From this week’s Blue Ribbon Flies newsletter –
MOUNTAIN JOURNAL: A New Voice for the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem
As a group of citizens with significant experience in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) extending over many decades, we the undersigned colleagues seek a new voice and a new framework to provide: 1) independent investigative journalism about issues in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, 2) a thoughtful consideration of what the future may hold in the face of an escalating range of on-the-ground threats to the integrity of the ecosystem, and 3) to foster responsible future management actions in the area.
In response to these concerns, we are launching a web-based forum called Mountain Journal under the management of Todd Wilkinson, a 30-year veteran of a large volume of some of the best reporting on the GYE.
Wilkinson, an award-winning author, will write his weekly column, The New West, exploring issues in the region. He will recruit colleagues and fellow journalists with broad, science-based experience in the GYE to contribute articles and columns. The result will be a platform for inquiry and an independent voice that will speak to the aspirations and concerns of the millions of people from around the world who care about the region.
Why the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem? Because the area holds the West’s largest concentration of still-intact wild lands, an un-paralleled variety and number of wildlife species, un-impaired headwaters of the West’s three largest rivers, and the potential to serve as a veritable natural “ark of resistance” to the stress of climate change. The ecosystem extends across 20 million acres of public and private lands in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho. It faces an unprecedented array of threats in the years ahead, including rapidly increasing human population growth and vastly increased human visitation, enormous new economic activity, ecological changes such as drought and infectious diseases, and impending threats to its public land core from ambitious commodity production. These changes are coming fast, and it’s more vital than ever that the public have access to credible, fact-based information to build and support public and private land policies to ensure the health and diversity of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem for future generations.
Mountain Journal will publish frequently. Its social media platform will be unrestrained by the limitations of a print journal. It will be fact-based, utilize emerging and established scientific research, and aim at the general public– people who care about the GYE, its public and private lands and its vibrant rural communities. It will continuously publish stories including long-form investigative pieces, shorter stories on emerging issues readers want to know about now, and explore what success on the ground looks like.
In dealing with government, elected officials, and economic interests and institutions, Mountain Journal will seek out stories and information providing transparency, accountability and understanding in a non-partisan manner. Examples of this approach are illustrated by a recent series of investigative pieces authored by Wilkinson regarding the critical issue of Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) and wildlife management. The CWD piece generated a unanimous response by the Montana State Senate, on a vote of 50-0, calling on the State of Wyoming to stop the artificial feeding of elk in feedlots, a practice that could contribute to the spread of CWD in Greater Yellowstone’s mammal populations.
In summary, Mountain Journal will provide an intellectual framework through which citizens can explore the ongoing political and economic forces that are shaping the future and viability of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
Mountain Journal will be launched this summer (2017) with two-year funding for Wilkinson as its creator and editor. This arrangement will give him the ability to do on-going research and travel as needed, and to immediately engage other journalists as contributors.
We are currently seeking funding from individuals and private foundations. The effort will be overseen by a Council with broad, long-term experience in the GYE. The establishment of an independent, non-profit entity is underway. The fiscal agent for Mountain Journal is the Craighead Institute.
