The heartache of Montana’s solitude

Please give Lyndsey Gilpin my congratulations on her great investigative reporting for “How the Park Service is Failing Women” (HCN, 12/12/16). I am in my 23rd year of retirement after wearing the National Park Service ranger uniform for more than 30 years. I can validate and corroborate every point that Lyndsey writes in her article. That traditional flat […]

I thoroughly appreciated, although was equally saddened by,  “How the Park Service is Failing Women” (HCN, 12/12/16). It does not surprise me that women — and most likely people of color, of Hispanic or Muslim backgrounds, and others who are not white males — are treated in this manner throughout multiple government organizations and business […]

“Will a twice-burned county change its ways?” (HCN, 12/26/16) details how residents of Montana’s Bitterroot Valley block efforts by their state and county governments to require homeowners in the fire zone to prepare for -inevitable wildfires. Residents reject county regulation and demand private-property rights. These Bitterroot Valley conservatives can teach us a great deal about […]

“So Shines a Good Deed” gives incomplete coverage to solar energy development and presents only one view of a rather complicated situation (HCN, 12/26/16). Both the federal government and the article cited are avid promoters of industrial-scale solar development on public lands. In California, the total solar energy produced from installations on parking lot structures, […]

Elizabeth Shogren’s “Latest” column in the Dec. 12 issue grossly mischaracterized the North Fork coal-mining exception to the Colorado roadless rule, as a “loophole.” The state of Colorado was never ambiguous with its intent to make provisions for the $1 billion-dollar coal-mining industry in the North Fork coal-mining area with its own roadless rule, and […]