Stewardship of Public Lands: Glacier 2024
Two Medicine, Rockwell Falls, Grinnell Lake, hydrological apexes, grizzly bears, and more.
The Kalispell airport is one of the nicest airports I’ve seen—tiny, but very well-appointed. Where ordinary airports feel grubby and commercial, this one feels more like a waiting room for the ultra rich. The men’s restroom boasts gorgeous wood paneling and stalls separated by actual walls and doors (as opposed to a flimsy barricade). And, at what appeared to be the airport’s only restaurant (a deli doubling as a coffee shop), you can get a $27 turkey and Swiss sandwich and a $6 drip coffee. What could be finer?
Get this: of the 17 people who live full time in Montana, three of them are on the Forbes 400 list of the richest people in America.
(The actual population of Montana is 1.13 million as of July 1, 2023, but the thing about the preponderance of uber wealthy residents is true. And by all accounts, it has become a serious problem in Montana.)
By now everyone has seen Yellowstone, so I will spare you the tedious commentary on how extreme wealth has altered the landscape, endangered a way of life, and brought to the foreground important issues related to the politics of representation (especially of Indigenous people).
I came to Montana to spend a week at the Glacier Institute with faculty, staff, and administrators from across the United States to learn about how the federal government manages competing interests and handles conflict resolution on public lands. In addition to the National Park Service, which operates Glacier National Park, many other federal agencies and non-governmental organizations work in and around the northern Rockies, including the US Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and an assortment of environmentalists and non-profit groups like the Flathead River Alliance. The Blackfeet Nation, whose reservation encompasses most of northern Montana, also plays a vital role in preserving and sustaining this magical place. At various points throughout the week, we heard from representatives from each of these groups: the NPS, Flathead, a long-time Glacier resident, and a Blackfeet elder and expert on soil and water conservation. Our conversations and workshops throughout the week were informed and energized by a single focal point: the Land, its wildlife, and their care.
And what a land it is. Glacier National Park sits on some 1 million acres of stunning forests, valleys, rivers, peaks, streams, mountains, and glaciers. It contains—officially, as of 2015—25 active glaciers. However, due to rapidly accelerating climate change and the fact that the last GIS report is nearly a decade old, I was told by a guide that this number is likely lower by at least a couple of glaciers, if not more.
As the NPS puts it on their website, Glacier is
A showcase of melting glaciers, alpine meadows, carved valleys, and spectacular lakes. With over 700 miles of trails, Glacier is a paradise for adventurous visitors seeking wilderness steeped in human history. Relive the days of old through historic chalets, lodges, and the famous Going-to-the-Sun Road.
Stewardship of Public Lands is a week-long educational excursion sponsored by the American Democracy Project and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities—or AASC&U (pronounced “ask-you”), as it’s commonly known—that encourages interdisciplinary experiential learning among a cohort of some two dozen academics, administrators, and student affairs professionals from around the country and from a variety of disciplinary and professional backgrounds. The primary reason for our visit was to learn about land management and conflict resolution among several competing stakeholders—skills that are instantly transferable to (and sorely needed in) so many domains in higher education—but, as often happens with these sorts of experiences, the outcomes came to encompass so much more than that.
There’s something magical—and fraught, which is part of the magic—about spending a week in the woods with people you barely know. It’s the perverse promise at the heart of all reality television.
“We’re going to take a dozen people and put then in a house for a weekend and not tell them that three of them are neo-Nazis, two have borderline personality disorder, one is a bed wetter (at 37), and another has voted Libertarian in the last four national elections.” This is going to be great! “Oh, and they have to survive on black beans and protein bars.”
Learning from the People
But seriously, there was an element of that to our work this past week. Despite months of Zoom meetings, when we arrived at the Kalispell airport on Monday, the 20 or so of us who made it to Montana were, in effect, starting anew. After all, if the pandemic taught us anything it’s that while Zoom is fine for certain rote tasks and announcements, there’s really no good substitute for meeting someone in person, being in the same physical space, breathing the same air, and facing the same circumstances—together.
Heck, for a solid week we even showered together. (Not at the same time, obviously, but in the same shared outdoor facility, which for a bunch academics—who at least in my experience tend to lean toward the coquettish—is quite a feat!)
It occurred to me on this trip that perhaps one of the things we lost in the pandemic was the ability to get in with a group and make nice. It is an uncomfortable proposition, in some respects, and a lot of people just don’t like making small talk. Small talk is uncomfortable and feels phony, but I’ve come to see it as a necessary evil, like throwing yourself butt first into a low-slung economy car. It sucks, and you have to take it on faith, but once you’re in…everything is fine.
Plus there’s been all this reporting and “science” on how, post-pandemic, no one knows how to interact in person anymore without crippling anxiety and awkwardness.
But the whole point of small talk is, or should be, to eventually get to big talk. Real talk. Talk about dreams and experiences and hopes and values. This is the stuff that humans are missing out on in the sterile landscape of our post-pandemic world.
