The changing landscape

Our world is moving faster and faster every day. “Out with the days of old and in with the new” is without a doubt the motto of the time. For the most part, our lives as Americans are pretty darned good, and our life as a Montanan is as good as it gets!

But … even in our sanctuary we see the ugly side of a society drunk on progress and high on achievement. We see how busy life can be, how many demands we all must juggle and how the few get rich and the rest of us shop at Wal-Mart. They may have nicer things, but we still have all the junk produced by China for the United States consumerism disease. Feed the plague!

I have always tried to love my home as much as I did when I was growing up here, and it was just a quiet haven fueled by the logging industry. There was a time when Kalispell was saturated in industry and the shopping centers where located in Missoula and Spokane. There was a time just a couple decades ago in the Flathead Valley when logging mills were more plentiful than hotels, when we had a large aluminum plant and various machine shops and other trades, and when employment was more stable and promising.

As a state we have drifted further and further away from real creation and intelligent harvesting of this land. We now serve people instead of supply for people while serving the land. In the 1800s, Montana had over a million cattle, a million sheep, hundreds of thousands of horses, millions of acres of farmland. It’s been rich in wheat since before the white man arrived. Sadly, those numbers have not increased and most have dwindled significantly and we now have 20 times the population!

This was a place of unimaginable bounty. From the pits dug deep in Mother Earth came some of the richest mines in America, a land scattered in iron, silver, copper and gold, “Oro y Plata.” Combined with the natural resources below our feet and those on top of the ground, to the air, the water and the sun … this is a golden land.

This place has always represented a natural beauty that can awe a person with the changing landscapes and leave a lasting impression. Anybody that has visited here, somewhere in the back of their mind had a thought … “I could live here.” Not too long ago this was a place for real men to come and work, a place to build families off of their backs and a community that personified Montana. It’s not just that we hunt, know how to build stuff, fix things, provide and protect. It’s that we have an appreciation of the natural world, a compassion for our people and a code that revolves around doing the right thing. I love true Montanans; they are some of the most capable, intelligent people I have ever known.

Montana is growing steadily. Just like the technology and digital world that changes with each passing season, our state is changing. The Treasure State is turning into “The Sold-Out State.” We’ve lost our path of living off the land and now all we do is promote the land — to visit, to buy and to build on. There are many to blame for this land of opportunity becoming land of the second-home wealthy people.

We could start with our own branch of state government: The Montana Office of Tourism, whose one and only job is to throw millions of dollars a year at advertising to the rest of the world to drive tourists to our home. We could blame the environmentalists who looked at the old ways of harvesting the land and thought it abusive, so they used lawsuits to stall and derail agriculture, mining and logging. We could blame ourselves for not being more selfish and wanting to keep this land for ourselves. Unfortunately there is really no one to blame for Montana’s emergence as a common household name. This place is amazing, and I hope for now and a thousand years into the future, it remains majestic — no matter how many people populate its valleys.

By the way, the Montana Office of Tourism has a new slogan for the year to lure tourists to come visit, “It’s Time.” I believe it IS time. It’s time to take notice of what this place always has been and to have the foresight and respect to see what it is becoming and do something about it before it is too late. We will all blink and every special spot in our great state will be discovered, every accommodating town will have a Super Wal-Mart and everything we’ve known as a peaceful, nourishing place will be lost.

Right now in our valley we have become a service industry. Either you work in a restaurant, store, some sort of retail business, or perhaps you are a professional with clients you are taking care of. You might be one of the fortunate ones working for the last stronghold industry of real estate like me. You could be a builder, banker, agent, so on and so forth. The point is most jobs revolve around serving people and most of those jobs are linked to the rapid development of this pilgrimage.

If I were smart I would just sell out, too. I’d be a real-estate broker, hand out my card everywhere, meet all kinds of newcomers, charm them, help guide them to becoming a landowner here in Montana. If I took it serious and worked hard, I would never have to worry about money. The problem is, money is not the most important thing. What’s more important is what you love. I love Montana, and I do not want it to continue to change at such an alarming rate.

It’s time for our elected officials to do their job and protect the old while planning for the new. Not every subdivision you allow has to be 100 plus homes. Take some of this money that is flooding in here with new tax bills and a $4 billion industry of tourism and start repaving roads!

It is time to take a look around and realize that our popularity is growing. This modern day boom town and state is just starting to grow, and if it is not guided properly it will be forever ruined. I take this issue very seriously. I realize that it is our elected officials duty and obligation to represent what is in the best interests of the citizens. Allowing this type of money-driven growth and completely neglecting the most basic necessities like maintaining roads and having a proper jail that has the space for local criminals is a good start. (There’s another absurd reality — our local jails are so packed that they are literally allowing inmates to go free without serving full punishment because they need the space for new offenders!)

There is so much that is being done improperly and it needs to stop. They talk about impeaching presidents all the time … are we allowed to impeach all the City Council members, mayors, commissioners, managers that have been at the helm making all these local decisions? That’s kind of a joke, but the truth is if the politicians were true Montanans and they actually cared about their home, none of this sell-out rapid growth, box-store building, tourist-attraction B.S. would have ever occurred. Take back Montana!

Chris Hall is a resident of Kalispell.