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The farm workers’ due New labor rights bill aims to end exploitation on Colorado farms. But will it devastate local ag?

BY WILL BRENDZA

2021

8

news:

New labor rights bill aims to end exploitation on Colorado farms. But will it devastate local ag?

by Will Brendza

boulderganic:

Tree-free paper is saving forests and farmers in Washington state

by Britany Robinson, Reasons to be Cheerful

buzz:

Lindsey Stirling on coming out of the shadows

by Alan Sculley

events:

Boulder Comedy Festival, Boulder International Film Festival, Colorado Music Festival and more

by Boulder Weekly staff

15 17 21 34

nibbles:

What has been lost and rediscovered since the day the dining died in March 2020

by John Lehndorff

38

weed between the lines:

The science behind water-soluble cannabis edibles

by Will Brendza

departments 5 7 13 26 27 28 29 31 33 37

The Anderson Files: Pushing for Medicare expansion and social transformation Guest Column: Rep. Neguse shouldn’t let Congress ban FaceTime and Amazon Prime News: #BoulderStrong Resource Center move, Bennet introduces oil and gas reform bill and more Words: ‘Self-Deceit #3’ by Lila Quinn Astrology: by Rob Brezsny Film: The Boulder International Film Festival returns Savage Love: Knowing You Try this: MotherClucker sandwich @ The Bumbling Bee Vegan Junk Food Bar Beer: Boulder County’s first brewery of 2021 Cannabis Corner: Reefer Madness

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Publisher, Fran Zankowski Circulation Manager, Cal Winn EDITORIAL Senior Editor, Angela K. Evans Arts and Culture Editor, Caitlin Rockett Food Editor, John Lehndorff Editorial Intern, Carly Herbert Contributing Writers, Peter Alexander, Dave Anderson, Emma Athena, Will Brendza, Rob Brezsny, Michael J. Casey, Sarah Haas, Jim Hightower, Dave Kirby, John Lehndorff, Rico Moore, Amanda Moutinho, Katie Rhodes, Leland Rucker, Dan Savage, Alan Sculley, Ryan Syrek, Christi Turner, Betsy Welch, Tom Winter, Gary Zeidner SALES AND MARKETING Market Development Manager, Kellie Robinson Account Executives, Matthew Fischer, Sami Wainscott Advertising Coordinator, Corey Basciano Mrs. Boulder Weekly, Mari Nevar PRODUCTION Art Director, Susan France Senior Graphic Designer, Mark Goodman CIRCULATION TEAM Dave Hastie, Dan Hill, George LaRoe, Jeffrey Lohrius, Elizabeth Ouslie, Rick Slama BUSINESS OFFICE Bookkeeper, Regina Campanella Founder/CEO, Stewart Sallo Editor-at-Large, Joel Dyer Cover, Will Brendza June 24, 2021 Volume XXVIII, Number 45 As Boulder County's only independently owned newspaper, Boulder Weekly is dedicated to illuminating truth, advancing justice and protecting the First Amendment through ethical, no-holds-barred journalism and thought-provoking opinion writing. Free every Thursday since 1993, the Weekly also offers the county's most comprehensive arts and entertainment coverage. Read the print version, or visit boulderweekly.com. Boulder Weekly does not accept unsolicited editorial submissions. If you're interested in writing for the paper, please send queries to: editorial@ boulderweekly.com. Any materials sent to Boulder Weekly become the property of the newspaper.

690 South Lashley Lane, Boulder, CO, 80305 p 303.494.5511 f 303.494.2585 editorial@boulderweekly.com www.boulderweekly.com Boulder Weekly is published every Thursday. No portion may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher. © 2021 Boulder Weekly, Inc., all rights reserved.

Boulder Weekly welcomes your correspondence via email (letters@ boulderweekly.com) or the comments section of our website at www.boulderweekly.com. Preference will be given to short letters (under 300 words) that deal with recent stories or local issues, and letters may be edited for style, length and libel. Letters should include your name, address and telephone number for verification. We do not publish anonymous letters or those signed with pseudonyms. Letters become the property of Boulder Weekly and will be published on our website.

Pushing for Medicare expansion and social transformation

by Dave Anderson

I

n the 2020 Democratic Party primaries, the progressive wing won on the issues. Most Americans support Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, $15 minimum wage, profound reform of Wall Street and big business, a wealth tax on the rich, labor unions, and ending racism and police brutality. A more moderate candidate, Joe Biden, won the nomination. Nevertheless, he ran on the most progressive platform in half a century.

As president, Biden has exceeded the expectations of progressives. But they are keeping the pressure on him. They remember that in 2009 many progressives relaxed and demobilized while Obama was furiously attacked by the Tea Party and obstructed at every turn by the Republicans in Congress.

Unfortunately, the Democrats have a very slim majority in Congress. The historical odds favor a Republican takeover of Congress in 2022. If that happens, it may be

BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

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not only a defeat of progressive dreams but also the beginning of the end of any real democracy.

Biden and the Democrats have to carry out programs that improve the living standards and quality of life of Americans. We have to think big because we are facing the gigantic crises of grotesque economic inequality, climate chaos and systematic racism.

When Biden introduced his American Rescue Plan in February, he declared, “The biggest risk is not going too big ... it’s if we go too small.” When Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D- Washington), the leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, heard that, the New Yorker reported she told her husband, “That’s our line! He used our line!”

That means embracing the boogeyman of Big Government. Economist Jeff Faux explains in Dissent: “For forty years, the right has flooded the public with anti-government narratives, with support from the neoliberal center. Center-right propaganda also blinded the public to the economic reality of their own lives: during

see THE ANDERSON FILES Page 6

JUNE 24, 2021

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the Obama presidency, 40 percent of Americans on Medicare, 53 percent of those with student loans, and 25 percent receiving food stamps thought that they did not receive any government aid.

“In a democratic society, distrust of government is a distrust of the people’s capacity to govern themselves collectively. For many on the right, the next logical step is toward Trump’s authoritarian claim that ‘only I can fix it.’”

Biden’s American Families Plan would be a huge step toward transforming our society.

It would provide paid family leave, childcare assistance, universal pre-K and more. It would be funded by taxes on the rich. We would begin to have a welfare state like other industrialized societies.

However, the plan basically doesn’t deal with health care. It does propose a permanent increase in Obamacare or Affordable Care Act (ACA) insurance exchange subsidies.

That’s good but quite inadequate.

During the 2020 primaries, high health care costs were a top priority.

Writing in The American Prospect, Jon Walker says, “One can only conclude that Biden doesn’t want to take on the power of the hospitals, drug companies and doctors right now.” However, he notes the ACA proposal is “among the least popular, with the narrowest set of beneficiaries. The sole thing that makes it stand out is that the health care industry loves it. The subsidies go directly to private health insurance companies, so that more people can afford care l

at hospitals and other providers, and prescription drugs. To the industry, it is purely more money and customers for them with no downside.”

In May, a broad ideologically diverse coalition of 150 Democrats in the House began a campaign to pressure Biden and the Democratic leadership to support a huge Medicare expansion which would be paid for by letting the federal government negotiate drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry.

The eligibility age for Medicare would be lowered to 60 from 65, adding about 23 million Americans. Outof-pocket costs would be capped. The program’s benefits would be expanded to cover dental, vision and hearing.

The proposal is supported by more than a dozen centrist so-called frontline Democrats who represent conservative-leaning districts. Rep. Jayapal told the New York Times, “It is really unusual to get this level of intensity on a health care proposal.”

In a letter this month to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, 103 labor, faith, healthcare, racial justice and other progressive groups urged Biden and the Congress to do the same thing. Except their proposal went a little further. They want to lower the Medicare eligibility age to 50.

We need to lower the Medicare eligibility age to zero. Right now.

This opinion column does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly.

BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

Rep. Neguse shouldn’t let Congress ban FaceTime and Amazon Prime

by Adam Kovacevich

I

magine a world in which Amazon isn’t allowed to offer Prime free shipping. Or Google can’t show you a map of the topranked pizza places in your neighborhood. Or FaceTime and iMessage aren’t pre-installed on your iPhone. Is this a world in which you’d be better off ?

That may soon be a reality for folks living in Boulder, but Rep. Joe Neguse can do something to stop it.

Two bills recently introduced in the House of Representatives by Reps. David Cicilline and Pramila Jayapal would make that world a reality, raising prices on everyday services, making it more difficult to find information and removing options for consumers.

Especially during the pandemic, Coloradoans came to count on the low-cost or free conveniences that tech innovations provide. Amazon offered a safe means of buying daily necessities; Zoom, FaceTime and Facebook created a free way to stay in touch with physically distant friends and family; and Google opened a convenient avenue to access up-to-date information from public health officials.

Rather than find ways to encourage more choice and more innovations, these two proposed bills would be a step back and make our lives worse.

These bills would force the removal of many of the helpful features that Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have built into services over the years to make our lives easier.

Some of these are relatively simple conveniences (such as low-cost Amazon Basics batteries, or seeing the full lyrics of a song appearing when you Google it). Others can be more consequential (marking yourself safe during a disaster on Facebook). What is common among them is that they all improve our lives to some degree, and at little or no cost.

This is not to say that the digital economy cannot be improved.

Regulators could use more funding to better monitor market developments.

Data portability measures could make

it easier for us to switch between platforms, making digital markets more competitive. But these proposed bills do nothing to address these problems.

That’s not what most of us want from

BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

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Washington.

Congress should focus on improving our lives, not banning lowor no-cost digital services relied upon by millions of Americans. Our leaders should use their positions of power to improve the lives of everyday Americans, especially as we all try to recover from a pandemic where these products and services were a lifeline or a comfort to millions of Americans.

JUNE 24, 2021

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There are real problems facing Boulder, and real problems facing this country: Rep. Neguse should focus on finding ways to create solutions to these issues instead of banning things that make our lives easier.

