A Special Celebration for 4 RCRG Graduates!

The Resources and Community Research Group (RCRG) is excited to announce four new graduates; Dr. Bills Walsh, Dr. Epstein, Dr. Smith, and Jackson Rose, MSc. These four students have worked extremely hard to accomplish and earn the following degrees. 

Dr. Katie Bills Walsh has earned a PhD in Earth Sciences and Geography studying Coalbed Methane Reclamation Activities in the Powder River Basin, Wyoming. Dr. Katie Epstein earned a PhD in Ecology and Environmental Science focusing her research on The Amenity Transition and Elk Management in the Greater Yellowstone. Dr. Kris Smith earned a PhD in Earth Science and Geography studying Opportunities & Resilience Traps at the Energy-Agriculture Nexus in the Bakken Shale Play of Montana and North Dakota. Jackson Rose has earned his masters in Earth Sciences- Geography based on his research on the role of community benefits agreements in negotiating rural development and modern mineral mining. On November 18, 2020, Dr. Julia Haggerty addressed the graduates with the following commencement speech.

I would like to address our graduates now, with the single goal of honoring you and your hard work and accomplishments. Dr. Bills Walsh, Dr. Epstein, Dr. Smith, and Jackson Rose, MSc., congratulations.

My remarks are organized around two fundamental principles of our research collaboration, the RCRG.

First, this celebration is fundamentally about the joy and opportunity possible in a life devoted to insight. There is no single endpoint at which “insight” is achieved – insight is a practice that insists on continual learning and reflection. It is the act of refusing opacity, or at least, relentlessly chipping away at it.  

Scholars, like the four we celebrate today, are the people for whom insight is life-sustaining. Figuring something out makes our heart race: it energizes us. Landing upon a way to communicate our insights effectively to our students and readers makes our hearts soar: it gives us joy.

Insight is our vocation.

Each of you is responsible for a body of work that offers new and original insights at the nexus of livelihoods, natural resources, place and governance—discoveries and analysis that would not exist if it were not for your curiosity, creativity and determination.

At this ceremony, we honor the generation of 3 doctoral dissertations and a master’s thesis. Each is a major piece of scholarship and together they provide original answers to two profoundly important and relevant questions:

Katie B, Kris and Jackson, your work asks:

·  Whether and how the residents and local governments of places that host natural resource development can bend those industries to fit local priorities? You help us to know and see what the outcomes of that very difficult struggle looks like from the perspective of local environments, livelihoods, and the human and physical infrastructure from which regional futures will evolve.

Katie E’s work asks:

·  What it means when rural regions are the solution to the problem of the need for meaning, status and identity on the part of those few individuals who control the vast sums of surplus capital enabled in our present political economy? How does the acquisition of property by the super rich shape environments, livelihoods, and the institutions that mediate among them?

For this audience, there is no need to state the obvious importance of these questions.

But in case your parents and families wonder why their talented student ended up in this faraway periphery studying in the oil fields, copper mines and ranches of America, let me say this:

·  You may live in a post-industrial economy that makes the work of resource extraction easy to ignore—a world that engenders an illusion that our iPhones drops out of some cyborg womb fully formed. But resources are absolutely fundamental to our survival—humanity will never be free of resource production. If we can’t generate natural resources in ways that minimize damage to people and place, society self-destructs—if not materially, then certainly morally. Dr Bills, Dr. Smith, and Jackson Rose MSc are doing work that is fundamentally about avoiding societal self-destruction. It’s that important.

·  The economy, is it often said, it the resources of a society, and how they are allocated.  The allocation of rural property—an entity which is in itself laced with the legacies of conquest--is reaching untenable levels of inequality. The desires and whims of the .01% ripple across rural landscapes around the world at an increasing pace, leaving behind a world of elaborate gates and no trespassing signs. The super rich turn their money over, more or less tax free, in Montana’s real estate. Some may leave a landscape richer in terms of biodiversity in exchange for that profit, but most are eroding what was already a tenuously-held public commons—and as Katie’s work has shown, our public servants and the residents of rural landscapes shoulder the burden of managing the conflicts the loss of this commons creates.

