The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is recognized as a standard for dealing with issues of large landscape conservation. Parallels are often drawn between Greater Yellowstone and other areas around the globe, including sub-regions of southern Africa. In this presentation, two Namibia-based conservationists, Dr. Margaret Jacobsohn and Garth Owen-Smith, describe their cutting edge work in community-based conservation. Jacobsohn and Owen-Smith are past recipients of the prestigious Goldman Prize, and are introduced by a brief video produced by the Goldman Environmental Foundation. You can learn more about them and their work in this Mountain Journal article.
On January 24, 2019, former US Ambassador Mark Johnson, Diplomat in Egypt, Iran, Kuwait and the Persian Gulf, gave a lecture in the Hager Auditorium at the Museum of the Rockies, entitled THE US & THE MIDDLE EAST: HOW WE GOT TO THIS POINT – UNDERSTANDING THE HARD LESSONS OF 1979. Ambassador Johnson is a 4th generation Montanan. He established the Montana World Affairs Council in 2000 with the goal of providing Montanans with greater opportunities to understand the world.
To find out more about the Montana World Affairs Council, you can go to their website:
What factors have led to the recovery of one of North America’s most iconic wildlife populations, and what is needed to ensure their survival in the future? In this presentation, Dr. Frank van Manen, leader of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team at the USGS Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center, shared his unique insights on these questions.
The EPA Superfund program was established in 1980 and over 1,700 locations have been placed on the National Priorities List. Superfund sites cover a vast array of environmental damages that contaminate the land and impact the health of citizens across the nation. There are 17 Superfund sites in Montana, including even a small one in Bozeman. In this presentation, Jennifer Dunn, a doctoral candidate in history at MSU, traces the development of the Superfund and focuses on the different historical and current situations in Butte and Libby. She is introduced by Crystal Alegria, director of the Extreme History Project.
In connection with the exhibitions Polar Obsession and Into the Arctic, the Museum of the Rockies presented an Arctic Evening with the Experts. featuring MSU scientists Mark Skidmore and John Priscu, both of whom have long experience not only at the North and South Poles, but also the third Pole: mountain glaciers. Their fascination has been with the life that exists under these conditions. Looking to the future, our understanding of ice and its life will inform missions to Mars to explore its ice cap. … Continue reading Arctic Evening with the Experts
Noted conservationists and scientists Mike Clark, Jim Posewitz, Rick Reese and Cathy Whitlock discussed their careers and environmental challenges facing our region today. Each panelist has a special relationship with the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and played a pivotal role in historical conservation efforts and/or scientific research throughout the region. Todd Wilkinson, journalist, author and Mountain Journal founder, posed questions and led the conversation. There was also a question and answer session with the audience. A videorecording of the event can be viewed on the MSU Library website.
On October 10, 2018 as part of the centennial celebrations commemorating the Armistice titled Memories and Legacies of World War I, Todd Harwell gave a lecture at the Museum of the Rockies called, “No More War, No More Plague: The Spanish Influenza Pandemic’s Toll on Montana.” Todd Harwell is the Administrator of the Public Health and Safety Division in the MT Dept. of Public Health and Human Services. He was introduced by Dr. Steven D. Helgerson, who served for 9 years as Montana’s State Medical Officer, and is the author of the book, A COUNTRY DOCTOR AND THE EPIDEMICS MONTANA 1917-1918, an historical novella. Their article, co-authored with Greg s. Holzman, with many of the slides shown in the lecture can be viewed here: https://mhs.mt.gov/Portals/11/education/WWI/HarwellFlu.pdf
Since its establishment in 1875, the campus at Warm Springs, now called the Montana State Hospital, has been put to use towards the palliative treatment of Montanans. The supervisors transformed what had been a health resort into a hospital dedicated to the care of the “mentally deficient wards” of the state. The changes to the campus and its buildings reflect the changing trends in mental health care over the years. Warm Springs was more comprehensive in that it also was self-sufficient for much of its history, with manufacturing and farming considered part of the care for the patients. In this talk for the Extreme History Project, Architect Lesley Gilmore tells about this history and some of the personal stories within it.
How food is grown and what humans eat have profound impacts on health, water, biodiversity, and climate. Challenges from increasing population, stagnating yields, changing diets and environmental degradation are all exacerbated by a warmer, more variable climate.
Dr. Paul West, co-director and lead scientist of the Global Landscapes Initiative at the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment, addressed these issues and discussed how this requires transforming the global food system, including key steps for increasing food security and reducing agriculture’s environmental impact.
