Outdoors reporter Rob Chaney reflects on ‘the funnest job’ anyone could have

Rob Chaney covered the outdoors for decades as a Missoulian reporter and editor. Last week he learned he had been laid off by the paper’s owner, Lee Enterprises. MTPR’s Ellis Juhlin sat down with Chaney to reflect on his time covering environmental issues, and to look ahead to his future plans.

Ellis Juhlin I want this to be focused on your time as an outdoors reporter and your work covering environmental issues. But for starters, first off, you were recently laid off. Can you just talk a little bit about what happened?

Rob Chaney There’s not really a lot to say. Last Friday, I got a call at a little after eight in the morning informing me that the budget had changed and my position had been eliminated. It’s my understanding that I’m the only one in the region of Lee Enterprises that I’ve been working in who was laid off.

Ellis Juhlin You spent decades in the newsroom at the Missoulian. Montana is this incredibly charismatic place that I think most people picture when they think of the West. How did you approach telling stories about this place?

Rob Chaney Telling stories about this place is the funnest job anybody could ever have. I grew up here. Montana is just a fascinating place, and I got a job in college as a boat captain on the DeSmet in Glacier Park where the whole job was telling stories and keeping people from jumping off the boat. And that was a ton of fun. And when it came time to figure out what to do with my life, somebody pointed out that I was the kid who did all of his homework on the bus on the way to school, and there was an occupation that paid for that skill. So storytelling on deadline became my career.

I’ve done pretty much every beat in the newsroom at one time or another and eventually had a chance, because I really love playing outside, to cover what was known as the outdoors beat. But outdoors is a great section head for a newspaper. It’s really inaccurate, or at least too small for what that beat really encompasses, which is an awful lot of science. There’s, you know, just a ton of really evolving, fast moving, controversial, fascinating science underpinning everything that we do in the outdoors, whether it’s the biology of elk population management for hunting or it’s the fire science folks just down the road here in Missoula who are on the absolute global cutting edge of figuring out what drives a wildfire.

Ellis Juhlin There’s so many things, like you said, that come into the outdoors beat. But when you think about that subject and all of the things that it encompasses, what would you say are some of the big, either stories, or issues or subjects that you feel like come up time and time again? If you had to maybe pick like the big three?

Rob Chaney The big three are wildlife — If I write a grizzly story about a grizzly getting a hangnail, everybody reads it.

And wildfire, just because we’re all trying to figure out why our life is getting rearranged by, you know, something that we’re choking on and seeing our favorite places burn down and trying to figure out what we can or should do about it.

And from that, kind of encompassing both is the weather. You know, everybody talks about the weather now. We’re actually having to do something about it because it’s not the weather, it’s climate. And it’s evolving. Our landscape, our way of life, our routines, our traditions, faster than anybody really wants to acknowledge or adapt to. It’s a highly politicized topic. It’s a highly controversial topic. It’s an incredibly complex topic, climate, and it takes an awful lot of of understanding of basic science and willingness to learn how far smarter people explain science to be able to even have a vocabulary to talk about it. And that scares a lot of people. That frustrates a lot of people. That gets in the way of storytelling. It makes it really hard to have a sort of a baseline that we all agree on because science has always been political. I mean, Galileo got put under house arrest for saying that, you know, the earth went around the sun instead of the other way around. It’s always threatened the power structure that takes advantage of the world as it is, instead of the world that’s actually out there.

Ellis Juhlin You wrote one of the more comprehensive books on the recovery of grizzlies in Montana, “The Grizzly in the Driveway”. And in the first chapter of that book, you have this line in there that I always think about, about grizzlies and their recovery as this unique and wicked problem. How do you think that a de-listing of bears in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem and or the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem will change Montana if those decisions go through?

Rob Chaney As far as I can tell, the decision to delist grizzly bears is going to be made almost entirely on political grounds. You know, there’s a lot of back and forth about have they reached the threshold of recovery? You know, have they hit a scientific level of no longer needing protection under the Endangered Species Act? There isn’t just a magic number of grizzly bears that, you know, as soon as we hit 501 we’re good. Yay. Game over. It’s an ongoing thing. And there is a great deal of evidence that says that if grizzly bears are no longer what’s known as conservation reliant, that is to say, if we don’t have a support structure of rules and resources giving them some kind of a cushion, we can screw it up in a couple of years and run ourselves right back to 1973 when we were just about out of bears.

Another factor of bear recovery is bears aren’t human. And I don’t mean that facetiously. I mean, they don’t care about maps. They don’t care about lines. They’re going to do what they’re going to do. And, you know, if you read the journals of Lewis and Clark and virtually everything thereafter, grizzly bears are not a predominant creature of the Rocky Mountain Continental Divide spine. They’re a creature of eastern Montana. The open prairies. They’re, they’re a river basin, Missouri, Yellowstone, Milk, you know, all of those farmland-ranchland areas. That’s where, evolutionarily, grizzlies belong. We don’t have any recovery areas in Lewistown for the grizzlies, where all of those places were, where Lewis and Clark were running into grizzly bears on a regular basis. So the idea that we have a recovery area that has hit its necessary threshold of, of recovered grizzlies along the Continental Divide or around Yellowstone Park doesn’t mesh with the historical and evolutionary characteristics of what grizzlies are expected to do.

