The mountains are home? Maybe, for a few of the world?s remaining indigenous peoples clinging to ancestral traditions against the lure of factory jobs; for the owners of the factories who purchase million-dollar ranches and summer homes in search of a more romantic image for themselves. The rest of us live by the creeks, on the well-watered and convenient flatlands and valleys, where we may contemplate mountains from afar. Yet sometimes the remoteness of the mountains, as well as the deserts and oceans, becomes more than a place for transcending the mundane; it becomes an economic necessity when we are driven to the upper Amazon in search of gold and grazing land; to the sands of Arabia for oil; to the Rockies and their rugged foothills in the northern Great Plains for coal. Beginning in the early 1970s, the Montana Power Company began to develop an old mining camp, appropriately called Colstrip, just east of Montana?s Wolf Mountains., into what it hoped would become the energy capital of the region. Before too long, Colstrip became a modern boomtown, and its explosive growth, its strip mines and smoke-belching power plants tore at Montana?s political terrain for a decade. The combatants in the environmental brawl it stirred up included Edward Abbey and Alvin Josephy, and even oceanographer Jacques Cousteau. The trauma of an industrial invasion of a rural cowboy hamlet was described and analyzed in the journals of academia, as rural sociologists and social impact assessment researchers decried what they claimed was the death of ?community? in the West.