And I think our relatively small but mighty cohort in Montana succeeded in that regard. The “secret” to our success, I think, was a combination of two factors: 1) we had stellar programming and speakers throughout the week who challenged and provoked us, in various ways, to think about our relationships with each other and the land, and 2) we shared an important commonality as fellow travelers and seekers of the wild and wonderful in the Montana wilderness—a willingness to step outside our proverbial comfort zones and become, at least to a degree, vulnerable with each other on the trails and at basecamp.
The third factor would be the sheer natural beauty of the place—a final point of commonality on which we could all agree.
Learning from the Land
On our first morning at camp, we heard from Pete Webster, National Park Service deputy superintendent for Glacier National Park, on his experiences working in and around Glacier, first as a fry cook in the 1980s. Originally from the Detroit area, Webster began working in the park while still a freshman at Michigan State University. In summers he worked cleaning, filleting, and frying whitefish at the St. Mary Lodge. Later, he went to work full time for the NPS, and spent five years as the interpreter for Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone. For a brief period a couple years ago, Webster even served as Interim Superintendent for Glacier. His talk was surprisingly candid in the way that NPS rangers can be, but often aren’t.
Webster talked at length about the challenges of managing one of the most popular national parks in the system—including balancing competing interests and ongoing environmental concerns. The ecosystem in a place like Glacier is so diverse and fragile that even something that seems relatively minor, like bringing an un-inspected and untreated kayak into one of the Park’s rivers, could have unforeseen and devastating consequences. Spotted knapweed and ox-eye daisy are two such invasive plants that have caused no end of headaches for Park personnel. Grizzlies and other wildlife, like the lynx and bald eagles, are endangered species that call the Park home. Glacier boasts one of the largest populations of grizzly bears in North America.
Termaine Edmo, climate change coordinator for the Blackfeet, spoke to our cohort on our second night about her work bridging the gap between Indigenous lifeways and those of the Park and its many stakeholders and visitors. In 2023 alone, nearly 3 million people visited Glacier National Park, up 1% from 2022. These numbers put an incredible amount of strain on resources and infrastructure in the park. Edmo’s job, in part, is to impart the best practices of her people to the decision-makers and power-brokers of Glacier and its 1,132 species of plants, 277 species of birds, and 66 species of mammals. Edmo spoke at length about the fragility of the land and that while it does not belong to any of us, we are its caretakers while we are here. The land will long outlive us, but our job on earth is to be good stewards of the land and to teach our children and their children to do the same. The challenge becomes translating this Indigenous wisdom into a language that capitalism and its boosters will understand.
Janet Paul Bones, who has lived and worked in Glacier her entire life, regaled us on the third night with an oral history of the Park and how much change she has witnessed over the last 75 years.
Bones’ father was an NPS ranger in the 1950s and 60s; later, Bones herself worked at one of the alpine chalets high up in the Park in the late 1960s and 70s. She told us about hiking to work in the old days and having so much fresh snow pack to walk on; today, the snow packs have declined considerably due to climate change, and the influx of so many visitors each year has in some ways radically changed both the management and the look of Glacier.
Each day began with a reflection question designed to provoke discussion. One day the question was, “To what extent is our relationship with the natural world broken?” On another day, we reflected on whether our relationship with each other is broken, and how we might fix it. We also grappled with weighty questions regarding the nature of conservation—who are we preserving this land for? And what “stage” of the land are we supposed to preserve?
Kiki, one of our intrepid oh-so-knowledgeable guides, pointed out that tens of millions of years ago, what is now Glacier National Park was a pre-historic swamp. Do we want to preserve that landform? Or is it just the more recent, beautiful version of Glacier that we are working to preserve? In this context, what does it mean to preserve a land for future generations? Where does the economic need for oil and gas exploration fit into this larger ethic of conservation and sustainability?
I kept returning again and again to the old Zen koan: If a tree falls in the woods, but there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?
Similarly, Nature (capital “N”) exists outside the human sensorium, though we only know it through our senses. And because senses depend on human perception to work, you have to be there to really take in a place like Glacier.
All well and good, but when you have millions of people visiting this place year after year, all that human perception starts to take its toll on the land itself. And this can wreak havoc on wildlife, people, plants, systems, water, etc.
Yes, I grew a dinky beard for this trip, mainly because the thought of shaving every morning at basecamp just didn’t appeal to me. As soon as I got home to Indiana, I shaved it off.
One more thing. I learned about (and experienced firsthand) a hydrological apex, which is a natural phenomenon where water flows from a mountaintop into three different bodies of water: the Pacific, the Hudson Bay (near the Arctic circle), and the Gulf of Mexico by way of the Mississippi River. In fact, here’s a picture of Rockwell Falls, which is a prime example of just such a hydrological apex.
Experiencing this firsthand was a game changer for me because it illustrated so powerfully how intertwined all these natural systems are—and how intertwined and interconnected we all are, too.
That’s it for now. Thanks for reading!
I think a lot about nature, the land, and climate change, especially when I take my small children for hikes along Griffey Lake. Like so much else with out-of-control late-stage capitalism, I feel like I am teaching them values that our leaders and much of society do not embrace. Thanks for the thoughts and pics, Paul!
Amazing post, Paul! The pictures are absolutely incredible, too. I've never seen such vivid colors in nature.