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The Revolution Where You Live

Stories from a 12,000-Mile Journey through a New America

Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

Fire, Coal, and Climate in Montana

It was the height of wildfire season in the West as I took off, a record-breaking year, and the air got smoky as I reached Montana.

A few days into my trip, I woke up at a campground south of Missoula to find a thin layer of black-and-white ash covering my truck and camper and the nearby pine trees. Driving in search of breakfast, I heard on the radio of the death of several firefighters in north-central Washington.

The smell of burning trees had followed me across Washington, Idaho, and into Montana along with the haze and the sting in the eyes and throat. An older couple I met at a coffee shop that morning told me that fires are common, but this fire season started earlier and was more intense than any they could remember.

A storm may be coming through in a few days, a young clerk at a run-down gas station and convenience store told me. Business was slow, and he had time to talk. It could bring winds that would blow the smoke away, he said. But it could also bring lightning strikes and set more fires in these bone-dry pine forests.

We risk passing tipping points where climate change takes on a life of its own, and it will be too late for humans to dial it back. We may have already passed some of these tipping points.

When more forests burn as a result of shifting climate patterns, and the burning releases more carbon, causing additional warming, we see this vicious cycle in action. Likewise, when receding ice cover in the Arctic leaves behind darker ocean waters, those waters absorb, rather than reflect, heat. Scientists have identified more than a dozen of these so-called positive feedback loops.

I thought about the salt waters where I live in Suquamish becoming acidic from the excess carbon, and the sea life that is dying. Then high in the Rockies as I crossed the Continental Divide, I saw evidence of the glaciers shrinking, year by year. For parts of the world that rely on runoff from mountain snow-packs, this is dire. I felt like I was witnessing a planet shift in real time. Instead of climate change being an abstraction of graphs and charts, I was seeing it in the changing waters, breathing it in the smoky air.

Journalists, scientists, policy makers, teachers, and other professionals are supposed to be dispassionate. We are trained to push aside our grief in favor of analysis and unbiased observation. Such practice is useful. But when we stand by as life on our beautiful planet dies, as one miraculous species after the next winks out, this stance turns from a professional calling into a pathology.

Cautiously, as I traveled, I let the lid off my grief.

Coal, from the Otter Creek Valley to China, and what happens in between

In Montana, I was looking for reasons to believe we can turn things around before we hit a climate Armageddon. I started with the people who were resisting plans for a giant new coal mine.

I first learned about the plans for the Otter Creek mine when controversy erupted about the transport of coal from the Powder River Basin in Montana and Wyoming to a proposed new coal export terminal in the Pacific Northwest.

The Gateway Pacific coal export terminal would be the largest in North America. It would be located some 100 miles north of Seattle on the traditional land of the Lummi Tribe. The terminal was designed to handle 54 million metric tons per year, most of which would be coal, according to the Washington State Department of Ecology. Mile-and-a-half-long trains and giant ships, many from Asia, would cross waters and lands considered sacred by the Lummi people. SSA Marine, half owned by Goldman Sachs, was pushing the project.

The Lummi Tribe opposed the terminal. If any doubts existed about the strength of their opposition, they were laid to rest in September 2012, when tribal leaders stood on the beach of their homeland and set fire to a large facsimile of a check from port developers they stamped "non-negotiable."

Lummi tribal members, like most of those in Indian Country, are not wealthy. But the tribe made it clear that money would not buy their support for a project they believed would threaten the clean water needed to support their fisheries and the sanctity of their traditional lands. The tribe has treaty rights to fish in these waters, which gives it the legal standing to block the terminal.

Lummi tribal members aren't the only ones who would be affected by this massive new coal mine and port project. Large numbers of Bellingham residents also oppose the project, and they elected a slate of county commissioners who were outspoken opponents to the terminal. The coal would be cheap enough to make it attractive to Asian nations, such as China, where toxic pollution is causing 1.6 million premature deaths a year, according to research cited in The Guardian. And it would add still more carbon to the atmosphere, worsening the climate crisis.

Then there are those who live adjacent to the source of this coal, the residents of the Otter Creek Valley in southeast Montana and the neighboring ranchers and members of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe. Arch Coal proposed to strip-mine this area, creating the largest such mine in Montana. The mine would yield 1.2 billion tons of coal over 20 years and be located in what is now a quiet valley of ranches and creeks near the boundaries of the Custer National Forest.

