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Threads Pulled from the Tapestry: Prairie Dogs, Human Disturbance and Biodiversity Loss By Claire Heywood
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hop a fence and walk into a field of burrows in a small yet-to-be-developed stretch of land within Fort Collins city limits. I survey the ground for soft mounds of sandy fur resting in the sun. Here, half of a colony of prairie dogs were recently exterminated to make way for a student housing development. It may be too early for scavengers to have pulled bodies from the burrows, unknowingly feeding on mammals fumigated to death by aluminum phosphide.
chasm between daily urban life and an idea of nature we idealistically seek to protect widens as we expand our impact, leaving ample room to forget what once existed where our homes, breweries and shops now stand. Today, I consider the broad implications of human impact through a lens as nuanced as any: the plight of the black-tailed prairie dog. Natural History of the Black-Tailed Prairie Dog
I spot a small brown mound fifty feet away through swaying blades of grass. When I get close, I realize it’s not a body, but a brown paper bag. Does it matter? A forgotten paper bag and the body of a poisoned animal in a field represent two lenses through which to gaze at the same overarching problems. I do not often think of what was cleared away to make room for the places in which I consume and enjoy my resources. I do not see whose family once lived in hollow earth below my home. I do not know where the plastic and paper I throw away will end up; perhaps in a field where hundreds of prairie dogs no longer live. We humans perceive very little of our impact unless we go reminding ourselves of it. Progressive urbanites are often in support of protecting the natural world, but the
Black-tailed prairie dogs—for simplicity’s sake, hereafter referred to as “prairie dogs”—exist in relationship to many other species in their ecosystem, and their disappearance from the grasslands could carry significant implications for other native species of wildlife. Mountain plovers, burrowing owls, endangered blackfooted ferrets, and hundreds of species of insects rely on prairie dog burrows for habitat and nesting space—thus their widely accepted designation as a keystone species (a species which is critical to the function and health of a significant number of other species in the ecosystem). The prairie dog provides prey for raptors and other predators, and before the advent of modern agriculture and development, their role as a grazer was critical in the health of enormous native grasslands.
Pausing to gaze out at a colony along the Foothills trail at Maxwell Natural Area, qualities reminiscent of humanity are easily observed: individual prairie dogs recognize other members of their coterie, or family unit, by exhibiting behavior similar to kissing. The highly social creatures engage in group communication through complex vocalization patterns. According to animal behaviorist Con Slobodchikoff, the level of detail in which prairie dogs communicate is a subject of study; researchers are curious if prairie dogs are intelligent enough to describe predators to one another. Prairie dogs chirp, bark, kiss, fight, cuddle, run, and forage from the time they emerge from the burrow at dawn to the time they retreat at sundown. When a predator approaches the colony, guard dogs emit a specific alarm call. All above retreat to safety into hollow earth below. They live in family units. They know one another. According to John Hoogland, who has spent forty years studying and observing prairie dogs, about two hundred years ago, prairie dogs likely numbered at over five billion with a range encompassing eleven states and parts of Canada and Mexico. In the twentieth century, burrowed earth of the plains became significantly less safe. Pioneers regarded prairie dogs as pests, and ranchers observed short grass on colony sites and concluded that prairie dogs compete with livestock for food. Ranch-
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publications manager
Evan Brengle cover watercolor
Karina Branson contributors
Rachel Becker Abigail Chabitnoy Whitney Chandler Jessica Crouch Emily Dishongh Lisa Ferguson Lacy Hamel Joelle Hamilton Danny Hesser Claire Heywood Solana Kaercher Delia LaJeunesse Colleen Lyon Jake Lyon Brian Majeski Cameron Miller Meg Schiel Dana Schlingman Danny Steiner Cori Storb J. Mark Tebben Blair Wittig Rachel Zemanek photographer
Dina Fike © Jessica Crouch
WE BRING YOU FORT COLLINS The Fort Collins Courier
brings information, tools, and expertise together to help our community members live engaged and more self-reliant lives. We want to explore the paths locals take, and inspire visitors with our city’s unique charm. Our areas of interest stem from our decade-long relationship with Fort Collins—in each issue we’ll feature content about bicycling, agriculture and the local food movement, as well as reporting about environmental issues and profiles of local makers and the return to craft. We distribute 5,000 copies of each issue to over 35 locations throughout Fort Collins.
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Fort Collins Courier Vol. 3, Issue 1, June 2016 Published by Wolverine Farm Publishing PO BOX 814 Fort Collins, Colorado 80522
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Wolverine Farm Publishing is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization based in Fort Collins, CO. We publish books, this community newspaper, and collaborate with other non-profits, businesses, and people toward a more mindful engagement with the world. Opinions expressed herein are not necessarily the opinions of Wolverine Farm Publishing, and are offered up freely to better discern the state of our local culture. Donations accepted online or by mail to: Wolverine Farm Publishing PO BOX 814 Fort Collins, CO 80522 est.
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ers also thought their livestock would fall into burrow entrances and sustain leg fractures, a logical deduction which has not been substantiated by evidence but has continually informed rural understandings of prairie dogs as pernicious enemies to agriculture. During the twentieth century, ranchers and commercial developers poisoned, shot, and buried alive billions of prairie dogs, often with assistance from federal, state and local agencies. The result was the reduction of a species which Merriweather Lewis once described as “infinite” to two percent of its original population. In 2000, the US Fish & Wildlife Service listed the prairie dog as a candidate species for the Federal List of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants. In 2004, the agency reversed the potential for protection of prairie dogs, triggering continual pushback from activists and concerned naturalists. The species remains unprotected, and prairie dogs continue to be recreationally shot, poisoned, and buried alive across their range. Why care about the prairie dog? Because they are particularly critical members of native grassland ecosystems? Because they are nearly gone?
Methods of prairie dog eradication Early settlers of the plains thought of prairie dogs as an enemy of ranching and agriculture, and eliminated them by any means necessary: drowning, shooting, trapping, and poisoning with arsenic and potassium cyanide. According to researchers Forrest & Luchsinger, Texas became the first state to implement an organized effort to poison prairie dogs by the masses. By 1920, every state with prairie dogs had begun organized, federally supported efforts to eradicate them almost entirely. The efforts at eradication have slowed, if only because there are now relatively few prairie dogs left to exterminate.
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Local obligations and opportunities to mitigate biodiversity loss Relocation of prairie dog colonies is more expensive than extermination, and the process of relocation can delay construction deadlines. The local Prairie Dog Relocation Group (PDRG) approaches developers with the goal of collaborating with the City of Fort Collins to relocate imperiled colonies from proposed development sites. Helen Taylor, a relocation advocate and a member of PDRG, emphasizes that developers need strong options and incentives for relocation. PDRG is behind a Community Funded campaign focused on collecting funds for the relocation of several imperiled colonies in Fort Collins. While some developers pay for the cost of relocating rather than exterminating, developers are financially incentivized against choosing relocation. Taylor’s emotional investment in the fate of local prairie dogs is apparent in her voice, even over the phone. Through her activism, she has come to know prairie dogs as iconic characters in the story of Northern Colorado’s natural history. But to dismiss the group’s plan of action as sentimental or unrealistic would be inaccurate; Taylor is aware that practical collaboration between all interested parties— activists, the public, city officials, and developers—is the only way to protect colonies which currently hang in the balance. The group urges citizens to learn about the prairie dog’s
Pellets of aluminum phosphide are placed in burrow entrances, which are then stuffed with newspaper. The pellets react with moisture in the ground to create a gas, which moves through the sealed burrow and into the lungs of animals trapped inside. The result is the death of all burrow inhabitants through internal bleeding over the course of several days. Foxes, skunks, coyotes, and other scavengers dig the poisoned prairie dogs from the burrows and consume the aluminum phosphide remaining in their bodies. Rain seeps into the ground; poison makes its way through the landscape. Rachel Carson, the prolific environmentalist and author of Silent Spring, famously noted that “in nature, nothing exists alone.” The application of Carson’s insight seems obvious here: the impact of injecting poison into millions of acres of grassland does not stand alone, and a species as pivotal to the grasslands as the prairie dog cannot be removed without unforeseen consequences. The culture of development has hinged on a remarkable capacity for nearsightedness; so often, humans entirely fail to consider the far-reaching implications of altering wildlife habitats, both for the health of ecosystems and the services we reap from them.
