Montana is known as the Big Sky country and holds the Last Best Place within it, aka Glacier National Park. However, the Bitterroot Valley of Montana holds another story altogether. Within this area of our beautiful state, we hide many environmental detriments including but not limited to “increasing scarcity and decreasing quality of water, locally and seasonally poor air quality” and “increasing population”. These problems and many more are definitely historical in nature; these factors don’t just pop up overnight like some sort of magic plague. Most if not all of these problems take years if not decades to develop and affect nature and mother Earth. Most of these problems, most notably, the toxic waste problem, stem from the spread of humans. So, in short, if we just stopped where we were, we might be able to save some of Montana at least.
The Bitterroot Valley of Montana is like a small scale world model that we can most defiantly use as a picture of the whole world’s environmental problems. After all, “Montana’s environmental problems include almost all of the dozens of problems that have undermined pre-industrial societies in the past…” which means that a majority of the worlds environmental issues can be represented inside of one little valley in Montana. I would say that that is a pretty fair area to judge the rest of the worlds issues on.
The language you used to describe Montana and what has been going on is excellent, the only thing I would wonder is how did humans specifically affect the natural resources of Bitterroot Valley. I like your use of the text to provide a valid source of information to draw from to back up your statements about the nature in Montana and how it relates to the rest of the world. I’d be interested to know if the Valley resembles almost all of the other biomes of the world, and how different factors affect Montana specifically. Another interesting topic could be how each negative factor impacting that valley, when singled out, presents the same problems in a different part of the world. Extremely well written response to the prompt!
The problems you pose in this blog post I believe are some of the strongest points that are in the first text we read. Using previous events such as the plague in the way oh comedy but also a vector to get your point across is a very successful tool to drive your point in. As I would also agree on Montana being a good place to use to judge the rest of the world, I would also stress the importance of the idea that things like climate a population are diverse and different around the nation and it is important to take that into account before using Montana as guide to the US problems. Super easy and fun to read response!