News

Urban-rural effort needed in Montana, speaker tells NPRC

Whenever he crosses the Bozeman Pass on drives from his Missoula home to Billings, Daniel Kemmis said, there’s a part of him that always wants to keep going, back to his home country in Eastern Montana and the rural landscape where he grew up.

By CLAIR JOHNSON
Of The Gazette Staff

http://www.billingsgazette.com/index.php?id=1&display=rednews/2004/11/13/build/state/30-urban-rural.inc

The values and virtues instilled by a rural lifestyle where people make their living from the land, Kemmis said, form the fundamentals of democracy.

Kemmis, director of the Center for the Rocky Mountain West http://crmw.org/ , a former mayor of Missoula and author, spoke about values, the urban-rural divide and ways to bridge it in an address Friday at the 33rd annual meeting of the Northern Plains Resource Council. Kemmis also is a former speaker and minority leader of the Montana House.

Rural values

Although Kemmis has spent most of his working life in urban settings, he was born in Fairview, grew up on a farm near Richey and graduated from high school in Sidney. It was from an urban perspective that Kemmis talked about what it might mean to be living rural values.

"Let’s be honest,” Kemmis said – noting that honesty, along with a sense of stewardship and adaptability, are some of what he considers to be rural values. In the wake of the country’s general election, where moral values turned out to be an important issue for voters in rural areas, urban residents may have bitter feelings about what are presented as rural values, he said.

Some want to exploit the divide, and others think the way to succeed is to wait until the West is more urbanized. Both are wrong, Kemmis said.

In working with city leaders in Montana and the West, Kemmis said, he has seen changes in the economy. Most of the growth is in urban areas, he said. Some suggest cities should band together and push their agenda through legislatures.

Bad policy for Montana

"I find myself resisting that advice,” Kemmis said. "A go-it-alone urban policy would be bad policy in Montana. A go-it-alone policy would be as guaranteed to fail as a go-it-alone foreign policy,” he said, drawing applause from audience of more than 100. "Not that I have strong feelings,” he added, to laugher.

Montana needs to recognize the importance of cities because "the simple fact is that cities are the generators of wealth and prosperity,” he said.

Kemmis also said environmental groups that advocate eliminating all timber harvesting and public lands grazing are mistaken, too. Those positions are easily interpreted as a war against rural families, he said.

Kemmis said it is important for urban areas to stand together with rural communities.

To succeed as a state, residents must give cities the "tools they need to work as well as a farm,” Kemmis said, paying attention to revenue generation and infrastructure. And in the long run, the well-being of cities is dependent on the well-being of rural communities, he said.

Also on Friday, NPRC released a final version of its peer-reviewed, technical study analyzing solutions for managing coalbed methane wastewater. The report concluded that injecting coalbed methane water back into the ground or treating it before discharge if injection is not possible are affordable and practical options.

A draft version of the report by Kuipers and Associates of Butte for NPRC was released in August for public comment.

Groundwater produced by drilling for coalbed methane in the Powder River Basin tends to run high in sodium, which can damage certain soils and crops. Disposal of the wastewater is a major concern for farmers and ranchers who worry that the produced water will pollute rivers and streams they use for irrigation. Draining aquifers is another concern in the arid basin.

The Northern Plains Resource Council is a grass-roots, regional resource and agriculture organization and is a member of the Western Organization of Resource Councils.

The annual meeting continues today at the Billings Sheraton Hotel.

Copyright © The Billings Gazette, a division of Lee Enterprises.

Sorry, we couldn't find any posts. Please try a different search.

Leave a Comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.