Letter from BSI Executive Director

Dear Friends of Big Sky and the Greater Yellowstone Region,

I’d like to take this opportunity and a moment of your valuable time to introduce the Big Sky Institute to those of you who may not know about us. I like to think of BSI as the wholly-owned subsidiary of the Big Sky community and of Montana State University. It’s a view I can have simply because to me, BSI would not exist without the strong support of the community and the university. The community and university make a strong team because both groups have an interest in “place,” which means the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem generally, and the Big Sky-Greater Gallatin Canyon area as a focal point. I suspect many of you have chosen to live or play in this area for the same reasons that this “place” has meaningful attributes for most of us.

A second reason for our strong team is that most of you are interested in knowing more about Nature in the area you live and play. At BSI, we believe that science-based education is the best way to approach Nature in “our place,” and that the university affiliation gives us a strong hand to play in that regard. We also believe that science is often presented to people in unpalatable ways, and that it should be reformulated to make it both palatable and fun to learn. From geology to geophysics and from microbes to moose, we work hard to make sure this learning is digestible and fun!

Everyone at BSI has one foot in the science world and the other foot in human communications, and our staff is selected for this distinctive trait. This means that your Nature interpreter is very likely involved in some aspect of meaningful research in the area as well as having the ability to communicate that science in a manner that is understandable to regular people.

Another goal we work hard to meet is to make sure the research we are involved with at BSI has some practical relevance to our society. So we are working in science specialties in the Greater Yellowstone such as climate change, changes in human use of the landscape, changes in native biodiversity and the challenges associated with invasive species, as examples. Probably, we are performing research in close proximity to your home; maybe at a spot even visible from your driveway. Lone Mountain’s rock glaciers or the Big Sky weather net come to mind in that regard.

Early this summer we will be opening our first office and natural history information center in Big Sky, at the long-vacant bank building next to the Chamber of Commerce. We invite you to stop in and check it out. Ask our staff-person a tough science question about our area. If they don’t know the answer, they will find it, and I’m betting it will be answered in plain English, just like you like it!

Best wishes from the staff of the Big Sky Institute,
John D. Varley, Executive Director