COLORADO SPRINGS — For the liberal elite, superfluous consumption isn’t fashionable anymore. If you have money, you aren’t supposed to buy more—you’re supposed to buy better. In an era when plastics threaten the environment, beverage drinkers are asked to find alternative straws. When the agricultural industry threatens global warming, wealthy millennials buy vegan products from…
DENVER — During World War II, the U.S. Army used the Rocky Mountain Arsenal to produce chemical weapons. After 25 years of cleanup and remediation, it became a national wildlife refuge. Today, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service tests pesticides on the refuge for Bayer AG, one of the largest pharmaceutical corporations in the world.…
SAN LOUIS VALLEY — Employees work from dawn to dusk at Medano Zapata Ranch. They’re clad in cowboy boots. Denim jeans. Patagonia jackets. They look like they should be at a bar in Denver. Instead, they’re young millennials going back to the land. “We’re training the next generation,” said Duke Phillips III, the ranch manager.…
SUMMITVILLE — On a cold, windy day in late October, snow blanketed the remains of an industrial gold mine above timberline in the Rocky Mountains. It fell on the jagged, step-like grooves of a reconstructed mountainside. It covered a small bump in the landscape—the only evidence of cyanide waste, now sheathed underground in plastic. It…
COLORADO SPRINGS — America runs on electricity. It powers our phones, turns the gears in our machines, and keeps our homes cool in sweltering heat. The United States consumes around 18 percent of the world’s energy supply, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Only 17 percent of our electricity comes from renewable sources.…
GREAT SAND DUNES NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE — On a Monday morning, stuffed inside a conference room, Fred Bunch took a moment to lean back and bugle like an elk. Then he chuckled. In 1968, Bunch hopped on an old cruiser in Alamosa, Colorado and pedaled through the San Louis Valley until he arrived at…
ERIE — Across the plains of Weld County, Colorado, metal towers splinter the blue skyline: oil rigs in every direction. One sits next to a high school in Erie. Another operates in a green public park where children shoot down playground slides. Others extract oil and gas within a few hundred feet of homes. They…
COLORADO SPRINGS — The shovel bit into my palm as I sliced its metal blade into the soil, heaving up the remnant roots of chard and vines of weeds that twisted over the garden bed. My muscles quivered from the manual labor, swing after swing as I churned the cold, dark earth after a summer…
I am a student, writer, and environmental educator who splits time between the cold, historic lanes of my hometown in Boston, MA and the mountain-shadowed Colorado Springs, CO. I study Creative Writing for Social Change and Education at Colorado College, where I’m currently at work on a short story collection. My fiction explores themes surrounding…
