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Once upon a time, southwestern Colorado, Telluride in particular, felt like Shangri-la, immune to the man-made and natural disasters that befell the rest of the world. It was one of the real attractions of moving here back in the early 1970s: you felt like you were opting out of the gloom and doom of the 20th century, into a country so far off the map trouble couldn't find it.

If "the center cannot hold," in William Butler Yeats's words, who cared?

The old Chinese saying seemed to still hold true: "The empire falls, but the rivers and mountains remain."

But that was then, and this is now. The Telluride area lost its otherworldly feeling two decades ago, with the horde of Realtors, developers, tourists and second-home owners that flock to every newly-discovered Shangri-la. When a character on "Sex in the City" dropped the town's name a few years ago, old timers like me knew the jig was up. Now we have posers like Ralph Lauren talking about "his ranch outside Telluride." (Ralph's spread is actually in a completely different watershed, the Uncompahgre not the San Miguel, on the wrong side of Dallas Divide), and hundreds of Hollywood types show up on Labor Day weekend every year for the film festival.

Who coulda thunk it, back in 1973, when I told my literary agent in New York that I'd moved to Telluride, and he said, "Tellurude? Tellurade? Is that anywhere near Denver?"

Well, if you think things are as bad as they can get, just wait. In the last couple of years, things have gotten really, seriously grim, in ways no one could have ever dreamed. The pine bark beetle infestation has spread from the Front Range into the San Juan Mountains; now the conifer forests on the ridges overlooking the Valley Floor are scarred with patches of brown-needled dying timber, and the plague shows no sign of waning.

Worse, there's a mysterious new malady afflicting southern Colorado's aspen trees; according to forestry experts, whole stands of formerly healthy trees are suddenly giving up the ghost, and nobody really knows why. The phenomenon, called SAD or Sudden Aspen Decline, began in 2004 down on the Dolores River headwaters, south of here, and that's where it's worst; as much as 10 percent of the aspen cover may be afflicted. Now it's showing up here: my old friend Glider Bob Saunders flew over Mill Creek recently, and reported that the aspens on the west side of the drainage looked "anemic" and "sick."

 If the bark beetles kill the evergreens and the aspens succumb to SAD, we're going to be left with mountainsides of scrub brush and erosion gullies, an instant freezedried wasteland. And don?t think it can't happen here. In the Himalayas of Nepal, overpopulation, deforestation and climate change combined to turn lush high altitude rain forests into dust-and-gravel deserts in less than two generations. It happened even faster in Afghanistan. When I hung out with the mujahedin back in the 1980s, their bases along the Pakistan border looked like Robin Hood's hideout in Sherwood Forest, log cabins hidden in the shadows of towering pines, where deer, wolves and monkeys roamed. Twenty years later, the great forests have completely vanished, logged off and hauled away to sawmills in Pakistan; you would never know they were ever there.

 So, why are we so suddenly being faced with environmental disaster here, in what seemed so timeless and pristine 30 years ago? I can't prove it, but I'm betting it has a lot to do with global warming. The same week that the SAD story broke, scientists reported that a chunk of the Arctic ice cap twice the size of England disappeared in a single week; by the end of the century summer sea ice will be 50 percent of what it is now. You would think that visions of the world?s coastal cities submerged by rising seas would bother the leaders of the United States and the other industrialized nations, but not so: instead, the same energy companies whose activities caused the meltdown are already fighting over who will drill for the oil and gas deposits uncovered by the vanished ice.

It's a long way from the melting Poles to the San Juan Mountains, but I'm still betting that our conifers and aspens are in trouble because of the same global warming that's killing the planet's ice caps so quickly. According to the experts, extreme cold spells in the fall and spring kill off pine bark beetle larvae, and rising temperatures allow them to thrive. The jury is still out on what causes SAD, but I have a hunch it's either stress caused by warmer weather or some kind of parasite that thrives on milder seasons. Everyone who lives here knows that winters in the San Juans just ain't what they used to be, and summers are hotter than ever.

 When I moved here 30-plus years ago, I thought I was pulling off the Great Escape; jumping the Great Divide, traveling so far that history and reality couldn't catch me.

Alas, it's turned out that there are no Shangri-las in the 21st century, no place where man-made trouble doesn't reach, and curse the wildest forests in the most distant mountain ranges.

Rob Schultheis is the author of six books: The Hidden West, Bone Games, Night Letters: Inside Wartime Afghanistan, Fools Gold, Waging Peace: A U.S. Army's Special Ops Team's Fight To Rebuild Iraq and The Devil's Teahouse, to be published this winter.