New West Network

My Page: Guest Writer

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

Guest Column

Max Baucus, the current chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, is on the verge of making history by writing (and perhaps passing) a sweeping reform of the nation’s health care system.

The Montana Senator - he was elected to the Senate in 1978 - is walking a path that one of his progressive Montana political forefathers - Burton K. Wheeler - blazed nearly 75 years ago.

Baucus has been catching some grief in Montana - the Great Falls Tribune rounded up some of the opposition - and from those farther to the left on the political spectrum for not pushing harder for the so called “public option” provision in his health care bill. Baucus says, with some political logic, that he is trying to produce a bill that will actually pass the Senate.

Whither the Salmon?

I stand on the rocky shore of Jensen Point near a beached snag, the cold salt water of Quartermaster Harbor lapping at my ankles. The point, which divides inner and outer Qurtermaster Harbor, is the site of a Vashon Island park. People launch kayaks, rowing shells, canoes, motorboats here. Swimmers start the Heart of the Sound Triathlon here, too. Swimming out into the deeper water of the channel, virtually all of us wear wetsuits. I once ran into a young woman wearing a Heart of the Sound Triathlon T-shirt and made a casual comment about the race. I’m never doing that again, she said. That water is so cold!

Be that as it may, people have been coming to Jensen Point for centuries. In 1996, archaeologist Julie Stein, now director of the University of Washington’s Burke Museum, led a dig here into a shell midden that has been carbon dated at up to 1,000 years old. Across the harbor, to the south, you can see sailboat masts at another park and marina; it’s all very bucolic, but a century ago you might have seen masts clustered there around a big floating dry dock, Puget Sound’s first, which opened in 1892. There was already a shipway on the site when the dock arrived, and a big mill nearby. People built and repaired boats along that curve of shore into the 1920s. Right after World War I, the Martinolich yard launched a vessel 250 feet long. In 1929, the yard launched the fishing vessel Janet G., from which a local family seined Alaska salmon for generations. 

Spearmint, Peppermint Still Grown Locally

If you’re brushing your teeth with Colgate toothpaste, there’s a chance you’re supporting local farmers, in a roundabout kind of way. After all, Flathead County is home to the four remaining mint operations in the state, but even those farmers know there is more history to Montana’s mint farms than there is future.

But Flathead’s enduring mint farmers are intent on staying upright in a market that has become increasingly saturated by foreign operations in countries such as China and India. They know they have the proper climate and the willpower to keep growing mint, but whether they have the appropriate economic conditions remains to be seen.

New West Book Review

Tree Spiker: From Earth First! to Lowbagging: My Struggles in Radical Environmental Action
by Mike Roselle with Josh Mahan
St. Martin’s Press
252 pages, $24.99

Mike Roselle is a co-founder of the San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network, Earth First!, and the Ruckus Society.  Tree Spiker details his life as an environmental activist and outsider agitator.  In his acknowledgments, Roselle notes that this book doesn’t completely cover the movement or even his memories, but that we should think of it as “a series of campfire tales and late-night bar talk.” And that’s exactly how it reads: like sitting next to a great storyteller and hearing his fascinating experiences.

Anyone living in the West, or anyone even remotely interested in the environment or environmental groups, should read Tree Spiker.  When I looked at the gothic-like cover with spooky trees and horror writing yellow font, I wasn’t sure how much I would like it.  In college I read Edward Abbey’s books and found Hayduke’s slovenly sexism and tossing aluminum cans out car windows unattractive, and I figured Roselle would be more of the same.  But then I read he spent part of his childhood in Butler County, Kentucky, where a billboard with a picture of three hooded Klansmen burning a cross welcomed people to Klan country.  That intrigued me, but Roselle hooked me with:

“I heard a rumor that my father, Stewart Lee, was in town.  I hadn’t seen him since my step-grandfather chased him out of our house with a pistol he kept for that purpose.  The last time I saw him, he was running down South Eighth Street toward the bars on Magnolia Street.”

Mike Roselle will read from Tree Spiker at Back of Beyond Books in Moab on October 15th (7 p.m.), in Jackson at Valley Book Store on October 20 (5 p.m.), in Missoula at Fact & Fiction on Tuesday, October 27 (3 p.m.) and at a fundraiser at The Badlander (7 p.m.), and in Portland at Julia’s Cafe on October 30 (7 p.m.).

Guest Column

Nearly everyone’s lives have been touched by cancer. A new state law effective October 1 establishes a cancer drug donation program to help cancer patients get drugs they cannot afford by distributing thousands of dollars of unused medication to patients, instead of destroying the drugs.

