Columns
A friend of mine recently lost his grandmother and came to inherit her fancy copper pots and pans. Beautiful, gleaming cookware … once he had cleaned the dust from them, as they’d hung up in her kitchen like a chandelier, unused, since the day they’d been purchased. He shared that his grandmother had bought them years ago with the intention of using them for special occasions. However, as the years went on, no occasion seemed quite special enough. His grandmother continued to wait, and wait, and wait to use them, until one day she no longer had the opportunity. It’s not uncommon to have something set aside for special occasions. It’s likely safe to say m...
Gray wolves in the Northern Rockies need federal protection to stave off the onslaught of measures the states have passed to kill as many as possible. Sens. Steve Daines of Montana and Jim Risch of Idaho recently blasted U.S. Interior Sec. Deb Haaland for her opinion piece ques...
Idaho and Montana’s successful recovery of the gray wolf was a significant achievement in species conservation. In less than ten years, not only were biological recovery targets for gray wolves met, but exceeded. Unfortunately, the delisting of the wolf has been mired in politics rather than informed b...
The birds outside my bedroom window go crazy every morning. I love it. They wake up – sometimes one by one, other times as groups - all with something so say, something to contribute. Perhaps they are calling out to friends or family; perhaps they are marking their territory or chasing squirrels fro...
As the Ukraine invasion enters another week, our gas and diesel prices now eclipse the old record set in 2008. Mindless partisan haranguing on causation and solution play out with hackneyed ‘Trump did it better’ and ‘Biden has the vision.’ Our energy conundrum is best addressed by an ...
We are five of the youngest lawmakers in the Montana Legislature. At 20, 21, 24, 29, and 31 years old, we are in various stages of renting and home ownership, and all of us are concerned about the housing crisis facing Montana. In every one of our communities—Billings, Belgrade, Columbia Falls, and eve...
Cities around the globe are transforming urban jungles into literal jungles. Driven by rising sensitivity to environmental and air quality issues, cities are opting to boost their tree populations in urban areas. In a previous column, I described a pitfall to this approach in the past: overplanting female tr...
It’s been almost a decade since I spent my first glorious summer in the shadow of the Mission Mountains, which felt like heaven after living the entirety of my life in the humid eastern Texas heat that stifled from April to September. Over the years I’ve lived in numerous places across the wester...
If you are like me, it is difficult to think of a reason why we would want to make Montana more like California. Nonetheless, this election cycle, there are several ballot initiatives being proposed to adopt California policies here in Montana. One such proposal by former Governor Marc Racicot and former Sec...
As I watched Russian troops march across the Ukrainian border in an unprovoked war that immediately made the world less safe for our kids and grandkids, I thought about the words of a World War I veteran from Great Falls named Mike Mansfield, spoken in the days after Hitler invaded Poland in 1939: “...
