America had a long love affair with agriculture. While farmers constitute less than 2% of the population, they’ve maintained a substantial reservoir of good will. However, huge factory farms are siphoning off that asset. What were its sources and how is it threatened? Farmers were revered by America’s founders, especially Jefferson. Our economy was predominantly […]
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University Press of Colorado, 1998, John A. Baden, contributing author and editor (with Karl Hess, Jr.).Available through Amazon Books.
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The West has long considered natural resource industries – logging, mining, and ranching – as economic keystones. Westerners have relied upon the federal “landlord” for substantial economic benefits. The world’s largest system of water diversions and network of forest access roads (eight times the mileage of the U.S. interstate highway system) testify to their success. […]
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“The data is overwhelming,” said University of Montana professor Paul Polzin. “There is no correlation between growth and amenities.” Economist Myles Watts of Montana State University laments that mining, factory, and timber jobs are “the sort of jobs that will lift the standard of living for a county or even an entire state.” These comments […]
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By my count, my wife Ramona and I represent nine generations in American agriculture. With her competence and cheer, we ran 500 ewes and wintered horses on our home place in Montana’s Gallatin Valley. After a time we sold the sheep, and for several years I taught in the University of Washington’s business school where […]
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The cowboy symbolizes the American West and universal manly virtues. For a few decades these rugged individualists ran roughshod over the wild expanse of the West, herding cattle, taming broncs, and working dawn to dusk. In myth, the cowboy still is the West at its best. But times they are a changing. The West isn’t […]
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The timber wolf is an icon of the changing West. It also offers a litmus test of the ability to think clearly. Emotional baggage is chained to the species like a # 4 Victor, the trapper’s tool of choice. Ranchers I’ve known for 30 years have come untrained, loudly sputtering at me for defending the […]
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Beneath Greater Yellowstone, powerful thermal energies relentlessly shift tectonic plates. The subsurface motion creates rifts and faults, occasionally volcanoes and earthquakes. The fundamental tensions are always there. The tectonic plates of culture and political economy are also shifting and generating profound tensions in the new American West. In Oregon and Idaho, hi-tech industries now provide […]
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Markets economize on love, that most precious of values. They encourage cooperation and civility among disparate people. This was one of the great lessons of Kenneth Boulding, a Quaker economist who was founding editor of The Journal of Conflict Resolution. Boulding developed the concept of “Spaceship Earth” with the understanding that we’re all in this […]
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Each fall my thoughts return to a boyhood of hunting. Opening day trumped Thanksgiving and even rivaled Christmas. Our rituals and gear provided anthropological fodder. In fifth grade I created the Concord Conservation Club. Like most rural people of my generation (I’m in my mid-50s), the green path ran through Field and Stream, the leading […]
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