In The NoCo

Although it is technically still winter — at least until March 19 — the flowers will soon be in bloom at Colorado State University’s Trial Garden. That is where many of the flower varieties hitting garden stores in the coming weeks undergo a rigorous, real-world testing process to see which varieties are resilient enough for Northern Colorado.

The garden was started back in the 1970s on a small plot of land near the old stadium, with only around 100 plant varieties. It's now one of the largest university trial gardens in the nation – with hundreds of varieties and tens of thousands of plants.

"It's just rows of rainbows. There are so many different colors out there," said KUNC's Emma VandenEinde. She covered the final rounds of plant judging last summer.

As spring approaches and sunny days wait in the wings, we are listening back to a conversation with VandenEinde about her time in the garden.

A national childcare shortage has its grip on Northern Colorado. It is affecting not only parents trying to hold down jobs, but also communities more broadly and local economies. The need is so great, in fact, that in February,  Larimer County had to freeze enrollment in its state-subsidized childcare program because it ran out of funds.

“Childcare is this cyclical, community issue, where we need a workforce for the childcare sector and we need the childcare sector for our workforce,” said Joy Sullivan, president of the United Way of Larimer County. “So it's this, mutually symbiotic relationship, so to speak, that we hear from employers all the time who cannot hire good staff because they can't find childcare.”

Sullivan is working to raise awareness about the cascading effects of the local childcare shortage and what needs to be done to ease the problem. In the first of a two-part series, Erin O’Toole sat down with Sullivan to get a better grasp on the issue. 

People of color in Denver breathe some of the area’s worst air. New research from the University of Colorado Boulder not only shows that the air in some neighborhoods is more polluted than others, it also links that disparity to an outlawed practice called redlining. In the 1930s and 40s, lenders and governments used color-coded maps to identify areas where people of color lived and deny those residents mortgages. The practice was outlawed in the 1960s but many of the social, health, and economic impacts persist today.

Lead researcher Alex Bradley, a chemistry doctoral student, sat down with In The NoCo’s Erin O’Toole to discuss the connection between redlining and poor air quality in Denver neighborhoods.

Today is Super Tuesday — traditionally the biggest day for primary elections and caucuses across the nation. In Colorado, unaffiliated voters can cast a ballot for either the Republican or Democratic candidates.

For more on the election and how KUNC is working to engage Coloradans in the democratic process, KUNC statehouse reporter Lucas Brady Woods joined In The NoCo’s Erin O’Toole. In today’s episode, we also hear from Nick DeSalvo, student body president at Colorado State University. DeSalvo is studying political science at CSU and already has experience running for local office. When DeSalvo was 17, he ran for the Pueblo West Metro Board of Directors. Now he is helping to inform some of KUNC’s election engagement efforts with young voters. Spoiler — he says there is a lot of work to be done to get more young people to participate in the democratic process.

In the West, two elements play an outsized role in our quality of life — fire and water. We know wildfire is part of the natural cycle of life here, yet climate change has intensified fires, making them deadlier, more destructive and more frequent. Meanwhile, our Western snowpack determines just how much water we have available to sustain our people, plants and animals. The relationship between the two is actually complex and it is central to Professor Anne Nolin’s work at University of Nevada, Reno. 

She joined In The NoCo’s Erin O’Toole to unravel some of those complexities and what they mean for us in Northern Colorado.

Just off Highway 34 outside of Greeley sits a ghost town dotted with a couple of deteriorating buildings and a sign. In the early 1900s this area was home to Dearfield. The thriving agricultural community founded by O.T. Jackson was Colorado’s largest Black homesteading site. Settlers grew corn, winter wheat, melons and strawberries and the community enjoyed great prosperity until drought, the Dust Bowl, and the Great Depression forced most to leave and seek work elsewhere.

“I think it's been very, very important to have Dearfield be an example of what Black people could do and have done – and the future of what Black people could do,” said George Junne, a professor of Africana Studies at University of Northern Colorado who has studied Dearfield for decades. 

Junne sat down with In The NoCo’s Erin O’Toole to discuss Dearfield’s significance. Their conversation comes on the heels of an announcement by the National Park Service that it is studying Dearfield for potential inclusion in the park system.

Wolves are a contentious topic in the West, especially in Colorado where they were recently reintroduced. They are also central to a new 20-year study looking at their removal and reintroduction in Yellowstone National Park and what that means for disruptions to the food web. 

Tom Hobbs and his research team at Colorado State University found that reintroducing apex predators like wolves failed to restore the ecosystem to its original state. Still, he cautions against drawing certain conclusions from the research.

“I really don't want our work to be cast as sort of anti-wolf, to use it to say, ‘Well, it wasn't a good idea to reintroduce wolves.’ That's not what we're showing at all. What we're showing is that the benefits of a complete food web — that includes large carnivores like wolves — can take a long time to be realized.”

Hobbs joined In The NoCo’s Erin O’Toole to discuss his research – and what it could mean here in Colorado.

In 2021, Nicki Gonzales became Colorado’s first Latina state historian. History is a lifelong vocation for the Regis University professor – one that has helped to inform her own identity, and honor her family’s legacy.

"When I was state historian, I would dedicate my presentations and my activities to my paternal grandmother, who I never met, but who was a single, mother of three boys here in Denver,” Gonzales said. “Her family, they were miners and they worked in the agricultural fields of Northern Colorado, Boulder County. And I think the most satisfying thing has been being able to honor my family's history."

Gonzales’s work has helped to provide us with a fuller picture of Colorado’s cultural landscape, uncovering state history and acknowledging its sometimes problematic details. She will give remarks at an event Wednesday, Feb. 28 at History Colorado, during the launch of a new curriculum for K-12 students focused on Denver's Chicano movement. That starts at 2:00 p.m.

Gonzales joined In The NoCo's Erin O'Toole to reflect on her search for identity and deeper meaning, starting with her own family history.

This is an encore of our podcast from Sep. 22, 2023.

One in 27 students in Poudre School District is experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity. That’s a statistic that KUNC senior editor and reporter Leigh Paterson recently stumbled on. Her reporting on youth mental health had suggested there was a problem, but this number told her the issue was more urgent than she’d thought.

“It is on the radar of all of the school districts that I interact with and it is just a very difficult problem to solve because it involves so many overlapping social and systemic issues,” Paterson said.

She directed the new KUNC series “Unseen but Everywhere,” airing Mondays on KUNC this month. It brings together the lived experiences of unhoused and housing-insecure students. The reporters who spent time with those students — Rae Solomon, Emma VandenEinde and Lucas Brady-Woods — joined In The NoCo’s Erin O’Toole to discuss what they learned.

Museum curator Acoma Gaither has been a student of Black history for as long as she can remember. She’s pored over rich historical accounts of Black life in America’s North, South and East. But she says a lot of the history of Black life in our state still needs to be uncovered.   

“And that's what really drew me to Colorado,” Gaither said. “I think there's so much opportunity and learning about that Western lens in terms of Black history. It's rich with a lot of hidden stories and I think the spirit of Black folks who came out here to farm and homestead — it takes a certain personality. So that kind of story and spirit really drew me out here.”

Gaither recently moved to Denver from Minnesota to work as History Colorado’s associate curator of Black history. She sat down with In The NoCo’s Erin O’Toole to discuss some of the untold stories she wants to uncover here.