New West Network

My Page: Guest Writer

<< Newer articles <<    Author Home     >> Older articles >>

Two men sit with their legs stretched across the sidewalk, backs against the green doorway near the Oxford Bar and Grill. A younger woman with a dog stands beside them.

“So this is where they are sticking us,” says a man who identifies himself only as Joe, as chalk lines closed around him.

Joe watches with a look of disgust on his face as a curious visitor uses a tape measure and chalk to identify the spaces that will remain available for sidewalk sprawlers once Missoula’s pedestrian interference ordinance takes effect on Thursday. 

The Idaho Group Blog

With slow but steady improvement in the economy’s vital signs, two questions are gnawing at analysts’ brain pans.  First, is this a sustainable recovery with the power to fuel substantial job growth?  Second, what will happen when the “double bubble” ruptures and some $1.7 trillion in commercial real estate notes come due over the next few years?

Most economic prognosticators portend a sluggish recovery with continued job losses throughout 2010.  New job growth will be slow, they say.  Too many businesses are changing fast or forever gone, like GM’s Saturn Division.  We can’t expect the same jobs to reappear and be filled by the same folks who were laid off.  Plus, globalization and the Internet have changed the game.  Look for new jobs to develop in health care, education, government and within new or fast-changing industries.

As for the double bubble effect, commercial real estate values are down about 35 percent since the peak in 2007, according to Moody’s.  Unlike residential mortgages, commercial loans are much shorter term—usually five to 10 years.  The first $300 billion in commercial-backed securities will come due in 2010.  Obviously, many businesses are on their knees due to the slowdown.  So there is a shortage of cash to payoff real estate loans, especially where property values have fallen far below contract values, which would cause buyers to bring even more cash to the closing table to accomplish a refinancing.  Meantime, lenders have locked down their underwriting guidelines and all but stopped making commercial loans, despite claims that they are open for business.

Guest Column

Climate change is here. It’s already influencing economic decisions and conditions across the world.

Yet most of the analysis on the impacts of climate change has been so large or abstract—the global impacts of weather patterns or rising sea levels—that the results often hold little value for an average family or small business.

Locally, there has been little research on the direct impacts that climate change will have on Montana communities.  Fortunately, more analysis is starting to take place at the state and local level. 

Health Care

In Whitefish, Montana, the average yearly cost of taking care of a Medicare patient over a three-year period ending in 2006 was $3,950.

Across the country in the Florida Panhandle town of Graceville, the cost of tending a Medicare patient during the same time was nearly $15,500.

People in Graceville are poorer than people in Whitefish, it’s true. But the difference in cost of caring for a Medicare patient in these two towns is astounding — more than four times more expensive in one rural Florida hospital than in one town in rural Montana.

The map above shows the wide range of costs in caring for Medicare patients among 2,990 rural and exurban hospital service areas. The map, the first of its kind, is based on a remarkable set of data collected by researchers at the Dartmouth Medical School. Doctors and economists there take a sample of Medicare costs from every hospital. They account for differences in race, sex and age from place to place, but not income. What they have discovered are large differences in medical costs from one part of America to another.

GUEST COMMENTARY

President Obama isn’t the first American President to win the Nobel Peace Prize.  The first President, as well as the first American, to receive that coveted honor was a one-time member of the Montana Stock Grower’s Association. Theodore Roosevelt was also the first and only future President to win the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Roosevelt was awarded the peace prize for successfully mediating the end to the bloody Russo–Japanese War. He received the Medal of Honor for leading his Rough Rider’s in their hell-for-leather assault on San Juan Hill.

In my opinion Theodore Roosevelt (he disliked the moniker “Teddy”) was the most remarkable American who ever lived.  His portrait has been on my office wall for three decades. I have over 60 volumes by him or about him.

Guest Column

In 2009, we celebrate the centennial of the arrival of the great American conservationist Aldo Leopold to the Southwest as a ranger with the U.S. Forest Service. Over the course of a diverse and influential career, Leopold eloquently advocated a variety of critical conservation concepts including wilderness protection, sustainable agriculture, wildlife research, ecological restoration, environmental education, land health, erosion control, watershed management, and famously, a land ethic.

Each of these concepts resonates today – perhaps more so than ever as the challenges of the 21st century grow more complicated and more pressing. But it was Aldo Leopold’s emphasis on conserving whole systems – soil, water, plants, animals and people together – that is most crucial today. The health of the entire system, he argued, is dependent on its indivisibility; and the knitting force was a land ethic – the moral obligation we feel to protect soil, water, plants, animals, and people together as one community.

