Obama, Clinton Vie for Votes
A New Political Day in Montana: Can The State Matter?
The annual Truman Dinner, organized by the Yellowstone County Democratic Party in Billings, has long been a homegrown affair held in a low-ceilinged conference room in a downtown hotel. Local candidates would mutter for a few moments and then sit to scattered applause. Later, the small, overdressed crowd would browse tables of donated items in a silent auction. A staple of the event was a goofy performance by a retired high school teacher named Jack Johnson, who would dress like Harry Truman and deliver one of the former president's famous speeches.
It was a great forum, in a kitschy sort of way, for Montana's citizen-legislature-in-the-making, but not this year.
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Featured Photo from New West Images
Angel's Landing, Zion National Park, Utah. Photo by Patrick Nelson
See more photos on the New West Images photoblog.
From edible Missoula
Rooted in the Soil
From Edible Missoula
By Neva Hassanein
Over the last decade, a movement to build a vibrant local and regional food system has gained tremendous momentum in Western Montana. As someone involved in this effort, I smile when I step back and look at how many pieces of the localization puzzle have begun to fall into place. While there is much to celebrate, the challenges have become clearer too. In the face of rapid population growth and development, one of the biggest hurdles of all may be saving fertile soil -- the medium in which our local food system must be rooted. Yet, opportunities for innovative and collaborative problem solving present themselves.
"Buy local" seems to be a powerful message in Montana where we tend to have a strong sense of place and a good dose of common sense. But the local food movement is about more than what consumers buy, although that is an important part of the equation. We are literally trying to build a local food economy that can serve and even expand these new markets in terms of production, processing and distribution. Moving toward a system of greater self-reliance when it comes to food -- an essential need -- increases our security, as factors like climate change, food safety, and rising oil prices raise serious questions about the sustainability of the global food system we have come to depend on. To meet these goals, though, we need to protect working landscapes now.
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MICROBREW MONTANA
Glacier Brewing: A Taste of the Wild West
When you drive up the main street of Polson to Glacier Brewing, you get a little flashback to the Wild West. Swinging saloon doors always do that.
The weathered BREWERY sign above the swinging doors helps, too. Later, I found it came from the historic H.S. Gilbert Brewery in Virginia City, which was Montana's first-ever brewery--and where the Virginia City Players still act out a comedy called The Brewery Follies. (The webiste touts the follies as all "satire, nonsense, foolishness and absurdity," so that sounds like something that fits into the Montana Microbrew series, don't you think?)
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From The New West Blog
The WUI and The Western Fire Season
Laura Zuckerman has a pretty comprehensive story today for Reuters that looks at the overall outlook of this summer's Western fire season, with a primer on how more homes in the Wildland Urban Interface (know as the WUI) and the effects of global warming are changing the regional and national, approach to firefighting.
That's not really news to most of us in the West who have watched tactics evolve first from the warfare-like 10 a.m. rule to a realization in the 60s and 70s that fires are natural and in some cases, should be managed, not suppressed. Now though, fire managers stuck trying to balance managing fires for natural benefit and protecting property (and in some cases lives) as more and more homes creep closer to the wildland interface. Throw global warming into the mix and you're also weighing which fires are natural and beneficial to the ecosystem, and which can turn into catastrophic ones that can actually do more harm than good -- in the remote wildlands or in the interface.
Oh, and then there's the question of how to fund all of this.
Zuckerman's story doesn't fully address all the issues hanging out there, but it does raise some of the more important ones and gives some good fodder to think about and discuss as we head into another fire season.
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Understanding the land you live on
A Sense of Place: Microclimates in Your Backyard
In the Intermountain West climate varies – by elevation, aspect, within valleys and even within backyards.
In natural landscapes, the varieties of plants (and where they grow) offer clues to microclimates. But man-made landscapes (like wheat fields and blue grass lawns) “mask” the diversity of climate within. The mask leads landowners to assume that the climate on their property is all the same. They discover their mistake when their plantings fail.
Natural features like elevation, aspect, and wind affect local climate, and therefore your backyard is a microclimate.
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New West Book Review
An American Dream Turned Nightmare: “Desperate Passage”
Desperate Passage: The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West
by Ethan Rarick
Oxford University Press
304 pages, $28
There’s a maxim among travelers that goes something like this: bad trip, good story.
That’s partly why the travails of the Donner Party and its cannibalistic trek across the Wild West – when it really was wild – has become such an iconic part of the history of this region for over a century and a half. It’s hard to have a trip any worse than theirs, trapped in the heavy snows of the Sierra Nevada for the winter eating their dead relatives. Remember that on the family road trip this summer.