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“It’s partly a scientific question and partly a philosophical one,” he said. “The scientific question: how many species can be lost without jeopardizing our own futures?” Ecosystem services are defined as the services humans reap from ecosystems, including water, oil, and so on. To help us consider the risk to ecosystem services associated with biodiversity loss, Boone brought up the rivets theory, in which the earth—and everything on it— is likened to an airplane. Each species on the earth represents a rivet on the airplane. As a passenger, you don’t know what will happen if one or two of the rivets fall off the plane. One rivet can disappear without too much concern, but at what point do you become concerned about the safety of the plane? When one or two, ten percent or twenty percent of the rivets are gone? “We don’t know enough about the organisms that provide us with these ecosystem services—we don’t know enough about what happens when some of these pieces go away.” “The other question to ponder is philosophical in nature: each person gets to ask, do other species have the right to occupy the planet? What cultural and social values are gained by sharing the planet with these other animals?” In a society more homogenized to benefit human life than ever, I want to live in a colorful world which honors variety and intentionally preserves cultural and biological diversity. The plight of the modern prairie dog poses a complex challenge for natural areas employees and city planners charged with managing a species whose habitat has been greatly reduced. In an undisturbed environment, prairie dogs functioned as an integral part of the ecosystem. But left unmanaged in a landscape of disturbance, prairie dogs can diminish natural areas, overgrazing on native vegetation and causing erosion. Natural areas managers want to manage for prairie dogs, but also for other species of native wildlife and vegetation. The ecosystem has been developed to death in some parts, desecrated and diminished in others. The relatively small number of prairie dogs remaining require attention and consideration in order to sustain them without harming other imperiled native species.
A memo from the Prairie Dog Coalition outlines the legal inhumane treatment of the species which continues today: “The Colorado Wildlife Commission approved the use of an explosive device called the Rodenator to destroy prairie dog burrows. This ‘bunker buster’ ignites a mixture of propane and oxygen. The ensuing explosion can break animals’ bones, burn their bodies, crush their internal organs, and cause suffocation. Despite the inherent cruelty involved, it is currently legal for anyone in Colorado to use. . . .” Pest-management companies such as Crit’r Call tout quick extermination services in Colorado, charging three dollars per burrow entrance poisoned with aluminum phosphide. According to the company’s website, “the Environmental Protection Agency allows only one effective fumigant for prairie dogs—aluminum phosphide. It can be used whenever we can get a shovel into the soil.”
COVER STORY
local history and participate in City of Fort Collins forums so that the public can weigh in to shape a more stable future for the remaining colonies within city limits. PDRG recently went through the arduous process of obtaining a permit from Colorado Parks & Wildlife to relocate imperiled prairie dogs to Cathy Fromme Prairie. Relocation advocates are “thrilled to be able to move forward.” In any discussion of substance regarding the shaky fate of prairie dogs in Northern Colorado, neither developers nor consumers can escape some level of responsibility for biodiversity loss. It is an exercise in self-awareness to gaze unflinchingly at the implications of each human’s consumptive existence without immediately resorting to blame of an impersonal “other” or external entity—in this case, developers. This is not to say that developers and corporations should enjoy freedom from regulation or that locals should fail to hold developers responsible for wildlife lost, especially when the process of extermination is callous and inhumane. But the pressure placed on the planet by human culture is unrelenting, and it is a pressure applied by everyone who participates in the culture. Serious consideration of biodiversity loss and how locals can take action to mitigate that loss seems a critical step for most of us who espouse, in various ways, a love of the outdoors. The world demands our attention in myriad ways. I asked Colorado State University professor and wildlife biologist Randall Boone to explain why biodiversity loss is important enough to warrant serious consideration by the average person living in Fort Collins.
No one can definitively say that the disappearance of prairie dogs would cause the collapse of an ecosystem. In fact, some scientists think of the rivet metaphor as limited because it assumes a dramatic threshold at which we may witness the collapse of all ecosystems. What if we’re instead witnessing the gradual fading of a once richly varied world into a duller, more uniform one? In an alternative metaphor, the biodiverse world as it functioned before the age of homogenized human disturbance is likened to a brilliantly colorful, intricately woven tapestry. Species lost from the planet due to human disturbance are akin to threads pulled from the tapestry. With time the color dulls; patterns and balances fade. Human disturbance is now the most significant interruption to the brilliant balance of life as it once functioned on earth. To ruminate on the beauty of that tapestry is to dream. It is a dreaming inseparable from a sinking, modern knowing: we are unable to observe the tapestry in its vivid initial form. We are the ones pulling threads from the tapestry: one by one. Why care about the prairie dog? Billions of prairie dogs amount to just one thread. Opportunities for engagement: The City of Fort Collins will review its management plan in May/June 2016 and provide opportunities for locals to weigh in on future management of prairie dogs. Concerned citizens can keep an eye on City of Fort Collins calendars for public listening sessions on the review of management plans for prairie dogs. Those interested in working with the Prairie Dog Relocation Group can contact Helen Taylor: helentaylor3@comcast.net. To make a donation to this group, please visit: http://campaigns.communityfunded.com/?p=12378
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BICYCLING
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Bicycling
Dear Åland, Oh! Land, Island of Peace and Rejuvenation . . . We peddled across your landscapes of endless apple blossom rows, baby goats, board and batten farmhouses, crystal blue lakes, windmills, maypoles, rolling hills, and mossy granite outcroppings reminiscent of our Rocky Mountain home. We strolled along your rocky pined shores, through ruins of Russian fortifications, and inside your picturesque windmills containing elaborate sketches of their functioning design. We ate your succulent perch plates, sea buckthorn berry marmalade, and drank your “handmade slow beer” from a “bryggeri” (brewery) with a special brew salvaged from an early 19th century shipwreck. We felt your Baltic sea-cooled air as we approached your beaches and the warm, steamy greeting of your wood-fired, floating, sailing “bastus” (sauna) as the midnight sun set high on the horizon, chuckling at the old saying that your people are “made in the sauna, born in the sauna, and die in the sauna.” We shared with you our own experiences with pine bark beetles, honey bees, and climate conundrums. We thanked you for your hospitality to lure us, point us in the right direction, send us to sleep late and wake us early with your long daylight, so we could enjoy such a tasty slice of the sweet Scandinavian way of life. — Colleen Lyon & Brian Majeski
Do you have a bike trip to share? Send it on to todd@wolverinefarm.org.
