Climate change, immigration, the Dolores River corridor and artificial intelligence (AI) were among many topics discussed by Colorado Sen. John Hickenlooper when he came to Cortez for a town hall on Aug. 28.
Following the town hall, which featured numerous questions from an audience of about 150, Hickenlooper gave an interview in private to KSJD and the Journal.
During the town hall, Susan Hackanson, executive director of the Adult Education Center in Durango and Cortez, asked him about immigration reform. She said the center sees people from all over the world, many escaping war or extreme poverty. She said it is “incredibly hard and expensive and time-consuming” to immigrate to this country legally. “It is brutal,” she said.
People have to be in the country for 150 days before they can even apply for work permits, she said, but how they are supposed to get by during that period is not clear.
Hickenlooper spoke about the bipartisan immigration-reform bill that was introduced in Congress this spring, a bill that he said no one loved but that represented compromise. “Friends on the other side of the aisle shuddered at it, but my Democratic friends had things they couldn’t stomach.”
However, it failed, partially because of concerns among some Democrats, partially because it was torpedoed by Donald Trump, who urged his supporters in Congress not to pass it because he feared it would hurt his chances in the presidential campaign if immigration reform happened before the election.
Hickenlooper said the issue of immigration is complex. “How many immigrants can we take in? How do we decide?”
He said part of the answer will have to involve addressing climate change, because that is the reason many people are being forced to leave their homelands.
“We have to be the solution,” he said of climate change.
Several people asked the senator about possible protections for the Dolores River corridor. At the river’s lower end, stakeholders have worked for more than a decade on legislation that would create a national conservation area on about 68,000 acres in Dolores, San Miguel, and Dolores counties. Such legislation was introduced in Congress in 2022 but has since stalled.
At the northern end, a broad coalition of environmental and recreational groups is advocating for President Biden to designate a national monument in Mesa and Montrose counties. Many locals vigorously oppose that idea, and a proposal for an NCA in those counties has been put forth as an alternative to a monument.
Hickenlooper said the river corridor contains “some of the most beautiful terrain I’ve ever seen,” adding that although it isn’t as large as the Grand Canyon, in many ways it is equally beautiful. He said it “absolutely needs preservation” but that a congressionally created NCA would be greatly preferable to a monument created by presidential proclamation.
From the audience, Silverton Sun Bear House Whitehorse, a member of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, said the corridor is of great importance to Utes. “For centuries, this land has been a cradle of Ute culture,” he said.
During the interview, Hickenlooper, a Democrat, reiterated his belief that an NCA would be preferable to a national monument.
“An NCA would be better by far,” he said. He added, “No one’s ever reversed an NCA.”
When Trump was president, he drastically shrank the size of Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument, which had been designated by President Obama. When Biden became president, he restored Bears Ears to its original size.
“AN NCA has got to be our first priority,” Hickenlooper said. “It’s our best shot. If we don’t get that, we can get a monument done.”
During the town hall, a woman who spoke in favor of the monument designation said time is running out, as Biden will be in office only until Jan. 20 of next year. Hickenlooper said she was making the assumption that Trump would win the coming election and that he was more optimistic about the chances of the Democrats winning.
At any rate, he said, Biden is “not going to make that designation unless we have tried everything to have a bipartisan solution.”
During his interview, Hickenlooper said the Dolores River is not foremost on Biden’s mind these days.
“No one is talking to him about a monument,” he said. The President has far bigger issues to deal with, including Gaza and Israel, Ukraine, and immigration. The Dolores River, he said, “is way down the food chain.”
Hickenlooper returned to the problem of climate change several times during the evening. “The consequences are so staggering, but they are incremental,” he said in the interview, meaning the topic doesn’t receive the attention it deserves.
He said the developed world’s appetite for fossil-fueled energy entails taking advantage of less-developed nations.
“If we don’t worry about it, if we allow the planet to warm, we’re taking our garbage and heaping it on people who have less to do with it,” he said. “Other people deserve the basic energy of a better life, like hot water to cook with and to take a shower.”
He said climate change raises philosophical issues, such as population. Many nations are seeing dramatic drops in birth rates, which some economists and leaders see as alarming. “Can we survive if the population stops growing?” he asked, explaining that he believes the slowing of population growth can be beneficial.
He said the average number of total births per woman in Mexico is now less than 2. “When I was a kid, it was 7 or 8.” (According to the World Bank Group, the number of total births per woman in Mexico in 1960, when Hickenlooper would have been 8, was 6.8.)
“The whole family can have a much higher quality of life” if they can keep their families at a size they can handle, Hickenlooper said, praising the fact that women now have a bigger voice in deciding when to have a family and how large it should be.
He noted that there are countries such as Japan where leaders believe the nation is “doomed” if birth rates continue to decline. In such countries, births are not out-numbering deaths, so the population is declining. At the same time, it is growing more elderly, leading to labor shortages and worries about whether the young will be able to shoulder the financial burden of supporting a large number of senior citizens.
But Hickenlooper said the rise of artificial intelligence may mean that in a decade, there will be job shortages rather than labor shortages. Not having a constantly growing population of young job-seekers could make it less challenging to deal with the situation.
He said there had been numerous good questions at the town hall. “Every time I listen, like tonight, I learn,” he said. “I learn a bit more about the community.”
Hickenlooper also spoke about why he believes an isolationist approach is wrong for the United States.
“The world has grown smaller and smaller,” he said. “We’re connected and affected by the activities of others.”
