| Chapter 1: | The Milltown Cleanup |
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Finally, people from Missoula's business community were interviewed. They represented an available group of citizens whose perspectives were based on living just beyond (but, notably, downstream from) the known contamination. They certainly cared about whether or not the efforts in Milltown were successful. In some cases, the success of their business was directly tied to the health of the river, and, indeed, Missoula's entire water supply could have easily been affected by a mismanaged cleanup effort. Ranging in age from their mid-40s to their mid-50s, most of these people were not involved in public activities associated with Milltown's problems or any cleanup efforts. However, they evidenced a rather comprehensive knowledge of the contamination and the cleanup and restoration plans. Comments from these residents have been treated as a coherent whole, presented variously as the composite characters Jim Stark and Lou Tenley.
Table 2 serves as a quick reference guide concerning the composite characters found in the following chapters.
Outline of the Book
Chapter 2 explains the theoretical approach that underpins collecting discourse data as a means of understanding a particular place and as a means of capturing particular senses of place. Specifically, we discuss the knowing of landscapes as an interpretive activity that is manifested in both individual and collective efforts. The chapter also explains our particular focus on the conversational discourses of place and our methods in terms of gathering and analyzing the data from Milltown.
Chapter 3 illustrates that locals tended to situate the Milltown environmental problem within an understanding of local history and endeavor. Knowing “this place” was a function of understanding landscape artifacts as evidence of important social histories, including the ethnic origins of neighborhoods as well as corporate interests and paternalism. Information regarding what had been true about the community was important to locals, as it was used to establish a platform for understanding the environmental problem and for understanding how local