real estate & development in the northern rockies

Imagining a Mindful New West

By Greg Lemon, 10-27-07

	Attendants of NewWest.Net's second annual Real Estate and Development in the Rockies conference listen to the final panel on Friday afternoon in Missoula. NewWest.Net's Jonathan Weber (far left) joined panelists Jonathan Schechter, Gary Ferguson, Peter Stark and Steve Loken (left to right) to discuss visions for the future of the West. Photo by Anne Medley.

Imagine asking local businesses to give one percent of their profits to help their community.

Imagine working for nearly 90 years to help reconnect urban youth with the natural world by convincing cities to set aside urban nature preserves.

Imagine turning to the overcrowded forest behind your home for the wood to make the flooring in your wife’s dance studio and discovering a niche market for a once-worthless timber product.

Imagine using local taxes to put local youths to work on community restoration projects.

These ideas and more—some already happening, some still faint—were all laid out in the final panel discussion at NewWest.Net’s second annual Real Estate and Development in the Northern Rockies conference Friday evening.

The panel was called “Imagining the New West: What’s Next” and was focused on thinking about the future for the region.

Steve Loken, owner of Loken Builders in Missoula, is an expert energy and home building technology. But he looked to the rural character of Montana and asked: Would it last?

“Will Montana continue to be a rural state in the future and will we be able to sustain the topsoil and farmland to continue to do that?” Loken asked.

Montana is increasingly becoming more urban and the ties to the rural landscape are disappearing. Society is moving away from depending on local farmers for food. For decades farmers have been the stewards of the land and yet, if we’re not careful, they’ll be gone.

So another question may be: How to we find young people who want to farm and then give them the incentives to do the job?

One answer might be carbon banking, through which farmers could actually earn money caring for the land simply for the carbon stored in their crops, Loken said.

Montana is perpetually low on money, he said. Yet people come here from all over the world because of the state’s pristine beauty and they’re not asked to pay for it. The solution: a sales tax.

“They open up their pockets ready to pay a sales tax and we don’t even ask,” he said.

Loken also suggested a Green Bed Tax that would generate money for a community restoration fund that would put youth to work caring and restoring their communities.

They already flip burgers at the fast food restaurants, he said, why not give them a decent paying job they’ll love.

Gary Ferguson, a writer and small business owner in Red Lodge is just completing a book about conservationist John Ripley Forbes. Forbes was born in 1913 and died in 2006. During his life he was devoted to connecting urban youth with the natural world.

Forbes grew up in a time in America when people were “absolutely on fire with the concept of nature,” Ferguson said. Naturalists were treated like modern-day rock stars and people were mindful of the natural world outside their city limits.

Captivated by that sentiment, Forbes worked to preserve tracts of wildland in and around cities to encourage people to keep the wildness of the world close at heart. That connectedness is what made our nation special and yet it’s being lost.

“It’s really—literally—and has been for most of this country’s history an essential aspect of what makes it possible to live well in the world,” Ferguson said.

People, given the opportunity, will do what they can to be mindful of the world around them.

For example, Ferguson is part owner in a small restaurant in Red Lodge. He’s taken care to use alternative energy, serve locally grown foods, and recycle. The community has been supportive of the effort and offered to help at every turn.

“They want to be a part of something that suggests a deeper more mindful way of being a part of the world of their communities,” he said.

Jonathan Schechter is the founder and executive director of the Charture Institute in Jackson, Wyoming. The non-profit research organization is focused on growth and change in resorts, national park gateways and other communities surrounded by wild, beautiful places.

These communities are changing rapidly and as the change occurs, the aspects of the place the residents value are being threatened.

Schechter has studied the communities and asked citizens what it is they value about their towns. He discovered a desire to do something to maintain community values in the face of change. So he came up with an idea.

In Jackson, 55 businesses donate one percent of their profits to projects dealing with sustainability in the community. The project is call “1% for the Tetons” and in 2006, the first year, it gave out $100,000 in grants.

Peter Stark described himself as a “tree-hugging, eco-liberal.” He’s a writer and now a businessman. When he and his wife bought an 80-acre patch of timber in the Rattlesnake area, north of Missoula and built a home.

Soon Stark realized that the overcrowded forest in his backyard wasn’t healthy. The larches were out competing each other for soil nutrients and water. Many of the trees were six inches in diameter, but over 100 years old.

Stark decided to thin the trees and mill them into flooring for his wife’s dance studio. The floor turned out to be a very high quality product and very merchantable. He partnered with local forester Matt Arno to start North Slope Sustainable Wood. The company manufactures larch flooring from trees harvested in forest restoration projects in the northern Rockies.

Utilizing the small-diameter wood harvested in these forest restoration projects is finally a way to break the stalemate between environmentalists and the timber industry, Stark said.

But like the other speakers, he’s not just interested in looking 20 years down the road. In imaging the New West, it’s going to take a bigger view than that.

“I was thinking on the way over here we’re looking a century down the road,” he said.

As the discussion deepened, all the speakers touched on Ferguson’s idea of mindfulness. And all agreed that tapping into and fostering a person’s desire to care for the place they live and the environment that surrounds them will be key to how the New West changes in the next century.

The younger generation obviously has a passion for the environment.

“It’s resonating at this visceral level,” Schechter said.

Ferguson’s idea was to put kids into places as simple as a garden. It’s an idea Forbes would have supported.

“Why not resurrect that notion of letting kids be involved in gardens if for no other reason than to engender a sense of mindfulness of where are food comes from,” he said. “Might be a great way to end up 50 years down the road in a better place then we are now.”

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