SUMMER 2012
Bringing self-sufficiency
and sustainability home
How changes in
GMO legislation
in other states could affect Boulder County Commissioners search for sweet spot in fracking
regulations
The buzz on bees and bee keeping Are we loving
Mother Nature
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staff
Susan France
SUMMER’S
Publisher, Stewart Sallo Editor, Joel Dyer Director of Sales & Marketing, Dave Grimsland Director of Operations/Controller, Benecia Beyer Circulation Manager, Cal Winn
HOT ISSUES
EDITORIAL Managing Editor, Jefferson Dodge Special Editions Editor, Elizabeth Miller Associate Editors, David Accomazzo, Quibian Salazar-Moreno
SALES Retail Sales Manager, Allen Carmichael Account Executives, Andrea Craven, David Hasson, Lisa Secco, Brooke Sunness
PRODUCTION Production Manager, Dave Kirby Art Director, Susan France Graphic Designer, Mark Goodman
GENERAL & ADMINISTRATIVE Marketing Manager & Heiress, Julia Sallo Office Manager/Advertising Assistant, Francie Swidler Circulation Team Dave Hastie, Dan Hill, George LaRoe, Jeffrey Lohrius, Elizabeth Ouslie, Rick Slama 12-Year-Old, Mia Rose Sallo
contents ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES 6
Consumer choice and GMO labeling
FOOD & GARDEN 12
The buzz about bees
SUSTAINABILITY 20
Local living
BUSINESS 28
Working the crowd
HEALTH 32
Secret practice
M
aybe you didn’t think that fracking and GMOs would be the hot-button issues this local election season, but we do. We think that the decisions our local government makes on these two issues are some of the more critical at hand — perhaps even more relevant to our day-to-day lives than bank bailouts and foreign policy.
Boulder Weekly Boulderganic Summer ’12
Sahara Ellison discovers the joy of watching baby chicks hatch at Boulder Family Farms Inc.
We’re opening this edition of Boulderganic with articles addressing the latest on those two issues, offering fodder to volley at your next political debates, or simply to consider as the time to visit the ballot box approaches. Sure, it’s tough to pull ourselves away from the pleasantries of summer to fight the serious fights. And we wouldn’t want to leave you without some ideas for enjoy-
ing these sunny months. So we’ve included some fun and some food advice, including making better use of your lawn this summer by tossing those weeds into a salad, getting outdoors to play in an eco-friendly way and nurturing some of our local creative projects. May you make the most of the longer days, and the days leading up to the November elections. Respond: info@boulderganic.com June 14, 2012 5
Susan France
E
ver since last year’s decision by Boulder County Commissioners to allow genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to be grown on county open space lands, opponents of that ruling have looked to this November’s election as the next best way to reverse the county’s position. With two county commissioner seats up for grabs and with most candidates running on a popular anti-GMO platform, voters should finally get their way on the issue. But regardless of how the politics in Boulder County turn out, this November’s election cycle could spell the end of GMOs on our open space land and quite likely on most other lands across the country as well, and it has nothing to do with voters in Boulder County. That’s because the very future of genetically engineered crops in the U.S. is on the ballot in California in the form of a GMO labeling initiative that has huge implications for all of us. And, at least for now, it appears as though voters in the Golden state are overwhelmingly in support of the measure that, if passed, could deal a deathblow to the genetically engineered seed industry as we know it. To understand the potential power of the California vote, a brief examination of the origins of the European Union’s (EU) GMO labeling requirements is helpful. The EU’s regulatory policies on the environment, food and genetic engineering in general are currently based on what is known as the “precautionary principle.” This has been the case since the 1990s. Wikipedia offers this definition of the principle: “The precautionary principle states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking the action. This principle allows policy makers to make discretionary decisions in situations where there is the possibility of 6 June 14, 2012
Could consumer choice spell the end for GMOs? by Joel Dyer harm from taking a particular course or making a certain decision when extensive scientific knowledge on the matter is lacking.” The precautionary principle was the guiding philosophy of many U.S. regulations between the late 1960s and mid 1980s. It was even written into the founding directives of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and gave birth to such programs as Superfund, which was initially created in response to growing public fears over toxic waste, not scientific research. Why the U.S. abandoned the precautionary principle is a complicated tale, which for the sake of space
will be simplified to two words: Ronald Reagan. But more important to the GMO issue is why did the EU change course and adopt the precautionary principle as its regulatory philosophy in the 1990s? The answer is Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease. While not the first or last regulatory failure of the EU, it was the most significant. It was the incredibly poor handling of the mad cow outbreak in Britain that turned the tide and ushered in the age of the precautionary principle in Europe. As the former French environment minister, Corrine
Lapage, said in her book on the subject, “The precautionary principle precisely responds to the need for prudence when faced with the consequences of technological progress, whose repercussions are exponential and unknown.” For years after the first cases of mad cow disease had been discovered in British cattle, that country’s government, along with EU authorities, assured the public that humans were safe because they could not contract the disease that was decimating European herds. The EU continued to allow infected British cattle to be exported. But then the unimaginable happened. Ten confirmed cases of Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease, a terrible brain ailment similar to Alzheimer’s, were linked to eating BSE-tainted beef. The EU regulatory agencies charged with protecting the public’s health and food supply had been dead wrong or covering up the truth for years. Either way, they, along with the scientists who had assured all was well, lost all credibility in the public’s sight. At the same time mad cow disease and the government’s incompetence in handling the crisis were beginning to dominate the European psyche, the U.S. was making its first shipments of GMO crops and seed into EU countries. The timing couldn’t have been worse for Monsanto and the other GMO-producing corporations. Europeans tend to view food production as a natural, rather than an industrial process, a reality that was already making them skeptical of genetically engineered foods. But their food-safety awareness reached near hysteria thanks to the mad cow debacle. As a result, they quickly became terrified and outraged, believing that GMOs could well be the next source of food-derived illness that regulators would be too incompetent to prevent. So despite assurances from the U.S. government that GMO corn, wheat and soy were safe, citizens all across the EU demanded that GMOs be either outlawed altogether, or at least labeled properly in all food
Boulderganic Summer ’12 Boulder Weekly
products containing them so that consumers could retain their right to choose whether or not to eat them. EU politicians, fearing a voter backlash that had been building from the madcow issue, listened. Europeans got their GMO labels. Europeans got their right to choose the type of food they eat. European consumers rejected products containing GMOs hands-down, choosing instead to purchase products containing ingredients grown from natural seeds. And as a result, even though more than 80 percent of Europe’s farmers say they would prefer to grow GMO crops, which offer larger yields and more profits, they instead grow nonGMO crops because there is virtually no market in the EU for GMOs as a result of labeling, which has its historical roots in the 1990s outbreak of BSE in England’s cattle. So could GMO labeling in one state in the U.S. have a similar effect nationally? Yes. This November, the citizens of California will be voting on a ballot initiative that would require all products containing GMOs to be labeled as such. The petition to put the initiative on the ballot easily garnered nearly a million signatures, nearly twice the number required, in a very short time, and from all indications, the measure will likely pass. That’s because labeling of products containing GMOs is one of the few unifying American issues that transcend party lines. A recent poll on the issue conducted by Mellman Group found that 91 percent of Americans support the labeling of GMOs in food products. And this percentage was relatively equal across all party affiliations, including Democrats, Republicans and Independents. The Mellman results were very similar to another national poll conducted in the U.S. in the early 1990s, which also found that nine out of 10 Americans supported GMO labeling. So how and why will California’s vote likely impact Boulder County? Because differentiation costs a lot of money. California isn’t just another state. It has a population of 38 million and consumes more than 12 percent of all food products in the U.S. For giant food companies like Kraft, General
Mills, Nestle and their peers to produce labeled foods for California and nonlabeled foods for the rest of us is not only excessively expensive, but pretty unrealistic in light of the fact that other states will most likely follow California’s lead.This means that labeling GMO products may well occur on a national level due to the California vote. And if that happens, U.S. citizens will most likely follow the same choice patterns as their European counterparts. While mad cow has not been a particularly big issue in the U.S., we have, in recent years, lived through many serious episodes of drug and food recalls that have left many of us skeptical of the companies that produce the products, the regulators charged with overseeing the process and the industry-funded science that told us these items were safe and beneficial one decade only to find out they were killing us the next. If consumers are given the choice to avoid GMOs and they do so, it will create a giant U.S. market for traditional, non-GMO crops of soy, corn, wheat, sugar beats, alfalfa, cotton, etc. To supply this new, non-GMO market, much, if not most, of our current U.S. cropland will have to be replanted with non-GMO seed. The market, not the law, will demand it. And regardless of the desires of most U.S. farmers to grow GMO crops, like their peers in the EU, they will have little choice but to return to traditional crops because there will be very few buyers for GMOs. The one downside to GMOs being labeled nationally and thereby creating a quick and massive demand for non-GMO crops stems from the fact that in the U.S., nearly all of the crops mentioned above are between 80 and 90 percent grown from GMO seeds. Monsanto has raised the issue that if GMO seed fell from favor, there wouldn’t be enough traditional seed to replace it. And that could lead to an entirely different crisis, a food crisis. So while the exact future of GMOs may be unclear, one thing is for sure, November will be blowing in some major changes for Boulder County and the rest of the country when it comes to GMOs. Respond: info@boulderganic.com
Boulder Weekly Boulderganic Summer ’12
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A controversial fracking operation has been erected near two Erie elementary schools.
B
oulder County government is following the lead of municipalities like Longmont by attempting to tighten its regulations on oil and gas operations like hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking” — without getting sued by the state. It will be tricky, as Longmont officials have found out, to tiptoe around areas controlled by the state’s Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC), which has the lion’s share of authority over fracking and other extraction processes that have been the source of health concerns lately. The state attorney general’s office has informed Longmont City Council that a number of its proposed regulations conflict with state law, although city attorneys counter that they have been careful to avoid legal entanglements. Boulder County has started down a similar precarious path, recently extending a moratorium on oil and gas permits until next February to give staff time to propose changes to the county’s comprehensive plan and land use code. In a Feb. 2 prepared statement, the county commissioners said they support “appropriate, tighter restrictions on drilling and increased local control to mitigate the impacts of these activities.” The million-dollar question, or perhaps multi-million-dollar question, is how to define “appropriate.” The commissioners’ Feb. 2 statement acknowledges that because most authority over oil and gas drilling lies with the state and federal government, “it is unlikely that Boulder County could simply prohibit hydraulic fracturing on either public or private land in the county.” County Commissioner Deb Gardner says staff have been charged with looking “under every little rock” for ways to regulate oil and gas drilling and keep county residents safe from possible air and water contamination. Gardner lists among her concerns the elevated levels of methane in the air around drill sites as well as the possibility that extraction practices can set off earthquakes. She says the millions of gallons of water used for fracking should be reused instead of permanently lost, and the contaminated water that comes back up after a frack job should be treated as a hazardous material when it is being transported. The challenge, Gardner says, is finding the “sweet spot” of regulations that are both strict and legally defensible.
