Columns

A new National Academy of Sciences study concludes the planet is facing a real threat of “biological annihilation.” The scientists who carried out the research call the decimation of the world’s large mam- mals a “global epidemic” and say the rate of decline is accelerating.
Up to 50 percent of all individual ani- mals have been lost in recent decades. Two-fifths of the 177 mammal species sur- veyed lost more than 80 percent of their range or geographic distribution between 1900 and 2016.
The release of this study coincides with news that the world’s population has reached an all-time high of 7.6 billion. In Asia, the world’s most populous continent, three-fourths of the mammal species sur- veyed have lost 80 percent of their range in the last century or so.
The fact that animal and human popu- lations are moving in opposite directions is unsettling but not surprising.

One must take inspiration and relief where I find it these days. For me it’s mostly outdoors in nature, my antidote to “The Sultan” and “Sheeple” who continue to invent new ways to disappoint. I was recently heartened by an essay, “The Hole in our Hearts,” by fellow blogger and wonderer, Juliet—a millennial half my age with an “old soul” beyond her years.
The essay begins with a tone-setting quote from Thoreau, “...for my greatest skill has been to want but little.” Gosh, almost sounds un-American today, enough to have “Wall Streeters” sitting on the windowsills in their “Ivory Palaces.”
I was burning a little midnight oil the night after consuming Juliet’s thought provoking essay—nose buried in Krakauer's "Eiger Dreams, Ventures Among Men and Mountains,"—trying to read myself through a bout of insomnia brought on by the CBS Evening News. I

In 2016, over 1,000 billion gigabytes of data were exchanged worldwide. That sounds like a lot.
At the same time, 35 million Americans didn't, and still don't, have access to 25 megabits per second broadband.
The upload speed at my house (and office) is 0.69 Mbps, and the download speed is 5.04 Mbps. That's not a lot.
We've all followed the efforts and roadblocks to getting high speed broadband to rural Colorado in recent years—to anywhere not off an I-25 or I-70 exit.
We're still waiting.
In March, Gov. Hickenlooper announced that Anthony Neal-Graves would head Colorado's Broadband Office. Graves was put in charge of driving the state's broadband strategy. In the announcement, the governor's office stated that seven in 10 people in rural Colorado have access to broadband, and the state wants to raise the rural level to 85 percent by the end of 2018 and achieve 100 percent for all of Colorado by 2020.

Talked to long-time Ouray resident Bud Zanett this week. He was recalling that this month marks the 99th anniversary of Rosa and John Zanett's arrival in Ouray. They were his grandparents,
John came to the states in 1910 and Rosa in 1912, and the two were married in Ohio and came to Ouray lured of mining.
The couple lived on 2nd Street, and back then options were limited as to where you could live. Those of Italian descent - not the rich folks - weren't "allowed" to live on the east side of Ouray.
Bud said it caused quite a stir when one of his relatives purchased the house next to the courthouse in the 1930s.