Adam Kovacevich is CEO of the Chamber of Progress, a center-left tech industry policy coalition promoting technology’s progressive future.

This opinion column does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly.

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WILL BRENDZA

The farm workers’ due

New labor rights bill aims to end exploitation on Colorado farms.

But will it devastate local ag?

by Will Brendza LOCAL FARMERS worry SB 87 will impact their business, policymakers hope to end systemic exploitation.

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t some farming operations in Colorado, agricultural workers are reporting disturbing working conditions. Workers say they’re denied access to health care services during emergencies; they’re unable to leave their employer-provided housing for fear of being fired; they aren’t provided water or shade, even under the blistering sunshine working upwards of 12 hours a day. They are the targets of racism and wage theft, and they work in barely livable conditions.

And recently passed legislation in Colorado — SB 87, for ‘Agricultural Workers Rights’ — is intended to put a stop to it, to end the exploitation of farmworkers in this state.

However, at Black Cat Farm in Longmont, there aren’t any signs of that kind of abuse. The small, organic farmstead is family-operated, serving fresh-to-table dinners overlooking the very fields where the food is grown and where Black Cat’s laborers work.

“When we bought this farm, it was so run down it was deemed ‘uninhabitable’ by the County,” owner Eric Skokan says. “But that was the only way we could afford it. So, it’s been a lot of work.”

He and his wife Jill have owned Black Cat Farm for eight years, though they’ve been farming for 15 seasons, he says: raising heritage chickens, turkeys, Toulouse geese, mulefoot pigs, Tunis and Karkal sheep — and of course growing a lot of produce on their Boulder County-leased fields.

It’s a small operation. And still, it’s one that Skokan admits he couldn’t possibly manage without a lot of help. Each season he hires about 10 local workers and between six and eight more on H2A temporary agricultural worker visas.

JUNE 24, 2021

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Like all Colorado farmers, Skokan provides room and board, food, transportation and utilities for his H2A employees, as the federal program requires. The H2A visa program expands available farm labor by allowing U.S. farmers to hire help from places like Mexico, South Africa and South America. The Department of State issues over 200,000 H2A visas a year to connect farmers like Skokan with the workers they need.

Still, Skokan says finding workers is a serious challenge — and not just for him but for farmers everywhere. At Black Cat, his employees work intense hours during planting and harvest; doing hard labor through what’s usually a very compressed season.

Typically, Skokan’s employees are working 60 to 70 hours a week at his farm, from May to August, he explains. Which is about the average for agricultural workers in Colorado, according to Colorado State University’s Food Systems department.

Even with the H2A program, farmers across the state are struggling to find workers.

“The biggest issue in farming right now is that there are not enough farm workers.

There just aren’t,” Skokan says. “And this rule change is going to exacerbate that. It’s going to make a bad situation worse.”

The new bill for agricultural workers’ rights is modeled after similar legislation passed in California. It passed through Colorado’s House and then the Senate on June 8, after weeks of heated debate, opposition and amendments. It’s now headed to Gov. Polis’ desk, where it is expected to be signed it into law. From there it will go to rulemaking with the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment (CDLE).

The law establishes the same worker rights that almost every other industry in BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

Colorado already has — rights which agricultural laborers have been exempt from until now. In short: the bill removes agricultural workers’ exemption from overtime pay; removes their exemption from minimum wage laws; and their exemption from the “Labor Peace Act” allowing them to unionize; it grants ag workers meal and rest breaks throughout the week; creates protections for whistleblowers; and requires overwork and other health protections be put in place. It establishes those and several other labor rights that proponents call the “bare minimum” to which these essential workers should be entitled.

“These are really fundamental human rights,” says Sen. Jessie Danielson, a Democrat from Wheat Ridge, who sponsored the bill. “It’s hard for me to take the argument seriously that this is such an attack on [agriculture] when we’re really talking about such basic protections.”

Still, farmers and agricultural researchers disagree. They argue that the new law doesn’t consider the nuances of the agricultural industry; that this bill will make things worse for farm workers, for farm employers and even for consumers; that the overtime provision will reduce their worker’s income by 30-40%; and that small farmers like Skokan, who are already surviving on the margins, will be pushed to a financial brink.

“I think the end goals of this bill are admirable. And I’m right there on the detail level,” Skokan says. “But it’s hard to think of a bill that would negatively affect small family farms in a more profoundly challenging way than this one.”

‘Systemic exploitation’ or a ‘few bad apples’?

During the Senate hearing on the bill, several ag workers and other witnesses to worker abuse testified about their experiences on Colorado farms. By almost any measure, the conditions they described are unsettling.

“In the heat one day, I almost fainted,” testified Juana Armijo, of her time working on a farm in Thornton. “We worked from sunrise to sunset.

Saturday and Sunday, without resting for two weeks.

Carrying my own water. Using my own gasoline.

And they didn’t pay in the end.”

Another farm worker from Weld County, who remained anonymous during her testimony to avoid retribution from her employer, said, “We have to avoid drinking water because they won’t let us go to the bathroom often. We have to work even if the sun is strong, [or if it’s] raining. ... Many times we feel discriminated against by our appearance or simply because we don’t have papers.”

Anita Rodriguez, a health worker from Center, Colorado, described visiting farm worker housing in her area. She recalled, “As I drove down a dirt road I was horrified — I saw a fence that was probably 10 feet tall with barbed wire. It looked like a prison.”

If the workers at that farm left without permission, Rodriguez says, they’d be fired on the spot. If they were an H2A worker that also meant losing their work visa, their employee housing, transportaBOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

tion and, of course, their income.

Nicole Civita, who helped craft and advocate for SB 87, says this exploitation is the direct result of agriculture’s exemptions from workers’ rights in Colorado. Without basic protections, this labor pool is being exploited by their employers, she says.

“It doesn’t speak well of us as a nation to think that we will call certain groups of workers essential and then treat them as wholly expendable,” she says.

Civita is the policy director with Colorado advocacy group Project Protect Food Systems Workers and a professor at Sterling College in Vermont where she studies and teaches food systems. From

about. They say they felt vilified by the legislation; that it framed all farmers as abusers and their workers all as victims — when in fact, the situation on the ground at their farms is very different.

“Our staff comes back year after year after year.

Our relationship with our staff is very much a partnership,” Skokan says. “I know that the vilification wasn’t pointed at us, but we were being swept up in it.”

Bruce Talbott agrees. He’s a fifth-generation peach farmer out of Palisade, and president of the Colorado Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association (CFVGA), one of the organizations that lobbied SUSAN FRANCE against the bill. He was equally horrified by those farm worker testimonies — and confused by them.

“The atrocities and the oppression that were presented in testimony before the House and the Senate, it’s just not something we’ve ever run into,” Talbott says. “I’m sure it exists ... but it’s just not the norm.”

Talbott admits that there are surely a few “bad apples” out there who do exploit their workers.

But, he reiterates: the issue in agriculture is not a lack of job opportunity, but a lack of laborers. If an employer is being abusive, there are plenty of other farmers who will treat them right who are ready to hire. Respecting your work force, and providing them with basic needs like shade, water, food, access to healthcare and fair wages is part of staying competitive for their labor, Talbott says.

“If somebody is not getting a good value out of something, they’re going somewhere else. It’s very easy to find a job,” he says.

To Sen. Danielson, those workers’ rights should be protected by policy, not entrusted to market values. She says the root cause of this state’s agricultural worker shortage is that some of the workforce is going elsewhere, to states like California, Arizona, New Mexico, Kansas, South Dakota or Minnesota, where they’re already proERIC SKOKAN at her vantage point, this bill is tected by varying degrees of agricultural workers’ Black Cat Farm in Longmont about workers’ rights — but it’s rights. also about addressing a much “They claim this is the worst thing that has deeper problem. happened to agriculture in a long time, but at “This is another place the same time they claim that exploitation never where we see structural racism embedded into our happens,” Danielson says. “How could it be that a laws, creating structures that systematically disadvan- bill that aims to end the legal exploitation of these tage certain groups of people,” Civita says. According workers would have such a significant negative imto her, the reason agricultural workers have been sys- pact on an industry if the industry claims that they tematically excluded from labor rights in this country don’t exploit their workers?” goes back to the foundation of agriculture in the U.S. “This is a form of structural racism that has served to exploit and oppress first black Americans For opponents, the most pivotal issue of the and then second, many waves of immigrants,” Civita Colorado bill is the overtime provision, says Adrian says. “These low wages, the terrible conditions, they Card, an extension agent with CSU’s Food Systems get justified because they say, ‘Well, people will come department. to do this because it’s better than what they can do in In most other industries in Colorado, workers are their home country’ — I don’t view that as an excuse protected by time-and-a-half pay when they exceed to exempt them from basic human rights.”

40 hours of work in a week or over 12 hours in a However, Skokan and others working in Coloday. SB 87 aims to establish that same protection rado’s agriculture industry assert that they’ve never for farm workers — which opponents say would be seen the kind of abuse those farm workers testified

Going into overtime

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AG WORKERS from Page 9

utterly devastating to Colorado’s local farmers.

Card points to data CSU collected from 354 local agricultural operations as evidence. It shows that 30-50% of all agricultural workers in Colorado work more than 40 hours a week most seasons. On average, in peak season, it’s closer to 53-67 hours per week. According to the 2019 Farm Labor Survey, farm workers in Colorado make $14.50 per hour on average — but this bill would establish minimum wage at $14.75. So, with the new overtime requirements, the seasonal cost of labor would increase for farmers by some $3,000-$6,500 per ag employee.

That might be manageable for large scale farming operations. But to farmers like Skokan, running a small family farm, it’s simply untenable.

