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 seems that activism in our region has been in a deep
sleep. Civil disobedience – at least the kind of peaceable law
breaking advocated by Henry David Thoreau as a response to slavery
and the Mexican War – 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 at 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 lives in Bozeman, Montana, where he is
working on a book about the bison-rancher and philanthropist, Ted
Turner.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Where do you draw the line?.
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