Policy of Place
Missoula, Montana

  I have been a resident of Missoula, Montana for 4 years.  It has taken me a long time to feel safe in assigning myself to a place.  Along with a claim of residence comes quite a bit of responsibility, but I embrace it.  Before Missoula I would have called myself a nomad.  In my 22 years I have live along with my parents in Washington state, Montana, seven different locations in New Mexico, and two in Minnesota before finally finding place in Missoula.  I have for most of my life felt rootless.  Finding a community has always been something I’ve yearned for.  A reoccurring theme in my study of the environmental movement has been the need for people to find a place.  This should be a place in which one can invest time and energy into building a sense of community and preserving the surrounding ecology of the locale.  So Missoula is my place, my community, and I have begun to lay down roots. 
    I enjoy hiking in the surrounding mountains and letting my spirit run free among the high peaks and the deep drainages.  At the same time my heart is heavy when I come into contact with the irresponsible logging practices in the surrounding wildlands and unhealthy development schemes in the outskirts of town.  I swim and kayak in the three rivers that find their confluence in and around Missoula.  As I drink water from the aquifer and plan my next river trip the morning paper informs me of yet another mine opening upstream, or an update on the Milltown Reservoir superfund site at the confluence of the Clark Fork and Blackfoot Rivers.  Biking to work on the busy streets finds my lungs not full of fresh air, but car exhaust.  Curses escape my lips as SUV after SUV take the bike lane as their own.  Later I may be safe from the busy street, but I’m yet to be safe from air pollution as the days are often plagued with a bad air inversion caused by the location of the city in a valley surrounded by mountains.  Pollution from Smurfit Stone Container Corp, Missoula Particle  Board, and thousands of nonpoint mobile sources often result in a thick smog that at times is almost palpable.  Forest fires in the past have created such a valley full of smoke that residents were encouraged to keep indoors and avoid physical activity. 
    Missoula is not a bad place to live though.  In fact it was rated among the top ten communities in the country by outdoor magazine.  At roughly 80,000 residents, it is home to a university, a vibrant downtown, and a veritable cornucopia of environmental organizations.  However, even in a community where 15% of residents voted for Ralph Nader in the last election there are glaring environmental challenges.  In this paper I will briefly examine the Missoula environment’s worst offenders, look at what is being done in the community to rectify these problems and finally suggest some of my own solutions.
    In the 1980’s Missoula banned the use of wood burning fireplaces, not to reduce greenhouse gasses, or to preserve forest but because often in the winter and sometimes in the summer Missoula would choke under a blanket of foul smelling pollution.  Missoula’s founders chose to locate the city under a severe air inversion caused by the narrowing Big Hole Valley between the Bitterroot Mountains to the west, the Sapphire Mountains to the east and the Mission Mountains to the North.  Woodsmoke no longer fills the valley but the increasing use of vehicles as the city has grown has been equally dangerous to health and well being of the residents.  Although industrial air pollution has also been a huge problem, I would like to first address the issues of urban sprawl, habitat fragmentation and the car culture in and around Missoula. 
    In the late 1980’s Southdale mall moved to the outskirts of town.  Within it gathered the usual mix of stores.  Located at the end of South Brooks Street the mall was at first on its own.  Quickly the space between the downtown and the mall was filled with smaller, but no less destructive strip malls and big box stores.  The prices were so good, and the shopping so convenient that the once bustling downtown, with its locally owned businesses, began to die.  Enter the story of American urban sprawl playing itself out in every community in our country.  However Missoula was different.  The residents saw stores closing downtown as the strip perpetually increased and they decided to act.  This move to action was spurred both by the longing for that sense of community but also from a deep seated environmental ethic that caused them to resist car culture and the inevitable habitat fragmentation sprawl creates.
   Today the strip is still spreading although more slowly, but the downtown has once again become the heart of the community.  Sprawl has caused damage to riparian and wetland areas mostly to the south and to the northwest of town.  This can be blamed on the planning board as they have allowed quite a few hideous developments to spring up.  The land that at one time was prairie now succumbs to the sprawl and the disturbed area becomes a breading ground for invasive plant species such as knapweed and leafy spurge which in turn move out into the wildlands.  Sprawl that pushes into the wildland urban interface creates problems with wildlife as ungulate species, bear and mountain lion venture down into the valley in search of food late in the summer.   Humans pushing deep into these habitat areas cause major problems for the Fish and Wildlife Service not to mention the animals that are captured and moved or euthanized.  The interface is also a key player in the debate over the development of a new fire regime.  As people push further up the drainages and onto the mountains so does the timber industry.  More firefighters risk their lives every year as more property owners choose to surround themselves with dense woodland instead of the Missoula community. 
  Cars are the main source of transportation from these areas, although public transportation in the form of buses is available.  The dilemma is that most people genuinely concerned with the environment and reducing the use of cars live closer to downtown, whereas the SUV drivers tend to live in the new developments.  One can find bike lanes on most streets closer to downtown, but these become less frequent the closer one gets to the urban sprawl.
