Western Colorado University’s Center for Public Lands is a hub for cross-boundary land management and study. This training and resource center brings together students, land managers, and communities with a goal to develop creative responses to contemporary land management challenges. We are an educational and community-serving institution working at the nexus of service, science and scholarship.

The Clark School seeks funding for the Center for Cold-Climate Food Security to amplify experiential educational opportunities around high-alpine and cold-climate food production, while addressing hunger in the Gunnison Valley. The Center would include a Food Systems Minor and a complex of substantial new infrastructure, including passive-solar greenhouses and a commercial kitchen. The Center’s living laboratory would build on the Clark School’s considerable momentum around student-driven efforts to investigate and experiment with sustainable food solutions. Partnering with food producers and providers throughout the region, Western students would be empowered to help end hunger and food waste in Gunnison and beyond.

Cultures around the globe have long looked to the mountains for inspiration. Mountain regions provide the basis for human livelihood and ecosystem services, making up twenty percent of the earth, thirteen percent of human communities, up to eighty percent of water consumed by humans, and twenty-five percent of biodiversity. Yet these pinnacles of vision and sources of life are in danger, with glaciers melting and over thirty percent of mountain people suffering from food insecurity. In this era of climate disruption, it is time to look again to the world’s mountain communities as beacons of a more resilient story, stretching from the planet’s headwaters to all communities downstream.