Progress Report: Telluride and MountainFilm

5 June 2011, Telluride, CO

In Telluride the aspen are just coming into leaf. The broad table-topped foothills are as green as the hills in Switzerland, and the deep groves of leafing aspen shimmer beneath the white peaks of the glaciated valley. The winter was a dry one, but spring made up for it with a series of snow storms that blanketed the hills and bevelled the San Juan summits to diamond points. So now it is that lovely perfect season of halves: half winter and half summer: half excitement and half wistfulness: warm breezes in the valley smelling of drying earth and lilacs and the San Miguel river coursing under budding willows; yet the mountains still in snow, the high ivory peaks holding winter like a last sip of wine against the sun-blue sky; the snowpack melting from the ridges so that each day, watching the lines where good skiing is still to be had, you see cliff bands exposed and sloughs of avalanche darkening the white bowls; and the feeling is one of watching the last locust blossoms wilt from the branch.

We're here for vacation, visiting family, and for MountainFilm, a festival of documentaries that focus on environmental and social issues from around the world. The festival is amazing, but something of a roller coaster ride emotionally. Just when you think the world is doomed, that we've completely doomed ourselves and the planet along the way — perhaps after watching a documentary about mountain-top removal mining practices (On Coal River) — you're filled with hope after watching another film on how the mere introduction of a bicycle has transformed and empowered the lives of people in developing countries (With My Own Two Wheels). You swing back and forth like this: between despair and indignation on one side, and hope and determination on the other. The theme of this year's festival is “awareness into action”. It's a perfectly good theme, an energizing one. Personally, internally, I find the real challenge when dealing with these matters is to avoid fatalism.

For if you believe we're fucked, we are. Or rather, if you believe we're fucked and do nothing about it, then our fatalism becomes nihilism and we truly are finished. And maybe in the end we are goners – we've pushed and overpopulated and pried open the earth to no end — but we can't ever quit fighting. We can't give up the struggle for what is right and good in this world, even if the fight comes to nothing. But it never comes to nothing. Even if that fight does no more than spare a watershed from mercury pollution for another season, or keep a kid healthy and a factory worker safely employed for a few more years or less — that less is always something more than nothing. It's the powers who want us to sit back and let them do as they please who would have us believe otherwise, who would foster our fatalism while they extract the last precious somethings of the world from under our dozing spirits.

It's not enough not to sleep; we must get up off the mat and fight, in whatever large or small ways we can.

Yesterday we went for a walk on the valley floor. Budding pussywillows, pink ground flowers and dandelions speckling the grass; three cow elk grazing by the river. (And the evening before a coyote out stalking the prairie dogs). The San Miguel River is charging with snow melt, fast and translucent with sediments as it cuts S-curves into the valley. The morning had started out dim and sweet-smelling with smoke from three fires to the south: one in New Mexico, one near Durango, and another in SE Colorado. But by mid-day the haze was clearing and the white peaks emerged against a slate-blue sky. Craig and his very pregnant wife Melanie joined us for the hike. As we walked Craig told me the details of how Telluride came together to buy the valley floor, just west of town, for 50 million from the developer who wanted to put condos and a golf course on the sprawling verdant open space. There was some division within the community, but now that the floor is not just public domain but open wild space for the rest of the critters living here, nobody can imagine a different outcome. We stopped beside a bend in the river to rest and snap a few photos. A favorite is of Ada touching Melanie's protruding belly as she declares “baby in dere.” A good chance one or two of those elk cows by the river have a baby in there, too. The valley provided important grazing during the spring snow storms. And in these days of over-development and crowding, the open space offers a lush and dreamy sustenance to our harried spirits. We're all “babies in dere,” aren't we?

Our idea of progress can't only be about development; it must also include non-development: leaving places alone. What the Telluride community did to protect this area is huge. The valley is a great example of what can be achieved when we come together and give what we can, big or small, in a larger effort to do the right thing. I know “right” can be relative, but walk this valley gazing up at the chiseled peaks, fish the river for rainbow and brown trout, laze in the flowers with your kid or sweetie or both, and you'll know this right in your gut.