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Seeking Truth In A Monkeywrench
"Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul."
- Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
"Pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, that I am meek and gentle with these butchers."
- William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
On March 21, 1981, modern-day monkeywrenching was born. With the changing of the season, upstart organization Earth First! ushered in a new era of environmental activism by "cracking" Glen Canyon Dam. Though the dam breach was simply an aesthetic one - an assemblage of duct tape, nylon rope, and 300 feet of black plastic unfurled down the face of the canyon's concrete plug - the effects of the action continue to reverberate through the conservation movement, acting as an echo of the simulated blast.
Ed Abbey spoke at the event, translating the intent of the deed into words: "If opposition is not enough, we must resist. And if resistance is not enough, then subvert. We must continue to strike back at the empire by whatever means available to us. Win or lose, it's a matter of honor. Oppose, resist, subvert, delay, until the empire itself begins to fall apart."
On that day, people cracked smiles. There were peals of laughter. Cheers. After years of opposition, resistance and repeated defeat, subversion yielded a new path. A small group of desert rats found - and rent open - an elusive and wild seam of hope.
In the words of Ken Sleight, "The monkey wrench is not a symbol of destruction...the monkey wrench is a symbol of restoration."
The Earth First! action at Lake Powell did not restore Glen Canyon to its former, free-flowing state, but the event did place a crack in the edifice of acceptable environmental activism. Out of that opening came an expanding landscape of preservationist possibilities that our thoughts and actions may now roam.
"To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting...True excellence is to plan secretly, to move surreptitiously, to foil the enemy's intentions and balk his schemes, so that at last the day may be won without shedding a drop of blood..." - Sun Tzu, The Art of War
On December 19, 2008 - nearly the winter solstice, in the winter of the Bush administration's last days - a University of Utah student committed a crime and, in so doing, carried the monkeywrench for a new generation. Twenty-seven-year-old Tim DeChristopher quietly entered a BLM lease auction in Salt Lake City. On the way in, he bypassed a peaceful protest outside of the BLM state office. Signs reading "Protect Wild Utah!" blazed yellow in the winter air, yet they yielded little influence with the oilmen inside. Upon entering, DeChristopher also bypassed Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance's months-long legal attempts to keep the sale from occurring. He took a different, more direct route to action.
Up for grabs were 149,000 acres of the southern Utah landscape - much of it surrounding Arches and Canyonlands National Parks - available to the highest bidder for oil and gas development. The economics student raised his bidder's paddle again and again at the auction, driving up prices on many parcels. He won 14 of them outright, totaling 22,000 acres and a tab of $1.8 million.
He had no means or intention to pay the sum. He bid simply to throw a wrench in the works. Once they caught on to his objectives, federal agents escorted him out of the building. He now faces felony charges.
"What the environmental movement has been doing for the past 20 years hasn't worked. It's time for a conflict. There's a lot at stake," says DeChristopher, the man who now wears the mask of both hero and villain on the stage of Utah's public lands debate.
DeChristopher's deed harmed no one. It was a peaceful act of civil disobedience. And it was effective. In January, a U.S. district judge halted the proceedings based on findings that the BLM itself didn't follow federal law in allowing the lease sale to move forward. Then, in February, Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar announced the withdrawal of 77 lease parcels from the sale, including those DeChristopher won. He labeled the auction an irresponsible Bush administration attempt to push through more drilling before leaving office. The Obama administration, according to Salazar, seeks a more balanced approach.
Without a young idealist directing the media spotlight on Utah by silently and illegally raising a bidder's paddle, would Salazar have denounced the otherwise business-as-usual event? Would a district judge have noted the BLM's own indiscretions? Do we owe the unmarred vistas from Arches to the deeds of a criminal?
Perhaps.
However, in the aftermath of DeChristopher's actions, one blogger has labeled him as "America's own Osama bin Laden." He is deemed an "ecoterrorist" by many public figures. Some comments posted to the Salt Lake Tribune website call to "hang him" or to send him to "federal prison and get his own pristine backside wilderness drilled." He currently faces 10 years in prison and $750,000 in fines for scheming to "defeat" federal law.
Utah representative Mike Noel, a Republican from Kanab, sponsored a successful bill this year making actions like DeChristopher's a felony. Noel said stopping a legal oil lease is no different than "burning down a man's cattle operation - [it's] ecoterrorism."
At the infamous lease sale, some angry bidders asked officials for permission to take the student out back and deliver justice their own way. At a subsequent auction, a consulting geologist commented that he meant to bring a baseball bat to the proceedings in the event of a DeChristopher redux. "I just came down for support in case we had more trouble," he said.
A young man quietly disrupts the resource extraction status quo for a day. The action is in the name of peace and preservation. The resource extraction crowd asks to pummel him in return - a modern-day act of Western-style justice.
Which is the greater act of terror?