SUMMER WAS MADE FOR BIKE T R I P S
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Literature
Coin-Op: Conversation & Community An interview with Delia LaJeunesse, Founder & Editor
By Rachel Becker
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he first time I wandered into the Wolverine Farm Bookstore at the Bean Cycle, I was magnetically drawn to a small section in the back—the local Zines—particularly a stack of small colorful issues with the words “Coin-Op” boldly expressed across the covers. Not sure what to expect, I found that the pages were filled with a diverse range of artwork and writing that felt immediately raw, thoughtful, powerful, and important. The arrangement of voices fearlessly cover topics like sexuality, gender, gentrification, family, consciousness, love, identity, capitalism, sexual assault — through mediums of poetry, essay, collage, photography & illustration. The more I explore these works, the more I discover new layers of profound depth and humanity — the authenticity of people’s direct experiences, thoughts, fears, and dreams. I recently had the opportunity to meet with Delia LaJeunesse, the founder of Coin-Op, to learn more about the project and how this all came to be. Fort Collins Courier: What inspired you to create Coin-Op? The idea for Coin-Op really started 2 years ago. I was studying Sociology and Women’s Studies at Colorado State University and having really interesting conversations on campus and in classes, but they were still pretty structured as academia tends to be. I was just trying to have a conversation with people everywhere in my life, and make feminism something approachable, not this incredibly daunting thing, or something where people feel like they’re being attacked. I have a lot of guy friends and I feel like they’re very often defensive which I think is a shame, because there are places for men to come in. I really believe that feminism is going to benefit everybody. I’m an artist, and a poet, and a zine just seemed like a safe platform to open it up in a way that’s more free, where we can work with those ideas and have a conversation. Seeing as the zine is based on contributions, is there a sense of community that’s developed around it? Yes, I have met so many people because of this, and had conversations and learned things about people that I really don’t think I would’ve otherwise. It is an interesting medium to connect with other people, because for the most part it’s an instant understanding of trust and respect which you don’t often get with strangers—you’re suddenly exchanging and communicating on a really high level. It sets some kind of standard for the level of honesty and authenticity we’re going to bring to the table which is really cool. Where does the name Coin-Op come from? I think at its core it’s a critique of capitalism—this frustration and feeling that a lot of people aren’t awake, they aren’t paying attention — that we’re coin-operated, and that we’re totally driven by money. We’re so embedded in capitalism that we have stopped seeing ourselves, one another, and the shit that we’ve been doing. It’s crazy when you start seeing what we are doing to each other and what we are doing to the Earth. How
do genocides happen, how are we drilling into the Earth — how is our psyche ok with that? But I think it’s because we’ve totally become wrapped up in this ideology of capitalism that our happiness and our worth is going to stem from material gain. Really, even very conscious people are still driven by money because we have very few options in this world. So really I think the name “Coin-Op” is a critique on being money driven and unaware. It has definite ties to feminist issues, but it also allows it to be broad. There are a wide variety of themes throughout the zines — can you talk more about how these themes like Capitalism, Food, Desire, etc. relate to Feminism and why you chose to incorporate them? I really do think it has a lot to do with the fact that most of my community happens to be men. Not that being surrounded by women is an easier platform for these kind of conversations, but I really want to believe that I can have this conversation with anybody, and anybody can understand why they need to be part of feminism. Going this broad with the themes makes feminism this global issue that I really think it is. I just see many social issues that I’m fascinated by, and I think if you turn your attention to the women in those social systems, or turn your attention to equality and kindness, which to me is what feminism is all about, and think about what that would do to that social system, it just enhances your understanding of it so much. It also brings attention to the fact that this is a human issue, and that the struggles that women face indicate a larger system that we are all part of. Yes, women are so powerful and can get so much done, but for really large social change, I think we have to find ways to include everybody. Sometimes it feels really slow moving. I mean, Sociology was my major and sitting through a lot of those classes, it really wasn’t until the very end that we starting talking about intersectionality, and looking at not only what women are experiencing now, and what black women are experiencing now, what poor black women are experiencing, and going further and further in. I think it was frustrating for me to have Sociology and Women’s Studies be these two very separate things that I was studying, when really they are wholly interconnected. I just don’t understand why we wouldn’t include feminism in every extremely broad thing that we’re doing — because that’s the way I think, I walk around this world and everything has to do with feminism to me. It’s not this random thing that I sit down and study, it’s life. At the last launch party, on What it Means to be a Woman, this guy was like, “I think we need to stop talking in terms of male and female and we really need to talk in terms of feminine and masculine energies.” And when you do that, then everybody is involved, because while there may be some people who are almost entirely masculine oriented, they have some feminine energy, and if you talk about how that needs to be explored and celebrated, then everybody can join in in their own way, in an authentic way, that’s not addressing other people but addressing themselves.
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There are ways we could all benefit from fostering the growth of our feminine side — in a way that allows you to be creative, and be healing and be kind and gentle. I see a lot of men who don’t feel that they can do any of those things which is tragic to me. Where do you think backlash against Feminism, or people hesitating to identify as Feminists, comes from? I think it mostly has to do with fear. It’s a huge issue—it’s a life changing issue if you take it seriously, and I think a lot of people are not down to do that. So they’d rather pretend it’s not an issue. It’s a lot like capitalism, in that “this is way too big I can’t change everything in my life” — which you can, but it’s a lot. I also think that there’s some aspect to it that people feel poorly about. When you start to look at your history and the way that you’ve interacted with people and the principles throughout your life, and your childhood, etc. — there are some negative things that can come up. And we don’t have very good ways to deal with that or to address privilege. We don’t have good ways of addressing things that need to be fixed that we’re a part of. It’s really hard to recognize yourself as a portion of the problem. Even if you are a super conscious female, in a lot of ways, if you’re not paying attention to these issues, then you’re kind of contributing. We’re all kind of contributing. I was drawn to this section of the mission statement on the Coin-Op Facebook page: “This zine aims to … recognize our communal wounds and search for the places we can find healing among us.” I love that — with all the suffering that’s going on in our world, there’s so much value in focusing on healing, as individuals and as a society. Has this been a healing process, for you personally? Definitely, for me personally. It’s been crazy. This is why I love that it’s collaborative, because there’s a level of accountability that’s really great. I can’t just turn my head and not feel things. I’ve worked through so much of my own shit by accidentally stumbling into these things. I’ve had several conversations with friends that are suddenly divulging really sensitive information to me, and I have to imagine that that’s because I’ve very loudly established that I’m open to this kind of thing. I don’t know if that’s healing for them but I also think that when we share things it slightly lessens whatever you’re feeling. There are some spaces for this — some people go to therapy, and people have intimate relationships that can be very healing. But having one more platform that’s a little bit more creative and artistic, where the intent is to share, to be vulnerable and to be open with people that are around you, offers an additional avenue that can be essential to how people deal with things. I feel like I’ve had to coax things out of people because I know that they have something but there’s a fear of sharing it, and then if they do, I’m so grateful that I did that. That’s really cool to me, to show people that you can share in a way that doesn’t feel really horrible which sharing often does. We definitely need start talking about this stuff as a culture, and start facing these huge problems in the world. Yes, there are some pieces in here that come from outside of Fort Collins and Denver, but for the most part this is pretty local. I think it’s been insightful for people to recognize that there are people in their immediate community that are dealing with things every day that they didn’t before acknowledge. We tend to think about violence and these things as happening very much elsewhere.
