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Defying
the wisdom of Thomas Wolfe, we went home last
month to West Glacier, Montana for the 50th
Reunion of Columbia Fall High School Class of
‘56. We found that some things, including the
people we grew up with, had changed little in 50
years. The ecosystems and the settlement
patterns of Western Montana, however, are
changing at an alarming rate and moving in an
unsustainable direction.
While
the sky is still “BIG” in the Big Sky
Country, it is turning from blue and white to
gray and brown. The mountains and valleys are
also turning from green, blue and white to
shades of gray and brown. This march toward
entropy is a direct result of changes in the
climate exacerbated by the cumulative impact
of badly informed settlement pattern
decisions.
Since
leaving Montana for Hawaii in 1960 we have
visited eight times but had not been home for 17
years. We have read about and seen graphic and
statistical evidence of the changes in the
Northern Rocky Mountains but the pace and extent
of change has to be seen to be believed. (See End
Note One.)
First,
the good news: The people were great! They are
older, of course, but just as I recalled them
and expected to find them. The Flathead Valley
still has some of the friendliest people we have
encountered. We had not seen most of those at
the reunion for 20 or 25 years. Some we had not
seen for 50 years. We spent from four to nine
years with these classmates, some we knew from
the 7th grade and a few went on to the
University of Montana with us, others we saw
over the summers. Of special note was the fact
that five of the eight students who completed
the 8th grade in West Glacier Elementary School
54 years ago were at the reunion.
Although
the house my father built with my help -- the
place our family lived when I graduated from
high school -- was torn down years ago, many of
the structural landmarks are still intact. In
fact a lot of them, including the Chalet where
CFHS ‘56 had our reunion dinner, are
registered national landmarks that can be
visited via a CD-ROM available at from most
Blockbuster, Borders or Best Buy outlets. Two
recent books, one by the son of our foreman when
we worked on the trail crew in Glacier National
Park document much of what we experienced
growing up. Having someone else think that
where, when and with whom one grew up was worthy
of writing a book adds a special flavor to a return
home. (See End
Note Two.)
So,
what has changed so much and continues to
change at an accelerating rate? Almost
everything besides the people, many of the
structures and the mountains we grew up with.
What is on the mountains has changed and what is
between the mountains has changed even more.
In our last column we explored
Regional Security from the perspective of food
production, processing and distribution.
This time we examine a range of threats to an
Urban Support Region we know well, the Northern
Rocky Mountains. The realities in clear
view in this Urban Support Region are caused by
and related to economic, social and physical
threats that face every New Urban Region and
every Urban Support Region in the United States.
We have organized our observations to reflect
the three overarching themes we
encountered:
An
Overview: Out the SkyWest Window from Denver to
Missoula and Back
We had not
visited the Rocky Mountain Front since the new
Denver International Airport (DIA) was opened to
replace Stapleton. DIA is an
impressive facility. More impressive is
what one sees out the aircraft window taking off
or landing.
When it was under
construction, DIA was best known for its remote
location. After a few short years the
airport is no longer isolated. Scattered
urban enclaves and scattered urban land uses now
stretch from the Core of the Denver New Urban
Region all the way to the Airport and far
beyond. There is no Clear Edge.
Those who follow the literature on “smarter
growth” often hear “land conservation” and
“Colorado” mentioned in the same breath. Take it with a grain of salt. Boulder and
other municipalities in Colorado may have done
good work to rationalize settlement patterns but
the Rocky Mountain Front is a mess.
Greater Denver is no better configured than
Greater Phoenix, Greater Houston, Greater
Atlanta or any of the New Urban Regions from
Charlotte, N.C., to Portland, Maine.
The same dysfunctional settlement patterns you
see around Denver can also be seen in Virginia,
Maryland and West Virginia flying in and out of
Washington-Dulles. They can be seen around
every other major airport in the United
States.
The SkyWest/United Express
flight from Denver to Missoula, Mont., more or
less follows the Continental Divide. Looking out the window,
we first got glimpsed the changes we would see on the
ground in Western Montana.
First, there was the
air through which we were flying. It was
dirty brown, the result of thousands of wild
fires burning throughout the western United
States and Canada. As we flew north and
west from Denver, it appeared that every area
where topography and rainfall combined to
support large areas of vegetation there was one
or more plumes of smoke contributing to the
sub-continental smog. We found out later
that our route was well west of the largest fire
then burning in Montana, the Derby Mountain Fire
near Big Timber. The view was the same, or
perhaps worse, on the way back to Denver.
