By Bella Houck
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – When longtime ecologist and Colorado College educator Lee Derr wants to explain climate change, he doesn’t start with charts or policy papers. He starts with tomatoes.
Colorado Springs, he says, is one of the fastest-warming metropolitan areas in the United States when it comes to nighttime temperatures, a shift most people sleep through.
“You will see that Colorado Springs is one of the metropolitan areas of the United States of the 48 contiguous, that is showing some of the highest increases in nighttime temperatures,” Derr said. “And the population’s asleep then, and they don’t care about nighttime temperatures. They only care about daytime temperatures, so no one is noticing it. But as a gardener, it’s way easier to grow tomatoes now.”
For Derr, a gardener with 40 years of notes on frost dates, the signs of a changing climate are written in soil and seed. “I have 40 years of experience when the last frost was in the spring, when the first frost was in the fall. And I can see a creep that is shortening the winter,” he said. “[Winter] used to be about September 15 to May 15. Now they’re probably back about October 15 to April 30.”
This interview was conducted as part of the Pikes Peak Climate Archive, an ongoing project documenting local stories of climate and environment change around Colorado Springs.
A Life in the Field
Derr’s path to becoming one of the region’s most outspoken ecological voices was not straightforward. Raised in Pennsylvania Piedmont, he came west to Colorado State University for school, worked in outdoor education in Summit County, raced bicycles for a time and eventually found himself in a sixth-grade science classroom.
“I said I would never be an educator,” he recalled. “I would have taken that bet a million to one.” But colleagues who watched him work with kids at places like Keystone Science School urged him toward teaching. “They said you can’t do this forever,” he said of seasonal outdoor work. “So… I ended up teaching sixth grade science.”
Derr later began mentoring graduate students in education and eventually joined the faculty at Colorado College as an adjunct, working with Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) candidates in science education. In recent years, he stepped back from formal teaching and now pieces together work as a contract land steward with Palmer Land Conservancy, visiting conservation easements across the region.
He jokingly calls this phase “retreading, not retiring.”
Ranchers, Retirement and the Price of an Acre
On the plains east of the mountains, Derr sees another front in Colorado’s climate and justice story: who can afford to stay on the land.
As a contract land steward, he visits ranches and farms protected under conservation easements–legal agreements that limit development and keep land in agricultural or open-space use.
“For about 50 years, by an act of Congress and the IRS you are capable of severing your development rights.” he said. “So keeping the land intact as a singular property. And the easement is a document that determines the uses that are now permissible.”
His first easement visit was with an 84-year-old rancher named Robert, on Colorado’s shortgrass prairie.
“I said, ‘Why did you do this?’ And he said, well… ‘See that ridgeline over there?’ He said, ‘I don’t know what the internet is, but that land used to be a ranch of 24,000 acres.’ And it was sold and they platted it… and you then are capable of selling those individual plats,” Derr recalled.
“In Colorado, it’s usually 35 or 40 acres,”. Once that happens, the old ranch landscape is gone. “Once you break it up, it will never be an ecologically sustainable system,” Derr said. “And this is in the short grass prairie of Colorado.”
Behind those choices, Derr says, are economic realities.
“Most ranchers are cash poor,” he said. “If they have 10,000 acres in Colorado, it takes at least 40 acres per Animal Unit, at least. So, 4000 acres, allows you to have 100 cows. 100 cows– you might have had an annual reported income of $30,000, $40,000. You have no way of building up a retirement.”
“So for many families, if the children didn’t want the ranch, the only way you can retire is to sell off your land,” he said. Other ranchers often cannot afford to buy it. Developers can.
Easements as a Different Kind of Deal
Conservation easements, Derr argues, change the math.
“The nice thing about a conservation easement is that it diminishes the value of the land, the accessible value,” he said. On the outskirts of Colorado Springs, that means “the principal person who is going to buy it is a developer.”
“What it does is diminish the land value, because it’s going to stay in agriculture,” he said. “And now someone can probably purchase it who can afford to keep it in ranching.”
Colorado sweetens easements with tax credits, which landowners can sell to corporations for cash. Those credits are valuable to companies with large tax bills but not to older ranchers with low taxable income. “Tax credits are saleable, [developers who] want them can buy them for about 92 cents on the dollar,” Derr said. “They save eight cents… and then that money goes to Robert.”