explored assessing transportation impact fees, for instance), Boulder County is breaking new ground. “We’re not going to adopt something that’s already out there,” Webster says. “Otherwise, we would have done a onemonth moratorium.” Conrad Lattes, assistant county attorney, says the legal area in which the county needs to be careful not to step on the state’s toes is “operational conflict” with COGCC rules. “It’s a tricky business, because we have federal laws and state laws that govern certain subject matter,” he says. “We have limits on the jurisdiction that the county government has. We can only regulate in areas that have been granted to us by the state government. And even in those areas where we have general jurisdiction, if there is operational conflict between local regulations and state regulations, then we are pre-empted from regulating that subject matter.” In a Nov. 16, 2011, memo provided to the county commissioners at their March 1 hearing on the subject, attorney Barbara Green outlined some of the possibilities for local restrictions on oil and gas drilling, and gave her assessment of how likely each is to be challenged successfully by the state. In the memo, she says that while counties probably can’t ban such operations outright, they may be able to limit them to certain areas or zoning classifications. And she notes that courts have upheld counties’ rights to require special use permits for oil/gas activities to minimize impacts on things like adjacent uses, traffic and the environment. Green also says that counties have the right to protect surface and drinking water quality, as well as wildlife habitat, especially if the standards used are consistent with state regulations in those areas. New setbacks from bodies of water are unlikely to stand, she writes, but counties may have more success with efforts related to stormwater, sediment/erosion control and the discharge of dredged and fill materials. However, Green acknowledges that it would be unlikely for a county to regulate technical aspects of oil/gas extraction methods, like the types of fluids injected. Finally, she says, counties cannot require access to companies’ records. The county has created a website that has various resources about the effort, including an interactive map and public comments. It can be found at http://bit.ly/bcoilgas. Respond: info@boulderganic.com
Cracking down on fracking County tries to boost regulations without stepping on state’s toes by Jefferson Dodge Jim Webster, the county’s community wildfire protection coordinator, has agreed to take on an additional role as coordinator of the county’s oil and gas inquiry. Several county departments are involved in the project, including land use, the county attorney’s office, parks and open space, public health and transportation (due to the impacts of truck traffic associated with drilling operations). Webster says the first step, which begins this month, is amending the Boulder County Comprehensive Plan, a broad policy document overseen by the Planning Commission. The second and more complicated phase involves proposing changes to the county’s land use code, the specific regulations that might be tightened to restrict oil and gas drilling’s impacts in unincorporated Boulder County. A joint meeting of the commissioners and planning commission on that topic is set for September, with public hearings before the planning commission in October. “The legal research is a big part of this,” Webster says. When asked whether the oil and gas industry has exerted any pressure on county government yet, Webster says no, but he describes the industry as “an active participant” and “an important stakeholder” that will have an equal opportunity to give input at public hearings and during written comment periods. In addition to possible water and air pollution, issues the county is examining include visual, noise, lighting, drainage, agricultural, historic/archeological/cultural and geologic impacts. Webster says that while other Colorado counties have explored tighter regulations on oil and gas drilling (Douglas and Arapahoe counties have
Boulder Weekly Boulderganic Summer ’12
June 14, 2012 9
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Boulderganic Summer ’12 Boulder Weekly
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Fracking and GMOs headline this summer’s Boulderganic After Hours event by Boulder Weekly staff
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Boulder Family Farm, Boulder
filled in November. We are also hoping to see a few members of our various city councils from around the county who are truly on the front lines of the fracking issue. In addition, we will be providing a couple of informative speakers on these topics. It’s our hope that this event will provide an opportunity for everyone who is currently working towards solutions on these two issues, or who is simply concerned about the impact that fracking and GMOs are having on our communities, to gather and exchange ideas in a casual, friendly setting. Boulder Weekly staff will also be joining in the conversation and we hope that you will, too. So bring your questions, suggestions and appetite, and join us free of charge for an enlightening, fun and important evening. And thanks for being loyal Boulderganic readers. Respond: info@boulderganic.com
Boulder Weekly Boulderganic Summer ’12
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Susan France
oulder Weekly is celebrating the release of our summer edition of Boulderganic at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, June 28. This summer’s event is sponsored by Eco-Cycle and is being held at Rembrandt Yard, 1301 Spruce St. (just east of the Boulderado Hotel) and we want you to join us. We’re pleased to be partnering with Rembrandt Yard for this event, which will also include complimentary appetizers provided by A Spice of Life Catering as well as additional expo tables featuring Hanuman Chai and other green, local businesses. The goal of the Boulderganic After Hours gatherings are always to provide a place to talk about the issues that matter most to the residents of Boulder County — issues like the environment, sustainability, health and food. At each gathering, we try to highlight a theme that is timely to the season, a particular issue or the political calendar, and this summer’s event, which has been titled “The Politics of Green,” is no different. With that in mind, we have chosen the subjects of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) for this After Hours event. With both of these issues at the forefront of concern for county voters as elections approach, we have invited our county commissioners as well as the candidates for the two open commissioner seats that will be
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Ellen Mahoney
uring summer, Boulder resident Julie FinleyRidinger is busy. Her vegetable, fruit and flower gardens are overflowing, and she awaits honey from her 14 bee colonies. A longtime beekeeper, FinleyRidinger teaches beekeeping classes through the Colorado State University Extension for Boulder County, and worked for more than 10 years as the garden director and beekeeper for Boulder’s Growing Gardens. Here are excerpts from a conversation with her: You’ve tended bees for more than 15 years. How did you get started? I walked past a beehive one day and just knew I had to do that. So I quit my job and moved to a small organic farm east of Boulder.A friend gave me all her old beekeeping equipment, and I caught a swarm and started keeping bees. I also asked beekeeper Tom Theobald, who owns Niwot Honey Farm, for advice.Tom gave me a list of books to read and told me to check out the Boulder County Beekeepers Association. Why do you like the top-bar beehive? The top-bar hive is a little bit different than a Langstroth hive, which is the white tower of boxes most people imagine when they think of bees.The top-bar hive has a horizontal space for the bees and allows bees to draw down wax in a more natural and organic shape.This hive gives them a lot of opportunity to draw worker or drone combs or, if you’re lucky, a queen cell. The bees’ instinctive ability to make their own home is something that no other creature on the planet does because bees create wax out of their own bodies.They don’t harvest it from a tree, they don’t bring it from a plant. How is your beekeeping helping the local food chain? Honeybees are efficient pollinators and this is a key reason I keep them.
the bee population will go back down to the size of a rugby ball once again.And by the grace of God, they’ll make it through the winter again, keeping the cycle going as long as possible. The beautiful thing about bees is that they never give up. There can be only three bees and a queen and there’s an egg. They’re eternal optimists. There’s a lot of discussion about Colony Collapse Disorder. Have you ever had your bees disappear? I’ve had colonies of tens of thousands of bees — so many Beekeeper Julie bees it’s hard to get the lid on FinleyRidinger with a top-bar the box, and I’ve come back a frame number of weeks later in the summer and there’s not a bee in sight. What happened? From where I’m standing at the side of the hive looking in, it’s really a message that there’s some serious poison in the environment that’s affecting how long a bee can live, what kind of food it can tolerate, and tion to the sting. But now if I get a sting what level of pesticide it can tolerate. But it’s not a mystery to me what’s it doesn’t really swell up, itch, and it’s happening. It’s a mystery why the EPA not painful at all anymore. [Environmental Protection Agency] is We haven’t had a problem with unable to protect our environment, and bears, but during bear season we have it’s a mystery to me that, as a culture, an electric fence around the hives. we seem to think we’re not part of our Describe the annual cycle of a food chain.There’s no silver bullet that’s beehive. gonna come and say it’s because of this The bees follow the seasons like or that virus or some crazy fly that’s most living things. In the winter they involved in it. It’s systemic. All things are huddle up and conserve warmth and connected. consume honey they’ve harvested What has beekeeping taught over the spring and summer. In the you? spring, the maple and willow trees are What goes on inside the hive putting out pollen, the crocuses are clearly reflects what we need in our up and the weather is beautiful. So world today. Each bee has its own the bees are coming out in the spring job and is living for the wealth of that looking for nectar in flowers like dandelions, which is an important crop for colony. Everything is very harmonious. Bees get a bad rap and lot of bad PR, the bees.The queen will now start to but the hive is the most cooperative, lay more and more eggs. community-minded thing I’ve ever witEverything expands in summer.The nessed.There is something very sacred bee population grows, there is more activity in the hive, the buzz gets louder, going on in there. Something that’s very humbling. and more honey is produced.And then Visit www.bouldercountybeekeepers.org as fall comes and only the asters and for more information. the goldenrod are left in the garden,
The buzz about bees
A conversation with beekeeper Julie FinleyRidinger by Ellen Mahoney
12 June 14, 2012
The bees in my backyard are pollinating my neighbors’ trees and gardens, so they’re not creating a lot of food here in the neighborhood. I have colonies out at different organic farms where the bees will pollinate a lot of acreage with a wide variety of crops.The bees are helping create thousands of pounds of foods and help close the loop of where our food comes from and how it’s pollinated.We’re not going to have food unless we have bees. Why don’t the bees fly off at the farm or from your backyard? Bees have an exquisitely refined navigation system along with a relationship to the queen. They have their own pheromones and their own sense of communication.A bee will fly within about a two-mile radius, and the location of the hive is where they’re going to reside to do their pollination. What about problems like bee stings and bears? When I first started keeping bees I wore a lot more protective gear than I do now, and I had a much bigger reac-
Boulderganic Summer ’12 Boulder Weekly
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ers, CCD is not mysterious. “There is no disorder and there is no mystery,” Theobald says. “Colony collapse is not a disorder, it is a symptom, and the root cause is pesticides.” Earlier this year, three studies were released that suggest that neonicotinoid pesticides are damaging to a bee’s growth, fertility, ability to forage and general health. The first study, published in the online journal Science, showed that bees fed imidacloprid (IMD), a commonly used neonicotinoid pesticide, suffered reduced growth rates and produced fewer queens. The second study, also published in Science, demonstrated that bees, equipped with radio-frequency tags and fed thiamethoxan, were significantly less likely to return to their hives after being let out to forage compared to bees that were not given the neonicotinoid chemical. A third study published in the Bulletin of Insectology focused on seemingly healthy colonies that were fed IMD. Within six months, 15 out of 16 of the exposed hives were dead. “These studies confirm what we’ve been saying all along,” says Theobald. “The effects of these chemicals are pervasive.” These chemicals are being applied to our farmland and our urban environments. Theobald suggests reading labels and not applying any chemical fertilizer to lawns or gardens. He also suggests writing representatives, telling them to work with Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency to get neonicotinoid pesticides banned. “We can do everything possible to create healthy colonies for these bees,” Theobald says. “But if we send them out into an environment that’s hostile to their existence, we’re all going to lose.” Respond: info@boulderganic.com
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or more than a decade, beekeepers around the country have experienced devastating honeybee losses, with some reporting losses as high as 80 percent. Not many industries can survive that magnitude of loss and still be in business to talk about it. Although beekeepers often describe their profession as a labor of love, many beekeepers around the country are being driven out of business, creating a shortage of the labor and bees needed to work the almost 100 commonly consumed crops that honeybees pollinate every year. “This could be my last year keeping bees,” says Tom Theobald, owner of Niwot Honey Farm, who has been keeping bees for 37 years. “You can’t continue to lose half or more of your base and maintain a business — no matter how hard you work.” The losses that beekeepers are experiencing has been dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD. Although beekeepers have historically lost large numbers of bees to pests and environmental factors like mites, pathogens, immune deficiencies and weather, the cause of CCD is claimed to be a mystery. The disappearing bees are not only plaguing beekeepers, but also scientists and the agricultural industry that relies on these small pollinators to produce crops like almonds, apples and berries. For years, many scientists claimed that CCD was being caused by a “perfect storm” of stressors, which weaken the hives, eventually breaking them down enough to be susceptible to variety of pathogens. However, new studies suggest that neonicotinoid pesticides are causing honeybee decline and death, supporting what many beekeepers have been claiming since CCD’s onset. And, for some of these beekeep-
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14 June 14, 2012
Boulderganic Summer ’12 Boulder Weekly
Hadley Vandiver
(From top) Mallow, purslane and yellow dock
The wealth in weeds
Eating locally out of your lawn by Hadley Vandiver
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his spring, like many Boulder residents with even a tiny scrap of lawn, I looked out my window and was appalled to see that hundreds of bright yellow dandelions had taken over. I quickly went to work trying to pull them out, but almost all of them were back the next week. Many homeowners and gardeners experience the same struggle, spending hours on hands and knees trying to force these weeds out. There are others, though, who have learned to embrace weeds — plants that are considered a nuisance and a candidate for removal — and even incorporated them into their daily diets. To find out if these Boulder weed eaters were really onto something, I went on two “weed walks” with local herbalists. Though I expected to go up to Chautauqua or venture out onto some unknown trail, both of the walks stayed in town in residential areas. My surprise that we would not need to leave the comfort of downtown Boulder was overcome only by my surprise at finding out just how many edible weeds there are. On both walks we stopped every couple of feet to examine another plant, growing straggly and wild out of the ground and just begging to be torn out to make room for something prettier or tastier. But each time, the herbalists handled the weeds with care, and explained their many uses for foods, drinks and medicines. Brigitte Mars, Boulder herbalist and author, has been eating such weeds since her childhood, and still gets some of her food from plants that grow around her home in downtown Boulder.
