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"Tim DeChristopher photos" by 350.org on flickr || Tim DeChristopher walks past his supporters with his legal team just before he was sentenced to two years in prison. DeChristopher was taken into custody from the courtroom.
Tim DeChristopher grew up in the beautiful mountains of West Virginia. As a child he watched his mother unsuccessfully fight corporate outlaw Massey Energy’s destruction of his magnificent surroundings, and as a young man became an environmental activist. At age 27, during the closing days of the Bush Administration, DeChristopher submitted bids at a Bureau of Land Management auction of public lands to fossil fuel companies, even though he had no intention of purchasing the properties, in order to stymie what amounted to a gift to the oil and gas industry. The uproar that followed DeChristopher’s sabotage derailed this collusive theft of public property and saved 130,000 acres of wilderness from destruction.
Last week a Federal Judge sentenced Tim DeChristopher to two years in prison for his heroic action.
DeChristopher’s lengthy pre-sentencing statement to the Judge in his case, which includes a cogent analysis of corporate dominance in America and the enormity of the approaching environmental calamity, is worth reading in its entirety, but I only have the space to quote his closing paragraph here. (See it in full at http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/26-13.)
“I’m not saying any of this to ask you for mercy, but to ask you to join me. If you side with Mr. Huber [the prosecutor] and believe that your role is to discourage citizens from holding their government accountable, then you should follow his recommendations and lock me away. I certainly don’t want that. I have no desire to go to prison, and any assertion that I want to be even a temporary martyr is false. I want you to join me in standing up for the right and responsibility of citizens to challenge their government. I want you to join me in valuing this country’s rich history of nonviolent civil disobedience. If you share those values but think my tactics are mistaken, you have the power to redirect them. You can sentence me to a wide range of community service efforts that would point my commitment to a healthy and just world down a different path. You can have me work with troubled teens, as I spent most of my career doing. You can have me help disadvantaged communities or even just pull weeds for the BLM. You can steer that commitment if you agree with it, but you can’t kill it. This is not going away. At this point of unimaginable threats on the horizon, this is what hope looks like. In these times of a morally bankrupt government that has sold out its principles, this is what patriotism looks like. With countless lives on the line, this is what love looks like, and it will only grow. The choice you are making today is what side are you on.”
“Which side are you on?” It is a refrain many in the RFC community grew up with. It was always a potent command, a call to action that was hard to ignore. The difference I see between the struggles of the 1930s and the 1960s, and the environmentally-related ones of today, is that those earlier struggles did not contain a looming planetary deadline. I don’t say this to belittle their importance. Those struggles impacted millions and involved efforts to improve the quality of human life across the globe. But if you believe, as I do, that the world’s militaries, corporations and the governments that serve them are engaged in a course of conduct that threatens to decimate the productive capacity of our world in the coming decades, then we have a limited amount of time in which to alter that conduct.
Tim DeChristopher hit the nail on the head when he said “this is what hope looks like.” The odds seem long and the road looks steep, but Tim DeChristopher, and others like him, give me hope. And I know whose side I’m on.
[Tim DeChristopher is a climate activist and board member for the climate justice organization Peaceful Uprising. For more information about his case and his related activism, or to contribute to his legal defense go to either http://www.tarsandsaction.org/tim-dechristopher-legal or http://www.peacefuluprising.org.]
43 Comments
Fantastic commentary!
I wish he hadn’t said what he said about tactics. There was nothing wrong with what he did.
Thank you for sharing this and pointing us to his closing statements. Recommended. As you point out, justice is not being served.
What does RFC stand for?
Tremendously honored to have you join us here, Robert! And thank you for sharing a slice of Tim’s courage and eloquence.
I thought it was great. He was looking the judge in the eye and making contact. He put it on the judge to think and decide what to do with his powers. The judge now looks like a hypocritical fool unable to think of anything constructive — thus representing the DOJ and the current judicial system perfectly. And Tim De Christopher showed that by squarely putting it to the test.
As I have said at other sites; I call on the President to pardon Mr. DeChristopher.
Obama’s a coward he’s not going to pardon any stinking hippies hell he won’t even have the DOJ investigate KKKarl Rove.
No, I wouldn’t want Obama’s pardon. Better his irritation by far. Thank you so much for this, strength and courage to Mr. DeChristopher; we shall not forget him. The ultimate problem is always the rape and pillage of the planet. It has to change, it is going to change, but how much better if our governments were concentrating on this rather than dropping bombs.
