Yesterday, one of the front page stories here highlighted US News and World Report’s livability rankings for all 50 states. Being rather happy with Colorado and not really thinking there’s any place I’d rather live in these 50 states, I like to see Colorado rank highly in these kinds of stories — the only drawback I see is when Colorado is ranked highly, more people come to the state, it becomes more crowded and the things that I like about Colorado tend to be affected in a negative way.
Colorado ranked overall 10th on the list.
Here are the individual rankings for Colorado (out of 50 states)
Healthcare: 12
Education: 11
Economy: 1 (all those MJ businesses doncha know)
Infrastructure: 8
Opportunity: 28 (wait, what?)
Fiscal Stability: 29 (not so good)
Crime and Corrections: 29 (we have a Supermax and we’re the destination of choice for criminals like Blagoyovich and other inmates). We also have far too many guns being shot off, but can’t most states say this?
Natural Environment: 31
That last one was the one that really surprised me. Colorado, with all these national parks, wildernesses, open spaces and Wild and Scenic rivers and highways, was worse than 60% of the other states for our Natural Environment? Fortunately, the article gave a couple more breakdowns.
Among the measures used to evaluate states' natural environments are drinking water quality, urban air quality and total toxic chemical pollution per square mile. The ranking also considers how much each state puts its citizens at risk for long-term, chronic health effects from pollution.
For air and water quality, Colorado ranked 44th. This is the measure of:
This ranking measures the number days with poor air quality and violations against drinking water systems.
That means only six states had worse air and water quality than Colorado does. I have been noticing the brown/gray cloud over the front range cities when I come down from the mountains, but I still find it hard to believe that nearly every state but ours has better air quality and water quality. Are they measuring solely in the the Denver metro or out on the plains by Greeley when the gas fields and the feedlots are suppressed under a thermal inversion (granted, that’s where half the people in the state live)? Are they measuring the water quality in the Las Animas river? Or the Platte river downhill from the feedlots of Greeley and the farms and fracking sites of the plains?
Those six states that were worse? Arizona, Delaware, Utah, Alaska, Oklahoma and Maine, in that order. I do not believe states, especially Alaska and Maine, are that polluted. New Jersey, for example, has a ranking of 5th for air quality. Can you imagine just how polluted Alaska’s air and water must be to rank more than 40 spots behind New Jersey? I’m just not buying this.
Colorado fared slightly better in the other category — pollution. Colorado ranked 20th in overall pollution, which supposedly measures:
This ranking assesses toxic chemical pollution and the long-term, chronic health effects of that pollution.
I moved from Denver, which has pollution, yes, to Estes Park, on the border of Rocky Mountain National Park where the water department says they have to add material to the water to make it dirty enough for any bacteria and other pollutants to actually clump together so the filters can take it from the water (iow, the water is so clean it needs to be polluted to make the cleaning process work). And the air — oh boy does the air smell fresh and clean up here.
I do not accept these results — not because I know otherwise, but because I doubt that these ways of measuring environmental quality effectively measure the condition of the states. I will not go beyond the statement here, because I do not want US News to suddenly change and put Colorado in their top 10 in environment, as that will also cause the overall ranking to move higher and more people will come to Colorado (y’all know how influential this report is, right?). So, I’ll just go outside, breathe in the clear, cold air, drink my clear, clean Rocky Mountain water, and be glad this summer will only bring about 6 million people to the area to enjoy Rocky Mountain National Park and the surrounding national forest land.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the rankings, on the snow we’ve been having every day of this past weekend through today, and whatever else strikes your fancy this Monday. The floor is yours.