Nate Schweber Writes Home

Chatty Travelers and Diamond’s “Collapse”

By Nate Schweber, 6-24-05

On a flight back to New York from London yesterday I got into a too-familiar conversation with the young woman sitting next to me about our new home.

ME: “So, do you like New York?�

HER: “Love it! But I don’t want to spend the rest of my life here.�

ME: “Me neither. Where do you want to end up?�

HER: “Montana.�

My eyes narrowed like a farmer’s watching an angry, muddy river creep up a levee. The crux of the exchange was identical to the one I had with a professional poker player from Houston on a flight from Missoula to Salt Lake last month.

It’s not that I dislike these people personally. In fact, we’ve got a lot in common: we all want to move to Montana. Therein lies the proverbial rub.

You read it in New West first, folks. I want to move back to Montana. I think of trout streams and pine-covered mountains when I see gutters and skyscrapers. Subway rats remind me of the deer, elk and black bears I used to enjoy watching. Crowded streets make me long for wilderness like mosquito bites make me long for fingernails. I’m not ready to turn Prodigal just yet -- I need to swipe a jewel from out of the teeth of New York City first. But I’m coming.

If there’s anything that New York City has taught me about my homestate it’s just how precious open space, low-population density, wildlife, and a clean environment are. I, like many others, want to make sure Montana stays the great place it was for the 22 years I spent growing up there. Some people join the Sierra Club. I blog on New West.

I knew it wasn’t a coincidence that the book I stuffed my nose in on both flights was "Collapse" by Jared Diamond. Coincidences don’t exist when you’re worried about something. That’s how I know it wasn’t a coincidence when I read in New West that Diamond, a part-time Bitterrooter himself, packed Hamilton High School earlier this week to talk about "Collapse," the sequel to his Pulitzer-Prize winning book “Guns, Germs & Steel.�

My friend and New West editor Courtney Lowery wrote a nice article about Diamond’s Hamilton speech, and a dude named “Russ� wrote a comment that “everyone in MT� should read "Collapse." He’s right.

Diamond’s book changed my mind about several issues facing Montana. For example he explained that the thick forests I get all misty pining for are not as “natural� as I like to think. Near the turn of the century the US Government instituted a rule mandating that every forest fire be extinguished in order to save trees for timber. This led to an 80 percent drop off in forest fires after WWII. Because forest densities increased from 30 to 200 trees an acre, and flammable Douglas Fir saplings proliferated while loggers cut fire resistant Ponderosas, Montana saw awful summers full of forest fires like the latest one in 2003. Collapse forced me to reconsider my staunch “no logging!� dogma that I espoused for years.

Diamond also educated me thoroughly about environmental issues facing Montana that I knew vaguely, but not in detail. He explained the infuriating process of one mining company buying out another, such as ARCO’s purchase the Anaconda Mining Company’s assets (and British Petroleum’s subsequent purchase of ARCO) and then trying to weasel out of cleaning spaces like the Milltown Dam and Berkeley Pit because the mess was made by the old company. He also explained the depressing problems with Montana’s water, ranging from decreased rainfall, vanishing glaciers and salinization of farmland. Diamond even writes about how introduced plant species cost Montana $100,000,000 per year in damages, while introduced Whirling Disease and Chronic Wasting Disease threaten Montana’s trout and deer and elk respectively.

Some of Diamond's facts are particularly eye-popping. Montana was once one of the nation’s richest states but is now one of the poorest. Missoula’s air-pollution levels sometimes match Los Angeles. Most rich out-of-staters who own land in Montana stay less than 180 days so they don’t have to pay taxes for local schools and government. Montana receives $1.50 from the federal government for every dollar it pays in. And if Montana was its own country its first world economy would’ve already collapsed because of mistreatment of the environment.

Scary stuff, eh?

Most ominous to me, as I sat reading Collapse next to chatty travelers who plan to make my homestate theirs, is that as Montana’s population grows, so will these problems -- and some politicians haven’t done a damn thing about it. For example, despite the Bitterroot’s aquifer being leeched by the onslaught of new homes, nobody has done a map of the aquifer to see how much water is coming in and, more importantly, how much can be pumped out. Worst of all was to read that Ravalli County -- which grew 40 percent in the last decade and threatens to grow at least that much in the next -- has “neither a county building code nor county wide zoning,� according to Diamond.

These are the problems Bitterroot Valley, Flathead Valley, Swan River Valley, Blackfoot Valley and Missoula Valley leaders need to take on. Otherwise we risk winning battles, but losing the war.

In both his book and in his speech Diamond said he had no answers about where Montana will be in the future, only where it was and where it is now.

I wised up by reading "Collapse," and Montana’s leaders might wise up by reading it too. Because if you think what’s happening in Montana is bad, what’ll you read what happened to the Mayans, the Anasazi, Easter Islanders and the Vikings who settled Iceland.

Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.