“Generally speaking, [Black Cat Farm] makes $5,000 a year,” Skokan says. “It’s just slightly better than breaking-even.”

He says Black Cat Farm can’t possibly afford to pay its workforce 2030 hours of time-and-a-half overtime wages every week of peak season.

Which leaves Skokan with three options: shrink the farm and grow a lot less organic produce for Boulder County; invest in expensive harvesting machinery and switch to crops that don’t need to be harvested by hand; or double his H2A staff (which would mean doubling all of the costs associated with that).

Of those options, Skokan thinks he’ll have to take the first.

“Depending on how this makes it through the rulemaking process, we will potentially be shrinking the farm by 50% or more,” he says. “We will just grow so much less.”

Talbott thinks that won’t be uncommon. He says this law change could significantly reduce the availability of Colorado-grown produce — like Pueblo Chiles, Olathe Sweet Corn, Palisade Peaches and Rocky Ford melons.

Senator Danielson, however, calls that argument a “false claim.”

“When these states around us have made similar [policy] changes, that [loss of local produce] has not been the result,” Danielson says.

And, if overtime is disincentivizing employers from overworking their employees, then it’s serving its purpose, Civita argues. Overtime pay was never meant to be a reward for working 10

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JUNE 24, 2021

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more — it was implemented in the 1930s as a disincentive for employers to overwork their employees. Any operation that stands to lose everything because it depends on laborers working overtime hours without overtime pay is an operation that needs reform in Civita’s eyes.

“There are farms, lots of farms ... [that] hire a workforce and plan to have that workforce work 80 or 90 hours a week throughout the whole season,” she says. “Yes, the overtime will become extremely expensive in those instances — as it should.”

Logically, most farmers will cap their workers at 40-hours per week as a result of this. However, that solution creates its own set of problems, Skokan says. And not just because he would have to find twice the number of employees in an already-slim labor pool.

“Many of our workers are H2A workers that we bring in from Mexico and they’re here for a finite amount of time and they are mentally prepared to move Heaven and Earth to work over a relatively short season,” Skokan says.

“If I have to tell the H2A staff, ‘Hey, you can come here, but the amount of money that you’ll be able to earn is going to be 40% or 30% less,’ many of them will just opt out. All of a sudden, it’s not worth it.”

Skokan says among his workers, particularly his H2A staff, the prospect of this overtime cap at 40-hours per week has been met with derision and anxiety.

“From their perspective, they can’t conceive of how to get the work done,” he says. “Everyone wants to work full throttle.”

Talbott points to what’s happening in California. The state passed its own overtime legislation for agriculture workers in 2016 and now, Talbott claims, California’s ag workers simply bounce around to circumvent the overtime cap, working at multiple farms instead of just one to get their desired hours.

“Our guys don’t want [overtime],” Talbott says. “They want the hours.

They don’t want to be penalized for working over 40 hours.”

Pennies on the dollar

Both Skokan and Talbott quickly shoot down the idea of ramping up the cost of produce to cover the cost of overtime pay. Farming is a price taking

BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

industry, they explain. Large grocery chains will only pay them so much for their carrots, arugula or peaches.

The market is so saturated with cheap produce from around the country and elsewhere, farmers have to take whatever price they’re offered, largely because consumers are so price inelastic when it comes to groceries.

Talbott says it would be great if people were willing to pay more for food, but they don’t have to be.

“Other [countries] can produce food a lot cheaper than we can produce it,” he says. “If people were making a killing in agriculture, we wouldn’t be losing farms and we wouldn’t be continuing to see consolidation.”

When it comes down to it, the real nut of this problem is not in the fields or on the farms — but in our food system itself. Farmers and their employees, who make up the very foundation of that system, aren’t being reasonably compensated for the critical service they provide.

At least on that point, Civita agrees with them.

“For every dollar that you or I or anyone else spends at the grocery store on food, only 14 cents of that dollar goes back to the farm level,” Civita explains. “And of that 14 cents, 1.2 cents go back to labor ... so somebody’s making a lot of money on the rest of us eating. And it’s not the farmers and it’s not the farm workers.”

Civita asks, how much are the CEOs of large chains or industrial food processors making? Why isn’t more of that money making it down to the actual source of the food? Why does farming have to be a price-taking industry?

“That is the problem and it shouldn’t be set up that way,” she says. “However, we’re not going to do better by continually saying, ‘Well, the farmers can just cut their expenses on the backs of the human beings who actually produce the food so that someone in an office somewhere can make a six-figure salary.’”

It’s systemic exploitation of the farmers, by the market, passed onto the farm workers. So to Civita, the question becomes, how do we work together as laborers and as farmers to fight that phenomenon?

The new Colorado legislation is at least part of her answer to that question, though many farmers think

it misses the mark.

“Everyone needs a living wage,” Skokan says. “It’s just really unfortunate that this bill was written as a ‘ready-fire-aim’ instead of a ‘ready-aimfire’ piece of legislation.”

Gov. Polis is fully expected to sign SB 87 into law in the coming weeks. From there it will head to rulemaking with the CDLE, where some of the more contentious details of the bill — like whether the overtime cap is at 40 hours-per-week or

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60, or exempted completely — will be hashed out.

Skokan, Talbott, the CFVGA and ag researchers like Card are hoping that the CDLE will recognize the unique challenges the farming industry faces; that they’ll listen to these farmers’ concerns and consult with them more than the lawmakers and lawyers who crafted SB 87 did in the first place.

Civita is hoping quite the opposite — that this bill moves forward into

JUNE 24, 2021

effect in exactly its current form. But she also says that having these kinds of conversations is the first step in addressing some of our food system’s most pernicious issues.

“We need to have some spaces for this kind of discourse where we can actually untangle all threads,” Civita says. “We’re disadvantaging the universe of the possible by not having this nuanced conversation and reducing it down to [legislative bargaining] instead.”

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COURTESY BSRC

#BoulderStrong Resource Center moves, supports Arvada community too

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n Saturday, June 19, the #BoulderStrong Resource Center opened in its permanent location to continue to support the King Soopers associates who were at work, the shoppers who were in the store, other employees and shoppers in the Table Mesa area, the families of the victims, and those in the Boulder community who continue to be impacted by the March shooting.

It is also open to members of the Arvada community, following a shooting in Old Town on Monday, June 21, that resulted in the deaths of three people — a police officer, the shooter, and a “good Samaritan.”

“This all has really impacted the overall community,” says Kate Parker, vice president of clinical care for Mental Health Partners (MHP), which is helping run the Resource Center alongside King Soopers and numerous other organizations contributing funding to support operations. “It’s a place to heal, it’s a place to get comfort.”

The Resource Center offers a welcoming and safe space, Parker says, with massage, acupuncture, comfort dogs and clinical support. (Therapy services aren’t offered on site, however.)

She says that news of the Arvada shooting could also elicit trauma responses in those impacted by the Boulder shooting — fear, anger, sadness, etc. Some people may want to talk and others may want a quiet place to meditate. Still others may like the idea of movement to get endorphins flowing and recall good memories, like going on a hike or doing yoga, she says.

“You don’t have to tell your story,” Parker says. “You can just come in and be too, if that’s something that would help you heal.”

The Resource Center moved from its original, temporary location in the Table Mesa Shopping Center to 2935 Baseline, next to the old Denny’s. It is open every day but Sundays and is expected to stay open for the foreseeable future, focusing on maintaining long-term, trauma-based programs.

“It’s important to give each other grace and space to process through all of this,” Parker says. “It is OK to ask for help, and help doesn’t have to be counseling, help can be a lot of different things.”

ACLU launches statewide Expanding the Table for Justice initiative

Bennet introduces oil and gas reform bill

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nder the direction of new leadership, the ACLU of Colorado is embarking on a 60day community listening tour of Colorado beginning in July. Led by the organization’s new executive director, Deborah Richardson, the Expanding the Table for Justice initiative will connect with advocacy groups, community leaders, policymakers and individuals to learn how the ACLU of Colorado can better support and engage the community, especially when it comes to the civil liberties issues that matter most. The interactive discussions and listening sessions will cover such topics as: criminal legal reform, disability rights, homelessness, immigrants’ rights, Indigenous justice, LGBTQ+ rights, multifaith issues, racial justice, reproductive rights, voting rights and more.

“My agenda is transparent,” Richardson said in a press release. “The ACLU of Colorado will transform, in warp speed, to align with our stated values of being for the people and of the people. And the first step along this journey is active collaborations with all communities.”

Registration is required: aclu-co.org/expanding-the-table-for-justice

n Tuesday, June 22, Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet reintroduced federal legislation to fund the clean-up of oil and gas wells abandoned by owners who either have gone bankrupt or who can no longer be identified. The remediation fund created

by The Oil and Gas Bonding Reform and Orphaned Well Remediation Act would create jobs with $3 billion dedicated to cleaning up orphaned wells — including wells, pads, roads and impacted habitat — on state, federal, tribal and private lands. It would also establish a long-term program with additional funding. The bill also includes a provision that would strengthen federal bonding rules to ensure companies pay for the clean-up of their wells in the future should they go bankrupt.

“There are more than 57,000 orphaned wells across the nation which threaten wildlife habitat, clean air and water, and human health,” Suzanne O’Neill, executive director of the Colorado Wildlife Federation, said in a press release. “Senator Bennet’s bill will clean up these toxic sites and reform the antiquated bonding system so that in the future, oil and gas companies will have to pay for the cleanup — not the American taxpayer.”

On the same day, Bennet also reintroduced The Public Engagement Opportunity on Public Land Exploration (PEOPLE) Act to expand opportunities for local input in mineral lease sales on public lands. The Colorado Senator first introduced both bills in 2020; neither made it out of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

“Together, these bills will reduce methane emissions — which is the fastest way to protect our climate, restore wildlife habitat and create good-paying jobs,” Bennet said in a statement. Both bills enjoy broad support across Colorado, from Western Slope farmers and ranchers to conservationists and county commissioners statewide, including Boulder County.