On the ground it was no different. We
photographed fires burning on nearby mountains
from U.S. Route 93 in the Mission Valley.
When we were growing up in Montana, we never saw
a “smoke” except for the ones we were on the
way to put out.
By logging onto
www.inciweb.org one could see that 100s of
thousands of acres were on fire at any one time
and millions of acres were burned during this
(yet another “bad”) fire season in the
Northern Rockies. The west being on fire is
old news for the MainStream Media. Those
in the Commonwealth did not see much fire
coverage. We did not know until we
returned that 2006 was the worst fire year in
recorded history.
In addition
to the gray brown sky, there was the gray brown
landscape. On the ground, it was not just
fires and smoke that was depressing. There
are clear signs that the earth had been tortured
by energy exploration, “resort” development
and logging. For a vivid rendition of the
current status of land use, resource
exploitation and its economic, social and
physical impact in Colorado, Wyoming and
Montana, check out High Country News and read
the essays and stories by those on the ground at
www.hcn.org.
The Great Divide Basin might as well have been
the Steppes of Central Asia, if not the Gobi
Desert or the An Nafud. It reminded us of
the landscape viewed from old U.S. Route 40
between Lovelock and Wells, Nevada in the '50s.
As we flew on northwest, one
could identify landmarks in the Wind River
Range: The Grand Tetons and Yellowstone as well
as in the Gallatin, Beaverhead, Bitterroot and
Lolo National Forests. Where the
background color was gray-green indicating
vegetation, there was smoke. The rest of
the area was just gray and brown including the
tops of the mountains that I recalled as being
white, even this late in the year.
Even more depressing were the scattered urban
settlement patterns. Instead of protecting
the assets that makes The Big Sky Country
attractive and unique, urban land uses are being
scattered across the Countryside and the
mountainsides. Here and there on the
ground, one can find a patch of green and blue
in which to seek refuge. From 35,000 feet
there is no way to hide the region-wide impact
if one understands the meaning of what he is
observing.
The settlement pattern
viewed from 35,000 feet is Geographic Pornography.
On final approach into Missoula International,
one can see some of the details: Urban
houses on 10-, 20-, 40- or 100-acre lots with three
or four cars/pickups and perhaps a horse or two to paw
up the dry grass. It is clear why the
majority of the billions spent on “fire
control” is spent to protect scattered urban
dwellings.
One can also see
the why the Forest Service spends far more to
manage timber sales than it recovers in timber
sale revenue. As we will note below, trees
do not grow very fast in the Northern Rockies,
especially above 3,000 feet with year after year
of low rainfall. The 30- and 40-year-old clear
cuts are covered with scrub growth or with
nothing but shale and outcrops, the thin top
soil having been washed off after the tree cover
was removed.
Fire,
Ice and Global Climate Change
Fire.
We profiled the impact of fire on our home town
and decried the scattered urban dwellings in
“Fire and Flood,” 3 November 2003. Both 2003 and 2006 were bad fire
years in the Northern Rockies. So were most
of the other years from 1988 to 2006.
Nationally, 1988, 1996, 2000, 2002, 2004 and 2005
were very bad years. In 2005 the record
for recorded history of wild fires was set with
8,686,750 acres burned. So far in 2006,
85,990 fires have burned an estimated 9,392,470
acres. That is a new yearly record and is
nearly twice the ten-year average.
Something is happening here.
Forest,
brush and grass fires are not new. Lewis
and Clark reported large fires set by Native
Americans to improve prairie grazing for horses
and buffalo. Large forest fires followed
the logging operations west from Maine to Oregon
in the 19th Century.
Fire is a
natural occurrence and many of the fires in the
Northern Rockies are started by lightening.
Fire in some forest environments is beneficial,
but in the Northern Rocky Mountains where
natural regeneration is very slow, it is hard to
justify managed burns to produce timber, manage
wildlife habitant or protect watersheds.
In the 20th Century, the largest fire was
the 1910 Great Idaho (and Montana) Fire that burned more
than three million acres. (Way more than
three million
acres, by our tabulation.) The famous 1933
Tillamook Fire in Oregon burned one tenth of
that area. The widely reported 1988
Yellowstone Fire burned about half that area.
Ah Ha! you say. “SEE! These forest
fires are not a sign of “global warming” or
global climate change, it is just something that
happens from time to time.”
Not so fast.
The Great Idaho Fire burned to within a few
miles of our former home in West Glacier.
