Two Western Slope Voices on What We Stand to Lose — and Restore
Craig Childs has been making a slow migration around western Colorado for 35 years — from Ouray to Ridgeway to the North Fork and now Norwood — and writing about the landscapes he's moved through along the way. His books are always about place, he says, but they move through time as well: what a landscape looked like a thousand years ago, a million, a billion.
His newest book, The Wild Dark, looks up. It's the story of a 200-mile bike trek from the Las Vegas Strip into the Mojave Desert — nine nights of riding away from one of the brightest light sources on Earth and into one of its darkest skies. Craig wanted to watch the change happen night by night, and what he found became a meditation on what 80 percent of people on Earth can no longer see: the Milky Way.
The consequences of that loss, Craig explains, go beyond the merely poetic. Excess light disrupts circadian rhythms in humans and wildlife alike, is linked to increased cancer rates, and throws off migratory patterns in birds, insects, and more. But he's also optimistic. Norwood, where Craig lives, recently became the first dark sky community on the Western Slope — and he says the change came less from regulation than from conversation.
Restoration Is Already Happening
The second half of this Local Motion brings in filmmaker Ben Clark, whose documentary Preserved tells the story of Vermejo Ranch — a 560,000-acre property in northeastern New Mexico that Ted Turner purchased in 1996 and has since transformed, in partnership with Colorado Parks and Wildlife, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, and multiple universities, into what Ben calls a living laboratory for conservation and restoration.
Craig appears prominently in the film, and both he and Ben share the same core message: the scale of Vermejo is extraordinary, but the principle is not. Restoration happens backyard by backyard, berm by berm. You don't have to be Ted Turner. You just have to pay attention to the piece of land you're on.
Craig Childs will be at the Montrose Pavilion on Tuesday, April 7th for The Wild Dark: Stories of the Night Sky — a visual, musical, spoken-word experience and book launch. Doors at 6:30, show at 7:00. Tickets available here.