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COURTESY COLUMBIA PULP

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n 2013, about 20 wheat farmers gathered at a local pizza joint in Dayton, Washington, to hear John Begley, CEO of Columbia Pulp, make his case.

Begley and his team had big plans. He told the farmers his company would start buying up the discarded wheat straw that was left lying in their fields after they finished their harvest. This wouldbe waste could be turned into pulp to make paper products, no trees required, reducing the carbon footprint of paper manufacturing and introducing a new income stream for the wheat producers. But the farmers had been sold on plans for buying up their wheat waste for various schemes in the past — and, despite many promises, none of them had come to fruition. Skepticism was high.

“Everybody was kind of feeling each other out,” recalls Begley. The meeting turned out to be the very first step in a years-long process of building trust and showing results. Wheat growers were brought in for tours and shown the pulp manufacturing system. Questions were answered and relationships nurtured. Finally, six years after that initial meeting, Columbia Pulp became the first tree-free pulping facility in North America, with a design capacity to process 240,000 tons of straw that the farmers would otherwise throw away each year. What was once garbage could now be salvaged and sold for pulp to make paper products that didn’t require felling a single tree.

Saving a carbon sink

Washington’s iconic forests of Douglas fir, western hemlock and sitka spruce are some of the most efficient carbon-sequestration ecosystems in the world. Taken together, these trees scrub 35% of the state’s total carbon emissions. All that wood is also worth a lot of money — net timber revenues from state forestland amounted to $124 million in 2018.

The tension is evident: A state whose forests are a critical carbon sink has built an economy that relies on turning those forests into plywood, sawdust and paper products.

But Washington is also home to a vast landscape that many out-of-staters don’t know about: 2.2 million acres of wheat fields that undulate across its southeastern flank, making it America’s third largest producer of wheat. “[Wheat] farmers in the Northwest have a good product in a good market, but there are years when they run really lean,” says Ben Rankin, founder of Columbia Straw Supply, which manages relationships between local growers and Columbia Pulp.

One of the many challenges of profitable wheat production is that the stalk closest to the ground is too dense for the combine to run through, so farmers must figure out how to clear what’s left standing after the harvest. There are essentially three options: BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

Tree-free paper is saving forests and farmers in Washington state

by Britany Robinson, Reasons to Be Cheerful till, burn,or bale. The first two are undesirable.

Tilling dries out the soil and causes erosion, and burning fills the air with noxious smoke. That leaves baling as the most environmentally friendly option.

The question is, what to do with all those bales of unusable leftover straw?

“That’s where Columbia Straw comes in,” says Rankin, who got involved with Columbia Pulp in 2014 after seeing a need to form connections between the company and the people producing wheat.

Columbia Straw Supply works with local balers to buy up all that leftover wheat straw, which Columbia Pulp turns into pulp for paper products, giving farmers a new stream of revenue — and pushing the paper industry in a more sustainable direction.

A new kind of paper

“Man has used straw in pulp and paper since the beginning of time,” Begley says. The Egyptians used papyrus, a straw-like plant found in wetlands.

But until recently, straw didn’t make sense for largescale paper pulp manufacturing.

The reason is that straw is about two-thirds cellulose, which is what you want for pulp, and about one-third other materials. “What made it uneconomical in the old days was how to get rid of that one-third of material,” Begley says.

Mark Lewis and Bill McKean at the University of Washington took on the challenge of finding a profitable, sustainable use for this excess wheat straw waste. Their work resulted in the Phoenix Process, which not only uses 90% less water and fewer chemicals than traditional tree pulping, it makes use of that final one-third of material to produce non-toxic biopolymers for fertilizer, de-icing agents and other products. l

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“I realized early on that it was going to work,” says Lewis, who’s been studying non-wood pulping since college. “The challenge was finding the right partners and banging my head against the wall — until I decided to start my own company.”

Lewis founded Columbia Pulp, along with Sustainable Fiber Technologies (SFT), which owns and licenses out the Phoenix Process. A recent life cycle analysis at Columbia Pulp found that the carbon footprint of this new pulping process is 76% lower than that of conventional tree pulps. Part of these saved emissions come from the process itself, but a large chunk comes from simply leaving forests alone. Clearing forests reduces carbon sequestration, and replanting those forests doesn’t revert their sequestration potential back to baseline — according to research conducted for the Canadian government, undisturbed forests sequester nearly twice as much carbon as managed ones. To top it off, only about 25% of a tree gets used when it is processed to make paper.

Between the forest conservation and the more efficient processing techniques, Columbia Pulp estimates that replacing 140,000 tons of conventional pulp with its own version would save 133,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year — the equivalent of what’s absorbed by 5.8 million trees.

The product is catching on. A partnership between SFT and Anheuser-Busch is now turning barley waste from beer production into the cardboard box that holds a six-pack of Corona. SFT has also licensed the Phoenix Process to Essity, one of the world’s largest producers of tissue products.

This story is part of the SoJo Exchange from the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous reporting about responses to social problems. l

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Keep up to date on all the summer festivals and events at

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SYDNEY TAKESHTA

Going through phases

Lindsey Stirling on coming out of the shadows

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by Alan Sculley

indsey Stirling could not have experienced a more abrupt and dramatic stop to her music activities than what happened when the pandemic hit in early 2020.

She was on a plane with her dancers, band and crew heading to South America to start a leg of her Artemis tour when word came that the tour was being canceled and it was time to turn around and fly back to Los Angeles. Not surprisingly, it took a minute to grasp what had just happened.

“At first I definitely thought my agent and my manager were just being over-protective,” Stirling recalled in an early June phone interview. “I was like, I can do this. We’re healthy, we’re good. My crew is willing to stay. My girls (her dancers) turned to me and they were like, ‘No, Lindsey, we want to do this,’ as if it was my choice. So I called [my manager] and I said, ‘Please let us do this. My crew, they’re all willing to stay.’ And they basically told me this is bigger than management and agents. This isn’t a choice. You’re coming home. It was just such

see STIRLING Page 18

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STIRLING from Page 17

a shock.”

Stirling spent the early part of the pandemic in Missouri with family before eventually returning to her home in Los Angeles, where she rode out the rest of the lockdown. Now with COVID restrictions easing, she has been busy preparing for the restart of her Artemis tour (named after her most recent album, released in fall 2019). Her show is getting a bit of a makeover from where it was when the plug was pulled on touring.

“We decided to completely redo all of the costumes, one because they just got so worn out on the last tour,” Stirling said. “That was kind of the thing I’ve been creative with lately … going to the fabric district and picking out the fabric myself and designing them. I’m super hands-on with all of that stuff and it’s really fun for me.

“And now I’ve had more time to see what fans love about the album,” she said. “I’ve been able to see what songs and what things they’ve [been responding to] the most. So I am switching up the set a little bit based on what I’ve seen over the [recent months], because Artemis was brand new when I went on tour [in fall 2019].” l

The new ON THE BILL: Lindsey Stirling. 7 p.m., Wednesshow figures day, July 7, Red Rocks to feature Ampitheatre, 18300 W. the two main Alameda Parkway, components Morrison. Tickets are that have $47.50-$85. made Stirling a unique fixture on the modern music scene — a diverse range of songs from all five or her albums that set her violin playing to a dynamic backdrop heavily influenced by electronic music and plenty of choreography for Stirling and her four dancers.

Interestingly, Stirling has never taken dance lessons. She said as a child she wanted to, but her parents didn’t have the money for both dance and violin lessons, and Stirling chose to pursue violin. But as she started to envision her career, her interest in dance was very much at the forefront.

“The goal for me was always to tour. I wanted to put on a show,” she said. “So I thought to myself if I believe in this so-called show that I’m going to do, I have to learn how to make it visually engaging. I can’t just stand there and play. That’s when I started to teach

BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

myself to dance, and it all just kind of started with what kind of movements can I possibly do while playing violin.

What can my feet do while my hands are still focused (on violin). It all kind of grew from there. Definitely being on Dancing with the Stars gave me a whole new set of moves.”

Stirling competed on Dancing with the Stars in 2017 and finished second with her partner, professional dancer Mark Ballas. By that time, Stirling was a rising star on the music scene, having launched her YouTube channel in 2007.

She was introduced to many Americans in 2010, when she made it to the quarter finals of America’s Got Talent.

But the show didn’t result in a record deal. Stirling went back to posting videos on YouTube, where she rapidly gained viewers.

Lady Gaga’s manager, Troy Carter, noticed Stirling’s burgeoning online presence and signed her. This led to the release of Stirling’s self-titled debut album in 2012. Three more albums followed over the next five years as she refined her classical-meets-EDM sound and did multiple tours. Her YouTube channel now has 11 million subscribers and she’s topped 2 billion views of her videos.

Artemis arguably represents Stirling’s most ambitious musical venture yet. In addition to including 13 songs, the project also features a six-part comic book series that tells the story on which the album is based and videos for several of the songs, making for a true multi-media project.

Stirling came into the Artemis project after an album, Brave Enough, on which she grappled with loss and grief following the deaths of her father and best friend. She was in a much better place emotionally and wanted the next album to reflect both past phases of her life and the much happier person she had become after completing the Brave Enough tour cycle.

“When I was thinking about concepts and album artwork and what not, I just kept drawing the moon. That kept coming up in the artwork,” Stirling said. “And I love that the moon goes through phases. And the phrase came to my mind that just because the moon is covered in shadow doesn’t mean it’s not still there. There was a time in my life I had felt like I was so covered up by sadness, grief, depression, shadow, whatever it was, that I felt like I had lost myself. I didn’t know what I was doing

anymore. But then I felt myself come back. Oh, it’s not that I was gone. It’s not that I lost who I am. It’s that I was covered with shadow. And then I really started thinking, who is the goddess of the moon?”