“It seemed like a way that we could feed more people on the planet,” Mars says. “It struck me that a lot of people were wasting their land and using chemicals to kill plants that are edible so that they could grow grass, which is not all that useful. And that seemed kind of silly to me.” Mars suggests that we could become healthier individuals and improve the health of the planet by learning to work with weeds, rather than against them. “Weeds are survivors,” Mars says. “They’ve adapted to survive where nothing else has, so they’re very hearty.” To live in environments that are often harsh, many weeds have developed ways of retaining nutrients more effectively, says Kat Mackinnon, a clinical herbalist and nutritionist in Boulder. These nutrients can include beta-carotene, vitamins A, B and C, omega 3 fatty acids, calcium, potassium, iron — the list goes on. Many weeds, like dandelions, have extremely deep taproots, which allow them to draw these nutrients up from deep, rich soils, Mackinnon says. These nutrients stay in the weeds when they are picked, making them nutritious additions to any diet. Edible weeds can also be a great way to stick with the trend of eating local foods. “It really doesn’t get more local than this,” Mackinnon says. “You know exactly where the weed comes from, and you reduce your carbon footprint by not shipping it anywhere.” Both herbalists stress the importance of knowing exactly what a plant is before deciding to eat it. Mars and Mackinnon suggest taking a weed
Boulder Weekly Boulderganic Summer ’12
walk or buying an edible plant book before making a salad out of your backyard. Many weeds can be used as medicinal teas or as salad greens, while others require more preparation. Here are a few of the edible weeds around Boulder that might be found in a book or on a walk. Dandelion: On both walks, I saw an abundance of dandelions rearing their little golden heads. One of the most common and most hated weeds, dandelions can also be some of the most useful, as the entire plant
is edible. The flower of the dandelion has a subtle sweetness and can be used to make wine or eaten fried as a snack. Dandelion greens are popular in mixed green salads, and their bitter flavor is comparable to escarole. Mars suggests eating the leaves in early spring, but the roots can be eaten at any time of year. “If you can eat the leaves before the plant flowers, they’ll be less bitter,” Mars says. Lamb’s quarters: The light green leaves of lamb’s quarters have an easily recognizable shape, even for someone with little horticultural knowledge (like me), as they look like miniature goose tracks. Also known as wild spinach, lamb’s quarters can be a great money-saver if substituted for store-bought spinach. Lamb’s quarters are especially high in iron and calcium. “People are always working hard to grow spinach or spending money to buy it at the store, when lamb’s quarters taste almost exactly the same,” Mars says. “And most people have it growing wild in their backyards.” Mallow: Biting into a mallow leaf is like taking a drink of water. The leaves have an oddly moist quality, which is refreshing and delicious on the tongue. “Mallow can be incredibly soothing if made into a tea,” Mackinnon says. A tea made from mallow roots or leaves can help alleviate sore throats and coughs. Purslane: Purslane is a small plant with a long-standing reputation as an invasive weed. It grows easily even in rocky landscapes, but its tiny see EDIBLE WEEDS Page 16
June 14, 2012 15
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leaves conceal a big flavor. “It has an amazing tangy taste, and a little bit of a crunchy texture,” Mackinnon says. “Purslane makes a great pesto.” Nettles: Touching a Lamb’s quarters stinging nettle is an unpleasant experience — I brushed up against one on my second walk, and my big toe itched and stung for the next 20 minutes. Apparently though, eating it — cooked — is not so bad. The leaves lose their stinging quality when boiled or steamed, and are tasty in soups. Just make sure you put gloves on before harvesting your own. “Nettles can also help with circulation, getting rid of cellulite and wrinkles,” Mars says. Yellow dock: Commonly seen on roadsides, in fields and in other untended areas, yellow dock is a member of the buckwheat family. The leaves can be eaten in the spring and have a sour taste, and the seeds can be used in cereal and breads. “I became gluten-free a couple of years ago, and I made a yellow dock flour that was a great substitute,” Mackinnon says. There are many more edible weeds that grow naturally in Boulder, and knowing how to identify them can help save money and improve your diet. “I learned about lamb’s quarters about a week ago,” says Kathleen Wills, a Boulder resident attending one of Mars’ weed walks. “Ever since then, I bet I’ve saved about $15 by eating it instead of buying spinach.” Though these herbalists tout the benefits of edible weeds, Steve Sauer, weed coordinator for Boulder County’s Weed Management Division,
does not share that fondness. “Weeds have a definite effect on the ecosystem here in the county, not only on public lands, but private lands,” Sauer says. “Weeds are super competitors and they will outcompete native grasses or outcompete native tree species. We’re all about making sure that the native vegetation is there and that’s why weed control is very important.” The Weed Management Division uses an integrated weed management plan to eradicate weeds like Mediterranean sage, knapweed and myrtle spurge. Tactics include mechanical control, which is any mowing or hand-pulling; cultural control, which includes re-vegetating and encouraging the growth of desirable grasses; bio-control, where insects are released onto the weeds; and chemical control, in which an area is spottreated with herbicide, Sauer says. The list of weeds that the county is charged with controlling is long, but does not include most of the weeds seen on a weed walk, such as dandelions and lamb’s quarters. Because those weeds are “domestic,” growing mostly in lawns and gardens, they are generally left to the care of the homeowners, Sauer says. As far as eating weeds goes, Sauer says people are welcome to eat weeds, but that the effect on weed populations is probably negligible. “I don’t really think enough people eat those kinds of weeds to make a lot of difference,” Sauer says. “There are so many dandelions and so much lamb’s quarters around, it would be hard for people to eat enough to actually help control them.” Respond: info@boulderganic.com
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or people who understand compost but are unfamiliar with compost tea, the reaction to the microbial-rich liquid brewed from compost is oftentimes repulsion — that is, until they realize it is to be applied to plants and trees, and not ingested by humans. Compost tea, however, is exactly what it sounds like, and the process for creating it is not so different from how we brew our chamomile or green teas. It’s a brew that’s produced by submerging compost in a permeable bag in water. But, unlike the tea that we drink, compost tea is brewed at room temperature for 24 hours in a tank where pumps and motors constantly inject air — a process known as extraction. The result is a liquid brimming with beneficial microbes, like fungi, healthy bacteria and microrisa. “The microbes in compost tea stimulate a plant’s immune system kind of like how probiotics stimulate ours,” says Dan Matsch, manager of Eco-Cycle’s CHaRM facility and compost department. “Applying compost tea adds microbes to the soil, and having an adequate population of them helps to stabilize and stimulate soil, and it actually creates more soil faster.” Amending soil through compost or compost tea is particularly important in Colorado, where most soils suffer from extremely low levels of
Amending Colorado’s thirsty soil with compost tea Microbial brew can stimulate the earth Jessie Lucier microbial activity. The general rule of the green thumb is the more microbes, the healthier the soil and the plants it supports. “Most people’s soil is lacking in a percentage of organic matter, like beneficial microbials, beneficial bacteria and nutrients,” says John DiFilippi, owner of ecoLogical Lawn and Tree Care. “Furthermore, the prolonged use of synthetic fertilizers and toxic pesticides actually depletes all those good things as well as kills off earthworms and beneficial insects like ladybugs and honeybees.” DiFilippi says that while the best thing for lawns or gardens is to apply
Boulder Weekly Boulderganic Summer ’12
high-quality compost directly to the soil, applying compost tea can also be very beneficial to plants. Compost tea, when applied three to six times a year, can boost the microbes in the soil, which will make plants happier and healthier. Boulder residents interested in applying compost tea to their lawns, trees or gardens have a couple of options, depending on the level of involvement desired in the process. One option is to outsource the entire process and leave it to experts like DiFilippi. Another option is to buy and apply. Compost tea can be purchased
directly from ecoLogical Lawn and Tree Care, Eco-Cycle or in some garden centers around town. Eco-Cycle sells the tea on Saturdays at the Farmers’ Market, but if you’re looking for a large quantity, Eco-Cycle’s compost manager, Mastch, suggests coming out to CHaRM on Wednesdays throughout the season to pick it up. Or, if you’re a true brewer, have access to clean compost and are intrigued by the process, you can make your own. Kits can be purchased that include everything needed to brew compost tea in a five-gallon bucket. However, since the tea needs to be constantly aerated, this can get a little tricky. For this reason, Mikl Brawner, co-owner of Harlequin’s Gardens, which brews and applies compost tea to its plants, says that most people prefer to buy their tea rather than brew it themselves. Whether you choose to brew or buy and apply, it’s important that the compost tea be applied to plants and soil immediately — ideally within six to eight hours — for it to be most effective. “Compost tea is a little complex,” says Brawner. “We’re still trying to understand it, and that’s tough because you can’t see what you’re doing. These are microscopic beings. An expert told me that the only way to really know its value is to put it on the plants and see how they respond.” Respond: info@boulderganic.com June 14, 2012 19
photo courtesy Mark Schueneman
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ou’ve gone local with your food. You’ve gone local with your shopping. You know about the farmers’ markets and the benefits of supporting local businesses. And you know about recycling your plastics and your bottles. But what about the house you live in? Homes are full of timber — somewhere between five and 60-some trees in each house — and mined minerals, built at the expense of the trees and the earth. In The World Without Us, Alan Weisman describes what happens to all that stuff if humans leave — the plywood or woodchip board houses collapsing in on themselves as their metals rust, aluminum corrodes, the gypsum in sheetrock washes back into the ground and weathering reduces plastic PVC pipes to hydrochloric acid. So what if you could build a home from waste materials and recycled materials found within 100 miles of your home? A structure that, maybe when you left, allowed you to take a few screws off the top, push the walls in and let it collapse in on itself to become a compost pile — a garden, eventually. What if you could build a home that instead of emitting volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from its paints, lacquers and other building materials — compounds that have been tied to health effects ranging from headaches and eye irritation to liver, kidney and central nervous system damage — would be safe from the moment you first opened the front door? You can. The problem is, you might have to build it yourself. Colorado builders aren’t the first to discover straw bales as building materials. Homes were built in Georgia and Nebraska almost a century ago using straw bales. Maybe that first little pig with the house made of straw
Local living
chemical ingredients. It’s very pure, very natural, and can readily be disposed of at the end of its lifecycle,” Beall says. “The intention is all the components of this thing are recyclable, compostable materials. At the end of the building’s life cycle, you can take the roof off and let the building — it’s all straw — compost.” With off-the-shelf materials, his rough prototype building cost about $3,000. A skylight and a few windows provide ample light for day use. A finished structure that had electricity and plumbing would come it at less than Mark Schueneman’s straw bale house $20,000, he estimates. It’s probably about the same as standard construction: $100 per square foot. He built that prototype with his daughter and her boyfriend, neither of whom had formal training, in a few days without experienced tradesmen or heavy equipment. The that needs no electric lighting during the day; it’s lit entirely by a skylight, giv- circular design eliminates tricky right angles, and could stretch up to as ing it an airy feel. Beall has been building ecologically large as 700 square feet. “This system is readily transmittadesigned structures for 25 years, but ble, you could teach this system fairly just started to work with straw bales easily,” he says. a couple years ago, he says. Now he’s He knows; he’s done it. Last year, put in a patent application for a new he took a workshop to the Eagle Rock straw bale house that could be carbon School in Estes Park and taught the negative, taking in more carbon than former at-risk high schoolers enrolled it emits. These circular structures are there how to design their own struca cozy 150 square feet — too small ture, and built one near the school. to be an official residence based on In some ways, the fact that you Boulder County building codes, and build it yourself could be this techsmaller than most people would want nology’s best benefit. Beall’s designs to live in. But it makes for an art stucould be packaged into a kit and dio, music room (he says the circular space is resonant) or workshop in the shipped to third-world countries to build homes. They might become back yard that could be composted at disaster relief structures, filling in the end of its life. for the tin FEMA sheds that were so The straw bales he uses will be hated after Hurricane Katrina. load-bearing, so no wood will be reIn developing nations, the buildquired in the walls, except what’s put ing made with local materials would in the window and door frames. For be cheaper — and there probably his prototype, Beall picked up some wouldn’t be plumbing or electricity. recycled windows from the Lafayette The intention of the structure, Beall Flea Market. says, is to use a local resource base “There’s no manufactured, no
