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THE AUDACITY OF POPE

Sierra Club President Carl Pope has one word for Democrats: Energy.

The environmental organization endorsed Sen. Barack Obama early on for president, and Pope will be on hand at the Democratic National Convention in Denver rallying Democrats around key environmental issues. Chief among them will be energy issues.

“If the slogan in 1992 was ‘it’s the economy, stupid,’ this election, the message is ‘energy is the economy, stupid,” Pope said in an interview with NewWest.Net. [more]

Diary of a Mad Voter: Joan McCarter

McCain set off a firestorm last week when he suggested that the 86 year old agreement that allocates the scarce resource of the Colorado River among the seven states of the Colorado Basin "obviously needs to be renegotiated" because of "new realities of high growth, of greater demands on a scarcer resource," he didn't mean it should, you know, be renegotiated, really, to make sure that the high growth states of California, Nevada, and Arizona got more of that scarce resource. But that's sure how it sounded to the people of Colorado. [more]

New West Book Review

How Far is the Ocean From Here
By Amy Shearn
Shaye Areheart Books, 307 pages, $23

Amy Shearn's surefooted debut novel How Far is the Ocean From Here transports readers to the "godforsaken fleabag" Thunder Lodge motel in the middle of a stretch of desert "somewhere between West Texas and East New Mexico," the last place you'd think the nine-month-pregnant protagonist, Susannah Prue, would want to be in high summer. In the time-honored tradition followed by those who've made a hash of their lives, Susannah is fleeing west. She is serving as the surrogate mother for a wealthy couple, and with the due date two weeks away, she impulsively drives out of Chicago and fetches up at the Thunder Lodge. [more]

A amateur Crow historian has completed a history of a pivotal -- and mystical -- all-Indian battle in which his tribe defended its homeland.

The historian is Elias Goes Ahead, a storyteller and lifelong historian.

"I was brought up among natural historians," Goes Ahead told me at a table amidst teepees and cottonwoods at an encampment at Crow Fair, his tribe's annual powwow near Crow Agency on the sprawling reservation of the same name south of Billings. "Ever since I was a little boy, they told me stories, passed on their knowledge to me because I was the one who listened." [more]

PICKENS' CHARGE

Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens is a geologist by training, but lately he’s been testing the wind. The real wind, and the political winds.

Pickens looks at the eastern edge of the Rockies and sees a massive generator – a wind corridor that could host thousands of wind turbines and satisfy a big chunk of our nation’s energy needs. [more]

multimedia

Missoula is home to a plethora of artists who express themselves in a variety of media. Alexia Beckerling is venturing into the studios and performance venues of a handful of local artists and bringing back multimedia glimpses into their creative worlds.

Meet Nan Bovingdon, a Missoula folk musician who brings a musical perspective to America's history by playing a variety of antique instruments. [more]

MICROBREW MONTANA

As near as I can figure, after visiting 20 of Montana's 23 microbreweries, Montana Brewing is unique. The company's owners have offered craft beer fans something that comes about as close to a brewpub as possible under Montana's archaic liquor laws.

Instead of a small brewery with a small taproom, which is the case with most Montana breweries, Montana Brewing is three businesses in one--a microbrewery, restaurant and sports bar, all separated but connected, right in downtown Billings. [more]

MCCAIN UNBUTTONED

No tie, collar unbuttoned, reclining comfortably in his chair, Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain looked like the straight-shooting Western politician his longtime fans adore and his handlers try to muzzle. Appearing in famously-liberal, fabulously-wealthy Aspen, Colo., McCain punctuated his tough talk on Russia and Iraq with wit. When audience members groaned that his $3.75-a-gallon-gas reference was well below Aspen prices, McCain chuckled.

“That’s the classic Democratic approach: soak the risk,” he joked.

Apologizing to the crowd members on the left side of the audience for turning his back to them, he joked they were probably all liberal Democrats anyway. Not so, though. Chatting at the Aspen Institute think tank with its CEO Walter Isaacson in front of a crowd of over 700, mostly supporters, McCain received resounding applause throughout his talk. Despite Aspen’s cachet among left-leaning glitterati, its wealthy second-homeowners are tilting the town rightward, and for many of them, McCain’s maverick style has been appealing for years, even when it wasn’t striking much of a chord with most voters.

For all the talk of that straight-shootin’ Western political model offering hope to the Democratic Party, it is ironic that this Arizona senator long struggled with the GOP using the same sort of approach. [more]

Energy and Environment

On a 160 acre parcel near Meeker, Colorado, Shell Energy Corporation is trying to efficiently extract the hydrocarbons from a layer of rock known as the Mahogany Shale. It's been tried before, many times, dating back to when cowboys noticed that if you used certain dark rocks in your fire ring, they'd catch fire. But Shell is taking the effort to a new level, spurred by record energy prices, accommodating federal land managers, and a willingness to radically evolve the technologies for extracting fossil energy from the earth.

It will take ten to fifteen years to discover if the experiment will produce economically viable amounts of oil and natural gas, or if the EROEI – the energy returned on energy invested- will balance out, but the technologies involved in the experiment are so new that in the course of operations, some entirely different process may yet reveal itself, drawing the elusive genie of energy from the thousands of square miles of ancient seabed algae.

Shale oil conjures images of vast, highly destructive mining processes, and of the massive, government-subsidized projects that came to a crashing halt on so-called Black Sunday, May 2nd, 1982, when cratering oil prices led Exxon pull out of its operations in Colorado.

The Shell experiment, though, is very different. [more]

'A Candidate Who Happens To Be Black'

Nov. 4's 85 days away, the dog days are upon us and, like a dog worrying at an old sore, the presidential campaign has suddenly come down to one tired and tiresome issue: race.

In Colorado this November, voters will decide on an anti-affirmative-action measure that would ban the use of race in college admissions, government hiring and contracting. The presence of that referendum on the same ballot as Barack Obama's historic candidacy, writes Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, on The Wall Street Journal's Web site, could generate "heated rhetoric" and "sharply divide the electorate along racial lines." [more]

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