CONSERVATIONIST TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS PUTS HERSELF ON FRONTLINE OF CLIMATE FIGHT
One cold day last February, Terry Tempest Williams, a prominent environmental author and advocate, stepped into Utah’s Salt Palace to begin her unlikely career in the energy industry.
Salt Palace, Salt Lake City’s largest convention center, was hosting a federal oil and gas lease sale, at which the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) would auction off 45,000 acres of public land for oil and gas extraction.
The BLM, the nation’s largest landlord, sold drilling rights to 810,000 acres in 2015. While that may sound like a vast area, it’s barely a postage stamp for BLM. Energy companies currently hold leases to more than 30m BLM-managed acres nationwide.
Williams had arrived with a cadre of protesters, who charged that drilling the parcels – and burning the fuel buried beneath them – would damage the land and contribute to dangerous climate change. Though Williams’s history of civil disobedience included more arrests and climate marches than she could count, she’d begun to feel she wasn’t doing enough. She’d come to the Palace to attempt a new form of activism, to further exercise what she called her “moral imagination”.
Williams filled out a bidder registration form and sat down in the front row, among representatives from Silver Spur Resources and Turner Petroleum.
A BLM agent approached to warn her that she could be prosecuted for misrepresenting herself as a legitimate energy bidder. Tim DeChristopher, an activist who in 2008 had purchased leases worth nearly $1.8m with no means or intent of paying for them, had served 21 months in prison. Though Williams knew DeChristopher’s story well, she told the agent that she had the right to be there. Before he could object further, the auction began.
Depressed oil prices made for a sluggish start to the bidding. The protesters began singing to disrupt the sale and were soon ushered from the hall.
Williams wanted to bid, but her mental math couldn’t keep pace with the auctioneer’s patter. Instead, she tweeted: “Holding the space. #witness,” she wrote. Many of her missives ended with #keepitintheground, or, in moments of particular passion, #keepitinthefuckingground. The auction ended without Williams placing a bid, and only half the acreage sold.
That afternoon, though, she and her husband, Brooke, traveled to BLM’s office to buy some of the unsold parcels over the counter. They spread out the agency’s maps and selected two tracts: one in Utah’s Book Cliffs, and another on the doorstep of Arches National Park, 14 miles from their home.
Altogether, the couple purchased rights to 1,120 acres at the bargain-basement price of $1.50 an acre. With the processing fee, the transaction cost $2,500, which they charged to their credit card.
Williams filed paperwork the next day to create her own firm, Tempest Exploration, LLC – the first energy company in history devoted not to extracting fuel, but to keeping it in the ground.
Ten weeks later, I met Williams in New York City, beneath the blue whale that hangs from the ceiling of the American Museum of Natural History. Williams had spent the spring teaching creative nonfiction at Dartmouth University in New Hampshire, 2,000 miles from her stomping grounds in Utah’s canyon country, and had come to the city for the weekend to visit a friend.
She had interned at the museum in 1983, and immediately made herself at home by lying down beneath the whale’s pleated belly.
“Don’t you get the sense that you’re in the presence of a higher intelligence?” she asked, her silver hair spread out on the grimy floor. “We’re not the only species that lives and dreams on this planet.”
I’d come to talk to her about her new book, The Hour of Land, which considers the role of America’s national parks in fomenting and reflecting political and social change. Though the release of The Hour of Land corresponded with the 2016 centennial of the National Park Service, Williams’s history is a radically different celebration than the authorized version.
The Hour of Land explores the notion that the creation of public land is inherently politically subversive, and that public lands – the “open space of democracy”, as Williams puts it – offer staging areas to rebel against the pillage and plunder that have come to characterize our relationship with the natural world.
National parks, Williams writes, “are so much more than a federally constructed reservation for recreation and retail. They are places of recognition – where we can renew and revive our understanding of what makes us human in relationship to the life that surrounds us.”
Visiting a dozen parks, Williams finds activism in many forms. For example, the Hollywood producer who bought 187 acres from the state of California and promptly gave it to the United Farm Workers, resulting in the César E Chávez National Monument.
Even oil barons, Williams writes, have become revolutionaries for American landscapes: John D Rockefeller covertly bought up much of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in the 1930s, eventually donating the acres that became Grand Teton National Park.
Nearly a century later, the theater has shifted, but the war for America’s public lands shows no signs of abating. The Republican Party’s 2016 platform vows to gut the Antiquities Act – a law, first championed by Theodore Roosevelt, that Barack Obama has deployed to conserve monuments in Maine, Hawaii, California and elsewhere. The Grand Canyon Escalade, a motorized tram that would convey tourists to the canyon’s floor, faces staunch opposition from the National Park Service, conservation groups, and many Navajo, who fear the arrival of “Disneyland on the edge of the canyon”.
“These are the closest thing we have to sacred lands,” Williams told me in the shadow of the whale. “And we’re willing to let them go? Who are we becoming?”
We moved on to the Hall of North American Mammals, where a taxidermied pronghorn stood against a painted backdrop of pastel mesas. Williams, who’d spent the semester teaching among the claustrophobic forests of Dartmouth University, was relieved to be in the presence of her native red-rock, even an ersatz version.