Well done on this – recommended.
Thanks for the diary, Tim De Christopher is a hero and it is always good to keep him in mind.
Thank you so much for posting this and the link.
Excellent piece and represents Mr. DeChristopher well. Something is very wrong when this kind of crap happens to a real guardian like Tim vs. what’s being excused on Wall Street, DC, and elsewhere… Our contemporary sense of social justice is FUBAR! The neo-cons say there is no common ethic. How’s this for a common ethic: SURVIVAL! Thank you Mssrs. DeChristopher and Meroopol. Maybe we can get past this deficit BS and start zeroing in on the real deficit: environmental disaster. I sometimes get irritated when I see crocodile deficit tears coming from someone who is about to hand off a smoking hulk of a planet to their kinds. WTF?
Welcome to Firedoglake. We need your advocacy to thrive. Welcome.
I don’t think he was foreswearing his tactics, I think he was taking away the judge’s opportunity to imprison him while praising his goals. Make less about “the law is the law, what can be done?” and more about “Which side are you on?”
Wonderful post. Rec’d.
Excellent!
Civil disobedience as a political tactic is dead unless we all participate. One person or a dozen or a hundred can easily be ignored by the pols and the villagers.
A million or two million or ten million engaged in sustained, coordinated action is the only way to attract attention today.
If the numbers aren’t substantial the majority of the media will simply ignore us as they did during the anti-war march prior to the Iraq war.
x2
Guts and solidarity like this is what it takes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yuK4m3UzRk
Pete and Arlo will always have a special place in my heart. With the full orchestration and feelin’.
We need an Earth Army to resist the corporate polluters and profiteers. Greenpeace is a good start, but some would say that it’s way too public and way too peaceful. Corporations pay attention ONLY to the bottom line, as they tell us endlessly.
If part of what many folks outside of the owning class are struggling with is how to affect change in a system where legal avenues of approach have been cut off and where the law benefits only those with the means to write it, DeChristopher provides an example of what can be done. Booyakasha!
As a Utahn, I can say that there is no justice in this case. Anti-wilderness right-wing radicals have attacked our public lands with bulldozers and ATVs, in widely-publicized events aimed at making a political statement against wilderness preservation. Not one of them has been issued so much as a ticket by the Bureau of Land Management.
Tim DeChristopher acted to stop an illegal lease auction that was rigged in favor of the oil & gas industry. It was a last-minute gift from the Bush administration after the 2008 election, when they thought no one was watching. None of the leases he bid on, or any others from that auction, were ever issued because it would have been a violation of environmental policy. He exposed a bidding process that was cheating the taxpayers. No damage was done to the land, and nobody lost any money.
The judge has come close to admitting that the 2-year prison sentence was based on DeChristopher’s politics and his statements made outside the courtroom, not on the law.
Inspiring. This is what a fierce advocate looks (+ sounds)
like.
DeChristopher is a good man who cares about his world. Isn’t that nice to find that among all the slimy, unprincipled people in gov’t today.
Some have said they will not forget Tim DeChristopher. I will not forget U.S. District Judge Dee Benson.
I should look into the specifics of this case more, but it seems to me there is a better model to be used here.
Why not establish S-corps to engage in these auctions and others like them, then unwind them when payment comes due? We should be using accounting tricks and SPV’s against this institutional corruption to shed liability the same way they’re used against us.
Depressing, sorry.
Stick a fork in the US.
Nathan, Clearly we hippies are outflanked, outmanouvered, outgunned by sophisticated money boys. I am clueless WRT financial instruments and their capability to be ‘weaponized’. Can you, who are clueful, point me to more info on this, or maybe do a (little) diary? Thanks!
Nice, outside-the-box thinking, Nathan!
Please write up a diary on this subject. I’ve no head for legal stuff, so can’t speak to it’s legal viability, but you may be onto something, there.
Yeah, I can probably put something together.
When you’re getting hammered by legal constructions and financial artifices it’s important to examine how they were used to defeat you. It’s no different than when you capture an opponent’s superior catapult on the battlefield and study it to build your own to use against them.
Thanks for the reminder about those rightwing actions in Utah; I was aware of that but had forgotten. Per usual: IOKIYAR, as always and forever. Wanna rape the environment & rip off US citizens: YIPPEEEE!!! Step right up.
