My Page: Peter Metcalf
Grab your popcorn and head to the Wilma film fans, its time for the sixth annual Big Sky Documentary Film Festival.
The festival, which begins Friday in Missoula and lasts through Sunday Feb. 22nd, screens 143 short and feature length documentaries from over 30 countries, many of which will mark their Montana, Northwest or even international premier. Subjects range from unique visual artists and cultural iconoclasts to hot button political issues like Aids in Africa and U.S. immigration.
This year’s festival features a series of films that provide a varied look at the complex continent that is Africa. The festival also showcases some of the work of Canadian Ron Mann, a long time chronicler of alternative cultural movements, and renown documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger. As with many other directors of this year’s films, both Mann and Berlinger will attend the screenings of their films.
Admission for a single screening is available at the Wilma box office and costs $6.00 before 5 p.m. or $7.00 after. Multi-film, day passes, and all movie passes are also available at the Wilma box office or online. Several events, including the opening movie Thriller in Manilla are free and open to the public. The awards presentation, also free, occurs Thursday, Feb. 19th at 7 p.m. The winners for best feature, best short and the Big Sky award will be re-screened over the final weekend.
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Get outside. Play. Have some unstructured fun.
That was Rick Potts, Conservation and Outdoor Recreation Chief for the National Park Service, charge to children, parents and everyone alike in his opening address Wednesday night to the inaugural Missoula Children and Nature Summit being held on the University of Montana, Missoula campus. The summit, which continues this afternoon, explores how to get children outside to connect with nature.
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Missoula Music Scene
Future of Missoula’s Top Hat Bar In Doubt After Owner’s Death
The future of the Top Hat bar, a long time feature of the Missoula music scene, remains in limbo, after the death of its long time owner Steve Garr.
The Top Hat “is in a time of transition right now. It won’t be closed per se,” Nicole Garr, Steve’s oldest daughter said by telephone Monday afternoon.
Steve left the bar to his six children, who must now figure out how to run and work the place, Nicole said.
“We’ve all been in this bar all our lives. Each one of us grew up in this bar,” Nicole said. And like their father they worked as bartenders or musicians there too.
The bar’s late owner, Steve Garr, passed away Friday at St. Patrick’s Hospital in Missoula from natural causes. He was 62. He began working at the Top Hat around 1974 as a bartender, musician, carpenter and about every other role imaginable. A few years after the bar closed in 1984, Steve purchased the bar. It reopened around 1987.
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Growth and Landscape
Residential Development Presents Challenges to Wildlife Managers
Underneath the portrait of a whimsical looking young moose, big bold letters on the real estate flier proclaimed: “This could be your new neighbor!”
Drawn by the allure of Montana’s open spaces and abundant wildlife, tens of thousands of people have moved to Big Sky country in recent years, many of them building homes right in a moose’s kitchen. That rash of residential development has created complex challenges for the state personnel charged with the management of Montana’s wildlife, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks management biologist Craig Jourdonnais told a small audience gathered in Missoula Saturday for the Sierra Club’s conference “The Heat is on: Managing our resources in the face of climate change.”
“My job is to try and make wildlife fit on a landscape where people live, work and try to make a living,” said Jourdonnais, who recently transferred to the Bitterroot Valley after years in the valleys near Bozeman.
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the new west conference
Panelists Scrap Over Streamside Setbacks
When it comes to the muddy waters of streamside setback proposals, this much is clear: Montanans love their rivers, and Montanans love their private property rights. Yet as more people move into the state and new development crowds the river corridors, this raises a dilemma. Protecting one may come at the cost of the other.
“People are loving these rivers and streams to death,” said Hal Harper, Chief Policy Advisor to Governor Brian Schweitzer. “They are holding them and hugging them too closely. It’s like a loving relationship where a person smothers a new spouse.”
Harper spoke in favor of some form of statewide stream setback standards during a panel discussion during New West’s 3rd annual Real Estate and Development in the Northern Rockies in Missoula, Mont. on Friday. He argued that science-based uniform statewide standards with proper variance procedures to evaluate individual pieces of property are necessary to protect the health of a river, public health and safety, the quality of life that attracts so many people to Montana and personal privacy from river users.
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the new west conference
Preserving Western Agriculture and Open Space
Perhaps no image is more emblematic of the changing West then an old barn surrounded by field of new houses. The irony in the image, of course, is that as residential development invades the West the agricultural land with its open space and wildlife habitat that draws people here is compromised.
“What will happen if you lose us?” asked southwestern Montana rancher Jim Hagenbarth. “The last crop we plant will be a subdivision. It will destroy all the habitat that we’ve worked to preserve.”
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the new west conference
Holley Lays Out Plum Creek’s Plans
The perceived rate of sale of Plum Creek Timber Company timberlands in Montana to private recreational buyers and for residential subdivision has elicited widespread public concern, lands that for generations have provided well-paying jobs, public recreation and wildlife habitat.
Plum Creek President and CEO Rick Holley took great pains to allay these concerns during his keynote presentation at NewWest.Net’s 3rd Annual Real Estate and Development conference Friday morning.
“We converted to a (Real Estate Investment Trust) in 1999 merely to access capital and to grow more efficiently,” Holley said. “We think of ourselves today as a land and timber company.”
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book review
A Perspective on the Russian Experience with Wolves
In 1965 an American working for the National Security Agency as a Russian linguist picked up a copy of Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf. Instead of a new found appreciation for the contentious canids, as Mowat’s book generated for so many of his generation, Will Graves found the book didn’t mesh with what he knew from 14 years of reading about wolves in Russia.
“His book is fiction,” Graves said Thursday over coffee in Missoula, taking particular aim at Mowat’s claim that in the far north rodents and small game comprise substantial parts of a wolf’s diet.
Alarmed by not just Mowat’s book, but what Graves perceived to be a trend of often inaccurate and misleading pro-wolf Western literature, Graves decided to set the record straight with a book of his own. Over the next 42 years, he meticulously clipped Russian-language news reports, translated popular and scientific articles, joined preeminent Russian biologists at international conferences on wolves, and traveled and talked with Russian biologists, game managers and hunters about the Russian experience with wolves.
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relisted
Wolf Protections Restored in Northern Rockies, Hunting Halted
A federal judge in Missoula ordered today that gray wolves in the Northern Rockies be returned to the endangered species list, effectively halting planned fall wolf hunts in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho.
U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy granted the preliminary injunction to reinstate Endangered Species Act protections for the northern Rocky Mountain gray wolf, as requested by the twelve conservation organizations that filed suit in April to reverse the delisting.
"It's an incredibly important first step," said Suzanne Asha Stone of Defenders of Wildlife, one of the plaintiffs. "It's literally the difference between life and death for hundreds of wolves in the region."
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Primary Election
Obama Supporters Jubilant in Montana
Champagne corks flew at the Obama election party in Missoula, Tuesday, even before the polls in the state had closed.
When CNN announced a few minutes after 7 p.m. MDT that Sen. Barack Obama had surpassed the 2118 delegates required to clinch the Democratic Presidential nomination, jubilant campaign supporters popped the bubbly and started celebrating.
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