The Colorado Sun surveyed five candidates for Colorado governor about wolves, hunting, fishing, wildlife, and natural resource management, with the next governor set to inherit a state where wolf reintroduction has been paused amid clashes with ranchers and where rural and urban Coloradans remain deeply divided. The next governor will also appoint members to the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission, which the Sun says has been roiled by political fights and concerns from hunters and anglers that their priorities are being pushed aside.
Wolves are the hook, but they are not the whole story. This is a test of whether Colorado’s next governor understands the state beyond the Front Range donor brunch circuit. Rural Colorado is not a side quest. It is where water, food, energy, wildlife, land stewardship, hunting traditions, and a whole lot of consequences actually live.
The Bullet Point Brief
- The Sun says the wolf reintroduction program has been paused amid escalating clashes with ranchers, while Colorado’s gray wolf population has dwindled to levels state wildlife officials say are not self-sustainable. That is not a bumper sticker problem. That is a management problem.
- The next governor will appoint Colorado Parks and Wildlife commissioners. That matters because CPW is supposed to manage wildlife, not host an ideological cage match between people who live with the consequences and people who like the concept art.
- Michael Bennet pointed to his broader platform on forest health, wildfire risk, water, and protecting Colorado’s outdoors. That is fine as far as campaign language goes, but rural Colorado needs more than “please visit my website” energy.
- Phil Weiser emphasized resilience, coordination, wildfire mitigation, the Colorado Water Plan, backup energy generation, and local storage. Better specificity, but the question remains whether “coordination” means actual partnership with rural communities or another meeting where Denver talks slowly at people in boots.
- The Republicans were more direct on the rural trust issue. Barbara Kirkmeyer said politics are blocking practical stewardship. Scott Bottoms criticized top-down mandates and said decision-making should return to local communities and people who work the land. Victor Marx called for active forest management, serious water policy, and locally informed wildlife decisions.
My Bottom Line
The wolf fight is really about trust.
Ranchers, hunters, outfitters, county officials, and wildlife managers are not props in someone else’s wildlife documentary. They are the people who get the phone call when livestock is killed, when a hunt is disrupted, when compensation is slow, when local economies take the hit, and when state leaders discover that slogans do not mend fences.
Colorado’s next governor needs to answer plainly. How will wolves be managed? How will ranchers be compensated? What happens when depredation repeats? Who gets listened to first, the county living with the problem or the activist group with the better email list? Will hunting and fishing be respected as conservation tools, or treated like embarrassing relics by people who learned wildlife management from a yard sign?
This is not anti-wolf. It is pro-reality.
Colorado can support conservation and still respect property rights. It can restore species and still defend public safety. It can care about wildlife and still recognize that hunters and anglers fund and sustain a huge part of conservation. It can protect rural economies instead of treating them like theme parks with cattle.
The next governor does not get to govern only the Front Range. Rural Colorado is not flyover country between donor events and mountain selfies. It is the test of whether a candidate can govern the whole damn state.
Source: Colorado Sun
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