After Leopold’s death in 1948, however, the idea of a whole system broke into fragments by a rising tide of industrialization and materialism. Fortunately, today a scattered but concerted effort is underway to knit the whole back together, beginning where it matters most – on the ground. Leopold’s call for a land ethic is the root of what is being called a new agrarianism – a diverse suite of ideas, practices, goals, and hopes all based on the persistent truth that genuine health and wealth depends on the land’s fertility.

New West Book Review

Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict
by Irene Vilar
Other Press
222 pages, $15.95

Irene Vilar was born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico.  Her first memoir, The Ladies’ Gallery, was a Philadelphia Inquirer and Detroit Free Press notable book of the year and was short-listed for the 1999 Mind Book of the Year Award.  She is a literary agent and series editor of The Americas at Texas Tech University Press, and lives in Colorado with her husband and two daughters.  Despite all these achievements, Irene Vilar also had fifteen abortions in sixteen years and tried to commit suicide seven times.  And no, her latest book, Impossible Motherhood, is not fiction.

Looking at the cover it’s easy to assume Impossible Motherhood is a sensationalist book.  The “abortion addict” subtitle sounds like a strange marketing ploy, but Vilar shows that she was an abortion addict, similar to how her brothers were heroin addicts and her father an alcoholic womanizer.  During her second abortion/suicide attempt, she almost bled to death.  One of her last abortions was an illegal one in Puerto Rico inside a warehouse-like room.  Vilar was at risk for cervical cancer and still had fecal matter from one of her pregnancies lodged inside her body. 

But Impossible Motherhood isn’t really about her abortions.  It’s about a destructive family legacy, self-mutilation, and, eventually, survival.  Surprisingly, it reads easily and is a gripping book.  Throughout I kept forgetting how many abortions Vilar had and kept hoping she would stop and save herself.  In lesser hands this could have been an overwrought book, but Vilar doesn’t sensationalize, or make excuses.  Most readers will be able to relate to the universal themes of trauma, depression, grief, loss and self-destruction.

Irene Vilar will discuss her book at the Boulder Book Store on Monday, October 19 at 7:30 p.m.

Weekend Essay

I learned something recently about the life my dog had before he met me. Whoever lost him or left him so that he ended up at the animal shelter must have been a fly fisherman. He likely had a wonderful, proper cast and was a better fisherman than me.

It is the first real information I’ve gathered about Jimmy James, but it’s insight that also has left me sad and baffled. Fishermen, I like to think, are not the kind of folks who abandon their dogs, especially dogs like Jimmy James. And if their dogs get lost, I’d like to think fishermen would search to the far horizon to find them.

Local Food Politics

“Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are good is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian.” – Dennis Wholey

We thought the idea was so simple, and such a great fit, that there would be no way there could be trouble. After all, what could be a better match than selling Co-op bread at our local farmers’ market? We weren’t looking for conflict or confrontation. We just wanted to peddle our humble loaves of bread. Trouble, it turns out, can plague even the most innocent of pursuits.

We’ve been making our own bread for a few years now, and we are proud of our little operation. We use organic wheat grown by farmers near Big Sandy, Montana, bringing you, our members, fine artisan and sandwich loaves that are significantly cheaper than other bakeries in town. Based on the daily sales and very loyal and repeat customers, we know we are on the right track.

we received a rather tense phone call informing us that we were no longer welcome as vendors at the Saturday Market. They refunded our forty bucks, and that was that.

Western Writers

One Friday last April at a Denver restaurant, the attention of every woman at the table was riveted to Sara Megibow, a literary agent four months into a surrogate pregnancy.  She told of how she agreed to do it for close friends, a breast cancer survivor and her husband.  Her story resonated not because anyone present was in the market for a good surrogate.  But most there were always in the market for a good story.  At least two of the women weighed Megibow’s experience as potential material to write about.  One said it might make a good article for a woman’s magazine.  Another thought it might fit into one of her series of inspirational books.  This was a table of women with ink in their blood.

Its web site describes Literary Ladies Luncheon as “A loose association of women writers. Or an association of loose women writers...and editors and literary agents.” The group—started by writer and publicity consultant Bella Stander— meets monthly at a designated Denver-area eatery, and often about a dozen attend for chow and chat, but twice that many may dined together at more prolific times.  The emailed invitees number up to 45; some show up for every lunch, others appear most of the time, and a few drop in occasionally.

Stander and a small circle of friends started the lunches in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1996.  “I was bored and lonely,” she says.  “As a writer you sit home and work alone, so it’s good to get to know other writers.” Stander founded a Colorado branch less than a year after she moved to the state in 2005.  The southern chapter still flourishes.  “We want to take over the world,” she says.

<< Newer articles <<    Author Home     >> Older articles >>