My Page: Todd Wilkinson

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INSIDE THE LAIR OF A COLLEGE SPORTS INFORMATION OFFICE

As sports guys go, William "Bill" Lamberty is a lionheart. He's the man in the trenches trying to make sense of what happens on the college court and gridiron; he's the talking head who reporters, coaches, and parents call when delicate student-athlete issues arise; he's the after-hours coach of his son's traveling baseball team who speaks with the humor of Yogi Berra and the verbal articulation of Bob Costas.

He loves reciting stats, no matter how obscure. In an average year, he attends hundreds of events. It's in his blood.

Lamberty should've been a sports columnist, making the big bucks, covering one of the major league franchises and being put in the hot seat on the Best Damn Sports Show Period.

Instead, he is, by choice, the sports information director at Montana State University in Bozeman. He's there to keep people reminded of the virtue that comes from athleticism and the value of having sports being a part of campus life. He doesn't try to polish everything with positive spin; he believes in telling things the way they are.

Twice a month, New West readers will be dropping in on Lamberty with a new feature called Six Questions For Bill Lamberty. It will focus on the athletic dramas, the triumphs and tribulations of coaches and student athletes at one typical campus in the northern Rockies. We hope you enjoy it.

This week, the big buzz in Bozeman is the Bobcat football squad's surprise invitation--and blast of new life blown into its sails--to square off at home Saturday against the 8-3 Furman Paladins in the first round of the NCAA Division 1-AA playoffs.
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CLIMATE CHANGE AND ENERGY

Climate change: It is regarded as one of the greatest challenges civilization has ever faced. As the scientific community, governments around the world, and industry come together in talks about how to address carbon dioxide emissions from human-related industrial activity pouring into Earth's atmosphere, a predominant focus is on coal. Experts say that any plan to curb CO2 emissions will be pointless unless three of the most populous and influential nations on the planet--the U.S., China, and India--take steps to transform the way that coal is converted into electricity.

In populous China and India, the paradox being wrestled with is this: How to raise the standard of living for billions of people, utilizing fuels of the Industrial Age, but simultaneously trying not to destroy any hope of addressing carbon dioxide outputs that are accelerating global warming?

Not long ago, a little known outfit called the Jackson Hole Center for Global Affairs began a series of talks between government officials in China and the U.S, energy experts, executives with industry and conservationists to find a way in which the best clean coal technology can rapidly be implemented. Today, Wyoming and the Shanxi Province of China represent the two largest coal-producing areas in their respective nations. In the American West, ground zero is the rich, coal-producing areas of the Powder River Basin straddling the borders of Wyoming and Montana.

This is the first in an ongoing series of articles about clean coal technology, the role that Wyoming and Montana are playing in international discussions about climate change, and opportunities for industry in the U.S. and China to become leaders in changing the paradigm of how electricity is produced, using a natural resource that is both abundant and troublesome. This fall, New West contributing editor Todd Wilkinson traveled to China along with a delegation of officials from Wyoming and Montana to participate in the groundbreaking U.S.-China Clean Coal Forum.
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WHERE DO YOU STAND: SHOULD MILITARY SERVICE BE MANDATORY?

Congressman Charlie Rangel is convinced that if more of his colleagues on Capitol Hill and their close friends were forced to make their own kids eligible for military service in Iraq and other violent hotspots around the world, American leaders would find greater pause in deciding whether to have the U.S. go to war.

Rangel, a Democrat from New York, a Korean War veteran, and the soon-to-be-new chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, intends to introduce legislation that would reinstate a national draft requiring that all men and women turning 18 in America be available for possible military duty. Rangel believes that the current all-voluntary military is tilted too heavily toward lower and middle class soldiers letting well-to-do kids, who may support the war in Iraq, off the hook.

Rangel has tried unsuccessfully in previous years to get similar bills passed.

Do you agree that a mandatory draft would change the way Congress thinks about committing U.S. troops to combat service around the world? [more]

STUNNING REPORT ON STUDENT DEBT

This week, millions of young people will be coming home from college to enjoy Thanksgiving with their families. If a new must-read series from USA TODAY is any indication of what's on the minds of late teens and twentysomethings as they sit around the dinner table toasting their future, America's brightest are feeling a heavier burden than their predecessors. The invisible chain around their necks is debt.

"Thirty years ago," write USA TODAY reporters Mindy Fetterman and Barbara Hansen in their excellent series started this week titled Young and In Debt, "the 'generation gap"' reflected the cultural gulf between World War II-era parents and their children. Parents then just didn't get sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Today, the gap is about debt."

As a corollary, if those same young people grow up in the Rocky Mountain West, home of skyrocketing real estate and inward population migration, it's also a safe assumption that many will be unable to return home after graduation elsewhere and find a job that pays them enough to buy a home AND pay off their other loans.

In small cities like Bozeman, for example, the cliche for homegrown engineering students has long been that graduates of local Montana State University will head off and work for Boeing in Seattle, pay their dues, bank as much as they can, and then return home flush to take a lesser-paying job and raise their families. Is that strategy still viable? [more]

KIDS REBEL, ADULTS (OVER)REACT IN RIVER CITY?