Derr offers another famous example from western Colorado: a peach orchard under easement near Palisade.
“The family was a 30‑year‑old couple, and they had two kids and they had just purchased a peach orchard that was under easement because they could afford it, and all the current peach growers were all 65 and above, and they’re ready to retire,” he said. The easement gave older growers some remuneration and ensured the land stayed in agriculture.
The younger farmer had gone to school for computer science, Derr said, and brought “skills in internet marketing” to the orchard.
“So if it wasn’t for conservation easements, there would not be a Palisade peach,” Derr said.
Bison to Blue Stem
Derr’s work on the plains is informed by a long ecological view of the Great Plains grasslands, including eastern Colorado.
“Before the westward expansion… bison, pronghorn, elk, grizzly bears. Everybody was out there on the prairie,” he said. Bison herds, held together by wolves, acted like a moving mowing and fertilizing machine. “You never came back to the same area unless it was good grass,” he said.
“The grasslands all the way from mid-Kansas, to the Rocky Mountain Front were the grasslands [that] evolved with this periodic mowing.”
One of his key examples is blue stem, a deep-rooted grass in the central and northern plains. “Blue stem… has roots that are 16 to 25 feet deep,” he said. In drought, “blue stem say, ‘No problem.’”
The arrival of private property and fencing disrupted that system.
“What we did was we invented barbed wire, and we shot all the bison,” Derr said. “And so with barbed wire, you can throw a cow out there… and you let them eat what they want to eat, they go around and they say, ‘I like this plant, I like the blue stem because it’s highly nutritious, but I don’t like this other stuff’. So what happens over a couple years you have all these less desirable plants and the biodiversity crashes.”
“You put one horse on 40 acres, it’s toast,” he added.
Powering Colorado: When Capitalism “Works” for Climate
If barbed wire and subdivision show capitalism’s role in ecosystem decline, Derr also points to a very different story in Colorado’s electric grid.
“Right now, the cheapest form of energy for the electric grid is renewables,” he said. “Because you’re not paying every day to buy more coal or oil. Once you have the infrastructure, you’re no longer paying, except you’re paying a little surcharge to the landowner who has those.”
He traces Colorado’s shift to a 2004 citizens’ initiative.
“Through the 90s, the people of Colorado kept getting wise and saying, we need to have renewable energy. We need to move to renewables. And one of the parties at the state level kept pushing for more renewables, the other party kept resisting.”
When lawmakers hesitated, citizens threatened to go around them. “They polled the citizens of Colorado, and they said, ‘If you don’t pass this as representative government, we’re going to do a citizens initiative’, which is a change in the state constitution,” he said. “In 2004 we voted that by 2025 we would have 25% renewables.”
Utilities responded by investing in efficiency and building wind and solar. “We outstripped what the citizens wanted us to do,” Derr said. “We almost doubled it. 43% of your electrical energy is renewables.”
Who’s Responsible?
For all the policy shifts and market signals, Derr comes back to a harder question: what is the responsibility of individuals in an unequal world?
“If I hop on a plane, if I drive my car, if I consume carbon– does the individual have a responsibility? What does my little contribution do?”
He is skeptical of carbon credits, including those used by institutions like Colorado College to claim “carbon neutrality.”
“Do carbon credits really count?” he asked. “There’s a lot of evidence that they’re not worth the effort. They give you a feel good–‘I’m a good person.’”
He worries that some proposed geoengineering schemes, such as putting reflective aerosols into the upper atmosphere, are attractive precisely because they fit a familiar pattern: high-tech solutions, financed by capital, deployed at scale, with uncertain consequences.
“There’s lots of money in Wall Street who are willing to throw money into geo engineering, which is, instead of cutting back on our carbon, we’re going to manipulate the planet,” he said. “If you pay someone to do it, you bet they will do it without thinking of the consequences. Because every plant on this planet, if you reduce the solar incidence, plants are going to feel it first.”
For Derr, the questions are larger than one ranch, one wildfire season, or one city’s renewable portfolio. They are about how a state like Colorado, wealthy by global standards, ecologically diverse and politically divided, chooses to use its land, energy and power in a warming world.