Based on evidence in Glacier National Park, what
burned in 1910 was old growth forest. It
was the climax forest that had evolved in the
conditions that existed in the prior 200 to 500
years. Forest growth in the last 100 years
has not begun to reproduce the dark, cool cedar
forest that existed before 1910. More of
the original Cedar old growth burned in the 2003
fire. There is still some left near Lake
McDonald but it is doubtful it will be
regenerated in the current climate cycle.
As we will suggest in the next section, the
Great Idaho Fire of 1910 burned out a forest
ecosystem that was already endangered by global
climate change. (See End Note
Three.)
Ice.
We turn next to ice, in the form
of glaciers. Glacier National Park’s
Glaciers, a harbinger of climate change,
have been retreating since first measured in the
19th century. Based on our personal
experience, glaciers in GNP have been on the
forefront of documenting Global Climate Change
(and at this point “Global Warming”) for
more than 50 years.
Global Climate Change
was already an old story in the '50s when we
joined the staff of the Pulitzer Prize-winning
newspaper serving the Upper Flathead. I
was 13 and in the 8th grade in 1951/1952 when
I landed my first job in journalism. The
editor/publisher was already well into the
Global Climate Change story. The U.S.
Geologic Survey and the National Park Service
were documenting the retreat of glaciers in the
Northern Rocky Mountains. Our mentor and
friend Mel Ruder joined those making the field
measurements on many occasions. The Hungry
Horse News carried pictures and a detailed story
on the findings each year. (See books
referenced in End Note Two.)
In 1955, having heard that Boulder Glacier, one
of the Park's more remote and, at one time,
largest glaciers was about to disappear, I
hiked alone for 40 miles round trip to see
Boulder Glacier before it was gone. You
can see before and after pictures of Boulder
Glacier on page 46 and 47 of Al Gore’s book
"An
Inconvenient Truth." Later, while working
for the Park Service, I helped document the
location of glaciers and thus the impact of
Global Climate Change on the ground and from the
air. (See End Note
Four.)
The
mantra of “Business-As-Usual” still denies
existence of Global Climate Change in order to
avoid even considering the possibility that
human activity is contributing to this reality.
As noted in “The Whale on the Beach,” 28
August 2006, even the most rabid
advocates of doing something about Global
Climate Change have not even begun to make the
connection between climate change and
dysfunctional human settlement patterns.
There is no place better to make the connection
than in Western Montana where the evidence is in
blue and white.
Climate Change
Bottom Line. The “climate” is
always changing. It is changing in long
cycles that last tens of thousands of years.
It is changing in short cycles that last a few hours. The question that most protagonists
are stuck on is:
How much does human
activity contribute to climate change?
Gore and others say human activity is a main
driving force. Lovelock says it is already
too late. Those who make a lot of money
from these activities – autonomobility, mass
consumption, ecological desecration, et. al. –
and those to whom they make political
contributions, say there is no impact.
The question and the responses are all beside
the point.
The critical reality is that
humans must shrink their ecological footprint
regardless of who is right.
Consider that:
Mass consumption of energy
and other resources make humans more vulnerable
to natural and manmade catastrophes. The byproducts of mass consumption make almost
every negative consequence worse than it would
otherwise be. A conservative approach to
energy consumption would be far more prudent
than continuing Business As Usual.
In
our work, we argue that dysfunctional human settlement patterns are a
primary driver of excess energy consumption and thus
human economic, social and physical
vulnerability. (See “Down Memory Lane
with Katrina,” 5 September 2005,
“Soft Consumption Paths,” 7 August 2006,
and “The Whale on the Beach,”
28
August 2006. Reading "An
Inconvenient Truth" or rereading "Earth in the
Balance" does not get that message across.
Functional
settlement patterns may or may not directly help
mitigate Global Climate Change.
However, there is no question that a more
intelligent ecological footprint stemming from
functional settlement patterns would make humans
far less vulnerable to the impacts of Global
Climate Change and almost all other natural and
manmade threats.
Our greatest disappointment on the trip was to
discover the “official” position of the
National Park Service – and thus the
Department of Interior and the federal
government – on Global Climate Change.
When “ranger naturalists” were asked about
the Global Climate Change (not “Global
Warming” or the impact of human activity on
“Global Warming”) in three locations we
always got the same answer, sometimes by two
naturalists reciting the same mantra in unison.
