A Yale Forestry School student from Colorado, where Yale's investment in the environmentally devastating Baca ranch scheme finally ended in response to sustained outcry in Colorado and Connecticut, calls on Yale to meet its full commitment to compensate the community and to institute the reforms necessary to stop future debacles: In 2002, residents of Colorado found out that Yale endowment money was behind a water-marketing scheme they had spent over $1 million and three years fighting. Yale's money, invested by the mega-hedge fund Farallon in creating a company called Vaca Partners, was used to purchase a stake in the 100,000-acre Baca Ranch in the south-central San Luis Valley. The intent of this partnership was to sell and export the ranch's groundwater to distant urban areas -- a scheme destined to have serious repercussions for the adjacent Great Sand Dunes National Monument. Not only are the Monument's wetlands -- key resting grounds for migratory birds like sandhill cranes -- fed by this water, but the famous dunes themselves are held in place partly by the aquifer. Vaca Partners' funds were also used to fund two cynical 1998 ballot initiatives designed to limit water use by the Valley's ranchers and farmers and enable the private marketing scheme. In this poor and heavily Hispanic rural region, agricultural water supply equates with livelihood. Pumping groundwater away for private profit would put severe stress on the already tenuous economic circumstances of communities in the San Luis region. Residents of these communities had to devote substantial time and financial resources to combating these initiatives. I'd like to be proud to be a student here at Yale, even when I'm back home in Denver. But it's hard to defend the actions of an institution whose closed-door investment strategies have cost Colorado residents millions of dollars, threatened to destroy a symbolically and ecologically important landmark, and nearly caused economic disaster for one of the poorest corners of the state. And it's doubly hard when the University reneges on its commitment to make amends for this sorry situation, as it has done in the past week.