Lou Bruno is a teacher, naturalist, and founder of the Glacier Two Medicine Alliance that advocates for protection of the Badger Two Medicine wilderness next to Glacier National Park.
INTERVIEW EXCERPTS
About why he lives on the front: “Driving home from school, the sun would be setting behind the mountains and lighting up the snow that was blowing off the peaks and putting alpine glow up in the clouds -- it’s extremely harsh, but it’s incredibly magical.”
And I love the fact that grizzlies are here, and that I live in country where I could walk down the road and run into one…We live with them every day, we take precautions. Everyone I know is glad to do it as far as my neighbors here, just because we like the fact that we live in grizzly country. And I feel like if you don’t like it, there’s 99.9 percent of the rest of the country that you could live in without grizzlies."
At a 2015 hearing on oil and gas development in the Badger: "People were constantly getting up, one after the other, and from their point of view talking about how important it was to keep the Badger wild, and to keep oil and gas development out. And these were Native Americans, they were veterans, they were farmers and ranchers, they were conservationists, everyone you could think of. And when you look at that broad spectrum of Montana society all having the same value system as you do, it’s pretty powerful."
"The problem is that a lot of people don’t believe that there is a democracy and that they can’t do anything. And I feel like when you adopt that attitude, then you’re dead in the water at the very start."
"I’m 74 years old. Do you think I could climb and hike to any place in the Badger I want these days? But it doesn’t matter to me… Is it right for me to impact all of these creatures and permanently impact the land and the landscape because of me, just me?"
