As usual, I’ve come home from my vacation with about 20 pounds of newsprint, collected, this time, mostly from Montana, Wyoming and Utah.
Reading local columnists, editorials, letters to the editor and the business sections imparts a certain fragile understanding of other people’s problems and views. Where they differ from ours. And where they don’t.
The Bozeman Daily Chronicle seems to focus on all things outdoorsy, as befitting life in Big Sky country. An editorial praises the change in U.S. Forest Service fire policy and its effect in the Bob Marshall Wilderness, where years of fire suppression led to entirely unnatural conditions in an area that was supposedly a fortress of natural processes. The decision to allow certain fires to burn (about half of fires that start are still suppressed) has produced a mosaic of burned areas where forests of different ages are easier to manage. Another recommends that if Montana Gov. Judy Martz cuts the state income tax by more than 9 percent, 9 million tourists should pick up the slack through a 3 percent sales tax on hotels, restaurants and rental cars. Hmmm.
Letters, as they do in most places, reflect local interests. An attempt by the city to annex property on Sourdough Road and rezone it as “medium density” is decried. Front page news in the Chronicle last week featured Gov. Martz being cleared by an ethics probe over her 1999 land purchase from Atlantic Richfield Co.; beef ranchers being told to produce leaner meat by McDonald’s purchasing manager, who addressed the “Montana Beef University,” an event sponsored by the Montana Stockgrowers Association; a six-month extension of the city’s ban on “big box” stores; regulations on snowmobile emissions to cut smog at Yellowstone National Park and the federal government’s imminent delisting of wolves from the Endangered Species Act.
Concerning the wolves, an editorial in the Jackson Hole News said, “It’s time for the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission to get real about the wildlife it is charged to manage.”
It seems the commission is planning to govern wolves, once federal protection is lifted, by classifying them as trophy game animals in wilderness areas of Shoshone and Bridger-Teton national forests, and listing them as predators everywhere else in the state outside Yellowstone and Teton national parks and the National Elk Refuge.
What’s in a name? Trophy status (the name chills our blood) would allow regulated hunting. Listing the wolf as a predator (that’s what a wolf is, after all) would allow the animal “to be shot, poisoned, run down, roped, hung, burned or skewered” everywhere else. Citing Wyoming’s “long and proud wildlife heritage,” the editorial blasts the plan. For a “threatened species to go from protected status to such unregulated killing is laughable.”
Shows how out of the loop I’ve been concerning legislative nomenclature. I’ve always thought “trophy” hunting abhorrent, and that the killing of any “predator” should be allowed only by the farmer or rancher whose stock has been preyed upon or is immediately threatened.
Incidentally, the same editorial page ran a cartoon showing a forest of oil derricks labeled “Dubya National Wilderness” and a passing motorist saying, “I guess it depends on how you define trees.” Seems they’re not all Republicans up here.
Back in California, news by the L.A. Times takes on a more theatrical slant: The port shutdown “On the Waterfront”; Mouseketeers taking over CNN, or not; LAPD’s newly appointed chief from “NYPD Blue”; Michael Eisner’s choice of Euro Disney’s James Rasulo, “An American in Paris,” to replace departing theme parks president Paul Pressler.
Nothing about bears, wolves, big box stores or oil wells. Welcome back to the company town.