of the West as
greenhouse gas levels continue to rise and contribute to global warming. “If
we have more hot, dry periods as predicted, SAD will continue,” says Worrall.
Aspen at lower elevations will likely disappear, he says, and those at
higher elevations will be weaker and sparser.

Excerpt:

The prospect of climate-change–induced flow variations adds additional
uncertainty. While there is a wide range of results in the different published
studies, all suggest a future Colorado River with less streamflow. In a 2007
report, the National Research Council of the National Academies concluded
that “the preponderance of scientific evidence suggests that warmer future
temperatures will reduce future Colorado River streamflow and water supplies.”
In late 2008, the Colorado Water Conservation Board issued a synthesis
report on climate change specifically targeted toward water managers.
This report warns that “climate change will affect Colorado’s use and
distribution of water. Water managers and planners currently face specific
challenges that may be further exacerbated by projected climate changes.”
The study concludes that “all recent hydrologic projections show a decline
in runoff for most of Colorado’s rivers.”

Given the current demands on Colorado River water resources, even
a small change in the mean natural flow at Lee’s Ferry will cause serious
problems. Among the most optimistic of the climate-impact studies published
is the 2006 paper by Niklas Christensen and Dennis Lettenmaier.
This study suggested modest reductions in the mean flow at Lee’s Ferry in
the range of 6 to 10 percent. Most recently, a project by the Western Water
Assessment to narrow the results of the various studies suggests the floor for
the estimated flow reduction is about 10 percent.

Three credible studies that model the current operation of the Colorado
River with a sustained 10 percent reduction on natural flow at Lee’s Ferry?
The recent environmental impact statement (EIS) on the lower basin shortage
criteria included an alternative hydrology appendix that used estimated
flows at Lee’s Ferry published by Connie A. Woodhouse, David M. Meko,
and Stephen T. Gray in 2006. The paleohydrology-based trace for the period
from 1620 to 1674 is illustrative. This period has an estimated mean flow
at Lee’s Ferry of approximately 13.5 maf per year. The model output shows
a number of unacceptable and shocking results. For example, the Central
Arizona Project (CAP) would experience forty-seven straight years of shortages,
including a number of individual years when the project would divert
no water at all. Lake Mead would drop below and stay below the minimum
level for the Las Vegas Valley Water District to pump water to its customers
(1000’msl) for a period of close to twenty years. California, which has the
most senior of the prior perfected rights in the lower basin, would experience
occasional large shortages.

In the upper basin, Lake Powell would operate below the minimum
storage level necessary to produce hydroelectric power over 60 percent of
the fifty-year period, and there were two periods, one of five years and one
of twelve years, when Lake Powell would be empty and the upper-division
states would have been unable to meet their obligations to the lower basin
under the 1922 Colorado River Compact.

The lesson is that without major changes in how we currently manage
the Colorado River, even a modest decrease in system streamflows on the
order of 10 percent could cause significant unacceptable impacts throughout
the basin.