Montana

There isn’t a lot for a kid in Montana to do in summer. School’s out and the heat is relentless – so stifling that the only real escape is the cool embrace of the fruit and vegetable aisle at Albertsons. By July, my hometown’s lone waterpark was overrun with feral, overweight preteens, their bellies jiggling as they stampeded across the scorching cement. After an overpriced afternoon at the waterpark, many of these kids would head to McDonald’s for dinner. The more upmarket option was to try to exploit a family with a country club membership. The fast food there is classy; quick but not greasy – think mini tacos and peppery chicken strips served with a petite white cup of ranch on the side. But down the highway are the real fast-food joints.

"You have a big mountain to climb!" is not the sort of text you eagerly await from your girlfriend’s father. But Billy, a true Southern gent, meant no ambiguity. As dawn cracked the alarms sounded in our Airbnb and six of us bundled into the back of the Dodge. A cool mist hung in the valley as “Baba O’Riley (Teenage Wasteland)” started up on the radio and got the blood running. At 6:15 a.m. we entered the shadow of Emigrant Peak, which at 10,921 feet, commands Montana’s Paradise Valley. Emigrant owes its name to Thomas Curry, a pioneer who struck gold in a creek on the east side of the mountain in 1863.

I recently found myself scrolling World Cement Weekly in search of news of a massive rewilding project in northern Mexico, created and funded by the cement giant Cemex. The growing success of the rewilding movement is strangely little known — though there are now places that are wilder, more vibrant, more teeming with life than they have been for centuries, few outside the movement know anything about them. Two decades ago, a nature-loving chief executive of Cemex decided that the company would acquire 346,000 acres of degraded land on Mexico’s border with America, an area larger than Los Angeles, renamed the El Carmen Nature Reserve.

These days, 'school choice' has become such a polarizing term that many bristle at the mere mention of it. Up to this point, discussions have centered on public charters vs. traditional public schools, yet talk about religious schools has been largely left to the periphery. But that will soon change, once we hear the outcome of a potentially landmark education case that’s currently before the Supreme Court. And if tradition holds, bitter political arguments over the outcome are certain to overlook the most important stakeholders — the children and their parents.The case, Espinoza v.