In Greek mythology, that goddess is Artemis.

“So it all started more with the concept of the moon, and then I became fascinated with Artemis as the goddess of the moon and she is this strong,

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fierce warrior who also is the huntress, but also she’s soft and she’s nurturing.

She’s the goddess of fertility,” Stirling explained. “I thought that was such a cool metaphor for women. We can be strong and fierce, but also we have this special nurturing side. So I just fell in love with what she represents in every way and this story just kind of poured out of it in a very organic way.”

Stirling has U.S. tour dates on the books through September, and a run of

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overseas shows planned for next February and March. At some point, she’ll be ready to tackle her next album and expects it to mark the start of a whole new phase in her musical story.

“I just feel like I kind of have said all I can say album wise in the style I’ve been in for so long and it’s time to make a big departure into something new,” Stirling said. “I’ve got a couple of ideas, but we’re going to see. It’s yet to be determined what will come out.”

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E VE NT S

EVENTS

If your organization is planning an event of any kind, please email the arts and culture editor at crockett@boulderweekly.com

Painting with Plants.

11 a.m.-1 p.m. Saturday, June 26, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, 1750 13th St., Boulder. Tickets: $65 for members, $75 nonmembers, bmoca.org The

this exhibition examines how the

Boulder International Film Festival.

June 24-27, venues around Boulder. Tickets: $35-$95, biff1.com The 17th annual Boulder International Film Festival (BIFF) will

Bazaar Art Mrkt.

1 p.m.-6 p.m. Saturday, June 26, Trident Booksellers and Cafe, 940 Pearl St., Boulder.

year’s BIFF.

Boulder Comedy Festival.

June 24-27. Venues around Boulder County, bouldercomedyfestival.com

Author Talk: Julian Rubinstein — ‘The Holly.’

6:30 p.m. Wednesday, June 30, Boulder Bookstore, 1107 Pearl St., Boulder. Tickets: $5, boulderbookstore.net

The Holly is a multigenerational

Feet Forward’s Community Resource Fair for the Homeless.

10 a.m. Wednesday, June 30, next to the Dushanbe Teahouse, 1770 13th St., Boulder.

#BoulderStrong Community Healing.

June 25-27, 3600 Table Mesa Drive, Boulder.

details. see EVENTS Page 22

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EVENTS from Page 21 MICHAEL ENSMINGER

ON THE BILL:

EVENTS

Colorado Music Festival. July 1–Aug. 7, Chautauqua Auditorium, 900 Baseline Road, Boulder. Full schedule and tickets at coloradomusicfestival.org

MUSIC

Colorado Music Festival is back Live performances, premieres, chamber music mark the 2021 summer season

by Peter Alexander

A

s the COVID-19 pandemic ebbs, life and music are slowly returning to “normal.”

For the Colorado Music Festival (CMF), that means live concerts in Chautauqua Auditorium. The orchestra is reduced, but the 2021 festival has a full six weeks of performances, July 1–Aug. 7. And as health regulations and recommenseats available.

Two things that distinguish the 2021 festival Oundjian: an emphasis on new music, including four world premieres, and a new series of chamber music concerts named for Robert Mann, the legendary will be a residency by violinist Augustin Hadelich, who made a notable appearance at CMF in 2018, and a series of Beethoven performances left over from the cancelled 2020 season, celebrating the composer’s 250th birthday. opening concert, presented July 1 and 2. Elegy (to those we’ve lost), by Aaron Jay Kernis, was written not for a commission but from the composer’s personal experience as a COVID patient and with having lost friends to the virus.

“You can’t just go back and start playing music without some kind of acknowledgment, and it’s very

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beautiful,” Oundjian says of Kernis’s piece. “It’s sad but uplifting as well, because it’s so tender.”

The other three premieres are works commissioned by CMF: Forestallings by Hannah Lash, July 22, a work that had been scheduled for the 2020 season; a Cello Concerto by Joan Tower, part of a program of her music on July 25; and a work by Emmy-winner Joel Thompson based on the writings of James Baldwin, Aug. 5.

Oundjian describes Tower as “an old friend” and “a wonderful lady.”

“She was dying to write a cello concerto,” he says, “and I’ve known [soloist] Alisa [Weilerstein] since she was a baby, so it’s all just friends.”

Thompson became known for his “Seven Last Words of the Unarmed,” memorializing black men killed by police. After George Floyd was killed in 2020, Oundjian approached Thompson and said he’d love to commission a piece from him including narration of James Baldwin’s writings. it telling that his writings could have been written yesterday,” Oundjian says. “And [Thompson] was very excited to do that.”

The newly created Robert Mann Chamber Tuesday series will feature performances by CMF orchestra members as well as three guest string

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“Mann was an inspiring teacher, with incredible energy, imagination, sensitivity to what you were on many, including me personally and the Tokyo some way by him.

“There is not one concert series named after Mann. This is the only one.”

Hadelich will play the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto on the opening night concert, July 1 and 2, and the Beethoven Violin Concerto July 29, and be in residence at CMF for two weeks in between, teaching and participating in other activities. “He’s an inspiration, he really is,” Oundjian says.

The Beethoven performances are scattered 5 and 7, performances of chamber works by the CMF orchestra members July 27, and Oundjian’s arthat Beethoven gets plenty of exposure in the classical music world, and “he was going to have about a million performances last year but they were all canceled, poor guy.”

“He’s not 251 until December, so he’s still 250 this year. I think it makes total sense, and we’re trying to replace Mahler’s Fifth Symphony,” which played in 2021 because of the number of players it requires,” Oundjian says.

“You want the festival to end with celebration, onstage, the winds onstage, and play Beethoven 5. I think it’s a really nice way to celebrate the end of the festival.”

BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

EVENTS

PIONEER MOTHER

MUSIC

FOXFEATHER/CNPHOTOWILDERNESSGEMS

Pioneer Mother presents “Picking on Old Crow Medicine Show.”

Saturday, June 26. 6:30-9:30 p.m.

Kettle & Spoke Brewery, 2500 47th St., Unit 12, Boulder. Tickets: $12.

Join Boulder-based Pioneer Mother at Kettle & Spoke brewery as they perform a tribute to the Americana music legends Old Crow Medicine Show.

An Evening with Foxfeather.

8 p.m. Saturday, June 26, Boulder Theater, 2032 14th St., Boulder.

Tickets: $50.

Foxfeather is an alt-Americana group born in Boulder. Come out and enjoy the sultry sound of their recent single, “Come and get it.”

THE BURROUGHS

The Boulder Bandshell (Boulder Bandshell, 1212 Canyon Blvd., Boulder):

The Burroughs. 7 p.m. Friday, June 25. Tickets: $25.

Hadgaba. 7 p.m. Saturday, June 26.

Tickets: $15.

see CALENDAR Page 24

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EVENTS

EVENTS from Page 23

MUSIC

WIDEPSREAD PANIC/JOSHUA TIMMERMANS

Red Rocks Amphitheatre (18300 West Alameda Parkway, Morrison):

Kygo. 7:30 p.m. Thursday, June 24. Tickets: $59+.

Widespread Panic. 7 p.m. Friday, June 25 - Sunday, June 27. Tickets: $70+.

Dirty Heads. 7 p.m. Wednesday, June 30. Tickets: $56+.

THE LOUISVILLE UNDERGROUND (640 MAIN ST., LOUISVILLE):

DELTA SONICS/BILL GOLDSTEIN

The Delta Sonics.

8-10 p.m. Saturday, June 26. Tickets: $10-$80.

MANY MOUNTAINS/ KT LANGLEY PHOTOGRAPHY

The Gold Hill Inn (401 Main St., Boulder):

Many Mountains (folk/rock). 5 p.m. Saturday, June 26.

HELP WANTED Kennel Assistants Needed!

Dylan McCarthy Trio (folk/rock). 5 p.m.

Sunday, June 27.

The Caribou Room (55 Indian Peaks Drive, Nederland):

The 89S. serve.

The St. Julien Hotel (900 Walnut St., Boulder):

Acoustic Ambush. 6-9 p.m. Friday, June 25.

Phil Robinson Quartet. 6-9 p.m. Saturday, June 26.

7275 VALMONT RD., BOULDER, CO 303.442.2602 • COTTONWOODKENNELS.com 24

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Scott Dale Trio. 6-9 p.m. Sunday, June 27.

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EVENTS

ARTS TAIKO CHANDLER, ‘WITHOUT CONSTRAINT’

Boulder’s Local Music Shop Since 1971 Shop online at hbwoodsongs.com for no contact pickup or freelocal delivery (on purchases over $20).

Open to customers or for pick-up with these new hours of operations: Mon.-Fri. 11:30am - 5:30pm, Sat. 11am - 5pm, Sun. 12-4 pm

Taiko Chandler: ‘At Twilight.’

June 28–Sept. 26, BMOCA at Frasier, 350 Ponca Place, Boulder, bmoca.org Taiko Chandler negotiates the delicate space between intention and instinct. The artist’s process is like a nuanced performance — physical and guided by technique, carried out with feeling. Chandler combines shape, color, line and texture as she responds to the natural environment and creates a visual language driven by her imagination. At Twilight references the artist’s favorite time of day, when colors subtly overlap and bleed together. The artist recognizes this moment as emotional, creatively stimulating and symbolic of her practice. This exhibition connects Chandler’s print and installation work by

3101 28th St, Tebo Plaza, Boulder

303.449.0516

hbwoodsongs.com

Let’s Go Out! It’s Time...

‘The Boulder We Love.’