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We don’t tend to recognize how embedded we are in structures that are pretty violent. I think recognizing that even slowly starts to shift your understanding of what it means to be nonviolent, and what it means to be loving, and to be healing, and what it means to take care of yourself. We even do violence unto ourself in a lot of ways. And that’s just so — what an illness we have, to not even be able to take care of ourselves, and to end up making ourselves kind of miserable…and then pinning it on other people because that’s what we do as a society. But really we have a lot of control about how we’re going to approach the future, the present. I really believe that you can’t take care of other people and you can’t address issues elsewhere unless you have dealt with them in yourself. Especially as women, we’re taught to take care of other people which is a beautiful thing, but we’re told to do that first. To deal with the people around us first, and then if you have time take care of yourself. That is sunk so deep in the way I operate — and it’s not a bad thing but I catch myself, how much is this depleting my energy and not being a fruitful productive thing? You have to approach yourself with kindness. How the hell are you going to get through this impossibly challenging world, if you can’t have gentleness towards yourself and your faults and your slowness of moving through the world? We’re all at different places. Any advice for potential activists, or people interested in social change? I’m still figuring it out, but I think ideally you recognize your own privilege first. Sometimes you end up getting to that point much later when you are recognizing conflict. Maybe listening is the starting point—actually listening to what is conflicting inside of you, and what is conflicting around you. Paying attention to peoples’ experiences, observing the world—understanding the way that you’re implicated in the system and understanding these huge social forces that are at work that keep people in whatever marginalized position they’re in. What does being a human being mean to you? I think it potentially means being connected to your emotions — and don’t get too attached to your emotions — but if you can pay attention to what hurts and pay attention to where you find joy, then I think we’re all going to become artists, and we’re all going to become lovers. That is the highest level of consciousness to me, to embody love; and love is art, and emotion is art, but we’re also totally animals. I don’t know, I think that being a really honest being is somehow focusing more on what emotions you feel and what your really honest experiences are. I’m going to quote Audre Lorde — “The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us—the poet-whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free.” This is so beautiful to me, to allow yourself to feel, to allow whatever comes into your energy sphere to be what it is and not resist it and just allow it, and in that way transcend the bullshit that we go through. It is pretty interesting that expressing emotion and feeling, which is also associated with femininity, is often viewed as a weakness in our culture—but there’s so much strength in emotional understanding. It’s so powerful…What are we doing calling that a weakness?
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Dirt: A Love Story, Edited by Barbara Richardson, Foreword by Pam Houston Review by Whitney Chandler “...I read that dirt has pheromones, or something, that come out of the ground and mix with our endocrine systems and give us a sense of well-being. In this way dirt is like potatoes and tobacco and opium.” -Peter Heller “Dirt House” Dirt: A Love Story is a compilation of essays written about thirty-six individual authors’ relationships with the land, including works by such Colorado writers as: Julene Bair, Peter Heller, Pam Houston, Laura Pritchett, Kayann Short, and Carrie Visintainer. Often referred to as dirt, but occasionally soil, mud and dust, each author’s view is written from their individual experiences and perspectives. The book is sectioned into five digestible, bite-size pieces. “Land Centered” contains seven shorts about the organic tenaciousness of the land on one’s memory. “Kid Stuff ” presents an assortment of playful memories, while “Dirt Worship” explores our deep relationship with the matter. “Dirt Facts” offers new knowledge on the subject, and “Native Soil” promotes advocacy for protection of the grounds we rely on to grow our food and nurture our bodies. This collection of voices speaks to the senses and to the heart. The words are full of deep meaning and memories of those that cared enough to share. Some provoke thought and some provoke action, but you set the pages down having acquired a holistic view of this grit, this dirt, our land. I’d recommend this book to anyone with an interest in soil in any capacity. There is something for everyone to enjoy within these covers.
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A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara Review by J. Mark Tebben Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life is not a little book. At 720 pages, it’s a sprawling character novel, following four friends over more than fifty years of their lives. When we meet them, they are tenuously beginning their post-college lives in New York. Yanagihara takes us from their childhoods to the ends of middle age and back again, intricately weaving various narrative and temporal perspectives into a brilliant and powerful novel. It is, in a sense, a classic New York story. The four friends inhabit typical New York careers—an actor, a lawyer, an artist, an architect—and spaces; much of the characters’ day-to-day involves apartment-hunting and renovating, society gatherings, neighborhoods, and trips upstate. But this is not a white male story like so many other New York novels—A Little Life’s world is a diverse one, where race, gender, sexual orientation, and even economic class are fluid and flexible. At the same time, these characteristics are central to the identities of the four friends. One of the friends, Jude St. Francis, eventually moves into the novel’s center and becomes its heart. He is at once a brilliant and a broken man, and his struggle to, in turns, repress, hide, live with, and heal from his various traumas bonds the friends together as they move through adulthood. The origin of the title A Little Life lies in Jude’s past, but the phrase’s layers of meaning develop throughout the book, which ultimately becomes both a mourning of the tragedies, and a celebration of the beauties, that life holds.
Notes on the Assemblage, by Juan Felipe Herrera, United States Poet Laureate Review by Abigail Chabitnoy In the midst of increasing global warming, political violence, and social unrest, it is easy to dismiss poetry as a luxury. What can a poem offer in such times? “Poem by poem we can end the violence,” United States Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera affirms in Notes on the Assemblage, his latest work from City Lights. “Notes” is perhaps the best way to describe these poems—notes from one who has stood “behind the torn universe,” notes on what the poet has seen from this removed vantage. And it is fitting, necessary even, that the first Chicano Laureate should lead us to such a vantage—one from which we are reminded our differences are not greater than our shared humanity. Combining news reports, witness accounts, lyric meditations, and anecdotes, written at times in Spanish and English, these poems distance readers from themselves to fill that distance with bridges. In Notes Herrera bridges cultures, languages, experiences, styles, and other poets and artists. These poems seek to unite, to engage all readers in a conversation capable of viewing tragedies and hardships not as isolated incidents of localized concern, determined by such chance factors as race, class, and country, but as common human suffering. This unity arises from the realization we do not need to fetter ourselves within a single narrow frame. The borders with which we define and divide ourselves need not be fixed. We are not helpless, not alone. We are, Herrera reminds us, “remarkably loud not masked.”
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LITERATURE
g The Cabaret of Plants, by Richard Maybey Review by Danny Hesser
The Story of My Teeth, by Valeria Luiselli Review by Evan Brengle
An affectionate foray into our plant life, into lives we never knew, coaxes and cools a desire we never knew we had. That’s what Richard Maybey lays bare in The Cabaret of Plants, denuding us of any preconceived notions that plants exist merely for us. If you are a flower child-atheart considering names for the twinkle in your eye, you might flip through these pages to jot down leading words: Llangernyw, spillikins, Adansonia za. Maybey’s explorations reach for us like vines foraging upward for light.
The star of Valeria Luiselli’s playful, episodic novel, The Story of My Teeth, is Gustavo ‘Highway’ Sánchez Sánchez, auctioneer and collector of objects. The self-mythologizing huckster wins Marilyn Monroe’s teeth at an auction, transplants them into his own mouth, and proceeds to auction off his removed teeth, each adorned with an apocryphal history. This is the story of Highway, but also the story of his stories.
Conjuring Wordsworth and Coleridge, whose careful attention came before us, he extracts a language and sensibility from the emergent, redolent landscape itself. But these are not primrose-tinted glasses we spy through— Maybey possesses a historicist’s lens through which societal upheaval might be viewed, alternately microscoping Rorschach trees used as prison cells, telescoping over time and oceans to illuminate the ethnobotanical uses of a mad variety of plants. He alights on researchers of antiquity, whose discoveries writers embellish today, at times unwittingly. What I thought would be an encyclopedic tome emerged as a biophiliac’s narrative, drawing from plants the attributes that make us love the natural world. This book abounds with allusions to a sort of spiritual genealogy of plants as well, performed by us, whose first record of our love affair remains, painterly, in caves. The language—drawing from an older world, rooted in botanical vernacular—is as rich as the fallow landscape, with words in symbioses with one another.
