As a journalist, I’ve
watched many forms of civil disobedience in the West. I’ve known
EarthFirst! tree-spikers and interviewed armed, tax-evading
Freemen. I’ve seen “green” grandmothers lie down before
bulldozers to stop the blazing of new logging roads across public
land, viewed the carcasses of dead grizzly bears and wolves shot
down by opponents of the federal Endangered Species Act, and
reported on the arrest of Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski.
I
am not implying that there is any justification for violence. Acts
of terrorism are wrong, no matter what the provocation.
But what, today, compels Westerners into action? Don’t say “jobs”
or “good schools” or “defending private property rights.”
Those values are givens, and they don’t differentiate people of the
West from anywhere else.
Most of us, I’m willing to bet,
would say that choosing to live in any of the Western states has
something to do with a certain quality of life, one that’s
influenced mightily by the condition of the open, publicly owned
landscape around us.
In recent years, though, it has
seemed that activism in our region was in a deep sleep. Civil
disobedience — at least the kind of peaceable law breaking
advocated by Henry David Thoreau as a response to slavery — seems
to have fallen out of vogue. This includes both environmentalists
and their counterparts on the other end of the political spectrum
who, just a decade ago, claimed to be victims of a “War On the
West” being carried out by Washington, D.C.
My attempts
of political agitation have been meek compared to the deeds of
others. During the 1990s, as hundreds of Yellowstone bison were
being shot or shipped to slaughter in Montana for doing nothing
more than wandering across an invisible national park boundary, I
suggested in a newspaper column — only half in jest — that
readers write a letter of disgust to then-Montana Gov. Marc
Racicot. I said they might also want to enclose a rock to challenge
the state’s Stone Age logic in managing migratory wildlife. Outside
the governor’s office at the state Capitol in Helena, I was told a
table had to be set up to receive the stones of dissent.
I also wrote a column about a landowner’s proposal to turn a
stretch of the Yellowstone River in Paradise Valley into an RV
campground. It was a place where the trout fishing was good and the
scenery magnificent. My suggestion was for motorists who disagreed
with the development, which needed approval from county
commissioners, to honk their horns in protest. The suggestion
resulted in lots of motorists beeping their horns, and the
developer became so annoyed that he phoned the county sheriff’s
department. Later, I learned about one unintended consequence: At
least one motorist was ticketed.
Looking back, I realize
that these recommendations were both lame and futile. Not only did
the campground along the Yellowstone River move forward, but the
other side of the waterway is now lined by ranchettes. The view
shed has been impaired forever and a wall of riprap, erected to
defend the residences against floods, armors several miles of the
Yellowstone River’s banks. As for Yellowstone’s wandering bison,
which can carry a disease, brucellosis, that is harmful to cattle,
little has changed. Buffalo blood is still being spilled, and,
after decades of controversy, there still is no resolution in
sight.
How can any citizen — old-timer or newcomer —
halt the destructive patterns that continue to erode the West? The
great conservationist David Brower warned that no environmental
victories are permanent. They may be fought valiantly to a
standstill, he said, but most flare up again, and every time they
do they are fated to be lost without citizen vigilance.
But it’s inconvenient to be vigilant, it takes courage to act on
personal convictions, and it makes other people angry. Yet how is
standing up to battle against landscape destruction any less a
patriotic calling than what is being asked of our soldiers in Iraq?
I have no regrets about helping to generate a few rocks
in the Montana governor’s office, or for temporarily disrupting a
developer’s bliss with a little noise. Still, in hindsight, those
gestures were meaningless. If Thoreau were alive today, where would
he draw the line?
Todd Wilkinson is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News
(hcn.org). He lives in Bozeman, Montana, where he is working on a
book about the bison-rancher and philanthropist, Ted
Turner.
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