Wednesday Update: Coming Into the Country, Climbing Mount Sanitas, Regrouping with Old Friends

UPDATE: Got this book handed to me last night during a lively and wide ranging discussion with David, my good, good friend and conservation colleague over a glass of red wine. He pulled it out of his brief case and said to me with great glee, "I know you're not going to like this, but I picked it up in the airport recently and think Soros makes a lot of since. I like the guy."

I winced as he grinned and asked him to tell me the bottom line of what he likes about George. He went on to say Soros thinks we're in a macro bubble since right after WWII and also now in a more immediate credit bubble. With the growth of the developing world he, Soros, no longer thinks current economic theory and free markets can predict the future. Thus, Soros has undertaken a new paradigm of economic (non) theory.

Chaos anyone?

I can't totally disagree with any of that, especially since mankind has never been able to predict the future with certainty. Only our own hubris makes us think we can.

Now if we can just get George Soros to convince Al Gore of the folly of predicting the certainty of climate change, then maybe we can make some progress here on planet Earth. It's not going to happen though, since Al has too much money, power and prestige at stake on his own theories.

Meanwhile, David loaned me Soros book to peruse as I turned in for the night.....I took it, laid down and without further ado, fell sound asleep, here in the beautiful hills over Boulder. And I slept like a baby, even with a book on nouveau economic theory on the foot of my bed....er, futon.

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I've been coming through Boulder, Colorado for decades now on my way to Wyoming. It's a great place to begin to get acclimatized to the higher elevations of the Rockies. I have long-time good friends and colleagues here that I met in Washington, D.C. doing conservation work in the eighties and early nineties and so it's always interesting and challenging to be back, especially since I've become a dreaded conservative.

In many ways, I'm considered a heretic since I've jumped off the band wagon of man made global warming and the extreme need of social engineering through government regulation and judicial fiat. While I don't dispute that we may indeed be in warming trend, I have taken a different path towards so-called solutions.

This change has been difficult for them and for me. For a while, we all distanced from one another and just didn't talk about it. In the meantime, I accidentally made other friends in Colorado who happened to be conservatives (in Evergreen and now Grand Junction where I'm also going for short visits before arriving in Wyoming) and love connecting with them here too.

My liberal friends and I ran into each other at a conservation weekend in D.C. about two years ago, sat down and talked and decided to stop letting politics and the environment get in the way of our enjoying the friendship we've had for so long. In many ways our paths have diverged since then such that we will never spend gobs of time together like we once did. Still, counting each other as good and ole friends is well worth the efforts on all our parts.

I made it clear I wasn't willing to be harassed over politics etc, and had no intention of doing that to them either---that isn't my nature anyway.

Yesterday, I and the wife of my former conservation colleague, and a good friend in her own right, got together for a climb up Mt. Sanitas early in the morning. It is a dazzlingly good push for me coming from a low altitude but we made it with flying colors. Great fun catching up and talking about our families and mutual friends. On the way down I slipped on some scree and twisted my ankle. She insisted I get a new pair of light weight hiking boots which I did. I

I am now at their home in the hills over looking Boulder nursing a sprained ankle and having a wonderful peaceful time. It's possible to be still friends, but it takes some doing.