My wish for all four of you is that you remain devoted to insight in all aspects of your life—demand it of yourself, your students, your friends and family, leaders of institutions that shape your world. Consider it your life’s purpose to craft warm and enticing invitations to the practice of insight.

What makes me most proud is that these insights have been made with a clear devotion to the places and people you have studied. As analytical and rich as your work is, it is free of clever critical riffs made for the sake of an ‘academic solo’ and recognition from academia’s in crowd. Indeed, your work is in fact harder to generate because of your commitment to what Kristin has so aptly called critical empathy, which means striving for authentic and genuine reporting on the good, the bad, and the ugly in ways that, again, invite rather than shut off insight in as many audiences as possible.

Empathy links closely to RCRG’s second fundamental value, interdependence.

Each of you has allowed yourself to ask for and receive help—help from your colleagues and teachers in the Department of ES and MSU, your research partners, your funders, your teachers, your families. These projects and your success, then, belong as much to your emotional and intellectual ecosystems as they do to you. We are creating a giant mural of gratitude on our whiteboard inside--in which these students attempt to name every person to whom they owe thanks--and when it is finished today, we will share it with as many of those people as we can. If you are here with us, you can be sure your name is on that board!

Jackson, Katie E, Katie B, and Kris, you four have also modeled and established an incredibly high standard of selflessness and collaboration as you have built the RCRG enterprise.  Pretty much every time I see another faculty member in my department they go out of their way to say, and I quote: “Your students are just so awesome.” And by that they are referring not just to your excellent scholarship, but to your leadership as scholars who are building a better institution. In the many ways you help each other and our department and university communities, you are actively dispelling the damaging, oppressive patriarchal ideas that hold the academy back – replacing them with models of mutual aid and collaboration that are in the true spirit of the land grant institution. Thank you for doing this.

My hope for RCRG has been that it will personify Robert Frost’s silken tent—a tent in the sense of providing hearth and shelter for scholars. And more specifically like Frost’s tent in being a place that “loosely bound by countless silken ties of love and thought to every thing on the earth” – today I honor you as a group of incredible women and men who have erected this tent, and filled it with possibility.

Go forth and prosper.

Navigating the Local Costs and Benefits of Modern Mineral Mines: The Role of Non-Regulatory Agreements

by Jackson Rose

In Spring 2016, a mining project in central Montana was generating controversy and heated debate around the state. At the time, the Black Butte Copper Project was a proposed underground copper mine located in Meagher County about fifteen miles north of White Sulphur Springs, a rural community with less than a thousand residents. At the heart of the conflict around the project was a recurring question that sparked my interest: does natural resource development create sustainable rural community development?

Two years later, as a Master’s student at Montana State University, I was still pondering that question. Around this time, I was offered the unique opportunity to get directly involved with the Black Butte Copper Project through a local stakeholder group called the Meagher County Stewardship Council. The Stewardship Council wanted our research group to provide resources, expertise, and advice designed to help them capitalize on the impending development. I used this opportunity to shape a thesis looking at the cost/benefit equation facing rural communities that host an emerging and highly relevant type of mining development: short-duration, high-impact underground mines.

So, what did I learn?

First, rural communities that host mining projects are increasingly turning towards non-regulatory agreements to both mitigate short-term impacts and realize long-term benefits tied to these projects. These agreements typically go above and beyond regulatory requirements and are negotiated directly with the project developer.

Second, community concerns and priorities tied to mining developments are contested spaces with multiple stakeholder groups involved. Outside of environmental groups, many stakeholders in rural communities are focused on the short-term benefits provided by a potential mine. The desire for a boost to the local tax base and high-paying jobs often comprises the ‘wish-list’ of these groups and may complicate the need to negotiate for fiscal and social impact mitigation. Ideally, communities are able to assess the regulatory gaps in the regulatory and institutional frameworks around hard-rock mining and incorporate formal initiatives into non-regulatory agreements to cover those gaps. However, my research suggests that communities may be unwilling or unable to assess and address regulatory limitations.

