BOZEMAN — Last month, over 150 affiliates of Montana State, visitors from Stanford University, and community members from across Montana crowded into Strand Union Building for the 12th Annual Eccles Family Rural West Conference. This one-day rural-issue barnstormer was organized by both Stanford’s Bill Lane Center for the American West and the Ivan Doig Center based at MSU.
“The issues we’re discussing today are legacies of Western pasts that are anything but singular and anything but linear,” shared Daniel Grant, faculty director of the Doig Center. Named for famed Montana writer Ivan Doig and built on his extensive media archives, the center’s mission is “to foster the integrated study of the North American West,” according to its website.
The recent conference is an annual occurrence, with past hosts peppered across the American West. In 2016, Stanford partnered with the University of Montana in Missoula.
Back under the Big Sky, this year’s speakers and organizers aimed “to bring together scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to exchange knowledge and ideas.” Holding the conference in Bozeman offered a distinct opportunity to focus on challenges in Intermountain swaths of the West.
“For a long time now, people have been talking about and prognosticating about the future of this new West,” Dr. Grant articulated earlier in the day. “We’re also living in it and actively shaping it now.”
One of the topics that took center stage was environmental stewardship. Guest speaker Julia Haggerty, Head of Earth Sciences at MSU, spoke about the importance of relationship-building in rural America. “The land grant universities have a brand, a trusted brand out in rural communities,” she said to the audience.
Haggerty’s talk led into a robust Q&A in which attendees further probed what might move the needle on rural environmental progress. Other guest speakers debated what exactly that progress might entail, and attendees chimed in during later discussion breakouts. Topics of consideration included how conservation value should be assigned and whether or not cultural factors should get the weight that they do. Environmental progress often was defined as building local resilience and finding solutions based in grassroots advocacy.
Terry Anderson, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institute, dubbed himself a voice for “free-market environmentalism.” In his talk, Anderson pushed for expressly market-based solutions to solve the West’s environmental woes. He advocated for financial incentives as the primary driver for issues like land conservation or climate innovation, especially in rural areas.
When it came to discussing rural politics, several speakers shared examples of model bipartisanship and geographic collaboration. State Senator Cora Neumann, who represents Bozeman and southern Gallatin County, spoke fondly of partnering with colleagues from redder, rural districts, which she says have many needs in common with her own. Such issues include efforts to improve housing affordability, reform property taxes, and renew Medicaid expansion, all of which Neumann worked on last session, she said.
At the end of the day, Lane Center Director Zephyr Frank hoped that the main takeaway for participants was greater optimism and excitement to collaborate. “People are leaving feeling…energized to maintain these connections and conversations that we’ve begun to forge in today’s event,” Zephyr said.