If its cannibalistic anticlimax is what we remember best about the Donner Party, though, author Ethan Rarick reaches deeper to uncover a quintessential story of America’s westward expansion, when not just adventurous thrill-seekers but pioneering men, women and children set out across forbidding deserts and mountain ranges for a chance to start over in a new land. In his book Desperate Passage, Rarick deftly re-creates the stories of these pioneers who risked everything for the 19th century version of the American Dream, and lost nearly everything in the pursuit.
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guest column
Building a New and Sustainable Residential Model
About a year ago, a client of mine came to me and asked me to design a house that would have no energy bill -- a "Net Zero House," producing as much energy as it used. During the same year, I found that my energy bill for my own house was beginning to become much more of a burden on our family budget. These two events led me to research energy costs and how those costs are impacting the average American household. It was immediately clear from the research that energy prices are outpacing income and our current way of building houses will create energy bills that will not be sustainable for the average household. [more]
Essay: In The New West magazine
The Family Farm, Version 2.0
I spread my sleeping bag on the floor and crumpled my coat for a pillow. I put the bag where my bed used to be.
The room still smelled the same. Aside from the echo, there was something homey, something warm, the smell of a vanilla candle still lingering in the empty walls. My brother and I were at the now vacant house for the night. It was Thanksgiving, and we wanted to stay somewhere familiar. The land had sold, but the house hadn’t yet, so we would stay the night on the floor in my old bedroom.
Facing me, in the wall, was a small hole about the size of a heel. My brother and I had been fighting about something teenagers fight about and, in a tantrum, my foot connected with the wall. My brother had laughed. I was 16 at the time.
I had forgotten about the hole, hidden by a dresser long ago. As I ran my fingers over it one more time, my brother walked in, shaking his head. He always told me I was too sentimental about this place. It’s just a house, just a farm. They’re just walls. It’s just dirt.
He didn’t believe it either.
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Boulder Becomes 'Smart Grid City'
The Grid Gets a Brain
If all goes as planned Boulder will become the world’s first “fully integrated Smart Grid City,” says regional utility Xcel Energy. Envisioned as the first true innovation in electricity distribution in close to a century, the Smart Grid movement is essentially developing ways to bring digital Internet-based technology to power lines, giving utilities and business and residential customers greater control and efficiency in the flow of electricity.
Ultimately, once the Smart Grid takes over a significant chunk of the existing power distribution infrastructure, utilities and governments will be able to use the power of the Web to better manipulate how electricity is generated and delivered.
In other energy news: Democrats ready populist energy legislation; Colorado eyes fine print on electricity bills; and O&G executives foresee oil-price downturn by the end of the year.
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New West Book Review
Rigged: Alexandra Fuller’s “The Legend of Colton H. Bryant”
The Legend of Colton H. Bryant
By Alexandra Fuller
The Penguin Press
202 pages, $23.95
In her extraordinary new book, The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, Alexandra Fuller does a cruel thing. She makes readers fall in love with a Wyoming boy in the space of a few pages, carries us through his life, which leads inevitably to a dangerous job on an oil rig, and makes us stand as witnesses to his end, however much we wish we could turn our heads away. I still feel heartsick a few weeks after finishing it. Fuller writes with simple grace and a cowboy twang, taking a rather unconventional approach for nonfiction by composing the book of the private conversations and intimate scenes that are the turning points of Bryant's short life, and though she must have spent months with his family and friends, the author stays offstage, disappearing into a bracing, honest voice that is motherly in its tenderness toward her subject.
Fuller will discuss her book at the Tattered Cover (LoDo) in Denver on Monday, May 12 (7:30 p.m.), at Borders in Portland on May 13 (7 p.m.), and in Evanston, WY at the Uinta Library on May 16 (5 p.m.)
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timberlands and real estate
Missoula County Asks Mark Rey to Halt Plum Creek Talks
Wednesday the Missoula County Commissioners sent a letter to Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey asking him to drop consideration of the forest road easement amendment until the documents proposed for amendment have been identified and made available to the public.
The commissioners wrote: "...the failure to identify, review, and properly reference the easements to be amended will make the proposed Easement Amendment legally void, and the process leading up to your expected approval fatally flawed."
Rey, overseer of the Forest Service, said during a meeting last week with officials from western Montana that he would not make the paperwork available and invited a lawsuit, which appears imminent.
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