June 30-Aug. 15. R Gallery, 2027 Broadway, Boulder, rgallery.art A special gallery dedicated to the beauty of Boulder, featuring pieces that show the energy and mood of Boulder County along with the geographic scenery. The gallery will be composed of works from local artists and debut

Clyfford Still Museum presents One Painting at a Time Virtual Talk with Janet Bishop.

6:30-7:30 p.m. Thursday, July 29 via Zoom or YouTube, clyffordstillmuseum.org Join us for a talk with Janet Bishop, the Thomas Weisel Family Chief Curator and Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Bishop will discuss Clyfford Still’s PH-71, 1948 in relation to artist David Park. This program will be a Zoom webinar, simulcast to YouTube and you can join via either platform.

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after Francesca Woodman

by Lila Quinn I know that room inside you where you go to hide when you’re scared and don’t want to be seen.

Where your back is turned away, eyes lowered if they’re even open, shut against some shame.

And I’m beginning to think shame is always a lie. To leave the house without mascara, and not have to say anything to anyone.

To know the make of the wall of that room inside us tells me as much as glass set against a dark back.

I have a thing for backs.

I can see where you shoulder your heartbreak, can guess where you feel cracked concrete maybe poured over your heart once, and I can take the hand that reaches for the hammer with which to chip away gently, gently.

Lila Quinn is a poet from rural Missouri and now calls Boulder home.

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comes from Ann and John Mahan at SweetWaterVisions.com.)

BY ROB BREZSNY ARIES

MARCH 21-APRIL 19: Author Albert Camus advised every-

one to “steal some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self.” That’s excellent advice for you to heed in the coming days. The cosmos has authorized need. So please don’t scrimp as you shower blessings on yourself. One possible way to accomplish this goal is to go on a long stroll or two. Camus says, “It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter.” But I think you are indeed likely to be visited by major epiphanies and fantastic new meanings.

TAURUS

APRIL 20-MAY 20: Robert Mugabe was Zimbabwe’s leader for 37 years. In the eyes of some, he was a revolutionary hero. To others he was an oppressive dictator. He was also the chancellor of the University of Zimbabwe, where his wife Grace received her Ph.D. just two months after she started classes. I suspect that you, too, will have an expansive capacity to advance your education in the coming weeks — although maybe not quite as much as Grace seems to have had. You’re entering a phase of super-learning.

GEMINI

MAY 21-JUNE 20: “We were clever enough to turn a laun-

dry list into poetry,” wrote author Umberto Eco. Judging from astrological omens, I suspect you’re now capable of accomplishing comparable feats in your own sphere.

Converting a chance encounter into a useful new business connection? Repurposing a seeming liability into an asset? Capitalizing on a minor blessing or breakthrough to transform it into a substantial blessing or breakthrough? All these and more are possible.

CANCER

JUNE 21-JULY 22:

it would drown me,” wrote Cancerian author Denis Johnson. I don’t expect that will be a problem for you anytime soon. You’re not in danger of getting swept away by a tsunami of insatiable desire. However, you may get caught in a current of sweet, hot passion.

You could be carried for a while by waves of aroused a fast-moving stream of riled-up craving. But none of that will be a problem as long as you don’t think you have something better to do. In fact, your time in the ultimately useful.

LEO

JULY 23-AUG. 22: In my opinion, psychology innovator Carl

Jung, born under the sign of Leo, was one of the 20th century’s greatest intellects. His original ideas about human nature are central to my philosophy. One of my favorite things about him is his appreciation for feelings.

He wrote, “We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only half of the truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy.”

I bring this to your attention, Leo, because the coming weeks will be a favorable time to upgrade your own appreciation for the power of your feelings to help you understand the world.

VIRGO

AUG. 23-SEPT. 22: For the indigenous Ojibway people,

the word Adizokan means both “story” and “spirit.” In fact, story and spirit are the same thing. Everything has a spirit and everything has a story, including people, animals, trees, lakes, rivers and rocks.

Inspired by these thoughts, and in accordance with cosmic omens, I invite you to meditate on how your life stories are central elements of your spirit. I further encourage you to spend some tender, luxurious time telling yourself the stories from your past that you love best. For extra delightful bonus fun, dream up two prospective stories about your future that you would like to create. (Info about Adizokan

LIBRA

SEPT. 23-OCT. 22:

writes, “It had been explained to me from my earliest childhood that I would know love — or that thing called ‘love’ — as long as I was smart and academically brilliant.

But no one ever taught me how to get that knowledge.”

I’m sorry to say that what was true for her has been and create and cultivate love. We may have received haphazard clues now and then from our parents and books and movies. But we never got a single day of formal instruction in school about the subject that is at the heart of our quest to live meaningful lives. That’s the bad news, Libra. The good news is that the rest of 2021 will be one of the best times ever for you to learn important truths about love.

Call 720.253.4710 All credit cards accepted No text messages

SCORPIO

OCT. 23-NOV. 21: Before he journeyed in a spaceship to

the moon in 1971, Scorpio astronaut Alan Shepard didn’t think he’d get carried away with a momentous thrill once he arrive at his destination. He was a manly man not given to outward displays of emotion. But when he landed on the lunar surface and gazed upon the majestic sight of his home planet hanging in the sky, he broke into tears. I’m thinking you may have similar experiences in the coming weeks. Mind-opening, heart-awakening experiences may arrive. Your views of the Very Big Picture could bring healing upheavals.

SAGITTARIUS

NOV. 22-DEC. 21: Sagittarian author Clarice Lispector

observed, “In a state of grace, one sometimes perceives the deep beauty, hitherto unattainable, of another person.” I suspect that this state of grace will visit you soon, Sagittarius — and probably more than once. I hope you will capitalize on it! Take your time as you tune in to the luminescent souls of the people you value. Become more deeply attuned to their uniquely gorgeous genius.

CAPRICORN

DEC. 22-JAN. 19: Trailblazing Capricorn psychoanalyst

Ernest Jones (1879–1958) said, “There is no sense of contradiction within the unconscious; opposite ideas exist happily side by side.” In other words, it’s normal and natural to harbor paradoxical attitudes; it’s healthy and sane to be awash in seemingly incongruous blends. I hope you will use this astrologically propitious time to celebrate your own inner dichotomies, dear Capricorn. If you welcome them as a robust aspect of your deepest, truest nature, they will serve you well. They’ll make you extra curious, expansive and non-dogmatic. (P.S.: Here’s an example, courtesy of psychologically savvy author Stephen Levine: “For as long as I can remember the alternate antics of the wounded child and the investigations of the ageless Universal played through me.”)

AQUARIUS

JAN. 20-FEB. 18: Aquarian guitarist Django Reinhardt was a celebrated jazz musician in occupied France during World War II. Amazingly, he was able to earn good

descriptions that the rampaging Germans regarded as abhorrent. Nazis persecuted the Romani people, of which he was one. They didn’t ban jazz music, but they severely disapproved of it. And the Nazis hated Jews and Blacks, with whom Reinhardt loved to hang out. The obstacles you’re facing aren’t anywhere near as great as his, but I propose we make him your role model for the next four weeks. May he inspire you to persist and even thrive in the face of challenges!

PISCES

FEB. 19-MARCH 20: Piscean author Richard Matheson

believed we’ve become too tame and mild. “We’ve forgotten,” he wrote, about “how to rise to dizzy heights.”

He mourned that we’re too eager to live inside narrow boundaries. “The full gamut of life is a shadowy continuum,” he continued, “that runs from gray to more gray.

The rainbow is bleached.” If any sign of the zodiac has the power to escape blandness and averageness, it’s you Pisceans — especially in the coming weeks. I invite you to restore the rainbow to its full vivid swath: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.

Maybe even add a few colors.

BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

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T

he Boulder International Film Festival is a local cinematic staple. And in 2020, BIFF -

— that one will be outdoors. But if you’re still not ready to venture into the world, BIFF has you

-

STILL FROM ‘SUMMERTIME’

And with that out of the way, let’s Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), the debut from Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson.

Composed primarily from archiFestival, Summer of Soul is part concert film, part reclaimed history.

(Stevie Wonder, Sly & the Family Stone, Nina Simone, The 5th Dimension, and on and on) for a series of Tulchin. But Tulchin found no takers held 100 miles north in Woodstock year — and so Tulchin’s reels were left unused and unseen for 50 years.

That’s when two producers, David Dinerstein and Robert Fyvolent, Thompson, who took the ball and ran

Welcome back

The Boulder International Film Festival returns

Prize and the Audience Award for Documentary at this past Sundance Film Festival.

Summer of Soul is a joyous portrait of a far-less joyous time in American history. And some are overcome with emotion. It’s beautiful. And the story Mavis Staple shares of Mahalia

by Michael J. Casey ON THE BILL: The

17th Boulder International Film Festival

Ditto for Summertime, the latest from Carlos López Estrada — of Blindspotting fame. Set Summertime deeper divisions. All of them are messy and free — in the best way possible. Summertime is Welcome Strangers

venues. Information at biff1.com.

The Silence of Quarantine, about two elderly AfriThe Incredible Lamont,

-

this weekend. Welcome back.

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BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

BY DAN SAVAGE

tion skills, and a willingness to negotiate and renegotiate.)

What you’re doing is consensual and no one is being exploited. Your hot neighbor is putting his content out there for gay and bi men to enjoy — and straight and bi women too — and being recognized by someone at the

Dear Dan: I’m a 40-year-old gay male. I live in a big city, in a dense neighborhood. While I’ve been working from home during COVID, I’ve been sitting at my kitchen table facing a big window. Across the alley is an apartment with a deck. At one point, I noticed a cute, a risk. Jacking off to your neighbor’s young, muscular guy outside. I ran into videos and enjoying the very slight power this guy a few weeks later imbalance and helping him ROMAN ROBINSON at a neighborhood liquor pay his bills in the process store. While I was looking isn’t gross. It’s the modern at porn one night I was porn business working as intended. and a link to his OnlyFans.