Builders explore straw bale structures by Elizabeth Miller
20 June 14, 2012
wasn’t so crazy. But the technology got shuffled away in favor of homes made from logs and bricks. But in the mid-’90s, a straw bale resurgence started. Today, Americans are re-examining the way we live, from what we eat to how we commute to work, and starting to make changes. We’ve thought smaller about the cars we drive. And now, some people are also thinking smaller and smarter when it comes to their houses. “I think people are concerned about toxic materials in construction, and I think people also realize that local natural building materials don’t rely on the extraction-productionconsumption-disposal linear stream of materials, so they’re thinking more in cyclical terms,” says Doug Beall, lead architect and builder at ECOS Designs, an ecological design company that draws from indigenous designs and uses natural building materials and concepts like passive solar and day lighting. Beall’s own home is an earth lodge with a great room at the center
Boulderganic Summer ’12 Boulder Weekly
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BOULDER’S LARGEST SELECTION OF to build it where it’s most needed. In the U.S. breadbasket, that’s straw — a byproduct of growing wheat, barley or rye. Even rice paddies produce a kind of straw that could be used for building. “With 7 billion people on the planet, we have to use our resources much more conservatively,” he says. That will mean building small, and building with less impactful materials. When Mark Schueneman built his straw bale house, the building’s end of life wasn’t so much what he had in mind. He was thinking about the people who would live in it. It wasn’t that he thought his wife’s cancer, or that of his sister-in-law, had come from the VOCs in their newly remodeled home. He just didn’t want that question to be a part of the equation anymore. “I thought, my next house, I don’t want it to have any of these unnatural products,” he says. “Then I thought it was pretty cool that I could get the majority of my supplies from inside the county.” His 2,200-square-foot home is made of straw bales, mud, clay, dirt and natural pigments — no paint and no carpet. He spent a total of $80 on the wood framing for the house, taking much of it from wood palettes given away freely. The insulation came from local straw bales and the rock in the 18-inch foundation that lifts the bales off the ground was dug up in his yard. The walls are plastered in 63,000 pounds of dirt, applied a handful at a time. All if it came from within 100 miles of his home. A “truth window” lets doubting visitors look right through plexiglass at the straw bale insulation. But really, the self-described “energy nerd” says, a lot of the draw came from the idea of the energy savings of living in a home insulated with 22 inches of straw and plaster. It pays off. His heating bill the first year in his home was $163 — for 12 months of propane to heat water, cook and run the ambient heat floors. Making an existing home more energy-efficient would be the more “green” option, he says, and he’d made those conversions in his last home. But he and his wife had planned to size down to a smaller home, and after she died, he decided it was time.
He had the opportunity to build on a piece of land right next to a creek north of Boulder, and went for it. Even on a 90-degree day, the house is cool inside without so much as a fan running. Straw bales lend themselves to curves, and the house has a cool, adobe feel. He practices passive solar principles, opening up windows at night to let the house cool down, and shutting them and the curtains when the sun starts coming in during the day. His path to this home started at a family cabin in Ontario. Built in 1936, the house relied on a series of buckets to simulate running water. Then someone suggested a solar panel to provide actual water flow. Schueneman’s wife bought him a book on solar energy that included a segment on straw bale houses. “I went for a workshop in 2001 and just fell in love with the idea of building a house out of sort of recycled materials,” he says. It took 16 months to complete his new home, which he says was wellreceived by the county when he went for a building permit. “It’s amazing, I’ve had busloads of people come to check it out, and I love showing it off because my first impression was what everybody else’s first impression is: Oh, no, you can’t build a house out of straw bale,” he says. Like Beall, Schueneman has taken the technology to other locations, teaching workshops on Indian reservations in Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. “That’s what I enjoy doing — I don’t want to convert any conventional builders,” he says,“I’d rather show people who have less than comfortable living situations that with effort and not a lot of money they can live comfortably.” Both will be at the International Straw Builders’ Conference, which is in Estes Park this September, along with people from 14 countries as divergent as Pakistan, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. The focus of the conference is on building resilience for the future inspired by nature — developing a certain resiliency by using local materials for low-tech building. Additional details on the conference are available at www.strawbaleconference.com. Respond: info@boulderganic.com
Boulder Weekly Boulderganic Summer ’12
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Boulderganic Summer ’12 Boulder Weekly
Jefferson Dodge
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Landscape designer and contractor Alison Peck, in front of the Prospect home where she is planning a rain harvesting system.
here is often confusion about the extent to which we can collect rainwater under Colorado law. But those who think rainwater harvesting is prohibited outright are
all wet. Even though it seems logical that we should be able to use water that falls on our own property, state water laws have traditionally limited the collection and storage of precipitation because of those who have rights to that water downstream. The regulations were loosened a bit under a 2009 law that allows residential properties that use or are entitled to a well — and that are not served by municipal water or a water district — to collect water from their rooftops. And according to Boulder landscape designer and contractor Alison Peck of Matrix Gardens, even those without a well may have more flexibility than they think under state law. While one may not be able to direct rain that falls from gutters into a cistern or barrel, Peck says water from downspouts can be diverted to patches of earth to support the growth of gardens, shrubs and trees — instead of flowing down pavement and concrete to the local storm drain. “I’d been interested in rainwater harvesting for years, but always heard it was illegal,” she says. “Every drop of precipitation that falls is owned by somebody.” That is changing nationally, especially in arid areas like Tucson, Ariz., and Santa Fe, N.M., which now actively promote rain collection. And nationally, one of the most significant urban water challenges is stormwater management. In big cities on the East Coast, Peck explains, the infrastructure is sometimes so old that the sanitary sewer system is connected to the stormwater system, and both drain into the sewage treatment plant, meaning that the plant gets overloaded during major storms, which can cause polluted sewer water to escape. So there is a big push nationally to reduce the amount of water that goes into those types of stormwater systems. Even along Colorado’s Front Range there have been commercial precipitation harvesting projects where water coming off of parking lots is directed to landscaped areas, for instance, or special porous concrete is used to allow water to seep into the earth below. “‘Thou shall not use rainwater’ was this monolithic edifice that was never going to change,” Peck says. “But that is changing.” One way to look at rainwater harvesting, she explains, is that it is simply a way to restore the environment to its natural state, to the condi-
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When it pours
You may be able to harvest more rain than you think by Jefferson Dodge tions we had before cities and their houses, roofs, parking lots, streets, sidewalks and driveways made water flow instead of get absorbed. Peck confirmed that homeowners can legally make use of the rain in their gutters in certain ways after she checked with the Colorado Division of Water Resources for a project she is working on. That project is to create a rainwater harvesting system for a new home in the Prospect neighborhood of Longmont. The house is on track to receive a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) platinum rating from the U.S. Green Building Council, and was designed by CU architecture and engineering students on a 2007 Solar Decathlon team. The building will use no fossil fuels and will have 100 percent of its energy produced by solar photovoltaics. Owner Kitty Brigham says the rainwater harvesting system will be a key factor in gaining LEED platinum status. Peck says she learned that property owners are not just limited to watering their lawns and gardens with redirected downspouts, they can even collect water for a brief period behind earthen berms or in small depressions, as long as the water soaks into the earth within 24 hours. She explains that one of the main challenges is to divert rainwater before it hits pavement. “A lot of times driveways are the biggest col-
Boulder Weekly Boulderganic Summer ’12
lectors of rainwater, and it’s hard to catch it because it’s headed down to the street,” Peck says. Once the water is diverted and reaches its alternate destination, like a bush, she suggests placing a piece of flagstone below the spout to keep the rushing water from eroding the soil into channels. The flagstone helps spread and disperse the water. One method Peck formerly employed was a system of perforated pipes that would carry water and distribute it through holes. But she found that the pipes often got debris or animal nests in them, so now she recommends keeping water on the surface when possible. “The simplest strategy is to make downspouts go onto land, not more paving,” Peck says. One option is to create a “rain garden,” a small depression formed to gather rainwater, planted with vegetation that doesn’t mind getting flooded during storms. Another consideration is the depth of the root systems being watered. Many plants native to the arid West have evolved deep root systems that allow them to survive drought. Peck says lawns can be good at holding and absorbing water, but most yards in Colorado have bluegrass, which has a shallow root system, so locals may be better off directing rainwater to trees, shrubs and perennials that have deeper root systems and “can pull on that water over a long period.” Pointing a downspout into a shallow-rooted vegetable garden is probably not a good idea for the same reason, she says, adding that a heavy storm could result in damaging inundation. There are also safety precautions to consider. Peck advises directing water at least 10 feet away from house foundations. “You don’t want to flood your basement,” she says, adding that some developments have been constructed in areas with expansive clay soil that can damage foundations when it gets soaked. Homeowners should also be careful not to direct water over leach fields or to neighboring properties, and Peck notes that creating rain gardens or swales next to established trees and shrubs might upset the below-ground balance to which they have become accustomed. With a little common sense and some extra downspouts, gutters or pipes, she says, Colorado homeowners can take advantage of their precipitation without running afoul of state law. To make sure you are following the rules properly, check out the Division of Water Resources website at http://water.state.co.us. Respond: info@boulderganic.com June 14, 2012 23
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SRI SRI SRI SHIVABALAYOGI MAHARAJ Sri Shivabalayogi, lovingly called Swamiji by thousands of devotees around the world, is a true Yogi, a God-realized master from India.
