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SOULÉ AND BELNAP ENERGIZE COLORADO PLATEAU CONFERENCE

More than 120 people attended the 11-13 March meeting of SCB's Colorado Plateau Chapter in Prescott, Arizona, USA. Attendees from the four states on the Colorado Plateau were engaged by Michael Soulé's opening plenary address, in which he described several epiphanies during his career as a conservation biologist and a human being. These culminated with the insight that the three life-affirming movements (humanism, animal welfare, and biocentrism) each are motivated by compassion for life (or part of life), and that the success of each movement will require expansion of its compassion to include the foci of the other two movements. The conference closed with a stirring address by Jayne Belnap (the "Queen of Crusts"), who argued that the Hindu-Taoist-Buddhist virtue of non-attachment is the key to remaining, sane, optimistic, and joyous as a conservation advocate. This attitude also will make the activist more effective--an irony given that the activist is not attached to the effects of her actions! Jayne's nimble way of presenting paradox, and her frank acknowledgment of the inevitable cycle of backsliding and re-learning, earned her a standing ovation.

Between these two plenary addresses, concurrent sessions addressed various conservation issues on the Colorado Plateau. Each session consisted of three or four short presentations from invited speakers, followed by a half-hour discussion among all participants. This less-frantic, more-interactive format was enormously popular. Each participant also attended one of several afternoon field trips. I attended the "Deep Time" hike, in which Lon Abbott explained the 3.5 billion year geological history of the Colorado Plateau in three hours. I learned more of that history than in my dozen backpacking trips into the Grand Canyon (which largely reflects a tectonically boring 500 million year subset of the big picture). Participants claimed the other field trips (from grasslands to agroecology) were just as rewarding, but I find that hard to believe.

Our conference was the first external event to be held in Prescott College's new Crossroads Center. Although the facility was only three weeks old, all of the parts worked well. The outstanding food included salads made from local wild plants. During an evening social, Chapter President Tom Fleishner played drums with the Moving Edge Ensemble, whose set gave way to a free-for-all drum session to end the gathering.

This was our Chapter's fourth general meeting (following meetings in November 2001 and 2003 in Flagstaff and an April 2004 weekend in Marble Canyon). At the Members' Meeting in Prescott, we resolved to co-convene with the Biennial Conference for Research on the Colorado Plateau in Flagstaff in Novembers of odd-numbered years, and to hold weekend stand-alone gatherings (as at Prescott) elsewhere in Novembers of even-numbered years. We look forward to seeing all Chapter members in Flagstaff from 7-10 November 2005 and we solicit suggestions (to cpc-p@dana.ucc.nau.edu) for meeting locations outside Flagstaff for the first half of November 2006.

Paul Beier

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