Are Highway’s tales and sales pitches authentic histories or mere fictions? The auctioneer unabashedly employs the arts of circumlocution, exaggeration, and outright fabrication illustrating that perhaps all salespeople are in fact also storytellers, and equally, all storytellers are themselves salespeople. Highway doesn’t sell just his handful of rotten teeth, he sells a handful of stories— stories linking these teeth to a motley crew of writers and thinkers: Plato, Petrarch, Rousseau, Woolf. Luiselli’s process of composing this book is additionally intriguing. An art gallery in Mexico owned by a juice factory invited her to compose a work to accompany an upcoming exhibition. As she completed sections of her work, Luiselli submitted them to workers at the factory for review and suggestions. The collaborative element is taken a step further in the English edition by the inclusion of a section created by the translator, Christina MacSweeney. The interplay of voices, characters’ as well as creators’, creates a nuanced, layered work. The Story of My Teeth is a quick read, but will provoke much time in thought, spiraling off from its own small narrative world onto complex and far-reaching trajectories.
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LITERATURE
fort collins courier
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summer 2016
CSU English Professor and Author of
Death of a Century an interview with Daniel Robinson by Jake Lyon
D
r. Daniel Robinson has been teaching English at Colorado State University for 35 years. He first attempted to write a novel when he was in the seventh grade, and continued to write into his college years. After a career in fighting wildfires, Dr. Robinson got his MA in English and went on to pursue his PhD, originally focused on Literature. However, after reading Robinson’s stories, a colleague convinced him to change over to Creative Writing, specializing in fiction. Robinson has now written three novels, After the Fire (Lyons Press, 2003), The Shadow of Violence (Texas Review Press, 2010), and Death of a Century (Arcade Publishing, 2015). Robinson’s interest and study of Ernest Hemingway and other Lost Generation artists—Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald—served as inspiration for his newest novel, Death of a Century. This historical thriller delivers an engaging narrative paired with an exploration of historical truth. Robinson portrays a member of the Lost Generation and the effects of WWI on this group of people, while also engaging the reader in an exhilarating mystery. Reporter and WWI veteran, Joe Henry, is framed for the murder of his colleague, Wynton Gresham, and is forced to travel to Paris in hopes of clearing his name. Fort Collins Courier: You originally studied Forestry, and then went on to get your master’s and PhD in English. What caused you to change your career path? Dr. Daniel Robinson: After my bachelor’s degree I fought forest fires for fourteen years and I left that for a couple of reasons. One is I had had five knee operations—so that was kind of limiting me, and also my wife and I had wanted to adopt a child and nobody is going to let you adopt a girl if you’re going to be gone six months out of the year. Who are some contemporaries you admire and how do you see them influencing your writing? I learned a lot from [Hemingway’s] interest in what you don’t put on the page—leaving things unfilled, and saying things between the letters and underneath the words. And then, the beauty of the prose of Cormac McCarthy has influenced me, but I have to be very aware of my interest in McCarthy, otherwise I try to become too much like him. I can’t do that, that’s not me.
What did you want this book to be? While I was writing it I was kind of thinking of it as two or three different kinds of books. On one hand, I wanted to make sure it stood alone as a historical thriller. Another is: I wanted it to be a discussion of how past events influence—continue to influence—our lives. I also embedded it with little bits and pieces of a puzzle of the 1920s. The more you know about Hemingway’s writing, the more you’re going to see little scenes in there; or Fitzgerald’s writing—you’re going to see parts of Gatsby in there, [and] This Side of Paradise. So I wanted it as a sort of literary game. How do you find all of the details of a time in which you obviously didn’t live? That was enormously fun—one of the more enjoyable parts of that besides putting it all together. The best and worst advice somebody can give to a young writer is to “write about what you know.” If you just stop with that, then that’s the worst advice, but Raymond Carver says: that’s great advice, but what people know really are their emotions, the emotions of individuals. It’s most important to know what you write about—which is a little bit different. You only know things through two avenues: one is through your past, and the other is through your research. I had already read a number of histories of the era because of my previous interest in that and those were good, but what was best was reading newspapers of the era, reading diaries— not the people who were in the Lost Generation—but people who nobody has even heard about. And really one of the most valuable books was the Sears catalog because it told me what people had, what things cost; it told me how people described things; it gave me pictures of the way people dressed. What was your biggest obstacle with “Death of a Century”? I think it was getting past the desire to have to have too much of those other characters (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, Pound) inside of it. It would have been too easy to integrate them too fully in the story. So making sure I removed them, I think, was the biggest thing.
Death of a Century
How did you then synthesize all of those personalities into what became Joe Henry?
What about the Lost Generation made you want to write a novel about it?
There came in the imagination. As soon as I relieved him of having to be with all of these other people, as far as the character was, it was very freeing because I could just make him a person and not have to worry about his relationship with those other people. A lot of that character comes out of the Hemingway short stories: the character that’s been so affected by the events of World War I that he does anything that he can to keep from having to relive those events.
I think just about every artist or writer wants to have lived in Paris in the 1920s, and obviously we can’t; but we can experience it through our work, through our writing. That was part of it—I’ve long been interested in that period, obviously as a Hemingway scholar. So I’ve studied it quite a bit, [and] I’ve published on Hemingway’s stories that he wrote during that time so it seemed like another one of those natural progressions for me to move into.
BOnnie Nadzam
reading from Lions FRIday, July 22nd 7:30pm Wolverine farm Letterpress & publick house Black Cat A Paperback Imprint of Grove Atlantic Distributed by Publishers Group West www.groveatlantic.com
316 willow street Free & Open to the Publick
Renewable Energy Climate Adaptation Reforestation Clean Cookstoves Central America • Tribal Lands
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WOLVERINE FARM
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summer 2016
Wolverine Farm Letterpress & Publick House listen
TNIRP
MAKE
WORK
SNACK
MEET
SIP read
DRAW
STUDY
WRITE
Mon - THu: 10am - 9pm / Fri & Sat: 10am - 10pm / Sun: 1pm - 7pm A letterpress print shop and community event space in Fort Collins’ River District, Wolverine Farm Letterpress & Publick House is available for rent for events, literary workshops and readings, films, music and other cultural offerings. We have local coffee, wine, beer, snacks, and local goods available for purchase. All proceeds go to Wolverine Farm Publishing, a local 501(c)3 literary/arts nonprofit.
Please visit www.wolverinefarm.org for more information or call 970-682-2590 with any questions.
fort collins courier
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summer 2016
WOLVERINE FARM
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COME RIDE WITH US Boneshaker Release Ride #10 saturday, June 18th, 4pm Leaving from the Publick House Join us on a bicycle ride to celebrate the release of the 10th issue of our beloved bicycle almanac, Boneshaker. During our bicycle ride we’ll stop and read various selections from the new issue, as well as banter and carry on.
“As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.” —H.D. Thoreau
If You’re Making a Cake for a King Make It Big and Other Songs
Relief carvings by artist and woodworker Trevor Ryan on display at the Wolverine Publick House June 1st through June 30th. Equal parts comedy and tragedy, Trevor’s images are sometimes celebrating, sometimes smirking at our shared situation. Simple and stark allegorical figures are carved and burned directly onto wooden slabs. The motley cast of cartoony characters endure absurd situations and tasks and leave the viewer with a bemused pathos.
Opening reception Friday June 24th 7-9pm
k
Shared with Jeff Nye and Jessica Crouch
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MAKE
fort collins courier
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summer 2016
Make
Gardening with Native Plants By Emily Dishongh and Rachel Zemanek
K
eeping Colorado colorful doesn’t have to mean planting foreign species in any Front Range garden this spring. Local gardeners can help fight the advance of invasive plant species by planting beautiful, useful, and easy native plants.
