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By Root 2040 0

the two most important of these weeds are Spotted Knapweed and Leafy Spurge, both now widespread throughout Montana. Spotted Knapweed takes over from native grasses by secreting chemicals that quickly kill them, and by producing vast numbers of seeds. While it can be pulled out by hand from selected small fields, it has now infested 566,000 acres in the Bitterroot Valley alone and 5,000,000 acres in all of Montana, an area far too large for hand-pulling to be feasible. Spotted Knapweed can also be controlled by herbicides, but the cheaper herbicides that kill it also kill many other plant species, and the herbicide specific for Spotted Knapweed is very expensive ($800 per gallon). In addition, it is uncertain whether the breakdown products of those herbicides end up in the Bitterroot River or in the aquifers used for human drinking water, and whether those products themselves have harmful effects. Because Spotted Knapweed has become established on large areas of national forest as well as of pastureland, it reduces the fodder production not only for domestic animals but also for wild herbivores in the forest, so that it may have the effect of driving deer and elk from forest down into pastures by reducing the amount of food available in the forest. Leafy Spurge is at present less widespread than knapweed but much harder to control and impossible to pull out by hand, because it establishes underground roots 20 feet long.

Estimates of the direct economic damage that these and other weeds cause in Montana are over $100,000,000 per year. Their presence also reduces real estate values and farm productivity. Above all, they are a huge pain in the neck for farmers, because they cannot be controlled by any single measure alone but require complex integrated management systems. They force farmers to change many practices simultaneously: pulling out weeds, applying herbicides, changing fertilizer use, releasing insect and fungus enemies of weeds, lighting controlled fires, changing mowing schedules, and altering crop rotations and annual grazing practices. All that because of a few small plants whose dangers were mostly unappreciated at the time, and some of whose seeds arrived unnoticed!

Thus, seemingly pristine Montana actually suffers from serious environmental problems involving toxic wastes, forests, soils, water, climate change, biodiversity losses, and introduced pests. All of these problems translate into economic problems. They provide much of the explanation for why Montana’s economy has been declining in recent decades to the point where what was formerly one of our richest states is now one of the poorest.

Whether or how these problems become resolved will depend on the attitudes and values that Montanans hold. But Montana’s population is becoming increasingly heterogeneous and cannot agree on a vision for their state’s environment and future. Many of my friends commented on the growing polarization of opinion. For instance, banker Emil Erhardt explained to me, “There is too much raucous debate here. The prosperity of the 1950s meant that all of us were poor then, or we felt poor. There were no extremes of wealth; at least, wealth wasn’t visible. Now, we have a two-tiered society with lower-income families struggling to survive at the bottom, and the wealthier newcomers at the top able to acquire enough property that they can isolate themselves. In essence, we are zoning by money, not by land use!”

The polarization that my friends mention is along many axes: rich versus poor, old-timers versus newcomers, those clinging to a traditional lifestyle versus others welcoming change, pro-growth versus anti-growth voices, those for and against governmental planning, and those with and without school-age children. Fueling these disagreements are Montana’s paradoxes that I mentioned near the beginning of this chapter: a state with poor residents but attracting rich newcomers, even while the state’s own children are deserting Montana upon graduating high school.

I initially wondered whether Montana’s environmental problems