The Planning Commission meeting on the Rights of Nature Wednesday June 18 will, we hope, be a non-event. Public testimony will not be taken, but I plan to be at the meeting anyway (est. time mid-afternoon) just to see how it plays out.
Staff has wordsmithed this issue to death, resulting in the following proposed language to be inserted into the Boulder County Comprehensive Plan Environmental Resources Element:
“Acknowledging our responsibility to ensure that naturally-occurring ecosystems and their native species populations continue to exist and flourish in Boulder County, Boulder County will develop conservation and recovery plans for priority Species of Special Concern.”
As far as we’re concerned, Boulder County is already doing that, so this merely makes it official. The media will continue to get it all wrong as they have done since the beginning. The RON people may crow about their success, but I support the final wording because it eliminates the “rights of nature” language and gets rid of an “all” in the original document that would have been impossible to implement.
I’d say we did very well in the end, but it represented a lot of kerfuffle and wasted time.
Now, I hope we can put it behind us and move on.
S