    The sustained sense of community has allowed for a very strong progressive presence.  Missoula is the headquarters of several local and state environmental organizations.  One such organization, Women’s Voices for the Earth (WVE) has made a priority of holding Smurfit Stone Container Corporation accountable to its environmentally degrading activities.  The liner board mill is one of Missoula’s largest employers, but also it greatest source of point pollution. Although WVE convinced Stone Container to shut down its chlorine bleach plant in 1998 the company still releases a great amount of dioxin into the air each year. (wildrockies.org/wve)  According to Scorecard.org, Stone Container is within the top ten percent of worst polluters in the country for both total environmental releases and air carcinogen releases.   The air inversion I’ve mentioned previously has contained an ever increasing amount of air pollution each year since 1988.  In 2000 Stone Container released over three million pounds of air pollution, almost 180,000 pounds of which were either carcinogens or suspected carcinogens.  
   Missoula Particle Board is another major source of point air pollution.  Of the over 200,000 pounds of releases annually, over half are known or suspected carcinogens.  The main concern is formaldehyde, which is a recognized carcinogen, but is suspected to cause many more health problems such as birth defects. 
  These major air pollution problems from Stone Container, Missoula Particle Board, and nonpoint sources coupled with the air inversion has created a recognized cancer risk just above the national average.  Although this may not be extraordinarily high, there are other problems in Missoula still to be addressed, mainly that of our own Superfund site, Milltown Dam. 
   Now, some communities may have Superfund sites, but not many communities can claim to have a nearly one hundred year old dam groaning behind the weight of 6.6 million cubic yards of metal contaminated sediment. (clarkfork.org)  If the dam were to burst it would flood Missoula leaving downtown under 100 feet of old mining tailings. Arsenic was discovered in the several wells in the town of Milltown in 1981. (missoulain.com)  The toxic pollution threatened to render all of Milltown’s water undrinkable, so scientists began to search for the source. Eventually the trail led to the Milltown reservoir and finally to Anaconda Copper Company 120 miles upstream. 
  The dam had been constructed in 1908 for hydroelectric power and has remained in operation ever since.  Although the dam was named a superfund site in 1982, it has yet to be cleaned up and delisted.(epa.com)  The mine tailings that are present in the Milltown reservoir have begun to leak into the aquifer and now show in several additional wells.  Arsenic, mercury, and zinc among others have been found in the dam sediments and within the wells.   The EPA’s dilemma lays in whether to reinforce the dam so that it won’t break or to dredge the river and remove the dam.  Several possibly responsible parties have been named, mainly Montana Power, the owner of the dam and Anaconda Copper Company, the source of most of the tailings.  It is argued by the responsible parties that the dam still supplies some power and therefore should be reinforced, but environmental and citizen groups hold that everyday the dam remains more toxic tailings flow over the top of the dam and seep into the groundwater.  At the end of last month the EPA suggested a 9 million dollar cleanup effort that would remove the sediments and the dam.  In a surprise concession, Judy Martz, Montana’s ultra-conservative governor (she once referred to herself as the lapdog of the industry), agreed with the EPA’s suggested cleanup strategy.
    After analyzing so many environmental problems I would like to briefly discuss the best mode with which to rectify these problems.   Missoula may be a haven for liberal thinking, but it is an island within the sea of western state conservativism.  I find that local government can be an ally, but trying to rely on the state to pass any sort of legitimate environmental policy is unrealistic.  Even current policies such as the Wilderness Act and the Endangered Species Act are not enforced by the state.  The federal government seems to be giving power back to the states and the regional managers of publicly owned land, which spells out habitat destruction around Missoula.  I feel caught between a rock and a hard place because it seems that in Missoula citizen action is working now to bring about changes in development and industry, but I know that in order to create long term protection of the environment, policy must be put in place.  In new policy I would like to see limits put on growth in the wildland urban interface.  Along with these limits a wide array of building requirements that would see smaller homes or more group living homes encouraged and all new development integrated into the street system of the community.   New roads would be built narrower to slow traffic and bus lanes would expedite public transportation.  With this could come an easier and more popular development of effective public transportation.   The release of dioxin and other carcinogens from our industrial sector must be curbed.  It is ridiculous to claim at one time to be in the top ten best places to live and at the same time be seen as housing some of the worst industrial polluters in the country. On a local level all these goals can be accomplished by placing environmentally progressive people into local office and onto committees, but what of the National Forest, BLM, and Wilderness surrounding Missoula?  What can be done in order to protect our rivers when it seems that they are all too often being severely disrespected upstream?  These questions will be answered in the Policy and Regulation course.  Meanwhile I will continue to invest my time and energy into my place, Missoula, Montana.  Perhaps it will become a community that can be an example of success over environmental challenges. 


Bibliography:
Scorecard.org
clarkfork.org
missoulian.com
wildrockies.org/wve
epa.com