by skytruth (flickr commons)
PLAN-Boulder County (PBC) Co-chairs Ruth Blackmore and Ray Bridge confirmed today that the PBC Board of Directors have voted unanimously to award Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper with the group’s first “PURGE Boulder” award at its May 4, 2013 Annual Dinner. This annual award initially came about as a way of honoring in perpetuity the work of the group’s beloved co-founding member, retired University of Colorado Physics Professor Albert A. Bartlett. According to Professor Bartlett, his pioneering public education work over the past five decades aims at “making sure that everyone thoroughly understands the exponential function as it applies to the intersecting curves of population growth and natural resource consumption.” Professor Bartlett, now age 90, continues to carry his message to audiences throughout the world, accompanied by his daughter Carol Braun, M. D., who is also recently retired.
Ray Bridge said that the influential citizen group has long understood the meaning of the exponential function and that much of the group’s success during the past 50 years in guiding public policy around sustainable comprehensive planning in the Boulder area has been driven by an understanding of the effects of population pressures on the area’s scenic and natural resources and overall quality of life. “PURGE was actually a deliberately chosen acronym for the award,” Bridge laughed. “It stands for ‘People United to Restore a Great Environment’ although some people prefer to think of it as ‘People United to Remove Gross Effluent’. Either way, it gives us some flexibility.”
According to Ruth Blackmore, this year’s vote to honor Governor Hickenlooper was an easy one. “The Governor’s crusade, with the financial backing of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, to turn the State of Colorado into a massive superfund site via hydraulic fracturing for natural gas over the past decade is reducing population pressure faster than anything we, or Professor Bartlett, could ever have imagined possible. Within five years, no one will want to come to Boulder County for any reason—not for tourism, new business startups, sustainable agriculture, higher education, nothing. It’s a kind of a rough route, but it appears that soon Colorado’s Front Range communities, Boulder included, will revert back, at least as a first step, to highly-adaptable scavenger species such as fast-evolving forms of bacteria that can thrive on fracking chemicals and other forms of industrial sludge. Then we won’t need even to consider over-population and over-development as sustainability issues anymore. After that, the task of restoring a great environment will be lobbed back into Mother Nature’s court—and she’s got plenty of time.”
This post originally appeared in the 2013 April Fool’s edition of the Blue Line.
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