A poet, journalist, jack-of-all-trades, and environmental activist, Michael Howell has used his skills to protect Montana watersheds and unite communities against out-of-state interests.

Michael was born in Mississippi, grew up in Texas, and moved north to pursue academics. He earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Philosophy at Penn State and University of Montana respectively. At UM, he studied with Henry Bugbee and taught in the Humanities program.

After earning his degrees, Michael worked on a vegetable farm in France then traveled across Europe and Asia for a year before returning to Montana. While working as a handyman in Missoula, he met his soon-to-be wife Victoria. Unwilling to leave the area to pursue a PhD, he and Victoria fired up the converted school bus they lived in and drifted down to the Bitterroot Valley where they started a weekly newspaper, the Bitterroot Star, in Stevensville, Montana’s oldest town. They sold the paper in 2020 and now publish the Bitterroot Free Press, a publication of the non-profit foundation they founded in 2014 to support investigative reporting and to help protect the public’s right to know and right to participate in government decision-making in the Bitterroot Valley.

In 2000, in response to growing threats to the local watershed, Michael founded the Bitterroot River Protection Association (BRPA), a nonprofit dedicated to monitoring the Bitterroot River Basin and protecting it from privatization and environmental degradation. He has served as executive director for over 25 years.

One of his proudest accomplishments was to stop the gutting of Montana’s Stream Access Law and removal of stream protections under the Montana Streambed and Land Preservation Act (310 Law) by preventing a group of wealthy landowners from establishing a private enclave along a branch of the Bitterroot River known as Mitchell Slough.

In 2003 BRPA engaged in a legal battle in which the landowners argued that the laws only applied to natural waterways, and the river channel was so altered by man that it was no longer “natural”, so the laws didn’t apply. In 2008 the Montana Supreme Court ruled these arguments ‘absurd’. Michael shared the story of this battle in his book Saving the Mitchell.

Michael’s contributions extend beyond journalism and environmental activism. For ten years he served on the Board of Trustees of the North Valley Public Library District. He founded the Journal of Wild Thought, an online publication highlighting a variety of perspectives in philosophy. His poetry speaks to the beauty of the land and is shared in The Cry of a Loon.

Michael earned numerous awards for his writing from the Montana Newspaper Association, and his environmental journalism earned him the Conservation Communicator of the Year from the Montana Wildlife Federation in 2004 and the Outdoor Writer Award from the Montana Chapter of the American Fisheries Society in 2006. His service to our community, land, and water earned him the Burk-Brandborg award from Missoula Conservation Roundtable in 2005.

By Kalle Fox and Vicki Watson