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Louisa Willcox
- Jun 30, 2019
Wild Thoughts About the Wild Gallatin
by Louisa Willcox For the last 30 years a view of the stunning Gallatin Range in southwestern Montana has greeted me nearly every morning. Our window looks out on three dark green hogbacks that link the broad belly of Paradise Valley to the spine of the Gallatin Mountains. Her expression shapes my day, sometimes glowering, radiant, or showing off a new white cap. Her moods are quicksilver and sometimes terrifying, as in August 2001, when high winds bellowed the Gallatin’s Fri
David Mattson
- Jun 27, 2019
Felicia’s Fate: The Trials of a Grizzly Bear Mom
by David Mattson Grizzly bears reside at a symbolic nexus that seems to relentlessly spawn conflict. Almost invariably, this conflict organizes around incidents that catalyze a mix of fear, anger, grief, and empathy—all inescapably configured by peoples’ mental constructs. There is the reality of bears, and then there are our contested inventions of who they are, what they should be, and what it all means. More complicating yet, grizzly bear-centric conflicts often arise from
David Mattson
- Jun 19, 2019
The Gallatin Forest Partnership and the Tyranny of Ego
by David Mattson We all have egos that we erect to circumscribe and reify the “self,” or so I have been told. Some scholars have gone so far as to argue that our lives consist of little more than obsessively hitting the world’s feeder bar to obtain emotional and material rewards for the ego, not unlike rats in a gigantic elaborate maze. Even so, this fundamental premise obscures important distinctions between motivations that literally arise from different portions of our bra
