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The Bitterroot Valley
The Montana valley whose older residents remembered a transformed landscape but could not identify when the transformation had occurred — Diamond's fieldwork case for the empirical operation of creeping normalcy in contemporary rural America.
The Bitterroot Valley in western Montana was the primary American site of Diamond's contemporary fieldwork for Collapse. Beginning in the 1990s, Diamond conducted interviews with residents and documented the environmental transformation the valley had undergone — forests reduced, rivers degraded, summers increasingly filled with smoke from wildfires — and the residents' own perceptions of that change. The striking finding was that older residents could describe the transformed landscape but could not identify when the transformation had occurred. Each year's conditions had been only marginally different from the previous year's; the cumulative change was enormous; the incremental experience was unremarkable. The case became Diamond's empirical grounding for the concept of creeping normalcy.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The Bitterroot Valley is located in western Montana, historically one of the most productive and biologically diverse valleys in the northern Rockies. Native American inhabitation dates back millennia; European settlement intensified in the late nineteenth century with timber,