New West Network

My Page: Emily Darrell

Running Says More Should Move to Acceptance Stage

Since learning last month that he was a co-winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, University of Montana professor Steve Running has received many letters and emails regarding his win, and not all have been congratulatory.

The hate mail, Running said in a lecture at the UM campus Monday evening, has come from those going through the “anger” phase of what Running calls “The Five Stages of Climate Grief.”
Running, a professor in UM’s College of Forestry and Conservation, won the Nobel for his work as one of the leading authors of the fourth assessment report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The IPCC was formed in 1988 by two United Nations organizations. Scientists from around the world were chosen to analyze a huge amount of data on climate change and compile it into reports. Each of the panel’s reports, particularly the latest one, has emphasized three major points: the Earth is getting warmer; it’s getting warmer quickly; and it’s getting warmer because of human activity.
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DOOR STILL OPEN FOR MCPAC

At a Missoula City Council meeting Monday night Mayor John Engen provided a piece of news, and cast a tie-breaking vote, which may have changed the fate of the Missoula Community Performing Arts Center (MCPAC).

Engen’s eleventh hour revelation -- that he’d spoken with a private developer that morning who expressed interest in investing in the arts center -- came as a shock to some council members.

“I have absolutely nothing formal to give you today,” Engen said to the council. However, Engen urged council members to “leave a door open” for the MCPAC.

Two hours of council debate and public comment later, the council voted to postpone until March 1, 2008 the decision on whether to extend a land reservation on a 60,000 square foot of Missoula’s Riverfront Triangle development site to the MCPAC for another 18 months. [more]

BEAVERHEAD-DEERLODGE PARTNERSHIP

Collaboration between three conservation groups and five major timber companies has produced a plan for the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest, Montana's largest, that would allow for both increased logging and expanded wilderness areas.

Tom France, director of the National Wildlife Federation's Northern Rockies region, and Bob Boschee, general manager for Missoula's Smurfit-Stone pulp and paper mill, spoke at a Friday meeting of City Club Missoula about their involvement in the drafting of the Beaverhead-Deerlodge Partnership bill.

"We have such a big common interest," Boschee said of conservationists and the timber industry. "The differences we have are not that significant." Sustainable forest health, Boschee said, is a primary objective for both groups. [more]

MCPAC A "LONG SHOT"

In a 9 to 3 vote Wednesday the Administration and Finance Committee of the Missoula City Council rejected a motion to allow the Missoula Community Performing Arts Center (MCPAC) another 18 months to hold onto a piece of the Riverfront Triangle development site at Orange and Front streets.

The committee advocating the building of the MCPAC has had a reservation on the city-owned land since 2004. No council members argued against the idea of building a top-of-the-line performing arts center, but objected mainly to the center's$60 million dollar price tag.

The motion will now be moved to the floor of City Council for a vote. The meeting will be held Monday night at 7:00 at 140 W. Pine St. [more]

ENVISION MISSOULA

More public transportation. More bike lanes. Higher density housing developments. Fewer traffic jams. Is this the future of Missoula County?

The broad consensus of attendees of the Envision Missoula workshop held at the University of Montana Tuesday night agreed that it ought to be.

The workshop, sponsored in part by the Office of Planning and Grants (OPG), offered Missoulians a chance to share their visions of what Missoula will look like when the population eventually doubles to 200,000, and to discuss how questions of land-use are tied to Missoula’s transportation future.

The data gathered at the workshop -- which will repeat Wednesday and Thursday -- will be used to help inform Missoula's 2008 long range transportation plan update. [more]

cities weigh in on national policy

Yesterday two Montana cities approved non-binding referendums urging “Congress to authorize and fund an immediate and orderly withdrawal of the U.S. military forces from Iraq in a manner fully protective or U.S. soldiers.”

The referendums, similar to ones that have been passed in cities around the nation, appeared on city council ballots in both Missoula and Helena and were approved by 65 and 62 percent of voters, respectively.

“I’m ecstatic,” said Deborah Hayden a member of the Helena Peace Seekers, whose son is an Iraq veteran who has experienced chronic pain and emotional problems since returning from a one-year tour of duty in Iraq.

But should national policy issues be within a city council's purview? [more]

Missoula Election Results

11:30 p.m. The ballots from Missoula's first mail-in general election were tallied Tuesday night and, unofficially, the 12-member City Council will have four new faces in 2008: Jason Weiner of Ward 1, Pam Walzer of Ward 2, Lyn Hellegaard of Ward 4, and Renee Mitchell of Ward 5.

Council Vice President Jerry Ballas of Ward 4 and Don Nicholson of Ward 2 were ousted. The two other incumbents running for reelection, Stacy Rye of Ward 3 and Ed Childers of Ward 6, held onto their seats.

A total of 23,660 ballots were counted, a voter turnout of 46 percent. [more]

A NEWWEST.NET/MISSOULA EVENT

I’m many thousands of dollars in debt because I’m working toward my graduate degree in print journalism. Not online journalism, or multimedia journalism, or even photojournalism, but print -- as in words, set in ink, which are put upon paper, don’t link to anything, don’t make noise, and can only be sent to a friend in conjunction with an envelope and a stamp.

Is the field I’m training for becoming obsolete? Is the fact that I’m writing these words for an online news site an answer to my own question?

Well, Monday evening I got some reassurance that the field of print media, while perhaps going through some tough times, hasn’t exactly gone the way of the typewriter.

Thomas Goetz, the deputy editor of Wired, came to Missoula to speak with NewWest.Net's Jonathan Weber about technology, the evolution of the media business, and the separate niches for online and print publications. The NewWest.Net/Missoula event, held at the Missoula Art Museum and co-sponsored by Pyron Technologies, was attended by many in the Missoula journalism scene, including the dean of the University of Montana J-School, Peggy Kuhr. [more]

OPG Wants You!

If the population of Missoula County continues to grow at around 1.5 percent annually, which the state of Montana predicts it will, the county will double in size -- to 200,000 residents -- somewhere between 2050 and 2065.

“At some point in time,” said Roger Millar, director of the Missoula Office of Planning and Grants (OPG), “there are going to be 100,000 more people in the Missoula area.”

“At that point, when they are here, what do we want to see? Where do we want to see them living? Where to we want to see them working? To see them playing?”

OPG is preparing a long-range transportation plan to address how these questions of land-use are tied to Missoula’s transportation future, and invite Missoulians to share their ideas at interactive mapping workshops to be held in the middle of the month on the University of Montana campus. [more]

toxic cosmetics

The label on your shampoo may read “pure and natural” and your face wash may claim to be “gentle”, but according to at least one activist group, some of the products that make such claims are actually full of toxic chemicals -- chemicals linked to cancer, infertility, birth defects and chronic disease. Cosmetic companies in the United States operate with virtually no federal safety regulation, a practice that the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics hopes to change.

At the University of Montana’s Urey Lecture Hall on Thursday night, Stacy Malkan spoke about her new book, Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry. The book details Malkan’s work with the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, which was founded in 2002 and for the last five years, has been working to get toxic chemicals taken out of personal care products. One of the campaign’s strongest arguments is that the European Union has banned cosmetics companies from using more than 1,100 chemicals in their products, while the U.S. government has banned only 10. If the products can be made safer (and often very without much cost or effort), the campaign asks, why shouldn’t they be? [more]