Arch Coal and its partners, including the Burlington Northern Railroad, would build an 86-mile railroad spur to get the coal to the main train line. The new rail line would follow the Tongue River, which borders the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, and cross ranches, many of which have been in the same family for generations.

"The only way the railroad spur can be built is to force it on the ranchers," Dawson Dunning told me when I sat down with him at a coffee shop in Livingston, Montana, just outside Yellowstone Park. Dunning, age 32, is a member of a family that has operated a ranch in the Otter Creek Valley since 1890. He has a round, open face, blue eyes, and a short beard. Instead of the stereotypical cowboy hat, he wore a baseball cap and shades, and he plans to return to that remote valley to operate the ranch when his father retires. To him, the Otter Creek Valley is home, and he doesn't want it destroyed.

Those ranchers and their organization, the Northern Plains Resource Council, along with the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Sierra Club, are at the core of the resistance to the mining project and railroad spur.

In support of this resistance, Lummi carver Jewell Praying Wolf James and his crew carved a totem pole and announced they would offer it as a gift to the Northern Cheyenne Tribe. I decided I would be there when it arrived on the reservation on August 30.

Another Way of Ranching

I stopped for the night in Billings, Montana, at an RV campground on the Yellowstone River. There was a breeze off the river, and with the camper vent opened, I could stay cool while I caught up on email and planned my next stops. Through the window of the camper, I could see a ridge rising straight from the river to a rocky peak above.

I'd heard that RV campgrounds were great places to meet other travelers, families and retired people who pulled up folding chairs around a campfire to swap stories and crisp marshmallows. Not true here. The giant RVs lined up along the pavement dwarfed my pickup truck camper. The park offered both WiFi and cable television, and the RVs were self-contained, with their own bathrooms and showers. On the pebbly banks of the Yellowstone River, I had the rushing water and the sunrise to myself.

I had stopped in Billings to meet the ranchers who have been fighting coal in Montana since the 1970s. I met Steve Charter, chairman of the Northern Plains Resource Council, at the organization's headquarters, and he invited me to walk out on his land to the north and to park my truck there for the night.

Charter wore a cowboy hat, a green cotton shirt, jeans held up by a belt with a silver buckle, and scruffy boots. His neatly trimmed beard showed some white amid the black.

He was just a teenager when his parents gathered with neighbors to found a landowners association to fight coal, he told me. "In the early 1970s, these land men from big eastern coal companies started showing up at our doors. They were pretty heavy-handed: 'We're coming in, and we'll offer you a reasonable price, and you'll sell to us.' And then they would say, 'Your neighbors have all made deals.'"

The Charter family, who lived in the remote Bull Mountains about 50 miles north of Billings, called their neighbors and learned that, in fact, they hadn't cut deals with the coal company. They met and formed the Bull Mountain Landowners Association.

"The coal companies didn't like that," Charter recalled with a chuckle. "Coming from Appalachia, they were used to strong-arming people and getting their way."

Like many stories of the West, the railroad has a role here. The federal government had granted railroad companies vast tracts of land in exchange for building the rail lines and serving the farmers, ranchers, and rural towns. But, according to Charter, the rail companies prefer large trains that carry single commodities, like coal. They dropped passenger services to small towns and shipments of cattle, farm products, and other local goods. Their preference for coal, together with their ownership of alternating square-mile blocks of land, made them a formidable foe.

"We weren't in a strong position to fight," Charter said. "If we lost the [grazing] leases, wed just end up with a checkerboard of unusable land, so the coal companies had a good argument about why we should cave in and sell out to them."

But they didn't sell out.

"We loved the land and didn't want it torn up," Charter explained. "Also, my dad was an ornery rancher and didn't like being threatened and pushed around."

They soon learned that other groups of landowners were also forming associations, including the ranchers at Otter Creek. So the groups from around the state met up in the Charters' living room and formed the Northern Plains Resource Council.

This wasn't long after the first Earth Day, in April 1970, and environmental consciousness was spreading. Young people just out of college heard about these ranchers who were battling coal, and they began to show up and volunteer. Those young people, and Steve Charter, who was just out of high school, became the first volunteer staff.

At first, the ranchers were leery of the newcomers, Charter told me. Many of the young people had long hair, which didn't go over well in conservative eastern Montana. "There were a lot of haircuts," Charter recollected.

