Note
There’s a lot happening in John Potter’s “On Borrowed Ground,” his popular cartoon created exclusively for Yellowstonian. Potter’s subject is Big Sky, Montana, the very emblem of unconstrained development and human population growth occurring inside a wildland area of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. In a recent conversation, the award-winning cartoonist asked: “If environmental concerns relating to Big Sky are this bad now, what will be their magnitude in another decade or two and why isn’t anyone, in any position of leadership, asking the question?You know what they say about the elephant in the room.”
Big Sky is located southwest of Bozeman in the Madison Mountain Range and inside a tributary drainage of the famed Gallatin River. It is the fastest-growing, four-season resort community in the West. Realtors and developers boast that despite a myriad of major concerns—dangers from wildfire, pollution issues that have affected the Gallatin River, large numbers of vehicle-wildlife collisions on US Highway 191 and epic wildlife habitat destruction—private land developers boast that it is only at 65 percent of buildout.
This means the development footprint of Big Sky is only going to continue surging, increasing its exposure to a potentially catastrophic wildfire, and bringing growing spillover effects of human pressures to nearby national forest lands connected to nearby Yellowstone National Park, and soaring traffic levels on US 191 impairing the wild and scenic character of the Gallatin River. As Potter’s cartoon makes clear, while some are claiming construction of expensive wildlife overpasses and underpasses along US 191 represent some kind of magical thinking panacea, the elephants in the room, wildlife biologists say, is ceaseless development pressure and a refusal to contemplate one word: limits. As they say, Big Sky is not going to engineer or grow its way out of a problem that lack of thoughtful planning, lack of zoning and and lack of regulation created.
Other cartoons by John Potter:
