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| Thanks, Mr. Turner, But No Thanks. |
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| Boulder's Bison Boondoggle |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, April 11, 2012. Last December Ted Turner was in town at his restaurant on Pearl St. There he met with some local dandies and dudes who were somewhat in awe, not without reason. The man is one of the rarest types of success with money made and lost on mostly worthwhile projects and schemes, the sort of entrepreneur America supposedly worships. One recent business, a restaurant chain called Ted's Montana Grille, is primarily based upon bison meat. Bison meat is unquestionably better for us than beef, being grass fed and devoid of hormones but unquestionably we also eat too much meat anyway. But if he's no longer cutting edge he's constructive and energetic and smart. He's in great shape for his mid seventies and looks to be with us for seven or eight more decades. We'd be lucky. Turner is difficult to dislike. He challenged Rupert Murdock to a fistfight and called him a warmonger when Fox News bent over forward and Dubya took us to war twice. He says abortion foes are bozos. He says men should cede power to women for a 100 years because they cannot do worse and may do better. He probably means all of it. It's refreshing to hear. In December, he offered Boulder the Damned a small herd of 25 bison to have and to hold. Gingerly, of course, but all ours. True, he has a struggling restaurant here, and there might be some advertising potential, but not directly and not without some expense at his end. Official Boulder expressed thanks and said they would look into it. They did, and the results this week are horrifying. To have 25 bison on a minimal stretch of open space land would cost a half million up front and one hundred thousand a year thereafter. These are reasonable guesses, but we know the expense will be twice that because, well, bison are mean, stubborn, and really stupid. As available mascots, drunken visitors from Pac12 schools may be inspired to relive things like stampedes down Boulder's streets. Well, the plantlife of local retailers dependent upon CU football and the politicians that pander to them saw mighty things afoot. A herd of bison to be viewed from the Boulder Denver turnpike so that when sports fans stampeded to Folsom Field for games, they might be reminded that CU's mascot is, indeed, the bison. A small, female bison named Ralphie that thrills the thrillable by being led at speed around the stadium at home games, but now a visible herd of older and larger Ralphies at entrance and exit from Boulder would be there for all to see and be humbled at what was, what just happened, what might improve by next game. This pedestrian hope for a bison herd to be paid for by some sort of funding by regressive taxation for dubious benefit has produced unsettling bed partners, by which I mean right wingers who are not really environmentalists and left wingers with five kids who aren't either joined in praising the return of a native species, the bison, to Boulder. Kumbayama Lord......... Last week I whined about replacing the fuel of forest fires with more fuel simply and lazily because the chosen replacements - Ponderosa Pine - are native. But again, what both the NRA, Drillers, and the Greenies mean by 'native' are those species in view when the first white family arrived in Boulder in their buckboard SAAB and wept at the beauty from the hill off the Turnpike south of town. There used to be 60 million bison, and here we are - heroes - reintroducing them to Boulder. Oh, Lordie, Kumbaya..... Bison are dumb, blind, huge, and very, very fast with endurance that is beyond comprehension. They can run at speed for miles and more miles and exhaust horse and rider. When they start moving in bulk it can look like the final scenes of Avatar, only bison are real and here. And, like the passenger pigeon, bison were artificially inflated in numbers when the white men came because the pandemics Europeans brought killed off the keystone species: native Americans. Without the Indians, pigeons and bison and elk exploded in population on the Great Plains where, with some reduction in terra-forming fires set by reduced numbers of Indians, the forest crept rapidly back in till agriculture set up shop. In Genesse Park, in Wyoming, on various farms and ranches in Boulder, there are plenty of bison. Boulder can neither afford their upkeep nor the fantasy of their return. |
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