Drill, Baby, Dri..

Frustrated political activism eventually becomes civil disobedience--That's not always how it goes: I don't think Thoreau was active about too much outside of his writing and his bean plants. But he couldn't truck what he deemed an unjust war or slavery, so he stopped paying the taxes that financed it.*

But it is the story of Tim DeChristopher. Tired of watching the normal political actions bear little fruit (picketing, speaking with his representative), DeChristopher was determined to halt what he felt was the Bush administration's prostitution of public lands to oil and gas interests. At a Bureau of Land Management public auction on December 19, the twenty-seven-year-old student outbid commercial interests to purchase 22,000 acres in Utah, none of which he could afford.

Environmentalists and guerilla-types have been exuberant about DeChristopher's stunt; everybody else not so much. The Federal government is threatening to prosecute him for interfering with and perverting its business (whoops, I almost wrote the public good). And DeChristopher, who now owes $1.8 million to the BLM, has to figure out what to do with his new real estate. Recently, a group of supporters raised $45,000 for the down payment, which might help keep him out of jail, but the consequences of DeChristopher's political act are still up in the air.



You can read more about DeChristopher, as well as watch video of him at the auction, by clicking on the donation button, which leads to the Bidder70 site. Lord knows if I had any extra money, I'd throw it his way.


* Aware he was dying, Thoreau's last words were "Now comes good sailing", followed by two lone words, "moose" and "Indian."