Summary Of Montana By Jared Diamond

Starting off in Chapter 1, Diamond begins to talk about Montana and use Montana for his case study on past and present environmental problems. He believes that Montana is ideal for such a study for two main reasons. First off he believes that Montana is the best source for his study simply because its society still stands today. Unlike many of the civilizations that he also speaks of--Polynesian, Anasazi, Maya and Greenland Norse-- he can understand what the circumstances were at the time and is able to communicate with the settlers of the land. This allows him to gain some insight into some of the aspects he can not otherwise study in some of the older, already collapsed societies, such as names, life histories and motives. His second reason

Some of the polarizations in which Diamond describes are the rich versus the poor argument, environmentalists versus the big business, those who want to maintain their old lifestyle ways versus those who want to see some change and one of the biggest ones, those who are against government interference and those who are for it. All of these disagreements are fueled by one main paradoxe; that there are so many poor Montanan residents whose own young adults are leaving Montana but yet attracting so many rich newcomers. This large gap dividing the rich and the poor, the newcomer and the old makes it so much harder to settle on a resolution for the bettering of

Time Huls is a farmer and begins by describing the origin of farming in his family in which starts off with his parents. Huls explains that his parents came to Montana around 1912 when the land was still fairly cheap and bought about 170 acres of land for only pennies. When his parents wanted to pass the farm down to their children they decided to let to children decide who wanted to farm more by determining who was willing to pay for the farm. With great family values instilled in them from their parents, the two brothers, one of which including Tim Huls, were able to sustain a family operated farm for years. He describes farming as something he and his family enjoy doing and explains that they would not have lasted as long as they had with the family company if they did not all have the same mind sets and respect each others opinions. Although they very much enjoyed farming they still had many obstacles that they had to overcome. As Diamond had mentioned earlier in the chapter, prices for farming equipment and sustainability had increased while the profit from the farm had remained the same. Another obstacle that they also had to face was the increased price for land due to land developers taking over. Instead of surcoming to defeat, Huls chose to change his ways and become more technologically advanced by installing a new barn house for his cows that made it faster and