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By Root 2016 0

own high school graduates leave the valley, and most of those leave Montana. Although population is increasing in the Bitterroot, it is falling in eastern Montana, so that for the state of Montana as a whole the population trend is flat. Within the past decade the number of Ravalli County residents in their 50s has increased steeply, but the number in their 30s has actually decreased. Some of the people recently establishing homes in the valley are extremely wealthy, such as the brokerage house founder Charles Schwab and the Intel president Craig Barrett, but Ravalli County is nevertheless one of the poorest counties in the state of Montana, which in turn is nearly the poorest state in the U.S. Many of the county’s residents find that they have to hold two or three jobs even to earn an income at U.S. poverty levels.

We associate Montana with natural beauty. Indeed, environmentally Montana is perhaps the least damaged of the lower 48 states; ultimately, that’s the main reason why so many people are moving to Ravalli County.

The federal government owns over one-quarter of the land in the state and three-quarters of the land in the county, mostly under the title of national forest. Nevertheless, the Bitterroot Valley presents a microcosm of the environmental problems plaguing the rest of the United States: increasing population, immigration, increasing scarcity and decreasing quality of water, locally and seasonally poor air quality, toxic wastes, heightened risks from wildfires, forest deterioration, losses of soil or of its nutrients, losses of biodiversity, damage from introduced pest species, and effects of climate change.

Montana provides an ideal case study with which to begin this book on past and present environmental problems. In the case of the past societies that I shall discuss—Polynesian, Anasazi, Maya, Greenland Norse, and others—we know the eventual outcomes of their inhabitants’ decisions about managing their environment, but for the most part we don’t know their names or personal stories, and we can only guess at the motives that led them to act as they did. In contrast, in modern Montana we do know names, life histories, and motives. Some of the people involved have been my friends for over 50 years. From understanding Montanans’ motives, we can better imagine motives operating in the past. This chapter will put a personal face on a subject that could otherwise seem abstract.

In addition, Montana provides a salutory balance to the following chapters’ discussions of small, poor, peripheral, past societies in fragile environments. I intentionally chose to discuss those societies because they were the ones suffering the biggest consequences of their environmental damage, and they thus powerfully illustrate the processes that form the subject of this book. But they are not the only types of societies exposed to serious environmental problems, as illustrated by the contrast case of Montana. It is part of the richest country in the modern world, and it is one of the most pristine and least populated parts of that country, seemingly with fewer problems of environment and population than the rest of the U.S. Certainly, Montana’s problems are far less acute than those of crowding, traffic, smog, water quality and quantity, and toxic wastes that beset Americans in Los Angeles, where I live, and in the other urban areas where most Americans live. If, despite that, even Montana has environmental and population problems, it becomes easier to understand how much more serious those problems are elsewhere in the U.S. Montana will illustrate the five main themes of this book: human impacts on the environment; climate change; a society’s relations with neighboring friendly societies (in the case of Montana, those in other U.S. states); a society’s exposure to acts of other potentially hostile societies (such as overseas terrorists and oil producers today); and the importance of a society’s responses to its problems.

The same environmental disadvantages that penalize food production throughout the whole of the American