This interview was conducted around 2009, at Ken Sanders Rare Books, in Salt Lake City.
MO: Take me through the early days of EarthFirst!
MO: How involved with them were you during that five years?
Oh, heavily. I could see the handwriting on the wall by ‘85. Under Reagan one, they decided to have a 20th Anniversary birthday party for Lake Powell. And I thought no way in Hell -- we’re having a funeral party. And this was completely my event -- it was an EarthFirst! event, but I financed it and it damn near killed me. It got out of control. I had like 50 reporters from all over the country calling me constantly. John Holland, the law enforcement officer from the Glen Canyon NRA said ‘You guys don’t have a permit.’ I just laughed at him and said ‘There’s nothing you can do about it. This is happening. You think you can stop it?’ And Bart Polar (SP) and I, eventually we decided we would meet with them. We thought we were meeting with him, [Officer Holland] so we went down there several days early to camp. I kind of go overboard with things and I wanted to have a proper funeral party, so I got it in my head that we should have an assault by land, by air, and by sea. So my brother had been on a week-long houseboat cruise on Lake Powell, and there happened to be two days left for the rental. Without having any idea what his older brother was getting him into, he turned over his house boat to me, and that became our pirate ship. At the same time, the park service and Coast Guard were launching these two giant mother ships on Lake Powell, and they had the governors of Arizona and Utah aboard these things, Governors Matheson, representing Utah, and Governor Babbit from Arizona . . . Things had changed; When we went down in ’81 and cracked the dam nothing happened. We had to go and point out to the rangers, ‘oh did you notice the crack down your dam?’ There’s this great photograph of a park ranger getting his copy of Desert Solitaire autographed by Ed Abbey, and then half-an-hour later all hell broke loose when the Sheriff’s department, the Highway Patrol and the FBI all swarmed in. At that point they were pissed and they wanted to arrest everybody, but we were just having a demonstration in the parking lot and apparently they couldn’t arrest us for that or kill us for that. The difference between that and two years later -- they had SWAT teams.
The FBI vs. Edward Abbey and EarthFirst!
We were up late at Willie’s Waterdog Salloon in Glen Canyon City, and heard all manner of stuff that just scared the shit out of us. There’d be curtains on cabins and all of a sudden you’d see a lens poking out. They were following us around. They actually followed us out onto the boat dock when Howie Woak (SP) and I were taking this fifty-foot houseboat out of the Waweek (SP) marina. This huge storm was coming up, so there was this giant, choppy wake; I know how to row my raft, but I’d never driven a motorboat in my life. How the hell we got that boat out that marina without crashing into all those expensive boats, I’ll never know. Somehow we got it out of there. Then it was a classic OJ Simpson slow-speed chase, cause when you’ve got the pedal to the metal on a houseboat they don’t exactly go very fast. So we’ve got two Coast Guard cutters circling around us as we’re driving it over to Lone Rock. And then we decorated it with all these manequins; We’ve got James Watt dressed up, and he’s down on his knees praying with crushed Coors beer cans in his hands, surrounded by Beach Boys manequins. Both of those alluding to famous quotations, when he didn’t want ‘those hippies,’ playing at the White House. And then his Grand Canyon River trip at the time; ‘Oh, the first day was OK, I was bored by the second day, the third day I was praying for helicopters.’ So we wanted to pay homage to that. They literally had SWAT teams around the dam and the Black Mesa power plant. They were gonna kill us. All we were there for was to harass James Watt in front of the dam. We didn’t have any designs on blowing the dam up or sabotaging the power plant.
