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Environment & Social Justice

5280: The Denver Magazine •

Hive Mind

“That’s my jaaaaam!” Samuel Ramsey says into his mouthpiece as the room erupts into applause and laughter. He stops the YouTube video—of himself, belting out pop lyrics in Thai—playing on the big screen behind him and turns back to his audience with a little bow. Clad in a black blazer over a white hoodie, his hair bleached at the tips, Ramsey has the look of a captivating entertainer. Or maybe a singer or comedian. Few would guess this dynamic raconteur is a world-renowned entomologist.
The Denver Post •

Adventuring to visit a glacier in Alaska and Canada before it disappears

Even in a state as saturated with dramatic peaks and geological marvels as Colorado, it’s thrilling to get up close and personal with something as grand — and as emblematic of our ballooning climate change crisis — as a glacier. Given the near certainty of continued climate chaos in coming years, seeing these remnants of the last ice age is becoming a catch-them-while-you-can prospect.
5280: The Denver Magazine •

Meet a Coloradan Who Wrote a Book About His Explorations in the Alaskan Arctic

When Jon Waterman first visited the Alaskan Arctic in 1983 as a Denali National Park ranger on patrol at the wild Noatak River, he had no idea how profoundly the experience would shape his life. Today, the Carbondale-based award-winning author—as prolific an environmental writer and researcher as he is an intrepid explorer and adventurer—has just released his 17th book, Into the Thaw: Witnessing Wonder amid the Arctic Climate Crisis (November 12, 2024).
American Rivers / The Source 2023: Life Depends On Rivers •

Invisible No More

On the way to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport — the nation’s busiest transportation hub — the air is filled with the hum of planes and the drone of cars as they speed toward departures. What you don’t hear is the rushing of water. Or even the trickle of a stream. Which is problematic, given that the headwaters of the 344-mile Flint River, which supplies water to hundreds of thousands of people across Georgia, are located at the airport. Or, more precisely, under the airport. A network of urban tunnels moves the Flint beneath the sprawling parking lots and runways.
5280 •

I Conquered a Via Ferrata—Then Wondered if I Should Have

As I wobble along the via ferrata’s cable-wire bridge stretched across the Uncompahgre Gorge in Ouray, I keep reminding myself of one thing: Don’t look down. Don’t look down. Do. Not. Look. Down.

That’s because a ribbon of frothy whitewater churns far below me. It’s the first feature of the Ouray Via Ferrata’s downstream route. My friend and I, despite our lack of rock climbing experience, are harnessed and helmeted behind our mountain guide, Micah Lewkowitz of Mountain Trip, who’d already cruised across the cable and swiveled around to snap photos of us.

Via ferrata is Italian for “iron path,” a concept that dates to World War I in Italy’s Dolomites, where they were developed to maneuver troops through inaccessible terrain. It’s a system of steel rungs, ladders, bridges, and cables permanently bolted into rock walls and ledges. This one follows the east side of the 180-foot-deep gorge, across from the famous Ouray Ice Park, for nearly a mile.
5280: The Denver Magazine •

Can Conservation Easements Give Young Colorado Farmers a Chance?

Dwarfed by five stainless steel grain-storage bins outside the Root Shoot malt house in Loveland, Emily Olander gestures toward the horizon. A two-story cookie-cutter house with a white fence peeks out from the rolling green land. “See that?” 38-year-old Emily asks. “That’s what we don’t want.”

The Olanders, who farm nearly 2,200 acres in northern Colorado and run a malt business that regularly supplies 150 breweries in the state, have nothing against the homeowners, of course. It’s the big-picture development they’re wary of—an encroaching sprawl that’s gobbling up farmland along Colorado’s I-25 corridor faster than older farmers can devise ways to affordably retire without selling their fields to the developers behind the ubiquitous mixed-use retail and residential enclaves.
Global Greengrants Fund: Our Voices, Our Environment—The state of funding for women’s environmental action •

Why Grassroots Organizations Benefit From Approaching Environmental Justice With a Gender Perspective—and Why Funders Should Support these Collaborations [Role: contributing case study author]

[See page 7]

Silvia Perez Yescas of Oaxaca, Mexico, knows what it’s like
to have her voice silenced. For an entire year, month after
month, she stood outside a room full of men who gathered to
discuss land rights and environmental issues that were affecting
family and community well-being. For an entire year, she
planted herself firmly on the other side of the room’s window—
she wasn’t “allowed” to come inside—and raised her hand
to participate in the discussion. For an entire year, the men
ignored her.

Why? Because Yescas is a woman. In Mexican territories where
vast swaths of natural resources are being threatened by energy
companies, infrastructure projects, and mining corporations
compounding the effects of climate change, the people most
impacted—women—rarely get a seat at the table to lend their
Global Greengrants Fund •

China’s water problem: the grassroots road to accountability

The images are no longer shocking: children swimming in garbage-choked lakes; waterways congested by bloated, poisoned fish rotting at the surface; industrial pipes openly spewing torrents of chemical waste into rivers and reservoirs. The numbers paint as bleak a picture as the imagery. More than 42 percent of China’s rivers and 75 percent of its lakes and reservoirs are too severely polluted for human consumption and fishing, says International Rivers.
Great Outdoors Colorado •

Conserving the Cline: A community effort to protect a historic ranch

On the horizon, barely visible through the falling snow, you can see them: elk, by the hundreds, silhouetted against the shadowy mountains beyond. Rolling meadows stretch in every direction, and Tarryall Creek, framed by the muted deep-gold of late-fall willows and shrubs, snakes its way through the land. Just off a rutted dirt road, an adobe-style pueblo-revival ranch house, built in 1928, stands hollowly, yet proudly over the landscape it anchors—a reminder of a bygone era, and a beacon of potential.
Our Voices, Our Environment •

Resisting Exploitative Extractive Industries in the Peruvian Amazon through Sustainable Agriculture

Under pressure from extractive industries like logging, mining, and palm-oil harvesting, the indigenous way of life in the Peruvian Amazon hangs in the balance. Families are struggling to sustain livelihoods based on land that is being depleted. Children are fleeing their homes for work in the city, leaving their heritage and culture behind. And natural resources critical to survival are disappearing into the void of foreign corporations with an eye on exports and profits. The biggest burden-bearers? Women—the caretakers of land, harvesters of food, and collectors of water.
Global Greengrants Fund •

The Green Heart of Central Africa

If you’re like billions of people on the planet, you get up in the morning, go to work to provide for your family, and come home at night with something for dinner. Your picture might be framed a little differently, but the details boil down to the same thing: livelihood. A means of support or subsistence. Now imagine your livelihood just…ends. Imagine that someone with more power and more money than you yanks away your occupation, your property, your food sources, and your access to medicine without asking what you think. Your entire means of survival vanishes. For the indigenous people of central Africa, this scenario isn’t hypothetical.
Global Greengrants Fund •

South Sudanese Women Find Salvation in Stoves

It sounds like a brutally disturbing nightmare: Alone in a forest miles from home, a teenage girl fights off a man as he tries to rape her. She flees home in terror, hours on foot, afraid for her life. The next day, the scene repeats itself as she is forced to collect firewood again. Facing her attacker in the forest again, as she must day after day. For Susan Ozene and countless women outside the city of Yei in battle-scarred South Sudan, this nightmare is more than a bad dream. It is reality.
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