“I’ve thought so much lately about what erosion means – how the same geologic principles that erode stone also erode us closer to the essence of who we want to become,” she said.
In her philosophical consideration of the natural world, Williams might be considered a successor to Thoreau, most famous for his nature writing but most ardent in his abolitionism.
She’s taken up the gauntlet from her friend Edward Abbey, the Utah polemicist whose novel The Monkeywrench Gang launched a thousand bulldozer-wrecking Earth Firsters. Public lands have always been more than scenery in the US: they’re political battlegrounds, now and forever.
“Lease sales are an ostensibly public process in which the public has no actual say,” Jason Schwartz, a Greenpeace media officer, told the Guardian. To Schwartz’s mind, Williams’s intervention carved out a potential new avenue for participation in the opaque auction system. “She showed that you don’t have to get arrested to protect the public interest – you can put a credit card down.”
The risk of setting precedent may be why BLM has refused to tolerate her interference. Unlike Tim DeChristopher, Williams won’t face charges, since she immediately paid her fees – but they will not readily permit her to keep her leases.
The agency’s rules stipulate that “lessees must exercise reasonable diligence in developing and producing … leased resources”, language intended to prevent companies from sitting on valuable energy.
By broadcasting her intent to keep her fossil fuels below ground, the agency ruled this fall, Williams violated the diligence requirement. In a letter to Williams dated 18 October, BLM state director Edwin Roberson wrote: “(S)ince you have stated publicly that you intend to keep the oil and gas resources in the ground … the lease offers are hereby rejected.” Williams would get a refund, but she’d lose her acres.
Some experts question the agency’s rationale. “If she’s willing to pay the money, I’m not sure BLM has reason to turn her down,” Mark Squillace, director of the Natural Resources Law Center at the University of Colorado Law School in Boulder, told the Guardian before the ruling.
Williams wouldn’t be the first to neglect her leases. Energy companies often elect not to exploit their parcels, if, for instance, they’re confronted with unfavorable oil or gas markets. If the rights-holder hasn’t drilled in 10 years, their leases return to the pool – although companies often manage to obtain “suspensions”, loopholes that allow them to stockpile land rights without making payments.
According to a 2015 report from the Wilderness Society, more than 20m acres of national leased land remain undeveloped.
The upshot, Williams claimed in her response to BLM, is that she’s being held to a different standard than other bidders. “The BLM has never demanded that a lease applicant promise to develop the lease before it was issued,” she wrote.
Squillace pointed out that Williams’s purchase likely wouldn’t protect any lands from drilling – after all, if her 1,120 acres had been coveted by energy companies, they would have been snapped up at auction.
But the author’s actions make more sense in the context of “Keep it in the Ground”, a burgeoning campaign to prevent the extraction of buried coal, oil and gas.
The movement is guided by climate science: a 2015 Nature study suggested that more than 80% of the planet’s coal reserves and half its natural gas will have to remain underground to keep warming below 2C. The Paris climate agreement, a global deal that takes effect on 4 November, aims to hold warming at 1.5C – a goal that’s rapidly receding from reach.
Transitioning to clean energy won’t happen overnight, but if we’re to avert disaster, the climate activist Bill McKibben wrote in September, “(W)e can’t dig any new coal mines, drill any new fields, build any more pipelines.”
The Keep It In The Ground Act, introduced last fall by senators Jeff Merkley and Bernie Sanders, would prohibit new leases on public acres.
Yet the effort is largely defined by its direct tactics, from the “kayaktivists” who tried to prevent Shell’s Arctic drill rig from leaving port to protesters who sought to barricade a lease sale in Denver this May. BLM later announced that lease auctions would be allowed to take place online, in part to prevent meddling.
To Williams, Keep it in the Ground is about transition – from extraction to preservation, from fossil fuels to renewables, from observation to participation.
Her own family is grappling with upheaval as well. Williams’s father, John Henry Tempest III, former president of a pipeline construction business, was initially enraged by his daughter’s tactics.
“When we got home the day of the auction, he said, ‘You have made a mockery of our family business,’” Williams recalled at the museum. “He was ashamed; he was embarrassed; he was scared.”
But her father was also horrified by the callousness with which many energy companies treat their workers. Thus Williams was not entirely surprised when, a few weeks after her purchase, she came home to find John waiting for her.
“He said, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing, but I do,’” Williams recalled. “‘And somebody’s got to take on these guys.’”
And so Williams’s father, a man who for decades fed his family on proceeds from the fossil fuel industry, accepted the chairmanship of Tempest Exploration’s board.
Whether Tempest Exploration will have any parcels to steward remains an open question. Williams announced last month that she would fight BLM’s decision to reject her leases. On her behalf, the Western Environmental Law Center filed an appeal, citing her legal right to have her lease bids considered “on an even basis with other bidders”.
In times like these, said Williams over the phone, “we’re going to have to get creative. Public land is hallowed ground.”
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
Follow Us!