“The Park Service has no “position” on the
Global Climate Change.” We were told
there were no interpretive lecture programs on
the topic. We saw no mention of it in
Park Service handouts. The park does not even
have before- and-after pictures of snow pack or
glaciers in the displays we saw. The
display at Jackson Glacier Overlook – Jackson
Glacier is the only Glacier clearly visible from
a paved road in the Park – was said to have
before-and- after pictures. That display had
before and after pictures 50 years ago.
The naturalists were quick to offer the URL for
a US Geological Survey website which they said
documents the issue. That response saved
their jobs but allowed them to sleep at night.
These are intelligent people and they knew they
were sitting on top of the most dramatic
evidence of Global Climate Change in the Lower
48 but their hands are tied by the political
orthodoxy. An incredible education
opportunity is lost thousands of times a day,
perhaps a half a million times a year.
The
last Great Cheap Energy Migration
Almost
everyone you talk to in Western Montana
has a story about selling their land to an
outsider for urban land uses. Everyone we
talked to misses the fact that they are
witnessing and participating in the last of the
massive North American Cheap Energy Migrations.
This Last Great Cheap Energy Migration (LGCEM)
is now in full swing.
As we have
said many times before, citizens of the United
States are burning up Natural Capital in an
unsustainable, mindless march of
Business-As-Usual lemmings who are running
toward an economic, social and physical cliff. (See “Whale On The Beach,” 28 August 2006.)
To put the last
LGCEM in context, we provide a
summary of ten Great Cheap Energy Migrations in
the United States over the past 100 years in End
Note Five. As drafty as this list is, the
reader will still get the idea.
There may well be more than
ten Great Cheap Energy Migrations. Most of
those listed overlap in time and impact.
Some that are listed might be combined in a
refined list. These migrations have impact
not only within the United States, they have
also profoundly changed immigration patterns
across the globe.
The Great
Cheap Energy Migrations reflects a continuation
of the Jacksonian delusion that the resources of
the United States were unlimited and that the best
economic, social and physical nation-state
strategy was to exploit them to the maximum
extent possible.
The Tenth and
Last Great Cheap Energy Migration is the
movement of the super rich, the very rich and
just millionaires to a places where they can buy
extensive parcels of land based on the illusion
that separation in an urban civilization yields security and
privacy. These dwellings may be primary
homes but are more likely to be second or third
“homes” or a hobby place (“farm,”
“ranch,” or other endeavor).
Airline in-flight magazine ads are a window on
the interests of travelers. In-flight
magazine for SkyWest is one big, glossy Real
Estate Ad. The ads are full of false
assumptions about privacy and potential
appreciation. It is the Florida land bust
all over. Not the current housing bubble
but a full blown bust. (See End Note
Six.)
Surprisingly, the only
complaints about “development,” other than
general references to the pace of change, were
about condominiums and townhouses. No one
seemed to have a problem with the 5-, 10-, 20-, 30-acre
lots, much less the ranches and retreats of
the super rich and the very rich. (See
Chapter 7 Box 2 in "The Shape of the Future"
addressing the myths about condos taking
over Montana. Also see the
Backgrounder “Quantification of Land Resources
and the Impact on Land Conservation Efforts,”
August 2006.)
It is not
that Montanans lack good examples of
functional settlement patterns. The maple-shaded streets in Missoula near campus of
University of Montana are lined with sturdy, well
kept "Not So Big” houses.
The evolving settlement patterns are driven by
cheap energy – cheap energy to get rich people
from where
they live to Western Montana and cheap energy to
get around in autonomobiles once they get
there.
The super rich, the very rich
and the just millionaires are seeking open space
and amenity. It is not just happening in
the Northern Rocky Mountains. For the more
adventuresome, Patagonia and some parts of Africa
are also destinations.
While
we did not hear complaints from our friends,
there are conflicts as depicted in High Country
News and in the MainStream Media. The
roots of these conflicts are examined by Joel
Garreau in his perspectives on “Santa Fe-ing.”
Conflicts also exist in similar regional
environments outside the United States and other
areas with attractive landscape that have experienced
rapid price increases. (See End Note
Seven.)
The reunion provided an
opportunity to informally survey classmates.
Almost all of them had a story to tell about
selling land. One had, after years of
effort, recently closed a deal to sell a family farm for subdivision in
the Upper Flathead Valley.
A member
of a respected Blackfeet family that had lived 50
miles west of the Reservation for over half a
century called herself “homeless”
because she had just sold out her land and was
awaiting a move to a new home. The
recently widowed femme fatal of our class was
camping with her sister while her new
condominium was completed. The buyer of
her home place planned to tear down the house
and build a Rocky Mountain McMansion on 30+plus
acres.