“To be with Sri Swamiji is to experience the reality of the divine spiritual presence.” 2012 Colorado Programs
Tuesday, July 3 at 10:00 AM Guru Purnima Pada Puja in Evergreen Call to RSVP and for directions
Thursday, July 5 at 7:00 PM
The United Methodist Church of Evergreen 3757 S Ponderosa Drive, (across from Safeway) Evergreen www. evergreenumc.org
Saturday, July 7 at 3:00 PM
First Spiritual Science Church of Denver 3375 S. Dahlia Street., Denver www.spiritualdenver.com
Contacts: Bruce: 303-884-3541 • Wade: 303-917-7873 Sri Swamiji has come to help us on the path of meditation. He does not give lectures. He silently teaches the practice of Dhyan meditation. His gift of meditation is given as a friend without obligation. His blessings serve to deepen whatever spiritual path one has undertaken.
Sri Swamijiʼs programs are always free and open to all. They include an introduction, one hour of meditation, singing traditional Indian spiritual songs called bhajans, arthi, and an opportunity to speak with Sri Swamiji individually and receive his blessings and guidance.
For more info about Sri Swamijiʼs mission and tour, visit www.shivabalamahayogi.com or e-mail ganeshplace@gmail.com or visit www.shivabalayogi.ca
24 June 14, 2012
Boulderganic Summer ’12 Boulder Weekly
Mount Elbert hiking traffic
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wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” In two years, many Americans will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson on Sept. 3, 1964.The passage above is an oftenquoted piece of the act. But it is also a piece that is arguably unknown or overlooked by the millions of Americans who trample onto — and perhaps leave trammeled — national wilderness lands every year. In Colorado, a place well-known for outdoor recreation and being home to the Rocky Mountains and their wealth of flora and fauna, balancing the love of the outdoors with the mandates of the Wilderness Act may be of vital importance to the protection of these lands. Another part of the legislation speaks to the lands being left unimpaired so they can be enjoyed by future generations.While Coloradans may want their kids and grandkids to enjoy the same natural landscapes they do today, some experts say that today’s recreation is threatening delicate wilderness ecosystems. Even Coloradoans who understand the need for preservation and protection may recoil at the mere thought of abandoning their weekend backcountry excursions. So, then, how do we continue to enjoy Mother Nature without loving her to death? “Coloradoans love their outdoors,” says Ralph Swain, the U.S. Forest Service’s regional wilderness program manager.“This is why people move here. It’s why people stay here. It’s why they live here.They love visiting wilderness.” There are roughly 3 million people living along or near the Front Range, and many live here because of the abundance of easily accessible wilderness. Research has shown that recreation has significant impacts on the biophysical and social aspects of an area. A Forest Service study shows recreation has direct effects
ing to other important work.
Can we stop loving Mother Nature to death? Some tips for treading lightly by Jessie Lucier on the soil, vegetation, wildlife and water, including a loss of mineral soil, fragile soil, trees, shrubs and wildlife habitat, as well as introducing exotic species and changing the composition of the vegetation, wildlife and water. The cumulative effect of millions of enthusiastic visitors can have devastating consequences. “In the U.S., we are not making any more recreation land. In fact, it’s dwindling,” says Ben Lawhon, education director for the Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics. “There are more and more people trying to enjoy a finite resource.” “People don’t always see immediate impacts,” Lawhon continues. “But then, all of a sudden, we’re seeing things like wildlife in trash cans in South Boulder.” Thankfully, many actions can mitigate our impact, and applying Leave No Trace principles is a good start. Plan properly Making sure that you have things like water and a map are vital. Educate yourself about where you are heading. Read signs and ask questions. Waste management When it comes to human waste, the best practice is to “go before you go.” If you’re camping, experts suggest
Boulder Weekly Boulderganic Summer ’12
packing out your waste.While this might seem unappealing, and digging a hole is the preferred method of disposing of fecal waste, remember that you are not the only person using the area. If you’re on a trail with your dog, pick up after your pet. Food and trash Properly storing food and trash is extremely important, Lawhon says. If you’re not actively using your food, it should be locked in a trunk or in a vehicle. Not doing so may invite local wildlife.This not only poses safety issues, but also may compromise the health and well-being of the attracted animals. Fire Wilderness experts stress the importance of being careful with fire. “Make sure that fires are definitely out before you abandon them,” says Elsha Kirby, the Boulder Ranger District’s public affairs officer. “Don’t just put dirt or rocks on it. Dump gallons of water on it. If you see smoke or hear popping, the fire is not out.” Kirby also suggests sensing for heat. While a fire may appear to be out, winds could pick up a flame. Kirby says firefighters are constantly putting out abandoned campfires rather than tend-
Stay on path Erosion is a serious concern. Creating a new path to avoid mud or a fallen tree is a major issue, Kirby says.Walking around a path causes erosion and damages vegetation. “User-created trails are a big problem,” Kirby explains. “People don’t think that their tracks are going to be used again, but they are. And if trails are not built sustainably, they create damage.” If you cannot get through on a trail, Kirby suggests turning around and finding another route. Volunteer or donate Swain says that one of the best wilderness volunteer organizations is based right here in Boulder. Indian Peaks Wilderness Alliance trains volunteers to perform trail maintenance and talk with visitors about taking care of wilderness and protecting it for use by future generations. If your schedule disallows you from volunteering, you can donate to the nonprofit organization. Educate yourself “We should challenge ourselves and others to learn something new about camping and being smart about recreating,” says Kirby. “A lot of people in Colorado are outdoor savvy, but that doesn’t take away our responsibility to learn more.” While many of these actions may seem obvious, even small steps to improve outdoor ethics can make a big difference. And often it is just a matter of gaining some knowledge about the wilderness areas that you are visiting. “People do not come to wilderness to intentionally do harm,” says Swain. “Most just come unprepared and uninformed.” There are many resources dedicated to outdoor education, such as Leave No Trace and www.wilderness. net. “We all have to share these things,” Lawhon says of our finite resources and wilderness lands. “Keeping simple things in mind is really important. Doing anything above and beyond what you’re currently doing is better.” Respond: info@boulderganic.com June 14, 2012 25
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Boulderganic Summer ’12 Boulder Weekly
courtesy of Boulder Parks and Recreation
J
ust when you thought Boulder couldn’t get any greener, Boulder Parks and Recreation is planning to do just that. By combining forces with University of Colorado Boulder’s environmental design program, the city is working to bring nature even closer to home by developing more natural, community-based parks that are more accessible to children, seniors and everyone in between. The department is planning to incorporate natural features such as creeks, dry river beds and drainage swales into the new design plans and allowing nature to shape the rest of the park. Although Boulder boasts tens of thousands of acres of natural, open space, Jeff Dillon, the parks and planning superintendent at Boulder Parks and Recreation, says he believes there is still room for improvement in Boulder’s urban parks. “[Open space parks] are very accessible, and Boulder is an extremely active community, and I think they have this strong love of open space,” Dillon says. “But one of the challenges is if you have a 4- or 5-year-old, you certainly don’t just let them run off into open space without some supervision. Our job is to kind of give that first opportunity. It’s close to home. It’s your neighborhood park; it feels safe.” The question Dillon asks is, “how do you bring nature back into the urban park system?” The department’s current project is the Mesa Memorial Park in South Boulder. The community members near the park, which currently stands as a vacant lot, have been working with Boulder Parks and Recreation since 2008 to transform the area into something the community can enjoy. Through a series of public meetings, residents have voiced requests for everything from a rock climbing wall and tunnels to a small
A Boulder Parks planning meeting.