The Monkeywrench Movement
My whole plan was, we had a little rubber raft, and I had all these people dressed in black Monkey Wrench shirts with hoods, and we’d painted up all these signs that represented over a hundred things that Lake Powell had drown in Glen Canyon. The idea was to have the folks come off the mother ship in the little boat, row it to shore and we’d have the funeral procession in front of the governors and all the official entities. One at a time we’d take the signs off of the ship, and throw them into the coffin we’d made on the back of my truck, and say the name of the drowned feature. As it turned out his huge storm comes in, and the giant ships that the dignitaries were on practically crashed into one another. It was a really violent storm -- rain and wind, and the Page High School marching band was out there. It was like something out of a Fellini movie, with people running for cover and the lightening and everything. And I was totally bummed out because I had a plane coming, and they had warned from Flagstaff that the weather was bad and they couldn’t fly. I thought damn. Then Ken Sleight, the legendary Ken Sleight gets up in the back of my pickup truck and, I swear to God, he gets up and the wind and the rain stopped, the clouds parted, and this ray of sunshine comes down and illuminated him and the storm was over. And he started talking in his quiet way about what Glen Canyon had meant to him. All of a sudden you could hear this little buzz, and pretty soon here came the plane with this giant banner trailing behind it: EarthFirst! Free the Colorado! It buzzed the town and the dam and it came over us. James Watt pretended later that he was unaware of the demonstration. Never saw it. There were hundreds and hundreds of people there.
EarthFirst! was really a throwback to the sixties and the yippies [Youth International Party] and guerilla theater. And yeah, it was very serious, because I think one of Dave Foreman’s main points with it was, through theater and excess, to make the mainstream envrionmental groups that are so villified by the right really be moderate, becasue we’re gonna be the lunatic fringe. But it was never about violence. By 1985 I had suggest to Foreman, ‘hey, young people are the future of the planet.’ Young people can also be unformed, and they don’t always think things through -- the consequences of their actions. Increasingly I could see that. The pressure of the FBI and all these people following me around, video taping me -- I couldn’t take all that. And we did other actions that got very intense and involved. At the time they were trying to do a Canyonlands nuke waste dump in Davis and Lavender canyons. I organized an action against that. We were gonna go down there and stand in front of the bulldozers but they didn’t come. So instead, they were having Department of Energy [DOE] hearings at the old Hotel Utah, and I arranged a band of guerillas that we dressed up in white paper suits to mock radiation suits. I had this old, ancient masonic robe that was all purple and gold with sequins, and so I dressed my shaman up in that, and had a prepared speech. And what does nuclear waste look like and feel like? Who knows, right? So I went down to a gardening store and bought bags of vermiculite and we filled up all these oddball container with this stuff. We went down to those hearings where all the state officials, the county officials and the DOE are sitting . . . and well-meaning people are getting up there, saying there two-minute, five-minute bits. We went in there and took it over, seized the microphones, turned it over to my shaman who read the prepared speech, while the rest of us went down and dumped ‘nuclear waste’ on the heads of every one of those sons-of-bitches . . . And kind of like George Bush in Iraq, I had no exit strategy. I assumed we would be arrested . . . so we look around at each other like, ‘Uh, well, that’s what we got,’ so, dressed as we were, we walked out, got in our cars and drove away. And no one got arrested. The point I’m trying to make is that, in those days it was about attracting attention to the issues and trying, through creativity and guerilla theater, to make a point. All of those well-meaning people that got up and and got their alloted five minutes approved in advance -- they all meant well, but the visual [effect] of the nuclear waste being dumped over the DOE’s heads on the six-o’clock news sent a much more powerful statement that ‘We don’t want your goddamn nuclear waste dump here, and we won’t put up with it. Get that shit out of here.’ I think it ultimately made a more powerful statement than every one of those people’s well-meaning speeches. And that’s what EarthFirst! was about in the early days.
Divisions appear in the ecological activism movement
As the eighties progressed it became increasingly obvious to me that one, I wasn’t cut out to be a leader for any of these kind of movements because I couldn’t handle the moral karma of being in charge of other people’s lives and welfares and decision making. Like the Bistite (SP) Badlands, where we had fifty people chanting on this gated fence that enclosed the coal dragline. At a single word or motion from Foreman or myself they would have knocked the fence over and torched the place. Unlike Dave, who seemed to relish [the power], it terrified me. Like Ed Abbey said ‘Be your own guru,’ or Bob Dylan, who said ‘Don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters.’ It’s just too scary. You know, bulldozers aren’t sentient beings. A road isn’t a good or a bad thing. A combustion engine vehicle isn’t a good or a bad thing. If you’re not taking a stand for a very specific thing in very specific way that you have thought through and know the consequences of, I can’t be party to that and I can’t lead other people into it. It’s too heavy.