Ellis Juhlin You mentioned the the 501. Like, okay, now we recovered, we hit that benchmark — and the problem with that kind of a binary thinking. What do you think has contributed to that sort of binary ideology, if you will?

Rob Chaney It’s really easy to make grizzly bears or wolves a rabble rousing issue, let’s say grizzly protection advocates and grizzly hunting advocates. I think that’s a fair division. Both use the grizzly bears of the poster animal for raising a ton of money with which they can do many other things that have nothing really to do with bears. You know, it gets people in a room, it gets people rallied up. It gets people writing checks. It gets people marching outside courthouses. Are any of those things actually affecting the fate of the bear, or the fate of the people coexisting with the bear? Not really. It’s very similar to abortion and immigration on the national political stage. It’s basically political myth. You know, you’re just snorting it for the high. Whereas the actual wicked problem, the evolving, complicated, multi-faceted issue that resists a simple binary solution really, really needs the more critical attention and the more calm approach of something that’s not just a rampaging drug high for other purposes.

Ellis Juhlin I kind of have another question about change in Montana. Montana’s economy has been shifting from kind of natural resource based industries that were the backbone towards outdoor recreation and tourism. Can you just reflect on what you’ve seen change over the span of your coverage and then how you imagine — if you want to get that speculative — what you imagine the future to look like?

Rob Chaney You know, Montana’s great seal and its motto is the Treasure State. An awful lot of of the, you know, colonial settlers impetus for coming out here. Originally it was furs. And then it was gold. And then, you know, the gold played out pretty quickly, but copper and other stuff was findable. And that underpinned a whole bunch of, essentially, get rich quick efforts. We’ve got a fair amount of easily accessible energy and coal and oil, but we also have a ton of solar and wind and hydro potential. So we’ve got an energy economy. We also have an incredibly beautiful landscape. And the joke in journalism has been, you know, come here, work for a newspaper and get all the scenery you can eat. I really wish people who were saying, you know, we’re transitioning to a tourism economy would go up to Seeley Lake in 2015 during the Rice Ridge fire and see how well the tourism economy worked. When the Seeley Swan Valley was just cloaked in smoke all summer long.

Tourism economy is a very simplistic uncritical hope, for, you know, we just want people who are going to come in here with their backpacks and their canoes and they will, you know, leave no trace except for the credit card receipts that they spend. Talk to anybody who’s running an ice cream stand in a edge of Glacier Park about, you know, how much fun it was to work 14 hour days for three months straight. Hoping like hell that there wasn’t going to be a forest fire or, you know, grizzly bear in the wrong campsite or something or other that shut you down. And also, you know, who wants to be working ice cream wages for a Suburban full of out-of-state credit card bearing tourists, you know, with an income differential of a factor of 10. You look at places like Jackson Hole and Big Sky where no barista can afford to live. So they’re commuting for, you know, an hour or two over a mountain pass every day to pour the latte for some tourist coming through who’s going to blow right out and never pay anything for the roads or the schools or any of the other infrastructure that makes a community. But I don’t think people should be placing heavy bets on, you know, we’ll just switch from these old school economies and industries to some shiny, new and polluting fantasyland.

Ellis Juhlin What is next? What does the future look like for you?

Rob Chaney I am slowly working on another book about the environmental history of Glacier National Park and how the forces of nature and ecology in the park have shaped things that humans have sort of taken credit for without realizing that they were really the toys and not the players. But, no, more immediately, I’ve got a bunch of projects in the works that are going to find landing pads somewhere, some of which are directly related to the coming election. So they got to find landing pads soon.

Ellis Juhlin Is there anything else that you want to touch on that I didn’t ask you about or anything that this conversation has brought up that you want to say?

Rob Chaney Only that, I guess I just want to reiterate, you know, Dennis Swibold over at the journalism school, just retired, and wrote a wonderful book about the copper collar and how journalism in a certain time in Montana history was, was just a shadow and a sorry remnant of what it is today because of the way that, you know, corporate powers wanted to have the world portrayed to their advantage and to their benefit. And we’re not doing that now. There is a hugely dedicated group of people who are working under incredible amounts of stress in order to deliver information and stories and data and facts to the public. And that is an intrinsic, inherent part of American society. That is a human need to communicate and keep cultures and communities and families together. And I just wish all of them the best of luck and the most resilience I can possibly offer. So anybody who says, you know, ‘journalism is dying’ is not paying attention. I am convinced that information, that storytelling is never going to go out of style and that all we’re arguing about is the delivery system.

Ellis Juhlin Thank you. It’s been great to pick your brain on this.

Rob Chaney My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Lee Newspapers did not respond to MTPR’s request for comment by deadline.