Bozeman News

Walking the Walk

Car culture is the double-edged sword of the National Park experience. Roads inside our parks make it easy for the elderly, the disabled and families with small children to get a taste of the grandeur and beauty of these places. But for the sake of air quality and the visitor experience, it's time the National Park Service got serious about offering bus service in Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. In some areas, private vehicle traffic should be restricted to get visitors out of their cars.
 

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Frivolity Meets Politics

For my money, there are few sins so egregious as the taking of yourself too seriously. I mean, really, what’s the point? We’re all going to eventually kick the bucket with an equal amount of kicking and screaming. Might as well enjoy ourselves while we’re here. So I knew I’d met a kindred soul when I ran into Brian Leland yesterday morning in downtown Bozeman. A local master electrician, he’s also the founder and organizer of “The Green Coalition of Gay Loggers for Jesus,” a tongue-in-cheek, don’t-take-yourself-too-seriously counterpart to a Tea Party demonstration being held in Bozeman the morning of July 4. 

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Kudos

Clean water. For Missoula residents Said and Sara Hemed, it would be a dream come true if they could finish digging a well in Said’s native Zanzibar village so people there could have water to drink and use for washing -- without having to walk a mile to a water pump and haul it back in buckets.

Said (pronounced sye'-dee) and his wife, Sara, a Montana native, have other dreams too. They want to provide classes for adults and children on the six acres Said owns in Mchekeni, a village of about 300 people in Zanzibar, a small island off the coast of Tanzania.

Along the way, they’ve launched a group, Artisans for Africa, and are selling handmade arts and crafts -- batik purses, screen-printed fabrics, leather baby booties, jewelry -- to raise the money needed to finish digging a well on the property.

 

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THE LEGACY OF KENTON CARNEGIE

Anything wolf makes big headlines--and, it seems, is never old news.

For fourteen years since conservationists and the federal government brought the wolf back to the northern Rockies (plus several years leading up to the reintroduction), anything and everything about the Big Dog has been, to say the least, controversial.

But something hasn't happened yet that could make it much more contentious. 

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Are We Stimulating Sprawl?

A report out this week from the national Smart Growth America group takes a look at where transportation stimulus money is going on the state level and it found that in most cases, especially in the West, states are spending too much on new roads and not enough on maintenance and repair of existing infrastructure or on public transportation options.

The report is exhaustive, and you can read the whole thing here, but two main points from the group are these:

Not enough money is being spent on repair and maintenance: “Despite a multi-trillion dollar backlog of road and bridge repairs, states committed almost a third of ARRA STP money—$6.6 billion—to new capacity road and bridge projects rather than to repair and other preservation projects”

Not enough money is being spent on public transportation: “By allocating few funds (3.7%) to public and non-motorized transportation, states made less progress on modernization, rapid job creation, enhancing public transporation, long-term economic growth, reducing greenhouse gases, oil dependence and providing low cost transportation choices,” the report states.

Read on to see the report’s findings on how specific Western states rank in the group’s assessment.

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Western Book Roundup

A few weeks ago I wrote about some creative ideas people are coming up with to support books in the midst of this changing media landscape. In keeping with that theme, the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association recently launched the Reading the West program, with the goal of helping bookstores promote books that are set in the West or those written by Western authors. The first featured books are New Mexico writer Rick Collignon's Madewell Brown and Austin-based Jaqueline Kelly's The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate. I spoke to MPIBA executive director Lisa Knudsen this week on the phone from her office in Fort Collins about the program.

Knudsen said that the MPIBA started the Reading the West program because "in these troubled economic times, we were looking for projects and programs that are free to our member booksellers and are a potential win win win—for the publisher, bookseller, and author."

"I shamelessly copied from my fellow regional bookseller associations," Knudsen said, noting that the Midwest and Great Lakes Bookseller associations sponsor similar programs. The Reading the West program makes advance copies of the featured books available to booksellers, as well as materials to use in their display and promotion. The authors are also available for readings at regional stores.

The MPIBA board hopes publishers will begin to send them information about relevant forthcoming books to be considered for the program, but for the first selections, the members discussed among themselves what good books of regional interest they knew were coming out.

"Rick Collignon is very popular in our region," Knudsen said, "and the committee was enthusiastic about his latest book. We also wanted to do what we could to promote independent publishers." Madewell Brown is published by Unbridled Books, an independent publisher based in Colorado. 

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