“Colorado’s climate makes for a uniquely challenging gardening experience, but is also uniquely rewarding,” said Colton McDonald, an employee at Bath Garden Center. Planting a variety of native plants that complement each other and the environment can be an easy and beautiful process. If an array of purple, yellow and green sounds enticing, a blend of leadplant, prairie sage, blue mist penstemon, evening primrose, blue flax, and chocolate flower should suffice. This assortment blooms in spring and summer, offering a sanctuary for bees, butterflies, and birds to pollenate and gather seeds. Cacti and succulents are also great for pollinators and bloom in spring and summer as well, but have the added benefit of being drought tolerant. Gardeners can also grow edible arrangements to feed themselves or the local wildlife. A full arrangement of prickly pear cacti, yarrow, elderberry, and wild strawberry will leave the gardener with a mouthwatering and elegant sight that can also provide health benefits. Yarrow is often used to fight colds and other ailments, and can also be used as insect repellent. Wild strawberries offer large amounts of Vitamin C and are
delicious and bright. Although the elderberry plant is mostly inedible, the plant’s flowers offer treatment for colds and flu. Prickly pear cacti produce delicious fruit. However, before eating them, make sure to strip it of the skin and spines. “Biodiversity is always something to shoot for—and don’t forget your soil,” McDonald said. “Billions of microbes, beneficial fungi, and other organisms are key to a healthy garden.” Local plant vendors offer a variety of choices for interested gardeners. Fort Collins Nursery on Mulberry Street and Bath Garden Center on Prospect Road supply soil, seeds, and a wealth of knowledge for the beginner or experienced gardener. Bath Garden Center and Forrt Collins Nursery offer educational tours for youth and adults, art shows, and low cost public classes for anyone with the desire to learn. Online garden sources are a great place to start, and the Colorado Native Plant Society offers a variety of seminars, lists, and workshops for gardeners’ education and enjoyment. Colorado is home to an abundance of plants that are both attractive and useful. Planting a garden of native flowers and herbs can enliven any yard without introducing invasive species.
MAKERS WANTED! Native flower illustration by Dana Schlingman.
Call ing all Mak ers
Are you a maker or do you know someone who is? The Fort Collins Courier is looking for makers to profile in upcoming issues. Everything from bicycles to broomsticks, furniture to fiber arts. For more information please contact Beth at beth@wolverinefarm.org.
fort collins courier
How to Make a Lace and Lilies Arrangement
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summer 2016
make
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Written by Lacey Hamel Designed by Lisa Ferguson
Each and every thing that we create at Lace and Lilies starts with a recipe. When deciding how we want our arrangement to look, we take into consideration the size, shape, color palette, and where the arrangement will find a home.
For this bold arrangement, we selected silver dollar eucalyptus, spray rose, snapdragon, lisianthus, godetia, bay leaf, dahlia, sterling range, ranunculus and hydrangea. We chose to have each of the blooms to be bold and colorful, so that they would make a statement in the fun, hammered copper vase.
To start the design of this arrangement, we placed the foliage in first. We always begin with the foliage to help create the shape and grid of the design. We love the variations in the shape and color of the eucalyptus and bay leaf.
The first flower we placed into our arrangement was a white hydrangea. Because the opening of the vase is bigger, this helps not only to add a texture we love, but also to fill the space so that the other flowers can stand upright and beautifully.
Placing your larger focal flowers in the beginning of your design is a must. Here we chose to use two bold dahlias and made sure to keep them at different heights so they did not fight for attention next to each other.
Next we placed our three ranunculus on three various sides of the vase. We always like to place more whimsical flowers in this way so that they stay true to their natural curve.
Sometimes when we have two of one kind of flower, we love the way they look grouped together. These beautiful snapdragons are paired together on the left side to make a more organic and free form shape.
To finish the arrangement, we added our filler flower and smaller flowers, making sure each flower has its own space and all the colors and textures are visible from all sides. We love this bold and colorful arrangement and it looks great on our coffee table!
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COMMUNITY
fort collins courier
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summer 2016
Community Compost Commons By Danny Steiner
T
he Growing Project is implementing a new program, the Compost Commons, intended to help make composting a viable option for anyone, including those who find composting unfeasible at their own home due to the space or time requirements.
The Growing Project’s executive director, Dana Guber describes The Compost Commons program as being completely “resident driven,” with the Growing Project providing “a platform for people to search for compost hubs.” The system works like a subscription service. A homeowner can sign on to become a “hub champion,” hosting a compost receptacle in their yard and providing a “hub” for composting in their area. Individuals can then “subscribe” to a particular compost hub near them where they can drop off their food and yard scraps. Guber describes the Growing Project’s role as “decentralized,” emphasizing that hub champions would be responsible for maintaining contact with subscribers regarding matters surrounding the hub. To extend the reach of the program, in addition to hubs being stationed at homes throughout Fort Collins, Guber states that the City of Fort Collins has also gotten involved with the intention to provide larger compost hubs called “earth tubs” at community centers such as churches or schools. Guber hopes to eventually have a streamlined web app where subscribers can, “sign in, type in their zip code and their address, and [find] hubs closest to them along with a way to get in contact with the hub champion.” The Growing Project would promote new hubs on their website helping to connect subscribers with convenient hub locations. Typical compost methods involve repeatedly mixing green matter (i.e. food scraps or garden weeds) with brown matter (i.e. sawdust or dead leaves). While there are various methods of composting one might use, Dr. Christopher Starbuck, in his paper, “Processes in Compost Making,” estimates that conventional composting methods take three
to nine months to yield a batch of usable compost, dark and crumbly, with the scraps inside being an unrecognizable, rich blend of organic material. Clearly, this process demands both access to outdoor space and time set aside for tending the compost. Additionally, a fairly large amount of compost is needed to heat up sufficiently to effectively transform scraps into compost; a single family may find that they simply do not have enough scraps to produce useable compost. Despite these challenges, the benefits of compost should not be dismissed. According to a fact sheet written by the United States Compost Council, the benefits of compost stretch far beyond providing organic matter for your plants to feed on. Compost can increase your soil’s ability to hold water, meaning less wasted water in the summer time, and can also supply various microorganisms that are beneficial to the growth of your garden. In addition to benefiting your garden, compost works to keep food and yard scraps out of the trash, which the EPA estimates take up a quarter of landfill space. The Compost Commons offers a solution to obstacles that prevent many from composting. With this new program, the Growing Project and its partners aim to empower and encourage community members to contribute to creating compost which can be used to nourish the soil in their own gardens, or other gardens in town if they are not gardeners themselves, and, in the process, reduce the amount of food scraps and yard waste added to landfills. Currently, two compost hubs are operational in Fort Collins: the first hub is located at Wood and Elm Street, and the second is located at 501 N College Ave at The Fort Collins Bike Co-op. The Growing Project, in collaboration with the City of Fort Collins, anticipates the opening of four additional compost hubs in various homes and communal areas this year. Opportunities for engagement: To become a hub champion or subscribe to a compost commons hub, contact info@thegrowingproject.org or visit www.thegrowingproject.org.