But even if your hot I instantly subscribed, went neighbor feels no shame through everything, includabout the work he does ing his gay sex vids, and, ... your hot neighbor may yeah, I came. I tipped him not care to be reminded and put in a few comments that his neighbors could about what kind of content be jerking off to him. If you he should put up next. He were to get to know him took my suggestions and better and you became I tipped him again. About a week ago he knocked on my door and asked if I had he does for a living, RW, then you should jumper cables. That night, I found a six tell him you’re a subscriber. But until that pack of beer by my door and a note from point, err on the side of keeping your him thanking me for my help. I got back mouth shut and your wallet open. You’re on his page and came so hard as I drank not endorsing or reinforcing shame about his beer. I don’t want to have sex with this making porn by being discreet; instead guy — he’s not really my type and he’s you’re making a reasonable assumption too young. I do get off on knowing that I about a boundary someone in his position can pull up his dick pics whenever I want is very likely to have and respecting that and that he will do anything for a few assumed boundary. bucks. But I question if I’m crossing a line.

He obviously doesn’t know his neighbor you when you say this guy isn’t your type is jerking off to him and probably wants considering the number of loads you’ve to keep his porn life separate from his blown while watching his porn. And while private life. Should I feel gross about this? he may be too young for you — and you —Rear Window in their 40s are too old for him is his call Dear RW: You know something about to make. your neighbor that your neighbor doesn’t know you know about him, RW, and Dear Dan: I am a newly polyamorous knowledge is power and having power woman in my late 30s. I am part of a triad, over someone can be sexy. Power imwhich is so fun and amazing, and I also balances are such a turn-on that people have a boyfriend. The boyfriend is why I will manufacture them in their absence. am writing. We have some serious NRE For some people having less power and have been spending a lot of time (or giving up the power they have) is a together. I recently met his girlfriend of turn-on; for others having more power (or 1.5 years and it derailed things for me. being granted more power) is a turn-on.

He has been sharing every detail of our So long as everything is consensual and relationship with her. She knew everything no one is being exploited or exploitative, about me, every private joke we shared, RW, no one has to feel gross about it. and so much about our intimacy that it (Pease note: Making sure no one is being made me incredibly uncomfortable. And I exploited during consensual power play knew next to nothing about her and it was or during consensual sex in the presence quite awkward for me. It turns out this was a boundary that I didn’t know I had. I thoughtful self-scrutiny, solid communicafeel betrayed and like there was a secret BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

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voyeur in our relationship. I am really into this guy but I don’t know how to move forward. How can I feel like we are sharing something special when he goes back to his other partner and tells her everything?

He said he could adjust his behavior but I don’t want to make someone change or have to trust that he’s not reporting everything back to her. Is this something I just have to deal with in polyamorous relationships?

—Newly Poly Problems Dear NPP: You don’t want your boyfriend to do anything differently — you don’t want him to change — but you also don’t want him to keep doing what he’s doing. Sorry, NPP, but you’re gonna have to pick one: he’s gonna change for you, i.e., he’s going to “adjust his behavior” and stop telling his other girlfriend everything, or he’s not gonna change and you’re gonna get over his other girlfriend knowing everything. Or if the issue was his other girlfriend knowing everything about you while you knew next to nothing about her, NPP, your boyfriend could “adjust his behavior,” aka “change,” by telling you everything about her from here on out. Or third option: you could dump him.

If you don’t want him to change and you also don’t want him to keep doing what he’s been doing to you, NPP, then let him do it to someone else.

Is there a way forward if you want to stay together? There could be. It would help to know why he was treating you differently. Have you asked? It could be that his other girlfriend wants to hear the details about the other people he dates — maybe hearing the details turns her on, maybe hearing the details makes her feel more secure, maybe it’s a little bit of both — and he is too thoughtless or too scared or too inexperienced to ask what you wanted. If he apologized to you and explained the differing treatment — and if the apology seemed sincere and the explanation was satisfactory — you could let him adjust behavior to make you feel more comfortable and then give him enough time to prove that he has changed… if you’ll allow him to change. you’re gonna have to get used to as you continue to explore polyamory. ... If you don’t want someone you’re dating to share intimate details with their other partner(s), you’ll have to ask them not to share.

Send questions to mail@savagelove.net, follow Dan on Twitter @fakedansavage, and visit savagelovecast.com.

JUNE 24, 2021

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L O C A L

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FA R M

T O

TA B L E LIMITED

TAKE-OUT AVA I L A B L E

S AT & SU N 9 AM - 2 PM

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TUE-FRI 11AM-2PM

JUNE 24, 2021

TUE-THUR 4:30PM-9PM

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F R I & S AT 4:30PM-9:30PM

S U N D AY 4:30PM-9PM

BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

CARLY HERBERT

TRY THIS WEEK: MotherClucker sandwich @ The Bumbling Bee Vegan Junk Food Bar

THE BUMBLING BEE VEGAN JUNK FOOD BAR. 1100 28th St., Unit 200, Boulder, 303-353-9199, bumblingbeeboulder.square.site

WHAT STARTED out as a family-run food truck in Virginia Beach, Virginia, is now a staple dining location for Boulderites with a bit of a sweet tooth. The Bumbling Bee was designed to satisfy the junk food cravings of those on a vegan diet. Its menu uses plant-based alternatives to create its iconic Maverick and Holy Shiitake burgers, but we tried the MotherClucker “chikun” sandwich on a recent visit. This savory sandwich tossed in a spicy house hot way out the door, we couldn’t help stopping to check out the pastry counter, where the Vegan Oreo Brownie easily became our current favorite dessert.

— Carly Herbert

2

1 CARLY HERBERT

Boulder Reservoir beach dining series will benefit local nonprofits

Where are Boulder County’s backroads farm stands?

Kinetics races, triathlons and

place over the decades at the Rez, and cocktails has never occurred at the Boulder Reservoir unless you brought it in a picnic basket. Driftwind, the restaurant and concession stand inside the Reservoir’s new visitor’s center, will offer a series of beach-side dining events this summer. The four-course meals, from chef -

Boulder County is blessed with an abundance of small farmers, beekeepers and food producers, but only a handful sell their crops and wares at the weekly farmers markets. If you drive the backroads of Boulder County you’ll see many little roadside stands packed with veggies, eggs, honey and often pickles, kombucha and other treats.

Occasionally there is someone sitting with the stand but more often it’s on the honor system. We are assembling a detailed list of these small farm and food stands for an upcoming issue. Send information including offerings and a detailed location to: Nibbles@BoulderWeekly.com.

— John Lehndorff

— John Lehndorff BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

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BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

PHOTO COURTESY MAINSTAGE BREWING

It could have been so much worse

B

ut it wasn’t. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, industry experts and economists predicted that the government mandate restricting in-person consumption would destroy the brewing industry.

Maybe half of all breweries would close. The outlook was bleak.

“I think all of those prognosticators were probably right,” Kean says. “The information we didn’t have at the beginning of the pandemic was all the federal aid that was going to come down.”

Here in Boulder County, only three breweries permanently closed during the pandemic, and one will be home to a new brewery later this year.

Two more breweries opened in 2020, one partnering in a preexisting location, another in a new building. Now MainStage opens up Boulder County’s 2021 cycle with at least two more breweries under construction. Additionally, Brewers Association economist Bart Watson reports that scan data is down, which he interprets as more customers returning to breweries and taprooms for beer instead of buying from grocery and liquor stores.

“The government did a great job helping out small businesses during COVID,” Kean says.

Now it’s our turn .

‘There’s always room for great beer.’

Eric Kean and Sam Scruby open Boulder County’s first brewery of 2021

by Michael J. Casey

W

ithout sounding too hyperbolic, COVID-19 was the largest disruption to the brewing industry since Prohibition: government-mandated stay-at-home orders, no on-premise consumption, no crowding of any kind and certainly not under a roof. The lion’s share of Boulder County breweries rely on taproom and over-thecounter sales, but for a solid 14 months, they had to pivot their entire business plan to packaging, to-go orders and distribution, a channel already clogged by big beer, regional breweries and limited shelf space. Yet, despite all that and the uncertainty of when anything would get back to “normal,” Eric Kean and Sam Scruby still decided to open their brewery.

“This was not a play for 2020 or 2021,” Kean says. “This was a play for the next 10 to 20 years of our careers.”

The two have been friends since college and are both Colorado natives who know the local scene inside and out: Kean from Left Hand Brewing, Scruby from Upslope. Now they’ve taken their talents to Lyons and converted the historic building at 450 Main St. into MainStage Brewing Co. “People have been like: Why do you want to open a brewery right now?” Scruby says. “But if you looked at all the momentum in 2019, it was experience-driven. It was on-premise neighborhood spots. ... We’re trying to pick back up where we left off before the pandemic.”

And where we left off was hyper-local beer, brewed and consumed on-site, most often to the accompaniment of live entertainment, which you might expect from a brewery named MainStage.

“Philosophically, I think everything has to be really good, whether

it’s a beer or a band,” Kean says. “I’m just aiming at the best talent we can possibly put on stage, and then within that, as much local music as I can do.”

Their event calendar is already packed, and Kean says he still has a hundred or so booking emails to read.

“A lot of what we’re ending up with is acoustic Americana, a little bit of rock ‘n’ roll — which is really, really strong in Northern Colorado,” Kean continues. “That said, I’ll put anything up if it’s great.”

And with Scruby at the kettle, the beer is bound to be great, too. As Upslope’s head brewer, Scruby’s métier ran every which way, from English pub ales to German pilsner to a memorable saison brewed with Champagne yeast. As Adam Avery told the guys when he stopped to check out MainStage, “There’s always room for great beer.”