We left hoping that our
friends got their money out before the balloon
goes up. Higher and higher energy cost in the years ahead will make these locations less
and less attractive, especially when owners will
be required to pay the full cost of their
location decisions.
Before leaving
this topic, it is important to note that not all
of Montana is subject to the same economic
forces. The conditions we describe impact
a 120-mile wide arc that follows the Idaho
border from Yellowstone to Canada. The
rest of the state falls into the high (dry)
plains ecosystem that has more in common with
the Dakotas and eastern Wyoming than with the
rest of Montana. (See End Note
Eight.)
Prelude
to Collapse
The third set of
observations has to do with ground proofing the
overall accuracy of Jared Diamond’s
description of Montana in the opening Chapter of
"Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or
Succeed." This book was the subject
of “Collapse, An Appreciation,” 8 August
2005. (See End Note Nine.)
During our visit, we
found few grounds to quibble with Diamond's description of Montana, especially
western Montana. In fact, we have seen only
one serious attempt to discredit Diamond’s
work. (See End Note Ten.)
It was great to see our classmates again.
One could not imagine a more interesting,
diverse, well-informed, friendly and articulate
cross section of people than those we saw again
and those we met for the first time in Western
Montana.
What was missing from
our conversations with classmates and
others?
All these are
necessary to understand what has happened and
what is happening in the Northern Rocky Mountain
Urban Support Region in which they exist.
The
citizens of Western Montana and, we
suspect, most of the Northern Rocky Mountain
Urban Support Region, are doing just what they
believe is in their best interest. They
believe what they are doing in the voting booth
and in the marketplace will further their
self-interest.
On a back road
in the Mission Valley there is a weathered sign
left over from a tent meeting or a past Easter
event. It reads:
“Forgive them Father for they know not what
they do."
That sign says it all
concerning the Big Gray Brown Sky Country.
Father
may forgive, but Mother Nature is not so
charitable. Neither is the economic reality of
dysfunctional human settlement patterns.
EMR
--
October 23, 2006
End
Notes
(1)
The September 2006 visit had an impact on our
thinking similar to revisiting Hawaii for the
first time in 29 years. Observations from
a 1989 tour of two islands led to a commitment
to write "The Shape of the Future." A
subsequent trip to Hawaii provided the
opportunity to complete the book’s chapter
outline and structure.
(2)
Tom Lawrence, "Pictures, a Park, and a
Pulitzer: Mel Ruder and the Hungry Horse
News," 2000; and Bill Yenne, "Images
of America: Glacier National Park," 2006.
(3)
Nineteen twenty-nine was another big fire year in the Northern
Rockies. It burned up to the back lot line
of a parcel adjacent to Forest Service land
which we bought in 1952. When we moved to
Montana in the early 50s the 1929 burn area was
still largely snags and
thick-as-the-hair-on-a-dogs-back Jack Pines.
Many of those Jack Pines were eight feet tall or
less depending on the soil. Now, 50 years
later, these trees frequently are no more than 20 to
30 feet tall. The reason there are few
private timber holdings in the Northern Rockies
is that the land does not produce enough fiber
per acre to make it profitable in the current
climate cycle.
(4)
On 29 January 2006 WaPo carried a Climate Change
story on the front page. The headline and
subhead says it all: “Scientist Debate Issue
of Climates’s Irreparable Change: Some Experts
on Global Warming Foresee ‘Tipping Point’
When It is Too Late to Act.” Since that
time we have noted many stories with the same
theme (7 Sept 2006 Seth Borenstein, “New
Climate Change ‘Time Bomb’ Detected,” AP,
14 Sept 2006; Marc Kaufman, Decline in Winter
Arctic Ice Linked to Greenhouse Gases,” WaPo).
The spin is new, the story is not. James
Lovelock in his book "The Revenge of Gaia:
Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of
Humanity," says it is already too late. As
we point out in "The Shape of the Future" and
later in this column, one does not have to
endorse Lovelock’s Gaia Theory to be very
frightened by Global Climate Change.
(5)
A Draft List of Overlapping Mass Movements
Fueled By Cheap Energy.
Migrations
fueled by cheap energy caused large shifts in
population and settlement patterns within the
Untied States as well as attracting workers from
other parts of the Globe from the early 20th
Century to today.