Then as EarthFirst! started to splinter -- and yes, that’s were ELF [Earth Liberation Front] and ALF [Animal Liberation Front], and the other acronyms come out of -- the epiphany for me was, ‘yeah, we’re serious about this, we wanna make statements and we wanna call attention to these causes and yes, we will stand in front of bulldozers and we will take it seriously, but it’s all non-violent. You can hit the people arresting you, you can’t sabatoge them, you can’t hurt them. That’s a moral line that personally I cannot cross, and once you cross that you don’t become any better than they are, whoever ‘they’ is. And it got ugly from incidents like the sagebrush patriots rally in arches. We were gonna stand in front of the bulldozers at Negro Bill canyon and, in part because they knew we were coming the Grant County (sp) commisioners called it off. so we had a rally instead. And that night we’re all getting drunk at the river camp, and two, three o’clock in the morning someone had notched, axed over a mile worth of high-powered transmission lines south of Moab in San Juan county . . . They put an American flag at one end, chopped through one and sent ‘em all down like dominos. Well guess who the FBI investigated for that act of terrorism? Us. We didn’t do it, ‘they’ did it. And that’s when I learned, hey, I got divorced that year, I’m raising two young children by myself. All of a sudden it’s like man, I can’t deal with this, this isn’t safe. ‘They’ don’t play by the same rules of engagement. ‘They’ don’t have any qualms about killing me, or killing us, or my children. I told Dave ‘we need to have some kind of yippie funeral and bury EarthFirst!, it’s over.’ And Dave wouldn’t do that. And then really bad things started to happen, ‘cause the movement just splintered apart. Ed Abbey died, and Dave Foreman was arrested on trumped-up charges of sabotaging a nuclear power plant, which was complete B.S. And these splinter groups started in, torching condos in Vail . . . In a sense innocent people were doing things that could lead to people being injured or killed, even if it’s fire fighters responding to the fire -- they’re endangering human life, and you can’t cross that line. So I don’t have any sympathy for those kind of people and their actions.
MO: Given our options now for sustainable and renewable energy, have you changed your opinion at all since then?
Not on nuclear, no, because to me nuclear energy is really simple; If it’s as safe as they keep claiming it is, you only need one rule: you can only produce nuclear power, ergo nuclear waste, in the place where you need the power, and you have to dispose of the waste in the same place. You’re not allowed to transport it, I don’t care if it’s from Italy to hear [referring to a recent proposal], or from Pittsburgh to the west desert. Transporting it is not allowed. And if it’s so safe there’s no need to move it away from population centers. To me, it’s really that simple. And what we’re learning about the whole biofuel thing, and the negative aspects with crops -- it’s so sad. The biggest thing about solar and wind and other clean alternatives, ‘well, we can’t do ‘em, they’re too costly.’ Well, how about when gasoline is ten dollars per gallon? Everybody’s pissing and moaning about four, five dollar-a-gallon gas -- that’s nothing. Ultimately it’s all about water. Forget energy. Water is the new oil. Water is the new gold. It’s like Ed Abbey used to say, ‘I’ll quit driving my pickup truck when everyone else does.’ Well, it could come to that. If we can’t set up a sustainable structure here, if manufacturers of these alternative technologies -- unless they’ve got a stable playing field -- they can’t have tax credits for five years . . . and have it taken away. We’re still paying farmers not to grow crops, but we really can’t afford to subsidize to get some clean alternative energies off the ground for an incubative period?
