A nice little piece in the New Yorker, Montana Ranch, with photographs by one of my favourite photographers, Ami Vitale.
It seems a very long time since we met in a castle in Poland.
For the New Yorker, she told Elissa Curtis “I wanted to do a story about my home, about the deep connection people have to the land here, and the importance they place in stewardship, and the vanishing way of life in the American West.”
Grazing animals have become the subject of lively popular debate since Allan Savory’s TED talk: How to green the world’s deserts and reverse climate change in March. But Savory’s ideas of “holistic management and planned grazing” are widely challenged, as a Slate article by James McWilliams, All Sizzle and No Steak, makes clear, with his final conclusion “the evidence continues to suggest what we have long known: There’s no such thing as a beef-eating environmentalist.”
Personally I still sit a little on the fence, and just very occasionally allow myself to have a little prime Scotch beef as a special treat, for example at Christmas – rather than a turkey. I think it is still grass fed like those on the ranches in the pictures.
Ami Vitale also makes films, as you can see from her ‘Mamtaz’ Story: The Fight for Climate Justice In the Bay of Bengal‘ on Culture Unplugged, where she is asking for support for her work, which includes a new feature film on the mass migration of people due to climate change called Bangladesh: A Climate Trap.