Community involvement comes naturally in planning green spaces Boulder Parks seeks collaboration by Travis Mannon amphitheater for live music and events. One person even asked for a go-kart track. The trick is to find the balance between what the residents want and what the city can afford. That’s where the community really becomes part of the urban development process. While a large chunk of the money — about 75 percent of the funds needed for the park project — comes from the city, the Mesa community members will have to dig deep to really make the park their own. The other 25 percent will need to come from local businesses, grants and volunteers. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, Dillon points out. Through active engagement from the community members, whose Boy and
Boulder Weekly Boulderganic Summer ’12
Girl Scouts have already offered to lend a hand, Dillon says he hopes the residents will experience what he calls “sweat equity ownership,” which creates a sense of pride and the feeling that they have earned the park and therefore really own it. After the latest round of meetings between Boulder Parks and Recreation and the community members in early May, the park project is finally picking up steam as the park employees take everything they heard from the community and put together the final design. With the help of two CU environmental design students — seniors Matthew Greenwald and Zack Kiernan — the park designers are not only taking the requests and layout of the park into consideration, but also the value
of every park feature. Even something as simple as a climbing wall takes a lot of strategic planning. “What are the play values of that climbing wall?” Dillon ponders aloud. He stresses the importance of keeping kids challenged while remaining safe. Dillon asks, “How do you design that climbing wall so that a 4- or 5-year-old can climb up so high — but then it’s too high to climb further until they’re stronger — but it also might be challenging for a 7-, 8-, 9-year-old? Children’s play is really their work. That’s how they develop the skills necessary to become adults.” Boulder Parks and Recreation is taking feedback on how residents feel about their parks and planning other future projects. One of the biggest on that list is the Civic Center area, located between Arapahoe and Canyon, spanning from 9th to 17th Street, because of its close proximity to schools, city buildings, a library and a farmers’ market. The natural play area along Boulder Creek also allows the park planners plenty of opportunities to engage people of all ages in nature. “The premise is to introduce more nature play elements into the park spaces around the city and possibly even outside the park spaces later on,” Greenwald explains. To get your voice heard and try to direct Parks and Recreation in your neighborhood, Dillon advises community members to attend their monthly meetings or visit the department’s website to send in suggestions and requests. The department also plans to roll out “Park Report Cards,” which Boulder residents can use to rate the quality of their local parks. But remember, parks don’t just spring out of thin air. It takes a whole community to build a park. Respond: info@boulderganic.com June 14, 2012 27
S
cott Lininger relishes the feeling he gets when he supports someone’s creative project on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter, one of many online platforms that allow people to pool small amounts of money with others across the country to fund a stranger’s idea. “I love it when I get my reward in the mail. It feels so personal,” he says. “The envelope’s usually hand-licked, and they come in these crappy packages that usually come from some guy in Canada, and it’s neat to have that connection. I didn’t just order a product from Amazon. I helped support this thing, and they shipped it to me.” Lininger, a software engineer at SketchUp, which until just recently was owned by Google, is one of the many people participating in crowdfunding platforms, which as an industry raised nearly $1.5 billion in 2011, according to a report from Crowdsourcing, LLC. He participates on both sides of the spectrum, as a contributor and a project starter, and he recently raised $2,758 through the site to fund a publicity campaign for his soon-to-be-released novel, Guesswork: A Prim and Odin Murder Mystery. But it’s not the money that most interests Lininger. “The thing about Kickstarter, beyond just raising money, is that 28 June 14, 2012
Working the crowd
crowdfunding, getting the incentives right is going to be key for the companies raising money.” With the passage of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act earlier this year, Congress essentially gave crowdfunding the go-ahead by loosening rules to allow platforms to start selling equity in companies. For an industry that grew 72 percent from 2010 to 2011, the floodgates might have been opened for even wilder growth. But so far, one of the biggest beneficiaries of crowdfunding has been the arts. Crowdfunding offers a brand new way for artists to raise money and fund projects, and Kickstarter, which, number-wise, funds more creative projects than business ones, raised $150 million last year. Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler pointed out a few months ago that the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has a budget of $146 million. Though Strickler’s insinuation that Kickstarter did more for the arts than the NEA might have been a little misleading — as some of the biggest Kickstarter projects are business- and tech-related, areas the NEA doesn’t fund — the gist of his point is clear. Crowdfunding has enormous potential for artists with the right pitch and the right audience to raise money. Boulder filmmakers Cathy Gurvis and Eliza Karlson raised almost $10,000 for a documentary called
New funding model kick-starts projects online by David Accomazzo you can find out if your idea is worth anything before you have to invest anything,” he says. “If you have enough energy to put together a video and a pitch, you can find out whether it’s going to resonate.” It works like this: Someone posts a listing asking for a set amount of money on a website, like Kickstarter, MicroVentures, LendingClub or IndieGoGo.(There are more than 500 crowdfunding platforms total, according to the Crowdsourcing, LLC report.) The users of that website then decide if the listing, which could be asking for money for anything from venture capital to credit card loans to charity, is a worthy destination for their dollars. Then — on most platforms — if the listing meets its fundraising goal, the money is transferred. If not, the person asking for the cash doesn’t get a dime. Crowdfunding is one of the many ways the Web is changing business. For decades, the only way businesses were able to raise money was to pitch to wealthy investors or get a loan from a bank. Barriers to entry on the lender side were high: Only those with access to tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars
could invest or make loans. Now, thanks to crowdfunding, in the same way that Amazon’s user reviews turned everyone into a literary critic, anyone with an extra $50 can be a venture capitalist. One company, Pebble Technology, started a campaign to raise $100,000 to fund the production of a wristwatch that syncs with iPhones and Android phones. By the time the campaign ended, the company had raised more than $10 million. But what exactly were people buying? This wasn’t like stock, where investors were buying a share of the company. It wasn’t exactly for charity, either — the company is clearly for-profit. What the listing was, essentially, was a discounted presale, with more than 65,000 people donating $99 or more in exchange for one or more watches when they become available. “They were going to get the first dibs on the product when it rolled out into the market, and so that became a huge incentive,” says University of Colorado at Boulder business professor Bret Fund, who researches how companies raise startup money. “So what I really think with this
Boulderganic Summer ’12 Boulder Weekly
Dance Class, about the women over 50 who dance in choreographer Nancy Cranbourne’s troupe. Ninety-five percent of donations for her project, Gurvis says, came from people with some sort of personal connection to the project. “Our product is really different. These types of projects [documentaries] are very different than putting in a donation, and getting back a watch,” Gurvis says. “People are really feeling close to it, which is exciting.” The question remains: will companies that usually looked to angel investors for funding turn to crowdfunding instead? It depends on what they’re looking for. Fund says one of the reasons the platform is so popular with businesses now is that before crowdfunding, entrepreneurs had no way of gathering small donations — it makes little sense to arrange a meeting to ask someone for capital if you’re only going to get $50 from them. Crowdfunding allows entrepreneurs to ask hundreds, maybe thousands, of people for money by investing only the amount of time it takes to make a video. Also, if startups eschew angel investors for crowdfunding, they might hold onto their equity, but they also forgo the positives angel investors bring to the table. “You get really sophisticated angels and what you call ‘dumb money,’ [investors] who don’t bring anything to the company besides money,” Fund says. “A lot of times you go to angels because they bring more than dollars. They bring a network with them; they can also maybe introduce you to your next round of investors. With crowdfunding, the advantage would be you don’t necessarily [have] to give away equity.” But with the new changes with the JOBS Act, crowdfunding sites might soon be selling equity as well. Fund, who oversees the Deming Center Venture Fund, an investing fund managed by CU students, says he thinks selling equity to the crowd is probably not a good idea. “Truthfully, from an investor per-
spective, you’ve got a company that has chosen to be crowdfunded, and if they hadn’t touched their equity as part of the crowdfunding, we would absolutely look at them and think … they were really bright to do that. If
they had given away some equity or something, it would be a complete turn-off because it messes up the capitalization table,” he says. “What you would want to do as an investor is that you’d see that and basically
you’d want to dilute the heck out of those shares.” In other words, invest at your own risk if you’re doing it through crowdfunding. Respond: info@boulderganic.com
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Boulderganic Summer ’12 Boulder Weekly
Learning in pajamas
compromising the quality of her education. Another Department of Education report, this one from 2009, showed that “on average, students in online learning conditions performed modestly better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.” This finding can be attributed to a number of aspects of online education, says Geoffrey Rubinstein, director of independent learning at CU. First, online education outlets are now teaching students who are more tech-savvy than ever before, and they are using technology in a more effective way to provide a better educational experience. “There are much more sophisticated tools out there now than just a PowerPoint with a voiceover,” Rubinstein says. “We might have a
The rising value of online education by Hadley Vandiver
F
ree time is not a luxury that 22-yearold Rhianna Taylor can afford these days. The University of Colorado Boulder senior works 40 hours a week at University Bicycles, and spends most of her other time running, swimming and biking in training for the CU triathlon team. But at the end of her action-packed days, Taylor’s work is not over. She still has class to attend. She usually settles in on her porch with her laptop and a notebook, ready to listen to a lecture, take some notes and post on her class’s discussion board. Taylor is currently taking Gender, Race and Class in a Global Context online at CU. Though she was a senior last year, Taylor still needs these credits to graduate, but her many commitments meant she would not be able to fit a “face-to-face” class into her schedule this summer. So Taylor, like thousands of other students across the United States, turned to online education. A study performed in 2008 by the U.S. Department of Education showed that since 2000, the percentage of undergraduate students enrolled in at least one online class (what they call “distance education”) increased from 8 percent to 20 percent. The same study also showed that students with families or spouses, students with full-time or part-time jobs and students with disabilities were even more likely to enroll in online courses. Why the surge in popularity? John Levisay, founder and CEO of Sympoz, a Denver-based company that offers online courses, says it has to do with time. “We believe that part of the reason people don’t continue to pursue education is that they’re just too busy,” Levisay says. “But with the online platform, you can take the class whenever you want to or can. Some people might do an entire week’s worth of class on an open Saturday, while another student watches every lecture at 10 p.m. when their kids are in bed. It makes everything a lot more convenient.” For Taylor, that convenience is everything. “I like the flexibility an online class offers versus the rigidity of summer school,” Taylor says. “It’s great because I can do the reading on my own time. And since it’s my only class, I can actually focus instead of spreading myself too thin.” And Taylor gets that convenience without
teacher record a little bit of their lecture, and then use a stylus on the screen to solve an equation in front of the students. Even if you are showing recorded lectures, students in online courses have the chance to go back and re-watch lectures, so that’s an advantage we have over traditional classes, where you hear the lecture once and that’s it.” This growth and innovation is not limited to formal classes. Sympoz offers a less traditional education — in the form of classes ranging from cooking and sewing to cake decorating — and embraces new technologies to teach these courses. Sympoz students watch video lectures and can ask questions while they watch. Their questions, and the teachers’ answers, are recorded, allowing later students to view the question-and-answer interaction, and chime in with their own ideas or suggestions.
Boulder Weekly Boulderganic Summer ’12
“If you think back to the best class you had in high school, college or even grad school, the real experience was not just the professor’s lecture, which is inherently a passive experience, ” Levisay says. “It was the lecture combined with the interaction with your fellow classmates and the actual instructor. The platform we’ve developed is inherently social and interactive. ” The interactions of students in online classes are essential to their success, says Rubinstein. “In any regular class, there are the people who are more extroverted and will sit up front and raise their hands,” Rubinstein says. “Sometimes there are people that have a lot to say, but aren’t as quick to jump out and say it. One of the things we find is that in many cases, the participation of certain students increases quite a bit in online classes.” There are yet other online education outlets that are helping teach people around the world without requiring them to enroll in a university or pay large sums of money. Organizations like iTunes U, the Khan Academy and TED have made videos and recorded lectures available for free. Each has its own model. iTunes U offers courses from universities such as Harvard and Yale, while TED talks feature some of the world’s most interesting and knowledgeable people speaking on topics of their choosing. The Khan Academy offers classes in subjects like math and the humanities, and provides quizzes alongside its videos and personal “knowledge maps” to trace each student’s progress. But will the free course offerings from companies like iTunes U begin to discourage people from pursuing a degree at a traditional university? Probably not in the foreseeable future, Levisay and Rubinstein say. “The difficulty is that in the purely academic sphere, you have large institutions that have a lot of entrenched constituencies, and so the speed of adoption of new technology is not rapid,” Levisay says. “You have all these traditions, and it’s very difficult to change those.” At CU, no degree can yet be achieved solely through online classes. What online education can offer, though, is the chance for people to continue expanding their knowledge of course material through a model that allows for flexibility of scheduling and the possibility of increased student involvement. “I think there’s going to always be an element of a live classroom,” says Rubinstein. “But if online education is done right, where it captures and actually drives good learning outcomes, I think it will continue to grow and have a major role in education.” Respond: info@boulderganic.com June 14, 2012 31
Elizabeth Miller
T
here’s a new kind of technology in town, and it’s subtle enough to walk past on the street, but strong enough to change your life. Or, at least, that’s what the people who practice kundalini yoga will tell you. To be fair, kundalini yoga didn’t just arrive. But the Adi Shakti Kundalini Yoga Center did just open its doors this spring. And when it did, founder Rachel (Surinderjot) Zelaya says it was like people who had been waiting sprang up to welcome it. The technology falls to a few simple tools: wear white, eat vegetarian, keep your head covered, practice early in the day and meditate. Zelaya opened the Adi Shakti Kundalini Yoga Center to be a place where people could come together to practice and to learn, buy all-white clothes and books packed with the thousands and thousands of kriyas — carefully crafted motions, chants, visualizations, eye movements and breathwork — to suit equally as many purposes. None of it was ever supposed to come into the hands of Americans. Kundalini yoga was a carefully kept secret in India until a man named Yogi Bhajan had a vision in the ’60s to bring it to the states. The myth was, in fact, that if you taught people who weren’t ready to learn — like white Americans — you would die. To the contrary, kundalini found footing in America in the late ’60s and early ’70s among people willing to take the message in and then go out and teach it. In the early days after kundalini arrived in America, after just a few classes you could be sent out to teach what you knew. Now, the teaching goes to those who have participated in formal teacher trainings. “He wasn’t a guru,” Zelaya says of Bhajan. “The underlying philosophy was that … we have the truth inside of ourselves. It’s a very empowering practice.” The meditation, breathwork and exercises allow people to have their own experience. When he came to the states,Yogi Bhajan said the yoga wasn’t for the people who first showed up to learn it, and it wasn’t for their children. He came for their children’s children. The yoga takes that long to take root, and to work. But even first-generation kundalini practitioners claim benefits. “From my very first class, it was like something shifted for me,” Zelaya says. But “you have to be open and ready, because you end up doing some
Patrice (HarInder Kaur) Klimo
Secret practice
there’s still a place for a fast-paced vinyasa, or flow yoga, class. “You do start to have an authentic experience,” she says. “It was completely transformative for me from the very first time. … There’s a sense of being at home with who you are.” Suddenly, the body isn’t a trap anymore. “I’d done yoga for years and years and came to kundalini and was like, this is what yoga’s supposed to be,” says Patrice (HarInder Kaur) Klimo. (Kundalini yoga gives its practitioners the same middle and last names — Kaur, for women, means “lioness.”) Klimo says it was the blend of physical practice with spirituality that worked for her. Don’t underestimate it, though.You’ll still feel the class in your abs and your shoulders the next day. But great abs aren’t the secret kundalini practitioners will slip you if you brave one of their classes — and you don’t have to catch the 5 a.m. slot to get the goods, though it’s there for the taking. They claim greater focus, calm, and a sense of joy and belonging. Licensed professional counselor Sat Tara Kaur Khalsa says getting up at 3:30 a.m. to practice kundalini for two and a half hours helped her have the focus to write her master’s thesis in a week. “It makes the mind very clear and calm and focused,” she says. Khalsa has practiced yoga since 1972 and lived in Boulder since 1990, where she’s attended classes at the various locations around town that have offered kundalini from time to time. “The center’s really given us a centralized location that has galvanized the community, and I’m really happy with the range of classes that are being offered,” she says. “It’s really a nice cross section of the ways that kundalini yoga and these teachings can be applied to various aspects of life.” Khalsa, who studied with Yogi Bhajan directly, found kundalini yoga after five years of searching for a spiritual path and trying various options, including various yogas. “There were some that were good for flexibility, some that were good for detoxing the physical body, and from my very first kundalini yoga class I could really feel how powerful it was and changing my energy, my psychological state, my mood, the depths of my breath, my self — from a yoga standpoint, the chakras,” she says. “When you move energy into the upper chakras or you balance the energy, there’s an immediate psychological effect from doing that. It
Kundalini center opens the door to a hidden world of yoga by Elizabeth Miller
32 June 14, 2012
really weird stuff.” Stick your tongue out and pant like a dog? Sure. Clap your hands, stomp your feet, cross your eyes and chant in Sanskrit and then in English — you’re in for it all. “My first experience of the practice was this huge assault on my ego,” says Trista Hollerbach, who now teaches at Adi Shakti. She was instructed to stick out her tongue and pant like a dog — in front of a mirror. “There’s no way!” was her first response, but she did it anyway. “After three minutes, I felt something shift in my body that never had changed after years of asana,” she says. Kundalini practice works quickly because the kriyas, the carefully constructed movements in each class, work the body, breath and mind at the same time. We’re igniting all of the energy at the same time,” Hollerbach says. The singing and the music incorporated into class have been transformative, she says — though
Boulderganic Summer ’12 Boulder Weekly
Elizabeth Miller
changes your perscience. The techspective. It changes nology to study the your paradigm. It brain is still relatively changes your respect new, Khalsa says, for things. It changes but there have been your understanding, studies, dating back even if you’re dealing to the ’70s, indicatRachel (Surinderjot) Zelaya with a painful situaing that claims like tion.” a certain kundalini Kundalini focuses attention on yoga meditation synchronizing the moving energy up the spine, increasing brain are true. flexibility through the spinal column “It’s interesting for me, having done to allow blood flow and energy to this for so long, because I’ve seen it move. As the energy moves, it passes go more mainstream and be more acthrough various chakras, each ascepted scientifically,” she says. signed to a different meaning — those A study published earlier this year at the bottom of the spine go to in the International Journal of Geriatric basal desires and survival instincts, Psychiatry on caregivers aged 45 to 91 like hunger correlating to the chakra in the high-stress situation of caring at your stomach. Move higher up, and for someone with dementia showed you access your heart, a center for that participants assigned just 12 compassion, and your head, the source minutes a day of kundalini yoga kirtan of wisdom. kriya meditation reported significant “That’s not to say that the lower improvements in mental health and chakras are bad, but most people walk a decrease in depression. Of those around in the lower chakras most of practicing kundalini, 65 percent the time,” Khalsa says. “With kundalini improved on a depression rating yoga and meditative practice you can scale by 50 percent, and 53 percent operate the upper chakras more, so improved on the mental health scale you have more choice and more balby 50 percent. Other participants in ance.” the study, who were given passive The theory goes that the easier relaxation with instrumental music, energy can move from your sacrum, improved by 31.2 percent for depresthe bottom of your spine, to the top sion and 19 percent for mental health. of your skull, the easier something Zelaya says her plan with Adi like a hurtful comment, which might Shakti is to make it open and accessihit you in the gut, can be moved up to ble to a range of people. Some classes your heart, so you can respond from a focus on prenatal care, some on place of compassion. recovering from addiction. The center “For me, it was the most effective is doing outreach to women’s shelters at shifting psychological states of any and in prisons. Zelaya herself has practice that I had tried,” Khalsa says. taught kundalini to civil war refugees As a psychotherapist, Khalsa says in West Africa. she’s seen some overlap and some “My vision is to bring this technolcomplementary aspects between ogy to people who need it, whether psychotherapy and spiritual work like they can pay or not,” Zelaya says. For what kundalini offers. that reason, some classes have flexible “If you think of yoga and meditapricing. tion as working directly on conscious“Come. Change — that’s the ness, and consciousness as the filter only danger,” says Hari-Mandir Kaur through which we experience life and Khalsa, who teaches a stress relief function, it’s going to affect a wide class at Adi Shakti on Saturdays. range of things,” she says. The doors are open. Even if you’re Exactly how those effects work, still in your usual black yoga pants. Respond: info@boulderganic.com and why, is a field as yet unplumbed by Boulder Weekly Boulderganic Summer ’12
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I
n the Academy Award-winning movie The Social Network, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg is portrayed as a brilliant yet socially awkward student intent on finding a billiondollar idea. Much of the focus of the film is on the interaction and subsequent legal proceedings between the geeky computer whiz and the outgoing Winklevoss twins — the Brooks Brothers-handsome Olympic rowers with old money pedigree and their own original idea. The film ends with Mr. Zuckerberg becoming the youngest billionaire in the world as a result of his work on Facebook, vanquishing his more socially established rivals and lionizing his entrepreneurial reputation. But in the real world — the one where Aaron Sorkin doesn’t provide the snappy dialogue — how often is this story replicated for those of us uncomfortable confronting a situation where we need to convince others of our competence? That’s the problem faced by introverts in America every day, who, despite their equal creative and intellectual powers, face shortfalls in the personality-driven culture that has defined our nation since big business, for the most part, adopted the extrovert model for its leaders. But introverts are beginning to advocate for recognition and understanding of their ability to play the business game just as well as their extroverted counterparts. “The statistics show that anywhere from a third to one-half of the population is introverted,” says Susan Cain, a self-professed introvert, Ivy Leagueeducated writer, former Wall Street attorney and author of Quiet:The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. “I equate this a little bit with the women’s movement, where the women’s movement was in the 1950s and 1960s. At that time, people were going to a lot of consciousnessraising groups, and the point was to raise peoples’ awareness of bias.” Awareness in the field of personality study usually reverts back to 1921, when the founder
Extro credit for being introverted?