1. The
northward migration of Southern (and Puerto Rican) non-urban workers to fill manufacturing and service
jobs. The prototypical worker moved to
Detroit to make autonomobiles and war machines
for World War I and World War II. However,
this migration impacted every major urban
agglomeration from Seattle to Boston.
2. Intra-regional and inter-regional
depopulation of marginal agricultural and forest lands
in every part of the nation-state.
Attracted by jobs and urban amenities, non-urban
workers moved to large and small urban
Agglomerations across the United States.
Great Cheap Energy Migrations
1 and 2 were the
culmination of what Peter Drucker has called the
most important and most rapid fundamental change
in human history: The urbanization of the First
World from 1800 to 2000. In 1800 about 95
percent of the population of the Untied States
(and other nation-states that make up the First
World) derived their economic and social support
from non-urban activities and five percent from
urban activities. Two centuries later the
numbers were reversed so that 95 percent of the
population derived economic and social support
urban activities and only five percent directly
from agricultural, forestal and other non-urban
pursuits. See “View from the
Heartland,” 3
October 2005, and Chapter One of The
Shape of the Future.
3.
Metropolitan Agglomeration occurring as urban
agglomerations grew and separate Industrial
Centers coalesced into large, coterminous
New Urban Regions: For example the Boston
to Hampton Roads “Megalopolis” and Great
Lakes Megalopolitan agglomeration from Pittsburgh
to Milwaukee.
4. Intra-regional Metropolitan Disaggregation,
resulting in the spreading out of large urban
agglomerations (aka, “sub”urbanization) with
“edge cities” and the rise of single-occupant,
private- vehicle
commuting.
5. Snow Birds
retiring in the South and Southwest
to stay warm in winter
6.
Air Conditioning / Interstate Highways, giving rise to the New South. Why wait until you
are 65 to be warm in the winter and play golf
year round?
7.
Money coalescing in “money centers" like New
York and San Francisco. Big brains gathering in
Silicon Valley and Austin and big shippers
clustering in Memphis are frequently cited as
examples.
8.
Big Defense as Big Government. A
“strong defense” and a small government is
an oxymoron. Government spending caused
migration to the Gunbelt, to the Space Corridor
and to the New Urban Region around “The
Capital of the Free World.”
9.
The McMansion Phenomena – the wrong size house
in the wrong location pushed large urban
dwellings far beyond the logical location of the
Clear Edge. See prior columns on
affordable and accessible housing location and
scatteration of urban land uses across the
Countryside within 100 miles of the Core of
Major New Urban Regions.
10.
Interregional scatteration of dwellings and
hobby venues for the Super Rich, the Very Rich
and just millionaires in remote, attractive
environments. This is activity of the
population cohort that Paul Simon calls “a
loose affiliation of billionaires and
millionaires.”
(6)
Big Fork, on the east shore of Flathead Lake,
has been a vacation and retirement destination
for the well-to-do for most of the 20th Century.
However, things have changed. Now the shop
front encountered most
often on the main street
is not a theater, a gallery or a watering hole,
it is a real estate office. There is a
Sothebys in Big Fork, Montana not unlike similar
agencies in Middleburg.
(7)
Joel Garreau, “Santa Fe-ing of the Piedmont,”
The Fauquier Citizen, 2 March 2006. Also
see Monte Reel, “Argentine Land Fight Divides
Environmentalists, Right Advocates,” 24 Sept
2006, WaPo. Mary Jordan and Kevin
Sullivan, “Irish Property Owners Are Rolling
in Green,” 2 Sept 2006 WaPo.
(8)
See Blain Hardin, “From Old West to New,” 4
Aug 2006 WaPo.
(9)
There are several books published since "The
Shape of the Future" was written that we regret
not being able to cite in the book.
Malcolm Gadwell’s "The Tipping Point" and Jared
Diamond’s "Collapse" are two of the most
important. For most of 2006 they have been
on the WaPo nonfiction best-seller list for
paperbacks. They had previously been on
the hardback list.
(10)
That attempted rebuttal was published by a
Montana property rights organization PERC in
Bozeman, Mont. While the report,
“Montana: On the Verge of Collapse,” by
Kendra Okonski raises useful points concerning
data, it primarily provides a forum to review
from PERC’s perspective factors that Okonski
believes contributed to the dysfunctions Diamond
notes. Okonski
also dwells on the governance
structure problems that stand in the way of
improving these conditions. The PERC
report does not call into question the substance
of the facts Diamond presents, although the text
purports to do so.
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