But somehow it worked out. "As people worked together and got to know each other, that's when the magic happened."

At Montana's 1972 legislative session, a coalition of ranchers, hippies, and environmentalists pushed through some of the country's most progressive environmental regulations, including laws requiring coal companies to restore the land after they mined it. They reached out to Appalachian anti-coal groups and the people there who had been "exploited and messed with for years," as Charter put it. In conjunction with the Appalachian groups, the council lobbied for a national mine reclamation act, which, after years of work, was adopted by Congress and signed into law by President Jimmy Carter on August 3, 1977.

Although they had help from some of the big green groups, Charter said the local groups from Appalachia and Montana led the work, and that, he believed, made the difference. "We're Ground Zero," Charter told me. "We know the issues because we live them. That gives us credibility."

Today, Charter is painfully aware that the issue of coal affects far more than the people who live adjacent to mines and train tracks. "Every ton of coal they mine can be translated into carbon dioxide. So we're all Ground Zero," Charter stated. "It's a nineteenth-century fuel, and this is the twenty-first century. All of the time and effort trying to prop up the coal industry would be better spent trying to figure out an alternative economy that's going to work in the long run."

The conversation then took a tack I wasn't expecting. It turned out that Charter had some interesting ideas about how to jump-start that economy. We were walking on the rocky, dry ground of his ranch, where a small rise allowed an expansive view of grasslands, prickly cactus, more outcroppings, and, off in the distance, the highway back to Billings.

Charter explained that since 1984 he had been practicing "holistic resource management," a technique for herding cattle that mimics the behavior of wild ungulates, like buffalo, when predators are nearby. In this case, ranchers use fencing to keep the cattle together, so their hooves grind up the grassland and they defecate and urinate on the ground, spread seeds, and then get moved off it. Although there is some controversy over when and where this method works, research indicates that land managed this way is healthier than when cattle are dispersed over a large area and plant life doesn't fully recover between grazings. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is among those institutions endorsing the technique. The system works best when the person managing the land understands it well and can observe the health of the land year by year to learn what amount of grazing and recovery time is optimal.

Charter only recently began to see an additional dimension to restorative grazing — its connection to climate change. Overgrazing, tilling, and other modern farming practices have depleted the carbon in the soil, allowing it to escape into the atmosphere. But restoring the soil contributes to the soil's ecological diversity and health and to the productivity of the grasslands. And it also helps the soil absorb massive amounts of carbon. Mycorrhizal fungi accomplishes some of this magic. It extends fine filaments far into the ground, releasing enzymes, dissolving rocks, and bringing nutrients up to the surface.

Microbes become part of complex food chains and carbon chains, Charter explained, and eventually form the humus that extends deep into the soil. That humus is basically made up of carbon. So ranchers could manage their land to dramatically increase the soil's absorption of carbon, making rangeland a giant sponge for excess carbon dioxide. This type of soil also holds rainwater more effectively, preventing runoff and flooding downstream and reducing the need for irrigation. The soil's capacity to hold water will become a critical issue as the climate continues to change and rainfall becomes more erratic, threatening vast areas with desertification.

"It's really exciting. There's a whole movement of people who are figuring out how to build soil in ways nobody had thought about. And people are getting amazing results," Charter said. Restorative grazing could allow ranchers to increase the productivity of rangeland "without having to give all the money to Monsanto" for fertilizers. "You're getting your prosperity from the soil, and you're building it over time," he said.

This form of ranching could add up to an agrarian renaissance of sorts, if Charter is correct, because it would require more workers. And this could help reverse the depopulation of rural America.

"They almost brag that we're down to half a percent of the population making their living from agriculture," he said. "There is no relationship to the land anymore. There's just someone driving a huge tractor, putting on all these chemicals." And when few people are needed to work the land, the small towns shrink.

"So this could totally turn that around. It's going to require a lot of knowledge, a lot of hands-on working with the land, because intensively managing livestock takes knowledge and it takes labor. But that's a good thing. This is the kind of job that people like doing once they know how to do it. As ranchers, we hope to bring people back to where human knowledge and hands will do this, and not petrochemicals and running tractors."

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Excerpted from The Revolution Where You Live by Sarah van Gelder. Copyright © 2017 Sarah van Gelder. Excerpted by permission of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc..
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