This presentation by Will Wright focuses on the life and home of abstract painter Helen McAuslan, using both to understand the connections between art and architecture within the context of Montana’s modernist movement. A common thread for McAuslan’s version of “modernism” was her rejection of a traditional past in hope for a more liberated future. McCauslan’s concern with social justice, reflected in her Kent State paintings, also developed into political engagement through the League of Women Voters. If the nineteenth-century West was remembered through the works of male artists such as Charles Russell and Frederic Remington, then the twentieth-century West should be known through the contributions of female artists like McAuslan.
Peter Hassrick, writer, art scholar, and museum director, presents the history of painting in Yellowstone by the major 19th century painters, Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran. He examines these acclaimed landscape artists’ competing claims on the nation’s first natural preserve and their vital contributions to America’s conservation movement. These artists very much influenced and were influenced by the social and political climate of the time.
How can a better understanding of human cellular processes inform the fight against neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases? Dr. Renee Reijo Pera, Vice President of Research and Economic Development and Professor at Montana State University, shares recent advances in strategies targeting these diseases, largely based on methods to convert skin cells to all-capable stem cells. She provides an overview of the early stages of human embryo development, and also discusses the role of research at universities, including MSU.
That Montana had a large Chinese population in the late-19th century is well known. However, most analysis of this community focuses solely on their challenges and contributions in the American West, paying little attention to the transnational nature of the Chinese experience. Mark Johnson, University of Notre Dame, helps us understand Montana’s Chinese pioneers through a global lens. They are seen as active and engaged participants who used the skills gained through their time in the American West to work for self-improvement and to strengthen a severely weakened China they had temporarily left but never forgotten.
In this Extreme History event from July 26, 2018 at the Hager Auditorium of the Museum of the Rockies, historian, author and educator, Dr. Ellen Baumler, discusses her research on Montana’s Pioneer Jewish Communities. How early in Montana’s history did Jews arrive? When, and in what ways, did they become influential? What were the differences among the Jews who settled in Helena, Bozeman, Butte, and Billings? Why was Helena’s YWCA the only unaffiliated chapter in the entire United States until the 1980s? Dr. Baumler reveals answers to these and many other questions.
The MSU Library Trout and Salmonid Lecture Series welcomed Chris Wood, president and CEO of Trout Unlimited, as the 2015 Trout Lecture keynote speaker. Along with personal stories, Wood described the critical leading role of Montana in moving fish management from stocking to habitat conservation and stewardship, and how Montana water law became the most fish-friendly in the West.
Award-winning author and angling enthusiast Thomas McGuane presented the annual Trout and Salmonid Lecture of the Montana State University (MSU) Library on May 5, 2016. Ranging widely from the healing effects of fishing for wounded veterans to his own angling experiences to the embarrassing potential of auto-correction in texting, he always came back to fish as “emblematic of the perfection of nature.” Yet there is concern for the future of cold water fisheries. “Montana is a snow-driven ecosystem,” yet it is facing the effects of global warming.
In this talk, Janet Ore, professor in the Department of History and Philosophy at Montana State University, discusses the concept of historic preservation and its application to Bozeman. Historic preservation arose as a movement to protect built environments that provided the tangible expressions of identity. Americans realized that in times of rapid change, places invested with history, memory, and emotion gave them a sense of history that could be lost when the physical markers of the past were eradicated. For many today, their multi-centered lives have impelled them to seek places where the symbols of a more rooted, seemingly less complex, past remain. Bozeman now stands at this juxtaposition.
The Montana Institute on Ecosystem’s Distinguished Visiting Lecturer series sponsored a talk by Dr. Kirk Johnson, Sant Director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Johnson is a paleontologist who has led expeditions that have resulted in the discovery of more than 1,400 fossil sites. His research focuses on fossil plants and the extinction of the dinosaurs. His recent documentaries include the three-part NOVA series Making North America, and The Great Yellowstone Thaw.
The lecture took place on April 28, 2018. A video of the presentation can be viewed on Vimeo.
Western Heritage Center Director Kevin Kooistra tells the story of Billings native Hazel Hunkins. Denied the opportunity to work in a local chemistry lab because of her gender, Hunkins promptly joined the national fight for women’s suffrage. This gritty woman remained undeterred even after national resentment led to arrest and recrimination for Hunkins and her fellow protestors. Kooistra’s talk mentions 1908 views on immigration, the group “Women Opposed to Suffrage,” and the means by which Hunkins lit a fire on the grounds of the White House.
Steve Adelson, Interpretive Ranger for the Little Bighorn National Monument, gives a dramatic verbal re-creation of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, also known as the Battle of the Greasy Grass.