"Why does [the government] always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?" - Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
The land of Deseret - the precursor to Utah - was formed by Mormons repeatedly engaging in acts of civil disobedience in response to an oppressive government. They were not terrorists. Pilgrims to Deseret were escaping terror.
When a literary critic of The Monkey Wrench Gang posited that the book promoted terrorism, Ed Abbey penned a letter to him, clarifying his sentiments on the term:
The book does not condone terrorism in any form. Let's have some precision in language here: terrorism means deadly violence - for a political and/or economic purpose - carried out against people and other living things...A bulldozer ripping up a hillside to strip mine for coal is committing terrorism; the damnation of a flowing river followed by the drowning of Cherokee graves, of forest and farmland, is an act of terrorism. Sabotage, on the other hand, means the use of force against inanimate property, such as machinery...The characters in Monkey Wrench engage in industrial sabotage in order to defend a land they love against industrial terrorism.
Herein lies the irony in our legal system: Industrial sabotage (by Abbey's definition) will land a man in prison. Industrial terrorism will line his pockets. Those who try to preserve sacred ground, wild ground, home ground, through disabling machinery and obstructing roads - those who attempt to stop industry in its soil-compacting tracks - are guilty of vandalism under present law. Worse, they are deemed terrorists. And it is the industries that seek to cut the forests and scrape the deserts that freely assign accusations of property damage and terror to others.
In this sense, property - an oilrig, a road grader, the lease on a parcel of land - is valued more highly than the integrity of this living earth. The pursuit of profit is placed above the sanctity of life.
In this post-9/11 world where the word "terrorism" enters our consciousness daily - via the newspaper, radio and television, carried by the voices of world leaders and journalists - is it a sign of our sensitivity to the term - or our lack thereof - that we would pin the word to someone like Tim DeChristopher? And how will the threat of such a title affect the next brave soul willing to act extralegally for the greater good?
If Socrates, Martin Luther, Benjamin Franklin, or Joseph Smith were alive and challenging the status quo today, how might we label them?
As naturalist Peter Steinhart says, monkeywrenching is "the reminder that we need more than profits, that we need meaning, wit, vision, dreams."
When will our laws - and our attitudes - reflect this?
"Be true to the earth." - Friedrich Neitzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
Truth is larger than the human imagination.
Through the ages, it has been necessary for pioneers to travel upstream from our current set of laws to show us the greater truths that transcend our own sense of them. Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., our country's founding fathers...all of them engaged in civil disobedience. All were criminals. All brought us closer to truth's source. They had to show us that our laws - rather than their actions - were unjust.
I don't intend to equate monkeywrenchers with the great and revolutionary men and women of history. Yet, I seek to place their actions in a deeper context. Sometimes breaking the law is the noblest act we can commit. Sometimes breaking the law brings us closer to source, to ground. As Martin Luther King, Jr. once wrote, "...there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that, - an unjust law is no law at all.'"
Where is the justice in destroying a river, a canyon, a forest - habitat for untold numbers of beings - to increase the profits of a select few and bring more material goods into our lives? Where is the justice in exposing men and women to carcinogens to generate more electricity? Where is the justice in tearing up fragile desertscapes to increase our recreational opportunities? There must be a higher source of truth than the laws promoting use of public lands for personal, temporary and trivial gain.
Who will make the pilgrimage to that fountainhead of truth? Who will teach us to be true to the earth? And how?
"A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." - Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac.
Monkeywrenching is not solely the territory of those on the left. The right engages, too, though they might have a different name for it. Something like "justice."
Is it justice when cattlemen in Wyoming or New Mexico shoot endangered and protected wolves, breaking the law to preserve their profits and way of life? Is it justice when residents of Escalante, Utah, vandalize vehicles that sport environmental bumper stickers, attempting to preserve the culture of their town? Is it justice when off-road enthusiasts in Monticello, Utah - including local politicians and law enforcement officers - try to preserve their motorized access by illegally driving their Jeeps up a sensitive canyon off-limits to vehicles? Is it justice when members of the conservation community receive death threats and rocks through their windows, when their children are picked on at school and local merchants deny them services?
What do we call this? Is it monkeywrenching?
Whatever we call it, such actions are a last-ditch effort to protect something that is endangered. Some environmentalists monkeywrench on behalf of threatened landscapes, waterways, flora and fauna. Some rural residents break the law to protect a disappearing way of life or increasingly tenuous economic returns. All of us do it out of fear for what the world might be like if we lose that which is most precious to us. We do it out of a lack of faith in the law to protect that which we hold dear. We are seeking a morality greater than the law. But morality on whose terms?
Representative Noel claims Tim DeChristopher "took millions of dollars away from us, and he's laughing at us. It's not right. It's not fair." A man from southern Utah posted to the Salt Lake Tribune website that "stopping these [leases] has stopped hundreds of jobs in the rural areas...this wasn't harmless. It destroyed many lives."
