Environment

The sky of west-central Montana turns into a highway for migrating golden eagles this time of year. And as the birds fly south, researchers are counting. Local researchers say annual counts show North America’s largest bird of prey’s migratory population is struggling in Montana.

The grizzly is one of North America’s few remaining large predators. Their range is diminished, but they’re spreading across the West again. Descending into valleys where once they were king, bears find the landscape they’d known for eons utterly changed by the new most dominant animal: humans. As the grizzlies approach, the people of the region are wary, at best, of their return.

"This is my idea of when America was great: when there were 8,000 varieties of corn ... when there were 50 million buffalo, the single largest migratory herd in the world ... in a territory with 250 different species of grass. Tremendous biodiversity: that is where life is, in biodiversity. Today, in the same landscape, you and I know that does not exist."

In February 2019, environmental justice activist, economist and writer Winona LaDuke delivered the annual Brennan Guth Memorial Lecture in Environmental Philosophy, as part of the University of Montana President’s Lecture Series at Missoula's Wilma Theater.

“Eager" is the powerful story of how nature’s most ingenious architects shaped our world, and how they can help save it—if we let them. Ben Goldfarb’s captivating book reveals how beavers transformed our landscapes, and how modern-day “Beaver Believers”—including scientists, ranchers, and passionate citizens—are recruiting these ecosystem engineers to help us fight our most pressing environmental problems. The Washington Post calls it, “A masterpiece of a treatise on the natural world” and The Boston Globe calls it, “The best sort of environmental journalism.”

When Bob Quinn was a kid, a stranger at a county fair gave him a few kernels of an unusual grain. Little did he know, that grain would change his life. Years later, after finishing a PhD in plant biochemistry and returning to his family's farm in Montana, Bob started experimenting with organic wheat. In the beginning, his concern wasn't health or the environment; he just wanted to make a decent living and some chance encounters led him to organics.

Renowned animal behaviorist Fred Provenza spent his academic career researching how animals respond to an intricately tuned system of flavor-feedback relationships at the cellular level—a nutritional wisdom that guides them to eat the appropriate combinations of foods to meet their dietary needs. But what about us? Do humans still possess the wisdom to select nourishing diets?

From the killer bee-infested border region of southeast Arizona to the sultry islands of the Galapagos, Warblers & Woodpeckers recounts the quest of a father and his thirteen-year-old son to see as many birds as possible in a single year.

"I, for one, choose a world in which I am not always at the top of the food chain. It's good, sometimes, to near a summit only to be turned back by a world that is bigger than your ambition." -- Jim Williams