“It sounds cliché, but I truly believe that,” Scruby says.

Scruby’s still working on getting a seven-barrel system into the historic building. The footprint is small, and the building has picked up a few quirks since it was built 140 years ago. But once he does, he’ll bring his playful R&D approach to MainStage’s lineup with lagers, hazies and barrel-aged beers.

“Music-wise and beer-wise, Sam and I line up a lot,” Kean adds. And with their new digs, 1,200 square feet inside, 3,000 out, they not only have “the largest patio in Lyons,” as Kean says, but the ideal location to provide “the best of what Colorado’s got: sunshine, beer, patio, music. ... That was our goal.”

Now it’s their reality. MainStage Brewing Co. is open seven days a week, from noon to 10 p.m. More information at mainstagebrewing.com

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COURTESY BIG RED F

Back around the table

What has been lost and rediscovered since the day the dining died in March 2020

by John Lehndorff

W

hen we last connected, it was March 19, 2020. My Nibbles column that day chronicled a surreal latenight trip to the supermarket “for some necessities to make it through the virus shutdown.” I wrote about the empty shelves and went on to recommend various canned tomato options.

I had no idea what we were about to face and I didn’t realize that it would take until June 24, 2021 for Nibbles, a column I’ve written since 1985, to appear in Boulder Weekly again.

Years from now, this time will have an asterisk next to it and our pandemic tales will sound exaggerated to our grandchildren. Before we happily return to dining, gathering and shoulder-to-shoulder market shopping, let’s remember the toll COVID took and how it has transformed every single part of our relationship with food in Boulder County.

That week in March 2020, the restaurants, bars, brewpubs, bakeries and food markets of Boulder County started going dark.

When they did partially reopen, we started ordering take-out and delivery from restaurants that would have laughed if you called turned to fried chicken as we demanded edible comfort versus taste bud entertainment. shelters. There were roller skating waiters on patios. Alcoholic drinks to-go became legal and it helped save many — but not all — local restaurants.

Longtime favorites are part of Boulder’s dining history — including Zolo Grill, The Med, Brasserie Ten Ten and Riffs Urban Fare, all of which closed in 2020. Also departed are Tahona Tequila Bistro, Bru Handbuilt Ales and Via Perla. Ice cream at the

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Heifer and the Hen, doughnuts at the Motorrad Cafe and BBQ chicken pies from California Pizza Kitchen are just memories.

Numerous eateries inside Rosetta Hall closed along with Lafayette’s Super Mini Walnut Cafe and Samples in Longmont.

At local supermarkets, we sighed and stumbled through the aisles and dealt with masks, social distancing, sanitizing, pasta shortages, higher prices and the sad absence of food sampling. time only to experience the frustration of never getting exactly what you order, especially toilet paper. Alfalfa’s Market in Boulder, Louisville and Longmont gave up the ghost... again.

The most important culinary impact of the COVID pandemic of ’20-’21 (and maybe ’22) has been personal. Food establishments laid-off thousands of cooks, waiters, bartenders and dishwashers. Those who still worked risked deadly exposure in close quarters and had to cope with customers’ verbal and physical abuse while enforcing health rules. Many essential food workers who kept us fed got sick and are still recovering. I know chefs who lost the ability to taste and smell. Some workers died of COVID during a time when families couldn’t even mourn them in person.

The pandemic has made us face long-standing, uncomfortable issues in the food world including pay inequity in restaurants, food insecurity, food waste, social justice, regenerative agriculture and the treatment of farm workers. Take-out and delivery of food and groceries was a safe alternative, but all that packaging only highlighted the monumental environmental challenges we face putting dinner on the table.

On the plus side, the pandemic did what my 40 years of writing about cooking in Boulder County had not accomplished.

It forced thousands of people to rediscover their kitchens, grow l

BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

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a vegetable garden, dine with their families and experience the blissful perfume of sourdough bread baking in the oven.

These painful months have also seen an unprecedented amount of volunteerism and community activism in Boulder to support food workers and to help save businesses. While empty storefronts still abound, a surprising number of restaurants opened during the pandemic despite capacity limits and social distancing.

Tierra y Fuego Taqueria began dishing chicken mole in North Boulder, and Ruby Ru’s Street Eatery started serving bourbon chicken in Lafayette. Shake Shack opened at 29th Street and Edwin Zoe launched Pho Mi next door to his Chimera Ramen.

Ash’Kara began dishing modern Israeli fare in the former Pepper/Wild Standard space.

The expansive Avanti Food & Drink was launched, offering a range of eating es-

opened their doors.

As we shed our collective isolation in this New Abnormal, it’s important to know that the danger is not over yet for diners, shoppers or workers. Many of us are not ready or able to dine inside restaurants or willing to take our masks off. The shortage of food service workers means restaurants will have slow service and limited hours for months to come. You may need to live without chicken wings. My simple request is this: Be kind and patient. Be generous. Be of service. It is a joy to get back to eating and cooking with all of you once again.

LOCAL FOOD NEWS

Bruce Randolph Jr., owner of Boulder’s Daddy Bruce BBQ (now Snarfburger), serving the same Turkish food and baked goods. … Coming attractions: Barchetta, -

events, tastings, farm dinners, classes and festivals to: Nibbles@BoulderWeekly.com

WORDS TO CHEW ON

“Summer cooking implies a sense of immediacy, a capacity to capture the essence —Elizabeth David John Lehndorff is Boulder Weekly’s food editor. He is the former food editor of the Daily Camera and dining critic for the Rocky Mountain News.

BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

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“The Boulder Mountainbike Alliance ran ads recently in the Boulder Weekly to promote our annual Membership Party and Colorado Gives Day. The campaign was a huge success and BMA raised $34,320 - all going towards improving Boulder County’s trail system! The Boulder Weekly ads led to additional awareness of BMA and played an important part in this extraordinary fundraising campaign. Thanks Boulder Weekly!”

Wendy Sweet President, Board of Directors Boulder Mountainbike Alliance

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BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

Reefer Madness

by Stewart Rogers

O

n Dec. 1, 1938, the ever-helpful FBI released a movie called Reefer Madness that “exposed” the dangers of marijuana. Bill and Mary get stoned with some friends, leading to hallucinations, sex and murder. The real craziness started in 1915 when California (of all places) made pot possession a felony punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment. Dozens of state and federal laws soon followed.

California weed arrests climbed from 5,000 in 1960 to 37,000 in 1967. The FBI reports that over 10 million Americans have been arrested for pot possession since 1996. Now that is madness!

As Dylan would say, “Everybody must get stoned!” And we did, starting in the ’60s and, for many, continuing to this day. After all, we were hippies. To hear some folks tell it, you couldn’t be a hippie unless you smoked pot, as though we belonged to a secret society with decoder rings, a hippie hand say that getting stoned was our patriotic duty.

If you’re like millions of Americans, you’ve smoked marijuana at least once and don’t need my explanation of the experience. If you haven’t tried it yet, you’re missing something extraordinary. Imagine feeling mellow and dreamy, yet insightful and aware, while connecting with other folks in happier, more accepting ways. Everything is funny. Music is awesome. You can dance and sing and laugh for hours or sit quietly in a corner contemplating the wonderfulness of an ordinary object suddenly Many of us came from middle class families ruined by alcohol. To paraphrase Neil Young, we’d seen the bottle and the damage done. We wanted no part of it.

BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE

So, as we had done with other facets of the culture we inherited, we looked for a better way, a safer, saner way to escape reality, a way that didn’t transform ordinary people into raging abusers and lifelong addicts.

Pot was the answer, and we loved her from the start.

Like a giggling little girl in a cotton dress on a spring day, she taught us to play, to laugh, to dance and to sing. She

To my knowledge, no one has ever overdosed on THC or few hours of getting high, stoners are much more likely to be making love than making trouble.

At last, straight folks are coming to their senses. The percentage of adults who support marijuana legalization has exploded from 12% in 1969 to 83% today. In recent surveys, 70% of the general public believe that marijuana use is less of a health risk than alcohol or cigarettes. In 1946, the American Medical Association

STEWART ROGERS

adventure and pleasure. She showed us how to party without becoming our parents.

You would have thought that ordinary folks would have applauded our discovery. After all, weed is, without doubt, the safest of recreational drugs. Cigarettes, alcohol, cocaine, heroin and opiates are proven killers.

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the District of Columbia have legalized pot for all uses. Another 20 states have approved it for medical use only. According to recent surveys, 35 million Americans smoke herb on a regular basis.

Another 20 million smoke occasionally. That’s more than the number of cigarette smokers, placing it second behind alcohol as America’s favorite recreational drug.

Just think how many lives could have been saved if folks had simply listened to the hippies and made pot their drug of choice. The 70,000 a year killed by drunk driving and drug overdoses might still be with us. The untold number of families devastated by drugs and alcohol might have been preserved. The millions arrested for pot possession could have avoided prison if only the moralists had just minded their own business.

Mark Twain once said: “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” It’s astonishing how much saner America has become about marijuana since my hippie days 50-plus years ago. Let’s hope for a full recovery soon.

Stewart Rogers is the co-author and editor of What Happened to the Hippies? published by McFarland Press. He can be reached at Stewart@WhatHappenedtotheHippies.com.

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ince Keith Woelfel got into the can-

So Woelfel and his team of research-

that utilize water-soluble cannabinoids instead of the more tra-

Their research has shown that water-soluble cannabinoids actu-

bodies absorb those cannabinoids -

the two to three hours it can take traditional -

That meant making cannabinoids

The ripple effect

There is almost no scientific literature on

-

The rigorous science behind Ripple’s water-soluble cannabis edibles explains why they work faster than the rest

-

by Will Brendza

series of learnings and now we are on our The most recent two of those studies maceuticals

Phar-

-

38

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JUNE 24, 2021

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