Wanna protect the environment and see that US citizens are ripped off by the corporations: Jail time for you, ya dirty hippie!
Twas ever thus. Pretty sickening.
Agree and would be excellent if you could pull something together on this topic and write a post about it. Yes, they are outflanking and outmanuevering us, and it’s done very willfully and skillfully. Of course, they have deep pockets to hire the best legal minds that money can buy.
Thanks so much for this update about Mr. DeChristopher. I am sorry to learn that he got 2 years in jail but unsurprised.
This is yet again another *whistleblower* that the Obama Admin couldn’t wait to incarcerate.
Here we have a very concerned young man, who saw something illegal happening, took a stand and stuck his neck out. What he did is admirable, but of course our corrupt police state, including the DOJ, has to throw the book at him. How dare the hippies stand in the way of the mega-corporations’ “rights” to despoil the environment and rob the mineral wealth of this nation for the profit of the upper 2% alone.
Typical. I hope that we continue to get updates about Mr. DeChristpher and that messages of support from FDL can be sent to him. I thank Mr. DeChristopher for his *service to his country.* It is very important what he did, and I appreciate the sacrifice he made. I wish him all the best.
Thanks for the post. recommended.
Tim DeChristopher’s statement he gives us this watchword distinctly. It should be emblazoned on Shame (not sympathy) cards.
“The rule of law is dependent upon a government that is willing to abide by the law.”
Thank you for this post.
Ah, but WE have Nathan!
You don’t really need the best legal minds that money can buy. Even crude implementations of strategy can prove effective. Tim DeChristopher is proof of this. His only real failing appears to be naivety and running his mouth. The judge in the case indicated this, stating that the initial offense wasn’t the heart of the matter.
If he’d had the wherewithal to do even a little bit of self-preservation using very common tools that run-of-the-mill entrepreneurs utilize, then he could have plausibly evaded conviction and replicated his efforts for little more than the cost of erecting and dissolving SPV’s. Hire a few paper-pushers and a sympathetic bankruptcy attorney for filing documents and you’ve got yourself a never ending stream of fictional people to throw a wrench into the existing process.
metamars,
I really appreciate the enthusiasm and support. Unfortunately, I’m good with analysis, tactics, and strategy. I’m shit with organization. It just takes too much time, and I can’t walk away from my business long enough to really dedicate myself to anything unless it can be done in sprints.
If I have a month-long lull and there are a bunch of resources rearing to go, I can get things moving very, very quickly. If I have to spend a month getting resources together, then by the time everything is organized I have to go back to dealing with business.
I’ll find my place in all this mess yet.
But that is who chose to prosecute him.
Reminded me of what Josh Stieber wrote to Congress last year:
@Nathan Aschbacher August 6th, 2011 at 2:17 pm
Cool.
Just Sayin.
Thank you for refreshing the reminder of Tim DeChristopher’s eloquent statement at his sentencing hearing. One can support his defense or ‘show the love’ at a pipeline coming near you.
I like Nathan’s idea – it could be a simple yet very effective action for those with the financial and legal resources. It would be very inexpensive just to drive up the revenue for many leases. Even though it may be hard to purchase leases with the intent to withdraw the land from resource exploitation, in that case, injunctions could be sought and maybe lease auctions stopped. If leases are acquired, the land could be developed (often a lease requirement) as a monitoring site for adjoining lease operations, doing animal census and reclamation projects.
Ok, here’s the lyrics . . . dawg bless us all.
Blue Highway – Union Man
A short life of trouble in a dark and dusty mine
has been my occupation, now I walk the picket line
I was down in bloody Harlan when they tried to organize
The miners faced starvation, you could see it in their eyes
The company hired some gun thugs, many miners died it’s said
They’d come to kill the Union but they lost their lives instead
And it’s which side are you on boys, which side are you on?
You’re either for the rich man or the Union standing strong
I came to New York City in the year of ’43
We were fighting Hitler’s armies in the war across the sea
But they would not hire a miner to do a workman’s job
at fifteen cents an hour, your pockets they will rob
I’ll never trust a rich man as long as I draw breath
To keep his golden mansion he’ll starve your kids to death
And when my life is over, don’t mourn my passing long
Organize resistance and keep the Union strong
Here’s to every miner who dared to take a stand
who lived to feed his family and died a Union man.
N that’s that, dammit. -Larue