Southern Utahns struggle each day to make ends meet. In the eyes of some locals, one who opposes industry also stands in opposition to economic stability, life and livelihood. To other, environmentally minded residents, industrial sabotage is essential if this region is to retain its beauty, its integrity, its beating heart and vibrant soul.
There must be a morality that encompasses the good of our biotic and human communities. Perhaps it's further upstream from the muddied waters at which we now stand.
"Monkeywrenching isn't guerilla warfare, but monkey warfare, and people can support it because it's not threatening." - Mike Roselle, Earth First! co-founder
Around these parts, monkeywrenching still occurs on a small scale. While Tim DeChristopher captured headlines with his public act of civil disobedience, others are surreptitiously performing "night work," speaking their conscience through their actions.
Survey stakes are still pulled. Road equipment is occasionally disabled. When McDonalds finally came to Moab and put up a billboard proclaiming, "You've seen the other arches, now come see ours!" it was repeatedly vandalized. The company eventually took it down. One of the many things Ken Sleight (a.k.a. Seldom Seen from The Monkey Wrench Gang) is famous for is barring a dozer from chaining nearby Amasa Back...while on horseback. He blocked the dozer's path with a barricade of flesh and blood - his and his mount's. And more recently, the 14-foot "G" painted on Moab's east rim (representing Grand County High School, first painted on the cliff in the 1930s), was transformed to read "Go Home!" just in time for Jeep Safari a few years ago. The Travel Council was not amused.
Such actions, while they raise the ire of some, are ultimately harmless. They are lighthearted approaches to the sometimes soul-wrenching environmental degradation we witness on a daily basis. Ecodefense of this magnitude (with the tactics of the Earth Liberation Front being something else entirely), provides levity for those living in the trenches of the thankless battle for preservation over profits.
Furthermore, monkeywrenching is but one tool of many in the activist toolbox. It is not meant to take the place of legal efforts such as lawsuits, lobbying or grassroots activism. It augments them. Plus, it's a helluva lot more fun.
This, I believe, is key to the monkeywrenching mentality. Keep it light. Take the threats seriously but don't be too earnest about the response. Don't morph reaction into retribution. Act from a place of wild and unsubstantiated hope. Follow up with beer. Repeat as necessary.
Also at the heart of the monkeywrenching sensibility is an avoidance of becoming "a body of ideas rather than a body in motion," as environmental writer Christopher Manes puts it. Keep the movement moving. Avoid becoming an institution. Avert the onset of fundamentalist mind. This is a pitfall for environmental organizations of all stripes, including the radical Earth Liberation Front and the mainstream Sierra Club.
Former House Resources Committee Chairman and Utah Representative Jim Hansen once said, "The rationalization of ecoterrorists is no different from the al-Qaeda terrorists. Both believe they are the sole proprietor of truth and righteousness. Both believe they have the right to impose their concepts of truth and righteousness on society. Both attack people who they think have violated nature's or God's law."
The key is in not believing we are the "sole proprietors of truth." The goal is to follow the stream of truth to its source, not imposing our own sense of values on its course. As Buddhist nun Pema Chodron says, we must soften what is rigid in our hearts.
This is her definition of peace.
And a fundamentalist mind is one that has become rigid. "First the heart closes, then the mind becomes hardened into a view, then you can justify your hatred of another human being because of what they represent and what they say and do," she says.
Those who engage in acts of civil disobedience and monkeywrenching - if they act from a place of softness, openness, flexibility, and unadulterated hope for something better - cannot in good conscience be labeled terrorists. If they maintain humor and humility in the midst of their stubborn commitment to truth - cheering at the symbolism of a black plastic crack on a dam, or facing down a 50-ton machine with a horse - we might instead call them provocateurs and pioneers.
But those who allow their fears of loss to outweigh their commitment to "meaning, wit, vision, [and] dreams" have succumbed to rigidity and fundamentalist mind. Where is the hope and humility in killing a wolf, in poisoning prairie dogs, in threatening to harm activists? Where is the reverence for life?
In Practicing Peace in Times of War, Chodron explains, "There is a teaching that says that behind all hardening and tightening and rigidity of the heart, there's always fear. But if you touch fear, behind fear there is a soft spot. And if you touch that soft spot, you find the vast blue sky. You find that which is ineffable, ungraspable, and unbiased, that which can support and awaken us at any time."
I believe that vast blue sky is where hope and truth reside. This vastness is Source. And sometimes a little monkey warfare is necessary to bring us to that place of peace.
Jen Jackson writes from Moab, Utah, where there are ample opportunities to do field research for an article like this one.Post a comment
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Tuesday, May 19, 2009
at 9:02:08 AM
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Bill says:
Good article...but what the hell is up with all the question marks??????????