"I've never felt in Livingston so harsh a reaction, that's been so vitriolic, downright venomous. It isn't the supportive response of a community. It's a negative chastisement of the schools in general and individuals in the school. It's almost like a feeding frenzy."
—Livingston, Montana English teacher Roger Powalisz

This Montana river town romanticized nationwide for its enclave of novelists, movie stars, trout anglers, and visual artists is today grappling with a recent outbreak of juvenile delinquency at the local high school.

Over the past month, three students at Park High School in Livingston, Montana have been expelled. Two of the cases involved students bringing guns to campus and the latest stemmed from a teenager allegedly punching a teacher.

"In addition to the expulsion," writes Bozeman Chronicle reporter Scott McMillion in a story titled Third expulsion at Park High raises questions, "Principal Eric Messerli drew shock and ridicule last month when he gave a male student a wedgie at a soccer match, an event that attracted press coverage and provided fodder for comedians as far away as England."

These events happened on top of a recent homicide in the community and the discovery of a local teen's body who disappeared last winter after setting out on a long walk along the Yellowstone River drainage. The latter was ruled accidental and attributed to exposure to the cold elements.

The recent events at the high school have everyone in the community talking. [more]

NEWS FROM THE IVORY TOWER: THE KABOOM OF AUTUMN

The roar of rifle and shotgun fire in the woods conveys far more information than the location of a hunter, researchers say. The acoustics of a supersonic bullet can also help scientists find better ways to save the lives of soldiers and spare wilderness travelers from noise pollution.

Such is the conclusion of Rob Maher, professor of electrical engineering at Montana State University. Because of its intense energy and distinctness, a gunshot is "the perfect signal" with which to explore the uses of sound, Maher tells writer Tracy Ellig. "It produces what engineers call the 'impulse response' of the sonic environment. If we can't make sense of how a gunshot behaves, then it's unlikely we can do much with more complicated, or lesser quality, sounds."

Ellig, who is a regular writer on the staff of MSU, writes a fascinating story which follows about the science of gunshots. [more]

WHERE DOES YOUR FOOD COME FROM?

The Community Food Co-op in Bozeman has, in many ways, become a flagship for the co-op movement inside the inner West. Thriving within an atmosphere of enormous competitive pressure exerted by national grocery chains, including Wal-Mart, Co-Op General Manager Kelly Dean Wiseman says that an emerging unified front among many different co-ops is leveraging buying power. It is resulting in lower prices, better and safer product choices, as well as giving individual stores a greater say in how organic and homegrown foods can change the way America eats and shops.

In his essay which follows, Wiseman discuses the purchasing power of the National Co-op Grocers Association which ranks second only to Whole Foods in its ability to deliver healthy food to the marketplace every day. [more]

OF FAIRWAYS AND ECONOMIES AVOIDING THE ROUGH

As new golf courses proliferate across the West, bringing with them more high-end development into former rustic valleys and retooled ski resorts, the perception is of a game on the rapid upswing. That's not necessarily the case, says lifestyle economist Jonathan Schechter, a frequent commentator at New West. In fact, Schechter notes, the number of Americans involved with golf is headed for the same kind of downward parallel turns as the ski industry.

Schechter says that Jackson Hole and ritzy Teton County, Wyoming—one of the wealthiest per capita communities in the U.S.— serves as an excellent case study for examining whether golf will remain the social icon of the upwardly mobile leisure class or be remaindered tomorrow as an activity of yesterday. Do people who come to Jackson to golf really appreciate what the place is all about? One thing is certain, Schechter says: It's the rare things found only in certain locales that retain their social value across generations. In this latest essay, Schechter ponders if the number of new courses springing up in the Tetons are creating an oversaturated market and what it bodes for fairway-style development. It's a commentary that should reverberate throughout the Rockies and the booming western Sun Belt.

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SEX AND THE ANIMAL KINGDOM—READ ALSO PETA RESPONSE TO EARLIER HORSE INCIDENT

Every so often an email arrives that is too good not to share. For New Westies who passionately enjoy the great out of doors and love to hunt, this real life court case comes courtesy of a dear (not deer) old college friend, Fredric "Fritz" Anderson. Together, we were classmates at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn.

Today, Fritz is a public defender in northwestern Wisconsin and recently took on a case involving a man who allegedly had amorous feelings for wildlife and apparently, it seems, for other animals. The case, as one might expect, attracted local media attention back in the upper Midwest which led to it being featured this week on The Smoking Gun blogsite. It involves two interpretations of the law that are sure to become fodder for sportsmen and women in saloons across America.

Is it legal to have sex with a dead wild animal? [more]

PASSING THE BATON

Ever since New West.Net formally launched New West Bozeman at www.newwest.net/bozeman in 2005, the flow of traffic from readers across southern Montana, northern Wyoming, eastern Idaho and well beyond has grown to a steady stream.

Beginning first with inaugural Bozeman editor Nancy Mahoney and then with Nancy passing the baton to yours truly, the page has been a listening post as well as a portal for community dialogue.

For me, it's been fun getting to know so many of you over cups of coffee and through correspondence. As of this week, however, I am stepping aside, morphing into a different role of "contributing editor," and focusing on writing a book about the global environmental work of Ted Turner. At some point, I'll fill you in more on that exciting project, and at regular intervals I'll be filing news stories, book reviews and artist profiles here on New West, but what I'm really pleased to announce is my replacement.

She's an energetic, boldly curious, wildly intrepid journalist (as well as a socially-responsible advocate) named Lucia Stewart. [more]

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