In the last state legislative session, House Bill 409 created a way for unused, unopened cancer drugs to be donated to participating pharmacies and care facilities and re-dispensed to qualifying patients, who otherwise could not attain them because of their astronomical cost.

Where the Wild Things Are

-– John Muir

“Hey. Hey. HEY!” A voice below the trail shook me from my thoughts. “Come here, come down here. I want to show you something.”

An old man was in the creek basin below, propped on crutches, waving at me. My hiking companion, Louie, a gregarious Labrador retriever, had already bounded down the slope to the creek and was exchanging greetings with the man’s black, gray-muzzled dog. 

Deciding that an elderly man on crutches poses little security risk, I followed Louie down the ravine.

At first glance the man looked short, but it was the stoop that made him diminutive, and he was dressed in olive: olive-green hat, shirt and slacks. His eyes were vibrant blue, bright like those of an obsessive mendicant or a young child. I’d met this man before, I realized.

“You want to see a 1,000-year-old tree?” he asked.

“Is it petrified?” I said.

“No, it’s still alive just like it has been for centuries.”

As Goes Johnson County So Goes ...

Buffalo – Few places evoke the Wild West of range wars and land feuds more than Johnson County, Wyoming.

The memory of the cattle war of 1892, the so-called “War on Powder River,” remains vivid today, although some in Johnson County wish it would fade.

Now, 118 years after that famous massacre, the county again finds itself in the middle of a fight. It’s a quieter battle this time, waged in courts and county offices, not on Nate Champion’s ranch, the center of the War on Powder River, which was a battle between homesteaders and open-range cattlemen.

As in the old conflict, the issue today is land use: who gets to do what with the land, and what is the public’s stake in the fight? A transition from large to small ranching was the root cause of the Johnson County War. The shift marked a decline in power for bigger cattlemen trying to stem the rise of the small rancher and settler.

GUEST COMMENTARY

By the time sunrise had lit up the 10,000-foot Lima Peaks on Saturday morning, August 22, over 120 cyclists had already arrived in Lima, Montana, population 250, and set up camp at the Mountain View Motel and RV Park. A steady stream of rigs with bicycles flowed off Interstate 15 and by 9 a.m. sleepy little Lima was hopping.

Bicyclists from around the region drove to the southwest corner of Montana for the 2nd Annual Montana Backcountry Bicycle Festival, an event sponsored by the Montana Mountain Bike Alliance.  Billed as a fun mountain bike gathering that combined world-class backcountry singletrack and down home hospitality, the Festival’s goal was to demonstrate that Montana’s small towns can benefit from mountain bike tourism attracted by great singletrack riding opportunities--the holy grail for backcountry bicyclists. 

Big Sky, Past and Future

Creating a major new ski-and-golf resort is no easy trick - there have only been two in the United States in the last 20 years - and for a while it seemed that Moonlight Basin, opened in 2003, had made it over the proverbial hump.

Moonlight’s vision of building a comparatively eco-conscious resort, one where wildlife could roam unencumbered and construction was concentrated in a few core areas while leaving lots of open space, seemed to be right for the times. The real estate sales that would fund much of the development looked solid at the outset. The settlement of a bitter conflict with Big Sky Resort, it's neighbor on the other side of Lone Peak, appeared to create a great opportunity in jointly marketing the two resorts as the "Biggest Skiing in America."

But Moonlight, like so many big development projects across the West, was not equipped to handle a sudden collapse of the real estate business, and the radical shift in the credit markets that went along with it. When lot and home sales stalled last year, Moonlight stopped making payments on more than $100 million in loans while it frantically sought a buyer. The resort's long financial emergency culminated earlier this month in a foreclosure lawsuit by its primary lender, the now-bankrupt Lehman Bros.

Lee Poole, Moonlight's owner, says Lehman has assured him that it will provide the money to keep the resort open while the long-term financing and ownership issues are resolved - a process that could take a year or more. One way or another, Moonlight will almost certainly survive in some form - and its fate will have a big impact on how Big Sky evolves as a resort community. [more]

Dam Removal on Back Burner

Surprisingly to environmentalists, the Obama administration has embraced the Bush administration’s science and its novel interpretation of the Endangered Species Act. Tuesday (Sept. 15) morning, after months of delay, NOAA Fisheries filed an adaptive management plan to convince U.S. District Judge James Redden that it can make the Bush administration’s 2008 biological opinion on operation of the federal Columbia River dam system work.

Last year, salmon advocates moved for a preliminary injunction against putting that BiOp into effect. The motion was stayed, pending consultation between the government and the various interested parties. There wasn’t much consultation after the Obama administration came in. Plaintiffs figured the government had already made up its mind. Now we know what it has made up its mind to do.

The plaintiffs are not impressed.

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