You’ve got to go back to Harold Ickes (sp), the Secretary of the Interior in the 1930s, when there was a proposal for the Escalante National Park, which would have been the largest national park in North America . . . We were planning and building solar subdivisions that were oriented toward the sun. That all crashed and burned with [the uranium boom] of World War Two. And this whole nonsense of my car only getting twenty miles to the gallon -- what kind of manufactured nonsense is that? We can do a lot better, even with these fossil fuels. It’s very frustrating. These are issues that everybody ought to be able to work together on, but it gets so polarized. And they you get these buzzwords; it’s such a bunch of horse shit. I mean, what does the word ‘conservative’ really mean? The older you get, the harder it is to see things in black and white.
We need trees [for lumber], and they are renewable resources, but there doesn’t have to be a road everywhere. Every forest doesn’t need to be logged, and every American doesn’t get to go every Goddamn place they want to go. It’s too damn bad if you’re too old, or too decrepit. There are places you should have access to, but you know what? It’s like the Grand Canyon -- I’ve been down there several times. It’s a transcendental experience, and I’ll go again although, I have to debate with myself, ‘how many times should I be allowed to go down the Grand Canyon in my life?’ Because, from John Wesley Powell, in 1869, the one thousandth person went down the Grand in 1969. One hundred years, one thousand people. Today? Twenty, twenty-five, thirty thousand people a year go down the Grand Canyon. It’s Disneyland during the Summer, it’s not a wilderness experience. And they had it in the master plan -- they were gonna phase out motorized boating, and all the outfitters were gonna go along with it. I believe it was Senator Hatch who got involved with it and got it overturned. The point being, now you can take a one-day, or three-day Grand Canyon trip, ‘cause they put you on these fast, motorized boats and zip you through the place. And you think you’ve been to the Colorado River, or the Green River, or fill in the blank. But these poor, deluded fools have no idea that they have been robbed, that that experience has been stolen from them because they weren’t down there long enough. So just because you have the wherewithal, just because you have enough money doesn’t mean you [should] get to. Because in my world, you can’t take the time, or won’t take two weeks out of your life to see one of the greatest natural phenomnons on the face of this earth, you’re not worthy. You don’t deserve to go down the Grand Canyon.
MO: Where do you stand on the issue of hunting, from an ethical or moral standpoint? Where do you think it fits in the current conversation around ecology?
This issue of hunting, I mean, I’m not a hunter, I don’t actually own a firearm. That’s just a personal choice. I’m also love to eat meat, and I don’t apologize for that. I certainly have respect for people that choose not to -- I’m certainly not going to force the carnivore system on a vegan, but I don’t think there’s anthing wrong. I think there’s a fine, ancient tradition of sustainence hunt, and I don’t find anything wrong with that. It is a bit of a brutal reality to kill something that has a life. You don’t hear the screams of a carrot as it comes out of the ground . . . It’s shocking, confronting yourself with that. Though I’ve never killed one myself, I’ve certainly been involved with deer hunting. I certainly, as a kid, helped clean and gut and prepare deer for food. It’s a brutal reality, but I think those of that eat meat that aren’t willing to accept how we get it . . . is nonsense. If you’re going to eat meat, I think at least, philosopically, you have to accept the willingness to kill it. We’re not hunter/gatherers anymore. We’re so far removed from the natural environment in all its manifestations. We don’t see the stars at night, we don’t see the weather, we don’t feel the cold or the heat . . . I’m not suggesting we all have to sleep outdoors every night . . . But we get so far removed from natural processes, and I think, over the generations, as a species, we definitely lose something by that. As Wallace Stegner so eloquently articulated in his Wilderness Letter, we, as a species, need wild things and wild places whether we go into them or not. And the emphasis is on wild. Where we start losing it is because there has been a tendency, in the past at least, in the environmental and conservation movement, to say ‘well it’s easier to raise money to save the sexy animals, the sexy wilderness, the sexy plants, than it is the unloved and the ugly and unwanted. It’s much harder to gain an aesthetic appreciation for the Great Basin and the West Desert than it is the high uintahs. It’s much easier to be overpowered by a great stone arch in souther utah, like the rainbow bridge, or delicate arch or whatever.