With thousands of acres of Utah wilderness at stake, Tim DeChristopher resurrected the lost art of civil disobedience.
By Erin Barnes
Fed up with sign-waving, petition-signing, and letter-writing, Tim DeChristopher decided the Bureau of Land Management’s December auction of 164,000 acres of Utah land to oil and gas prospectors called for stronger action. After an econ final on the 19th, the University of Utah grad student drove to Salt Lake City, where he slipped past protesters waving signs reading PROTECT WILD UTAH, walked inside the auction, and took paddle number 70. “I wasn’t going to change the minds of any oilmen by giving a speech,” he says, “but I knew I could drive up the price of bids.”
“Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul,” Ed Abbey once wrote — words that had eaten away at the environmentalist in DeChristopher for years. Like Abbey, he left Appalachia for the Southwest. After attending Arizona State he moved to Utah in 2005 to help troubled teens work out behavioral issues in the wilderness — a job that had him wandering the desert for almost three years. But it wasn’t enough. “I felt like I was trying to fit pieces into a broken system,” says the 27-year-old. “To be effective, I knew I had to understand economics and use those tools to effect change.”
The BLM auction had all the signs of lame duck chicanery: The original announcements were buried in Election Day press coverage, and, according to Steve Bloch, conservation director and attorney for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, the agency refused to hand out leases later than January 19, one day before Obama took office. “It was a fire sale, a last parting gift for industry. Some of these parcels were hotly contested throughout the Bush administration,” says Bloch, whose group was one of seven to sue the BLM. “This was their last chance.”
DeChristopher’s original plan was simply to bid up the prices the oil developers had to pay for the parcels, but after a few angry looks and watching acre after acre go to developers anyway, he felt he had to do more. “My sentiment and my action were in the same place,” he says. “It was a very peaceful moment.”
DeChristopher raised his paddle above his head and held it there, not even bothering to lower it between bids. “A federal agent finally came over and said, ‘Let’s go outside,’ ” he says. By the time he was removed, DeChristopher had purchased 12 parcels in a row of a particularly beautiful 22,000 acres surrounding Arches and Canyonlands national parks — at a cost of $1.8 million, which he certainly did not have. “The agents asked me what I was doing,” DeChristopher explains. “I said I was disrupting what I felt was a fraudulent auction in an act of civil disobedience.”
He never imagined what would happen next. Blogs told his story, letters of encouragement poured in, and, astonishingly, people started giving small donations through his website bidder70.org — eventually adding up to $110,000, enough to make the first payment on the leases. Patrick Shea, a lawyer and former BLM director in the Clinton administration, also caught wind of DeChristopher’s situation and offered his legal services free of charge.
On January 17, three days before the inauguration, a judge ordered the BLM to stop handing over leases until the courts can decide if the auction was even legal. Then, on February 4, new interior secretary Ken Salazar ordered the leases of 77 parcels scrapped. “The Bush administration rushed ahead to sell oil and gas leases near some of our most precious landscapes in Utah,” Salazar said. “We will take time and a fresh look at these 77 parcels.”
Now DeChristopher — who was taken into custody but never charged with any crime — is organizing for more direct action with his own nonprofit, Peaceful Uprising, which trains people to commit acts of civil disobedience to fight global warming.
“In this climate crisis, our leaders are going to have to show courage and make sacrifices,” DeChristopher says. “And we will have to as well. Even if that means getting arrested.”
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