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AGRICULTURE
fort collins courier
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summer 2016
Agriculture
For Activists, the Efficacy of a Local Food Movement Hinges on Access By Claire Heywood
T
he local food movement provides people in Fort Collins with choices for their consumption. For those interested in shaking the hands of people growing their vegetables, adopting seasonal eating patterns, and attending farm-focused gatherings and seasonal celebrations, Community Shared Agriculture (CSA) memberships are widely available. The local farmers market gives folks a weekly opportunity to support a wide variety of local growers and makers, while the Food Co-Op is a wonderful resource for people desiring responsibly sourced food yearround. For people without excess income to spend on local produce, volunteer positions are available at many local farms—including Native Hill, Happy Heart, and Garden Sweet—in early spring. But for many low-income and food unstable individuals living in Fort Collins, work schedules and budgets allow very little room for access to locally grown, healthy produce. Is the local food movement a revolution at all if it only gives access to some? If you ask three foodinsecurity concerned organizations, the answer is no—but work is underway to make the local food movement more effective, inclusive, and accessible to all. The Growing Project (TGP) is a hub of local food activism which promotes access to fresh, locally grown food by growing and donating thousands of pounds of food from a one-acre educational garden, increasing the abundance of community gardens, and providing access to education so that locals have more opportunities to grow their own food or find growers nearby. TGP specifically addresses the fact that low-income individuals disproportionately lack access to healthy, nourishing food. Food Finders, a volunteer-run, bicycle-powered food waste redistribution effort led by TGP, was able to pick up more than twelve thousand pounds of fresh food in 2015. That produce was redistributed by Food Finders to a host of organizations whose names are familiar to many residents of Fort Collins: Larimer County Food Bank, Fort Collins Rescue Mission, and The Family Center/La Familia—as well as a name you may not yet know, but probably should: Sproutin’ Up.
According to Sproutin’ Up Executive Director Anne Genson, kids who participated in a previous season at Sproutin’ Up almost always want to return for another season. The organization has limited funding acquired from grant-writing and donations from the community, but includes as many kids as possible in summer programming. This year, Genson is integrating summer programs involving Sproutin Up’s new CSA, Bucking Horse Farm. Kids will have expanded opportunity to learn about gardening in a largerscale farm operation, including retail and social skills associated with running the farm stand at Bucking Horse. The collaboration between Food Finders and Sproutin’ Up is an innovation built on community resourcefulness and dependent on the cooperation of several parties. In the end, a bridge is built between providers of nutritious food and those lacking access to it. Food Finders asks employees and volunteers at local farms to spend their time and effort (two precious resources during the growing season) to set aside excess resources. Volunteers for Food Finders harvest excess produce, load trailers, haul said trailers on their bicycles, and deliver food to other organizations. Sproutin’ Up, whose programs are entirely volunteer-driven, provides critical outreach to lowincome communities, spending time with residents and children in communities to determine how to best offer education and resources to interested residents. The people involved in each organization avoid being preachy in their community offerings; instead, they ask questions and engage in conversations with local residents, work with people curious about gardening in their neighborhoods, and extend access to those who desire it. Whose responsibility is it to be sure that the local food movement reaches everyone who wants to participate? Perhaps a large responsibility spread amongst many parties invested in the positive social and environmental impact of locally grown food would be socially sustainable. When everyone with an interest in local food has access to community gardens and affordable neighborhood food stands or shares, the local food movement may lay down roots of permanence and serious influence—call it movement, revolution or both—in Fort Collins. Get in touch to work with The Growing Project or Food Finders: www.thegrowingproject.org
During the growing season, Food Finders volunteers fill bike trailers with produce from Native Hill, The Growing Project gardens, and Fort Collins Food Co-Op (among others) and drop off at one of a handful of organizations, including Sproutin’ Up. The nonprofit sets up free, youth-ran farm stands in low-income neighborhoods, where produce which may have gone to waste is given away to local residents. Additionally, Sproutin’ Up works with neighborhood youth, ages ten to thirteen, to plant community gardens in low-income neighborhoods through their ten-week apprenticeship program. Youth participants learn about valuable organic gardening techniques, nutrition, and have the opportunity to earn a stipend each week.
Sproutin’ Up is seeking summer season volunteers for garden management (watering, weeding, harvesting) and farm-stand management (supervising kids, nutrition & gardening education with families). Contact Sproutin’ Up online to donate or learn more: www.sproutinup.com
Photos used courtesy of Native Hill Farm.
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summer 2016
AGRICULTURE
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FOOD & DRINK
fort collins courier
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summer 2016
Food & Drink
a f o s n o i Confess
r e v i D r Dumpste
Humor by Joelle Hamilton
B
efore you crunch that celery stock, there’s something I want to tell you—and I’m gonna say it straight this time, not like last time when I addressed you in the midst of your firefighter’s final exam, and due to a sudden wheezing fit, I couldn’t talk.
But I tossed and turned more than a ship at sea and in existential anguish besides. I wanted to be part of the solution, not a cog. That’s why I stopped. I vowed to live an ascetic life and give away all the trash I ever find. That’s why you’re snacking on that celery today. I’m no trash tycoon, I’m not a garbage cosmonaut, I’m giving everything I find away; in fact I may even give you this jar of tomato sauce.
At first, I left clues to unravel so you would inquire about my pastimes like most roommates—why I cover expiration dates with my index finger on the way to the fridge; smell vaguely of pasta sauce; suspiciously crack my bedroom door—not invitingly open, but not fully closed either. I’m sure you’ve heard of hippies building houses from soda bottles and Damien Hirst’s art circa the London School movement? Good. Well, I eat trash. What I don’t eat, I give to you. Everything on my shelf in the refrigerator, the dresses I wear to church, the puppy Valentine’s cards I give your grandparents? All trash. Take that celery stock for example. I discovered it inside a watermelon, nestled in a coin purse, tucked away in a vat of slime. Usually the best junk hides in the gross stuff— can’t tell you how many times I’ve found a perfectly good hairdryer in a box of moldy peaches. I started at the bottom; working under a ladder as a grocery stocker in the basement of a prominent organic food store. I culled mangled and dissatisfying produce to its final resting place, maintained a database of GPS coordinates for locally sourced living lettuces, and rearranged potato chip labels. If not executed to exacting standards, my supervisor, a far-sighted man, would pull my hair and threaten to pay me in apron buckles. One night, while taking out the trash, I found a curious piece of bread on the stockroom floor, immediately followed by a piece of cheese, then a chess piece—a queen— and following this miscellanea to the back lot, a crypt for substandard food confronted me: a metal container exploding with a fetid stench and an epiphanic glow I later identified as the flashlight grasped in my right hand. So appalled, so angered by the waste I could only yell, “Why?” in the direction of my manager the following day, to which he replied by nervously tugging earlobes with an apparent ignorance. He continued to evict expired creamers from the dairy case.
Acupuncture - Chinese Herbs Massage - Qigong - Diet Therapy
I took his ignorance as an invitation to take the food. First, just the fruit. Bananas dressed for box seats at the opera. Apples so professional they could train dolphins. I was on a dumpster elevator and had firmly pressed the button for the top floor. But I was alone. My friends called me “Racoon” and hurled tomatoes.
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One night after my post-work ritual of showering off the day’s tomato juice, I found a loophole in some EPA documents. As long as I substituted the words, “green,” “promise,” and “share,” for “trash,” and “yuck,” private and public entities could not contain their enthusiasm for the newest sustainable technology.
Hugh castor, Lic. Acupuncturist
Soon I was hauling it in. I would load up my bicycle with all the dripping, putrid bags I could muscle and advertise on the international markets. Not long after, I sold thirty pounds of detritus to resurrect the career of a failed novelist researching a dystopian reality. The Japanese bought twemty million pounds of trash and engineered a fleet of uncanny street cleaning robots. NASA did the unthinkable: harnessed gas emitted from evaporated sacks of guacamole to create a cheap jet fuel.
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fort collins courier
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summer 2016
FOOD & DRINK
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Waste Conscious Restaurants Bring Caring to the Community By Blair Wittig
M
any restaurants in Fort Collins do what they can to help cut back on waste; they recycle, use compostable materials, and buy local. Yet, only a few try to further minimize their carbon footprint by using locally grown and produced goods, modifying their portions, and educating the public about being responsible consumers. Local restaurants exemplifying such efforts include FoCo Cafe, Jessup Farms, and Ras Ka.