Thirdly, negotiations between rural communities and mining companies are further complicated by the reality that the most influential stakeholder groups are often environmental/conservation organizations with significant legal, policy, and economic expertise. These groups often hold leverage during the crucial stages of the permitting process, when mining companies are seeking a ‘social license to operate’ or local acceptance and approval of a project. Conservation groups exercise this leverage via the threat of litigation, which results in their priorities (and a large share of a limited resource pool) ending up in formal agreements. While these groups often include locals, their ability to represent the broader community is in question.

Taken together, these findings help explain why certain priorities, specifically long-term community development concerns, are not always formalized in non-regulatory agreements. When they are present, evidence suggests that community development initiatives are often limited in scope and heavily front-loaded, leaving their long-term sustainability in doubt. Importantly, my research does not suggest that the institutional and regulatory environment might limit rural communities’ ability to secure enduring benefits. Pressure to secure a social license to operate appears to exist even in strong regulatory environments. This pressure creates opportunities that communities can and should exploit to capitalize on natural resource developments.

The question of whether or not natural resource projects lead to sustainable rural community development is not going away. In the West, rural places like White Sulphur Springs continue to host large-scale industrial developments with no guarantee of lasting socioeconomic benefits. I believe that non-regulatory agreements offer a unique mechanism for rural places to secure these benefits and ensure positive outcomes for future generations.

Water infrastructure: finding the interesting in the boring

by Grete Gansauer

You never notice everyday objects like faucets, drains, spigots, and fire hydrants until you read academic articles about them until your eyes water. And then, like a physical sarcastic joke, you start seeing these things almost as often as you’ve read the words on the page. Infrastructure surrounds us, all the time, and goes humbly unnoticed until it is broken, leaking, or out-of service. It is, after all, infrastructure - unseen elements meant to facilitate modern economic life without friction. Although the presence of built infrastructure seems unremarkable, the processes by which it enters our world are markedly the opposite.

Built infrastructure is surprisingly interesting. Once you see the invisible prowess of streets, telephone lines, and underground water pipes you’ll never be able to ‘unsee’ the unsung impact they have on our day-to-day reality. Suddenly, a flush toilet becomes an opportunity to consider ‘modern life’. Water flowing from a tap urges you to consider how much effort it really takes for H 2O to appear to flow effortlessly into billions of homes around the globe. And a road raises questions about political boundaries: who owns this road, anyway? Infrastructures are great feats of human ingenuity, but these technologies often create political and social outcomes beyond their intended use, which fascinates academics. 

Lest you think infrastructure researchers are all engineers, we span a variety of social science disciplines including science and technology studies, geography, anthropology, urban (and rural!) planning, and political science. We are united because we have discovered a great secret, a clandestinely juicy topic cloaked in the guise of normalcy. In particular, infrastructure geographers are concerned with the ways that these large-scale technologies take shape over space and time. Where do they start and where do they end? Who built the thing? Why? And a recurring theme, how the heck are they going to pay for the maintenance?

Answers to these questions are often quite nuanced. For example, this summer I am researching transbasin rural water systems in the Western US. Geographies of these regional water transport pipelines are larger than one might expect, sometimes covering hundreds of miles of mountainous terrain (an attribute which becomes quite expensive when heavy water must be piped uphill). Those of us living in the arid West might not feel that regional water pipelines are particularly out-of-place, however, my research thus far indicates that the scale and number of these projects in the Western US is nearly unmatched elsewhere on the globe. (Aside from, predictably, China, where a 2,700-mile long water pipeline is under construction.)

Regional water systems are envisioned by their proponents as a solution to both water quantity and water quality challenges, and as an opportunity for small rural communities to pool their investments into one big water system. Some tout such pipelines as critical to local economic development. However, large water systems are extremely costly, and they pose governance difficulties as they traverse and connect several jurisdictions. My research explores these emerging geographies of rural water resources, and critically examines regional infrastructure solutions to water management. Thankfully, I find it deeply interesting. I never would have guessed I would be so intrigued by big, ugly, underground pipelines, but now I see there is more to infrastructure than meets the eye.