Thirty-Five Years Ago This Week: Gloria Gonzales Roemer, finance and outreach director for the Denver County Republican Party, announced that she would be seeking the GOP’s nomination to unseat incumbent Democratic U.S. Rep. Pat Schroeder for election to the 1st Congressional District.

Roemer told The Colorado Statesman that it was her strong background in business and her intimate knowledge of the city of Denver that was vital to ensuring Denver’s prominence in the global economy.

“Small business is the backbone of the Denver economy,” Roemer said. “Government needs to provide an atmosphere in which it can flourish. Job creation not only helps the economy, but it keeps families together.”

Roemer said that she was also driven to seek election because of her deep rooted concern for the Hispanic community including the school dropout rate, the skyrocketing number of business and home foreclosures, an increasing tide of gang violence and the lack of funding for social programs.

“One good example is the Headstart Program, for which Denver received the lowest funding of any urban area,” Roemer said. “Someone needs to take Denver’s concerns to Washington and find a solution to our current economic and social programs. I will do just that.”

Schroeder, first elected in 1973, was serving her fourth term in the U.S. House.

In other news, “What the world needs is to develop an environmental ethic,” Gov. Roy Romer said at the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ panel event to discuss the question: “Is Environmental Protection More Talk Than Action.”

“We have been operating with a frontier ethic — one based on taming the land,” Romer said. “Now we have to change and concentrate on developing a stewardship of the planet.”

Romer was joined by Jean Michael Cousteau, vice president of the Cousteau Society, and former Sen. Gaylord Nelson, D-WI, who was one of the main organizers of the first Earth Day in 1970.

To support a better stewardship of the planet, Romer called for packaging products in materials that were ‘environmentally benign’, solar cars, fluorescent lighting and the building of energy efficient houses.

“There can be a balance between economic and environmental concerns,” Romer said. “But, as in the case of the Rocky Flats nuclear plants near Boulder — the environment must come first. Rocky Flats should never have been built so close to Denver in the first place.”

While deeply supportive of environmental protection policies, Romer also warned that legislatures must tread carefully as they set about crafting regulations to ensure that they were both reasonable and enforceable.

“We have to be careful about making regulations that create criminals,” Romer said.

Nelson said he couldn’t agree more with Romer and because concern for the environment was a political issue, it had to be approached through the political arena. Nelson advocated for a new school curriculum from kindergarten through high school in order to teach children about the environment

“The governed have to understand what is happening to the planet,” Nelson said. “If people destroy something that is made by man they are known as vandals. But when they destroy something irreplaceable that is made by God, we call them developers.”

“There is a critical need to restructure all levels of society,” Cousteau argued. “We have to guarantee a pension system for all people so they don’t feel they must have 10 or 12 children in order to have one survive to care for them in their old age.”

Rachael Wright is the author of several novels including The Twins of Strathnaver, with degrees in Political Science and History from Colorado Mesa University, and is a contributing writer to Colorado Politics, the Colorado Springs Gazette and the Denver Gazette.