In The New West magazine
Urban Livestock: A Tender Issue
The urban livestock movement can seem more whimsy than necessity, more social gesture than lifestyle. It can be viewed as a protest of the American industrial food system, but also strikes an old instinct: to raise and gather food.
"There is certainly a romantic nature to it," said John Bottelli, a 37-year-old urban parks planner who also owns three chickens. His wife, a cellist, named them after classical composers. "It's also an affordable way to get fresh eggs."
In some cities across the West, the collision of these rural ideals and urban life can be jarring. In Missoula, Mont., the city council spent months debating an urban chicken ordinance last year before finally agreeing to allow residents to keep up to six chickens, no noisy roosters.
In the video at above, NewWest.Net's Anne Medley explores the issue in Missoula.
[more]
In The New West magazine
The Gravel Next Door
Last summer massive gravel trucks rumbled and thundered away the peaceful early morning, every morning, on Paul Matteuci's picturesque riverfront acreage in Montana's Gallatin Valley.
"A county road bisects my property," Matteuci said. "A gravel truck came by about every five minutes from 5 a.m. to dark."
The noise sucked, sure, but the traffic hazard was downright dangerous. The Silicon Valley entrepreneur had found the place appealing, in part, because of the romantic notion that his 4-year-old could run out the front door without being supervised every second.
Gravel is the foundation, literally, of growth. Beds of gravel lie beneath every building, roadway and sidewalk. It's also a main ingredient in concrete. And almost everyone hates proposed gravel pits, as well as the massive trucks that haul the loads. It's one of those wonderful ironies of the West these days. Economics pull growth and gravel together with inexorable force. If hauled more than a few miles, the cartage can easily top the cost of the gravel itself.
Geology plays an important role, too. Glacial moraines and pebbly former riverbeds produce top-notch gravel. We're talking about meadows and valley floors – the closer to a river the better. Just the kind of place guys like Matteuci adore.
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From The New West magazine
Q&A With Bozeman Architect Ralph Johnson
Ralph Johnson is a Bozeman architect, professor and author of Building from the Best of the Northern Rockies.
NW: What will it take for meaningful green designs to get the benefit of large-scale production? You've studied and profiled some innovative projects in the book Building from the Best of the Northern Rockies, but many of them seem, well, pretty similar. Why, for instance, have we never seen anything fundamentally different, like a 200-home straw bale subdivision, popping up on the outskirts of Bozeman?
RALPH: There are a couple reasons why subdivisions look the way they do. Builders want to build what they've built before and sold before. Zoning ordinances where they exist are written to promote the normal. If you're atypical – good or bad – you jump through far more hoops. That takes longer, and time is money. There's also the – 'I don't like the look of that.' And if the banker doesn't like the looks of it, the bank isn't going to give you a loan. That's what it takes – some crazy builder willing to take this up.
[more]
In The New West magazine
Western Outlook: Partly Sunny, With a Chance of RecessionThe economic watchword of the moment may be "recession," but in the upper Mountain West, continued growth is tempering the impact of tight credit markets and the slowdown in residential construction.
In Colorado, energy development and commercial construction as well as investment in the mountain resort areas has offset a weak residential real estate market on the Front Range, said Mark Schweitzer, a Denver-based economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.
"The resort region and the energy region, right next to each other, are intertwined," competing within the same workforce for employees, Schweitzer said.
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In The New West magazine
Robert Struckman: Misfits and Why We Love Them
Back in 1981, some weeks before the start of grade school, a tinker of a man walked out of the Bob Marshall Wilderness with a backpack and dirty clothes and asked me how my luck was.
That summer, like most others of my childhood, my father worked for the U.S. Forest Service. Five of us lived in a one-room, bathroom-free shack on the outskirts of the town of Seeley Lake, Montana.
My luck, as it happened, was great. I was fishing on a bit of a stream no wider than a ditch, yanking brook trout from the water with grasshoppers as bait.
The mountain man sat down beside me. Soon he set up a tent a few hundred yards from our shack, caught a few trout of his own and cooked them in a quick, flavorful stew with reconstituted carrots and powdered vegetables. We wiled away the day, eating and philosophizing. I fished with him for days until he packed up and hiked off.
I had that bearded and thoughtful mountain man in mind in 1999 when I telephoned libraries around the region for an informal survey of hermits and other self-styled castaways for a daily newspaper feature about the culture of the West.
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In The New West magazine
Jonathan Weber: Chasing the West’s Big Story
Not quite three years ago, in the spare bedroom of my home on the outskirts of Missoula, Courtney Lowery and I launched an online publication devoted to the big story of growth and change in the Mountain West. We always envisioned a multi-product company, but NewWest.Net would be at the core. And we think we’ve done pretty well in building a rich publication with an active, engaged community of readers and contributors. The immediacy of the Internet, and the power and flexibility of so-called Web 2.0 tools, has made it possible to create a new kind of publication.
Yet even in the Internet era, there is a lot to be said for old-fashioned print. Over and over again, people have asked us, when are you going to publish in print? And it’s not that these folks are hopeless Luddites, or resistant to change for the sake of it. Rather, they appreciate the power of ink on paper -- a highly flexible, shareable, portable, high-definition technology in its own right.
Although I’ve been involved with print newspapers and magazines for most of my two decades in journalism, it’s been a few years now since I’ve done a magazine, and the past month or so has been an enjoyable reminder of the surprisingly vast differences between print and online publishing.
[more]
From The New West magazine
Design Showcase: Ag Chic
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Jill Baumler's home near Bozeman, a 70-foot-tall grain elevator that once housed up to 28,000 bushels, is part of a new trend -- albeit small -- of rehabilitating tattered artifacts of the West's booming agriculture economy.
"There's a real interest in our past and the things of our past," says Bruce Selyem, the founder of the Country Grain Elevator Historical Society. Restoring churches, schools and barns has been popular for some time, Selyem says, but just in the last decade or so, "the grain elevator has become a symbol of the same thing."
Click here or on the photo above to see Anne Medley's photos from Baumler's home. [more]
Special 5-part Series
A Brief History of ‘Aspenization’
David Frey's off-season journey through some of the Rockies’ premier ski resort towns took him in search of the "next Aspen," whatever that might mean. "Aspenization" is seen as either a blessing or a curse in ski towns and in this five-part series, David sets out to find out which is which in Western towns that, along with their neighbors, have undergone some of the most dramatic recent changes in the West.
As David points out in Part I of the series, these communities also serve as bellwethers as more and more towns become caught up in an economy based less on traditional resources than on lifestyle. It’s not even about skiing anymore. It is about people seeking out a corner of the West that calls to them.
Click below to catch up with the other parts of the series...
Conservation, Development & Class Conflict
NewWest.Net Special Feature: The Ameya Preserve
There are some stories in the New West that seem to encompass many, if not all, the issues we are facing as an evolving region. One of those stories is the case of the Ameya Preserve, a large-scale luxury home community planned in Montana's Paradise Valley.
In this five-part series, writer David Nolt explores the issues involved and the controversy surrounding the Ameya Preserve, which at its heart, begets complex and conflicted feelings about what kind of place the West is, what it is becoming and who is bringing the change.
Part I: Conservation, Development & Class Conflict
Part II: The Rural Subdivision, Deluxe
Part III: Montana State Land for Sale
Part IV: Private Property, Public Access and Montana Values
Part V: The Race to House the Super-Rich
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