may be relatively new in the fields of history and science, the concepts of introversion and extroversion in America predate Jung’s assertions by at least a couple of decades. But old or new, how they fit in the world is shifting. “Until the turn of the 20th century, there was more room in American culture for introverts,” Cain says. “Really, what changed things was the rise of big business — that was really where the pendulum shifted and we suddenly started to admire people who were salesmen and people who could easily impress you at a cocktail party with charm and charisma.” In her book, Cain says the need for charm and charisma has permeated all facets of the modern corporate world. In today’s marketplace, there are so many creative people working to develop ideas that there has to be some sort of natural weeding-out process. One option is the presentation of such ideas, and with that comes the potential for great ideas from introverts to be usurped by those from more gregarious personalities. That’s where well-rounded individuals who can think on their feet while staying goal-oriented become assets. Richard Swanson, principal partner at The Swanson Group, an Illinois-based company specializing in strategic sales and marketing consultation, acknowledges the need for proper balance in the business world, where money and reputations ride on the efficacy of ideas and decision-making. “I believe that listening is the best attribute,” Swanson says. “An individual that wants to learn will probably listen. And some people are so into themselves that they only want to hear themselves talk. They won’t be able to bring unity and be part of a strong team.” One of the difficulties in today’s business culture for more inwards-looking professionals lies in not just self-expression but in interaction. “When confronted with aggressive behavior, an
Quiet your perceptions that a gregarious nature equates to success by Michael Callahan
Boulder Weekly Boulderganic Summer ’12
of analytical psychology, Karl Jung, introduced the idea that our personality traits are inherent. While nobody can be a pure introvert or extrovert, we tend to exhibit behaviors on one side of the scale more frequently than the other. That tendency defines whether we are considered more outgoing or inward-focused. According to this Jungian trait theory, introversion and extroversion describe how individuals get energized to deal with their interactions in the world. Introverts tend to look inward to fill their reservoir of confidence, while extroverts fill their inner well by gravitating towards others in more sociable and active environments. While the terms
See INTROVERT Page 36
June 14, 2012 35
INTROVERT from Page 35
introvert might be more inclined to say to themselves, ‘It’s not worth getting into a fight with this person over this initiative, idea, etc.,’ even though the guy with the aggressive behavior might be wrong,” he says. But few business successes are determined by the quickest, or the loudest, talker. Success takes some combination of work ethic, smarts and creativity to go along with proper timing. For introverts, it might just come down to what they are trying to voice. In some people, introversion seems to fade a bit when speaking about a subject they are passionate about. “When I’m speaking about [my book], I feel really passionate and I feel like I know what I’m talking about,” Cain says. “But it’s become much easier because I have such a huge incentive. I think that it may not be that energizing or inspiring, [but] I think it’s always best if you’re doing it in the service of something you really care about, like work that you really love.” As far as preparing for uncomfortable situations, it’s like anything else — practice makes progress. “It’s really much more of an ongoing process that I’m still working with,” Cain says of her own work on becoming more extroverted. Introverts can also tap their already-sharp skills of perception. Introverts are usually good listeners, and they tend to pick up on subtle nonverbal cues extroverts might overlook, while extroverts might forgo follow-up questions or miss making deeper connections due to their tendency to seek out further stimuli. “If you don’t have the gift for chatter, focus on what you do have, a predisposition to watch and gather data,” Devora Zack writes in her book Networking for People Who Hate Networking: A Field Guide for Introverts, the Overwhelmed and the Underconnect36 June 14, 2012
ed. “Tap in to your high level of focus, combine deep listening with well-informed questions, and you need never be at a loss for conversation.” What else can introverts do to dip their toes in the pool of wealth tilted towards ebullient behavior types? Well, you could “fake it ’til you make it.” Research has shown that using techniques to act outgoing can help even extreme introverts take on and succeed in social activities inside and outside the workplace. Barring that, or a Zuckerberg-like personal spark, introverts can only hope that performance over time can help to sway perceptions back toward the middle. Like many of the big issues bandied about in the sphere of public opinion, the labels of introversion and extroversion tend to be categorized by the ends of the spectrum. The reality is that most of us are near the middle, with subtle tendencies to either venture outside our own realm or seek within the spark that allows for everyday interaction. “Generally speaking, we tend to overestimate extroverts and underestimate introverts,” says Cain. “There’s a perception that extroverts make the best leaders. What I’m saying is we need to think about these things in different ways because introverts can also make really good leaders. They just approach it kind of differently.” Swanson says he believes the fire is within us all to prove our mettle in an unforgiving world. “It’s about confidence and knowing who you are and where you’re gonna go,” he says. “Is it an aggressive behavior? Sure. Is it more extroverted? Probably … but what matters more to me is the experience of being in a win/loss position, and those who know how to recover from a loss. If an introvert is bright and can show leadership qualities, they can be successful as well.” Respond: info@boulderganic.com
Boulderganic Summer ’12 Boulder Weekly
High performance doesn’t have to mean high impact. Casey A. Cass/University of Colorado
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n Boulder, people like to move. And, while many studies suggest that group fitness and group sports might be the way to go, finding an outlet for group exercise can sometimes be a challenge — especially in a community as transient and busy as Boulder. So to solve this problem, a couple of University of Colorado alums developed a website designed to be a one-stop online venue to connect Boulder’s fitness community. BoulderActive.com provides users with details on activities, like where the next pick-up basketball game is happening as well as fitness-oriented articles. Site visitors can also find information on activities that might appeal to more obscure interests, like water polo and badminton. “The goal is to connect people,” says Forest Summers, co-founder of Boulder Active. “If someone wants to find a good place to find a sport or a partner or a buddy, they can.The goal is also to empower people to try something new.” Summers and co-founder Henry Prescott are long-time sports enthusiasts and currently work at the Mapleton YMCA. Both say they were inspired to develop the website by the many people who approached
them wanting more information about finding people who enjoy the same sports- and fitness-related activities that they do. “Sports are only as fun as the people who you play with,” Prescott says. “So we decided it would be a great idea to create a website that has information about all types of sports as well as a community forum that gives people a chance to connect.” Boulder Active also offers a pass that allows participants to check out a variety of fitness-related activities at locally owned and operated businesses around town. “The idea of the pass is to help promote local businesses while also giving people a chance to try something new,” Prescott says. If team sports don’t appeal to your fitness goals, the website also provides information for those more interested in mind/body activities, such as yoga. “There is so much to do in Boulder that there is no reason why people shouldn’t be enjoying all these activities,” says Summers. “We really hope the website continues to gain popularity and people who have just moved here or college students use it to have fun, reach their fitness goals and connect with like-minded people.” Respond: info@boulderganic.com
Boulder Weekly Boulderganic Summer ’12
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ou’re dirty, bruised and sore. So are the people around you. Paying upwards of $90 to run (sometimes bike) and crash through military-style obstacles isn’t exactly the typical way to spend a Saturday. So why are adventure races gaining in popularity? Because in addition to the sore, muddy bodies, there are smiles. Simply put, these races aren’t just about competi2011 Muddy Buddy tion. They’re fun. And that fun keeps people from around the country coming back to mix up their workouts in multi-event adventure races. Ted Stauffer knew that he had to make fitness a priority. His doctor told him so. “So we brought a treadmill into the house,” says the athletes of all ages and abilities. 46-year-old father of three. And he Jordan Wirfs-Brock, 26, is an started using it. He started by walkultra-marathoner who specializes in ing. trail races. She used to run mara“Being a person driven by data, I thons, focusing on achieving personal strived to better my pace each time I bests and pushing herself to get went out for a walk or jog,” he says. faster. Stauffer ran the 2010 Bolder “And then it wasn’t fun anyBoulder. And he finished it. He signed more,” says Wirfs-Brock. “It was up for the Warrior Dash and Avery fun in that it was a challenge, but it Brewing’s “Four on the Fourth” 4k. wasn’t doing it for me.” He finished both. So she moved toward trail runBut something about the Warning. For Wirfs-Brock, the trails rior Dash — and adventure racing in provided a more unpredictable atgeneral — sparked Stauffer’s interest, mosphere where self-sufficiency and and kept him motivated to train. problem-solving (and not just pure “What? An obstacle course for speed and endurance) became key adults? And I don’t have to join the features of success. armed forces? Sign me up!” he says. Wirfs-Brock, who has already “Like any kid who loved running completed two ultramarathons this obstacle courses, it recaptured my summer, is also participating in a inner child.” non-traditional race that’s more fun Stauffer says he’s looking forward than competition: a zombie run. to another Warrior Dash in summer The “Run for Your Lives” is a 2012, and is hoping his friends will 5k obstacle course taking place in come along for the ride. He’s even Lakewood as well as 10 other locastarted a Facebook group to encour- tions nationwide. It not only involves age his pals to join him. mud and obstacles, but hordes of And he’s not alone in his zeal “undead” volunteers who chase you for adventure racing. Judging by the through them. ever-growing number of mud runs, Wirfs-Brock is volunteering to be scavenger hunts and even zombie a zombie for this race, and says she’s trail races, adventure racing seems excited to be doing something new. to be increasingly popular among “Staying fit should be something
Mud, friends and the pursuit of happiness by Adrienne Saia Isaac
Boulder Weekly Boulderganic Summer ’12
you enjoy doing. It shouldn’t be a chore,” she says. That seems to be the overall philosophy of these adventure races, especially the ones involving mud. The LoziLu Women’s Mud Run, held for the first time in Colorado in May, strives for just that. Founded by four former University of Wisconsin athletes — two of whom have relocated to Colorado — the LoziLu run focuses on camaraderie and training, striving to eliminate the pressure of competition. “All four [of us] have done multiple Iron Mans,” says Francis Donovan, co-founder of LoziLu. “We love that stuff, but at the same time it’s very nerve-wracking. … Competition, no matter how small, gets your nerves going.” Donovan and his co-founders strive to bring excitement rather than nervousness or intimidation to the participants. They don’t even keep times at their events, opting to focus the racers on personal accomplishment. “[Adventure races are] just really fun, it’s kind of like being a kid again,” Wirfs-Brock says. She also points to the diverse nature of conditions and obstacles on the courses. “Because it is something that
you can’t prepare for, it takes some of the pressure out of it,” she says. “To me, it’s less stressful.” The concept of the nontraditional, mud and fun run isn’t new. Bob Babbitt and his friends have been running them for almost 20 years. What started as a casual event in the mid’90s to benefit a friend who was hit by a car and paralyzed has turned into the Columbia Muddy Buddy. “We wanted to put on something that was really fun and not the most serious thing in the world,” says Babbitt. The roughly six-mile race was a no-permit, rogue race with about 500 participants for years. But by 1999, it had grown to the point of being unwieldy, and Babbitt organized it into a sanctioned event. Today, the Columbia Muddy Buddy has grown to include eight events across the nation with more than 30,000 competitors last year. “We wanted you to bring the family,” says Babbitt. “You could do this with your wife, your kid.” There’s even a “Mini Buddy” event designed especially for 4- to 11-year-olds. The race includes the crowd favorite “mud pit” obstacle. The Boulder event takes place in August at the Boulder Reservoir. According to Babbitt, races like this attract a diverse group of athletes. “You have the ‘endurance buffet’ — I can do a 5k one weekend, next weekend the Muddy Buddy, the next a century ride, the next a triathlon,” Babbitt says. “When I started racing 25 years ago, if you were a runner, that’s all you did. Now people don’t categorize themselves.” Some sports medicine professionals say they are also seeing many types of athletes entering the races. “Adventure races and mud runs seem to attract a different type of See ADVENTURE Page 40
June 14, 2012 39
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ADVENTURE from Page 39
athlete than a 5k or marathon,” says Adam St. Pierre, clinical exercise physiologist for the Boulder Center for Sports Medicine. “It’s more of a ‘weekend warrior’ vibe,” he says. Denise Knutson, a certified athletic trainer with CU Sports Medicine, has not only given advice and treatment to mud run athletes, but has participated in them herself. “Those events appeal to the playful nature that people have and INFO. that you put Interested in paraside for being ticipating in one an adult and beof these races? ing responsible,” There’s still time to sign up. Knutson says. “It’s an excuse Down & Dirty to get muddy, Mud Run and Obstacle Course get wet, swing Deadline for on monkey entry: day of the bars — all those race Event: June 24 things we did as Location: Aurora a kid.” Sports Park, Knutson Aurora competed in Run for Your Lives the Columbia Zombie Run Muddy Buddy Deadline for entry: June 29 run and bike Event: July 14 race last year. Location: She recomThunder Valley Motocross, mends overall strength training for anyone who plans to compete. “There was a part of it where I had to walk through 75 yards of the Res,” she says. Before diving in, she suggests “not just working on your lower extremity strength, [but] working opposing muscles, working your chest, back, working your core.” St. Pierre concurs, recommending strength and balance training for all participants, and an evaluation for those with longer histories of injury. “The type of event and obstacles dictate the type of risks,” he says. “Uneven surfaces increase the risk of twists and sprains, similar to what you’d see in a standard road race. But if you’re climbing a wall, it puts you at risk for an upper body or shoulder injury. If you’re jumping over something, you risk traumatic
lower body injury like a torn ACL or knee injury.” He says he hasn’t seen many injuries specifically resulting from these events. However, there is a higher risk for acute injury due to the specific set of obstacles and demands of mud runs — rather than a stress injury from overuse or repetition seen in a lot of road racers. Some adventure races do carry a weightier intimidation factor. The Tough Mudder, a national race occurring in mulLakewood tiple cities each year, is known Columbia among adventure Muddy Buddy Deadline for racers for putentry: August 8 ting its parEvent: August 12 ticipants through Location: Boulder more dangerous Reservoir, obstacles. That Boulder race boasts an Warrior Dash obstacle called Deadline for “Electric Eel” entry: August 6 that combines Event: August 18 & 19 live electrical Location: wires with water Copper and another Mountain Ski Resort called the “Fire Walker,” which is, well, exactly what it sounds like. Regardless of the dangers posed, the Tough Mudder enthralled over 100,000 hardcore adventure racers in its second year (2011), and anticipates 400,000 participants this year. The concern posed off-course for these races is their price. Most of them cost more than $50. Wirfs-Brock is avoiding the cost of her zombie run by volunteering at that particular race. Others, like St. Pierre, say they just aren’t ready to commit the cash. But the allure of the mud pit, and the prospect of getting to play in it with your friends and a few hundred strangers, is still enough to make him consider the prospect. “They look fun,” he says. “So maybe someday.” Respond: info@boulderganic.com
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