When 'e' meant something else.

• Author: RUNDLES, JEFF

WE USED TO DERIDE ENVIRONMENTALISTS, AND NOW WE ARE ONE

In some ways it's deja vu all over again. In other ways it's simply instructive.

Much of my writing and reporting this winter has focused on the world of e-commerce, and for a long time I was just caught up in the moment, in the Internet, and was just concentrating on the new "e" world.

In the back of my mind, however, there has been this little nagging voice telling me, "You've been here before." Then it struck me. E-business. I had written that word or phrase before, but not for a long time. It was back in another time, when "e" meant something else entirely.

A little over 20 years ago, I was a young reporter assigned to the hot energy beat, and an offshoot of that coverage brought me in contact with the burgeoning "environmental business" movement. E-business, as it were. It wasn't much, mind you, because at the time "environmental" was a dirty, liberal word and even the mention of it in the same sentence with "business" bordered on the blasphemous. There was talk of clean air and clean water and environmental protection, but these were all codes words for anti-business. They were bandied about by tree-huggers and whale lovers and all manner of people who would undermine capitalism as we knew it.

The big thing back then was, of course, solar power, and the sitting president, Jimmy Carter, came out to Colorado to dedicate the radical Solar Energy Research Institute in Golden, and a bunch of us were invited to have lunch with him at Rick's Cafe in Cherry Creek, because that establishment used a solar hot water system.

Most people just wanted the environmental movement -- not to mention Jimmy Carter -- to just go away, and in many practical ways they both did.

But someone once said that the most powerful force on earth is an idea whose time has come, and much power has obviously come to bear in 22 years. Back then you could literally see the air in Denver, and I don't just mean the brown cloud. There were days when the air in front of you could be touched, and it could stain your clothes. In 1979, for example, the State Air Quality Control Commission declared emergencies on 58 days because the level of carbon monoxide in the air exceeded...