FoCo Cafe Owned and operated by Jeff and Kathleen Baumgardner, the FoCo Cafe really gives a sense of a tight knit community. One of Jeff ’s main rules is conservation education: “We plate small to try to eliminate plate waste, and encourage seconds, so from the very beginning there’s the expectation of not having plate waste. The food we serve is locally sourced, mainly organic. Plate waste is only a component of what you would call waste in a restaurant, but is a major component.” Baumgardner gives scraps to a local chicken farmer, and plate waste goes to John Anderson, who owns a worm farm, or into compost to fortify local gardens. There are an equal number of recycling and trash units on site at the Cafe. “We go to really great lengths to separate anything that could be recycled,” Baumgardner explains. FoCo Cafe uses a glass recycling station, Classy Glass. “A lot of the glass you think is being recycled actually goes to the landfill, because there’s not a good economic outlet for it,” Baumgardner says. Classy Glass takes in bottles and melts them down to be formed for another use. FoCo Cafe encourages their guest’s compliance with their conservation guidelines by educating them as they order. “Every plate we start with the lettuce; we tell them where it’s from (for example, their lettuce is from Quatrix Aquaponics); we show them the lettuce and ask them how much they would like,” Baumgardner says. “Each volunteer has this discussion with each customer in order to get full but eliminate plate waste. Our way is labor and time intensive.” Through the FoCo Cafe, the Baumgardners have given Old Town a sustainable, safe, and affordable place where those of any walk of life can come and be nourished.
Ras Ka Ras Ka, a local Ethiopian restaurant, offers a welcoming environment with couches and warm lanterns. Hanna Selassie, owner and operator, treats her guests like family the minute they walk in, inviting guests to “sit in the living room, and make [themselves] at home.” She continues her attentive approach by taking every aspect of her meals into consideration, especially the waste. “Unless it’s meat, everything is composted,” she states. Selassie composts her excess lettuce, rice, coffee, and tea, but she takes food waste to her house, and mixes it in the soil. “Whatever naturally grows, I let it grow,” she says. Sourcing locally, Selassie gets her fruits and veggies from all over Fort Collins: Sprouts, farmers markets, and local orders from stores. She donates her cans to the Poudre School District for artwork and science projects. One project is to fill a can with soil and grow plants to sell at the farmers markets, as well as other fundraisers. “What they came up with is so fantastic. This is a better alternative than the box tops, where it’s just sugared cereal,” she gleams.
As for the Old Town community adopting ways of being sustainable, she would like to see other restaurants adapt to her methods, but she concedes, “If they have a better way, I’m open to learning it.”
The Farmhouse Restaurant Jesse Doerffel of The Farmhouse Restaurant at Jessup Farms follows through on local sustainability as well as restaurants in Old Town, but takes full advantage of their location on a one-eighth acre plot east of Old Town off of Timberline Road. The Farmhouse is part of a five building area called Jessup Farm, a warm and inclusive community complete with a cafe, barber shop, and ale house. Behind all the buildings is where Doerffel gets her materials for the restaurant. “We are unique in that we have raised beds and a quarter acre in our backyard to farm, in addition to our own chicken coop. We cook from scratch and break down whole animals daily,” she explains. As with Ras Ka and FoCo Cafe, The Farmhouse keeps things local when it comes to eliminating waste. They feed kitchen scraps to the chickens and compost in the summer. When asked what new innovations Jessup Farms brings to Fort Collins dining, Doerffel states, “We spend more money on our to-go containers as we do not have easy access to a commercial composting facility.” The containers are American made from a cross between recycled plastic and cardboard. After extensive research she decided this was the best idea. “It took questioning the materials: their origin, the carbon footprint involved with delivery, and resources used to create them.” Doerffel’s research helps make the restaurant unique, but she’s also open to learning from others: “I have several peers and mentors in town that I reach out to. It’s always great to collaborate and learn from each other. We’re always looking to improve.” Many in Fort Collins strive to make responsible decisions as consumers, being mindful of the health of their communities and their environment, in addition to their bodies. Restaurants like FoCo Cafe, Ras Ka, and The Farmhouse Restaurant offer healthconscious and ethically-conscious alternatives that the Fort Collins public can be proud to support.
22
VISIONARY
fort collins courier
:
summer 2016
Visionary
Calibrating the Alchemist’s Compass: An Adventure Room in Old Town Spotlight on Cori Storb and Somewhere Secret By Solana Kaercher
T
here is Somewhere Secret in Fort Collins: a place of mystery and riddle, in which the farther you go, the better it gets.
Once in the room, there are two opposing forces splitting one’s energy; one driving to process all of the components efficiently; the other slinking around in awe, attempting to absorb all the magical details alive in the room.
Cori Storb, mastermind and co-owner of the adventure room, Somewhere Secret, says the game dances “the blurry line between science and magic.” Her creation, which debuted in December, is a participatory room where players have one hour to decode a multitude of puzzles to unlock a treasure map. The map directs players to the treasure, which is waiting somewhere in the outside world.
Jake Ritter, a Fort Collins local, found himself in the space with a few friends and a few strangers. “I had no idea what to expect—I had slight anticipation and was very excited,” he said. “It made me feel like a kid again.”
Adventure and Escape rooms are sprouting up around the world, a testament to their enchanting qualities. Non-existent before the 2007 inception in Japan, today there are about 3,000 worldwide to unravel. Though the themes are diverse, all are united by their ability to fortify team dynamics and remove individuals from the world on the other side of the door. The theme of Somewhere Secret is ‘Alchemy.’ The hunt embodies gems, elements, and magic from beginning to end. It all comes together above the Walnut Creek Artisanal Mercantile, where players climb the creaky wooden stairs and begin to feel the age of the building sink in. Storb guides participants with a twinkle in her eye as she tells the tale of one of the original settlers of Fort Collins: an alchemist who used esoteric powers to create said treasure, but upon realization, feared the idea of it getting into the wrong hands. The alchemist hid this treasure and Storb has been the only one to uncover its secrets. The experience is quite unique. The room speaks of decades, even centuries, past, with its warm, wooden fixtures and hand-laid wallpaper. “I came at it from a storytelling angle and wanted to make a world for people to go into,” said Storb. “Puzzles are what tie the story together.” Trinkets are cleverly placed, inviting the participants to interact and investigate. It is intimate and quiet as the hourglass passes sand in the corner.
A wide range of mental prowess is required to free the hidden map, making it necessary to have a team of people possessing various talents. Along with harnessing natural curiosities and abilities to think abstractly, Somewhere Secret fosters a communal spirit of exploration and celebration. Tiny successes within the room quickly stack one atop another and the story unfolds. The game is a brilliant alternative to traditional forms of entertainment, such as movies and video games. One of Storb’s hopes was to make art that can truly belong to others. By inviting the community into this space, entangled with adventure and history, she has done just that. No two games will be alike, or forgettable. This experience will do much more than make players think, laugh, and question for an hour. The treasure hunt only just begins if the map is unlocked, leading friends, coworkers, or new acquaintances itching to find the prize. The tasks are not easy. In fact, several people have returned for another round to locate the map. The game is highly adaptable for different skill sets, which is convenient for younger audiences. Storb and co-owner Marc Durant have a new game room in the works—fantastic news for all the puzzle junkies out there! Somewhere Secret can be discovered every day of the week at 222 Walnut Street. The experience is donation based. Details for reservation times and age restrictions can be found on www.somewheresecret.com.