The first thing I do is thank the gods for making turnbuckles (actually that’s the second thing I do after taking the thorn out in my pants). Loosening the wires, and even undoing them, would be simplicity itself. There’s a lot of them, but security would be no problem here: forest surrounds this tower on all sides. Even the tower itself could be easily attacked: it’s made of a spindly grid of metal tubing. I could cut through the thing in an hour or two with a hacksaw. Someone with a torch could do it in minutes.
All this talk of taking down towers makes me wish I was a farmer, not only because the farmers I’ve known have generally been crackerjack mechanics—I was a farmer (commercial beekeeper) in my twenties, and learned to my dismay that most farmers spend far more time with machines than animals—but also because back in the 1970s a group of farmers called the Bolt Weevils were pioneers in the art and science of taking down towers. They specialized in towers with high-tension electrical wires.
It all started when the United Power Association and the Cooperative [sic] Power Association decided to put a 400 mile transmission line across Minnesota farmland between coal-fired generating stations in North Dakota and the industry and homes of the Twin Cities.258 As always, the poor would be screwed so the rich could benefit. First, as with water, most of this electricity would not be used to benefit human beings, but industry. Second, the utility corporations chose to put the power lines across lands belonging to politically powerless family farmers rather than across huge corporate farms with political clout.
One of the farmers, Virgil Fuchs, became aware of the plan, and went door-to-door informing his neighbors. He was just in time: representatives from the utility corporations were right behind him trying to get farmers to sign easements. After Virgil’s warning, not one farmer signed.
What follows is a story we’ve heard too many times, of local resistance overwhelmed by distant power, of politicians and bureaucrats who go out of their way to feign community interest while going just as far out of their way to stab these communities in the back. In essence, it’s the story of civilization: of human beings and communities harmed so cities and all they represent may grow.
Local townships passed resolutions disallowing the power lines, and county boards refused permits for construction. The response by the corporations was to ignore local concerns and turn to the state for help. The farmers also turned to the state for help, speaking to their purported representatives. The response by the state government’s Environmental Quality Council was predictable: public hearings were held, people voiced their opinions, and after discovering that opinions ran overwhelmingly against the power lines, the state doctored the transcripts of the meetings (dropping out unfavorable testimony), then went ahead and granted the permits. One county sued, but the case was dismissed.
Government representatives promised they would at least let farmers know when construction would begin, but they lied. Suddenly one day surveyors showed up in Virgil Fuchs’ fields.
Here is why in many ways I respect at least some family farmers more than most environmentalists: Fuchs fought back. He drove his tractor over the surveyors’ equipment, and rammed their pickup truck.
It must be said, however, that Fuchs was in some ways risking less by doing this than if he had committed the same actions as an environmentalist. He was sentenced to community service, and eventually even the record of his arrest and conviction was expunged. You and I both know that any environmentalist who did this to equipment belonging to any extractive corporation would probably get charged with attempted murder and receive at least fifty years in prison: remember that environmental activist Jeffrey Luers is serving more than twenty-two years for torching three SUVs in the middle of the night when no one was around, and three environmentalists face up to eighty years for allegedly torching an unoccupied logging truck. Similarly, when gun-wielding farmers in the Klamath Valley stood off sheriffs and sabotaged public dams to force water to be diverted away from salmon and toward their (publicly subsidized) potato farms, sheriffs joined the fun and no one was arrested, let alone indicted, let alone prosecuted, let alone sent to prison, let alone shot. And they got the water. If you or I re-sabotage those dams to keep water for salmon (water for fish: what a quaint notion!), and we pull guns on sheriffs as we’re doing so, we, too, wouldn’t go to prison: we would go to the cemetery.
Farmers began gathering at Fuchs’s farm and at others across several counties. They fought the surveyors wherever and however they could. They’d suddenly, for example, gain permission from the county to dig a ditch across a road (to prevent vehicles from driving across them) for this reason or that. One farmer stood next to the surveyors and ran his chainsaw so the workers couldn’t communicate.
Local sheriffs did the right thing, or at least didn’t do the wrong thing. One said, “As sheriff of this county, I became involved when the landowners and other concerned citizens objected to trespasses of their property [by the power companies]. In the meantime the power companies expect my department to use unlimited force, if necessary, to accomplish their survey and ultimately the routing of the power line. In my opinion this is a situation that began with the Environmental Quality Council, at the request of the power companies, and that’s where the problem should be remanded for resolution. I will not point a gun at either the farmer or a surveyor. To point a gun is to be prepared to shoot, and this situation certainly does not justify either. It does justify a review of the conditions that bring about such citizen resistance.”
Where is this sheriff when environmentalists need him? Would that sheriffs would always defend local humans against distant corporations, or at the very least not enforce the ends of these corporations through violence.
The governor also refused to intervene. That’s where things stood when a new governor took office that winter. Things looked good for the farmers: the new governor considered himself a populist. As one farmer said, “He thought of himself as representative of the people, with a capital P, not of the bureaucracy or the bigwigs or the business people, and so he had, I think, a great hope and belief that he could get people together and solve the problems.”
But when politicians present themselves as representatives of regular people it’s time to start packing (either your luggage so you can flee, or a pistol, so you can, well, you know . . . You choose which).
The governor took to slipping off in secret to visit farmers at their homes. He told them he sympathized, and said, “You really got stuck in this case.”
Philip Martin, head of United Power Association, sympathized too. He’d grown up on a farm, and he even knew and loved Virgil’s mother—“She reminded me somewhat of my own mother,” he said—but as from the beginning of civilization the demands of this deathly economic system trumped all human cares, feelings, and needs. Demand for electricity was growing by 10 percent per year, construction of the lines had already begun, and the clock was ticking on interest on a $900 million federal loan. The logic was, “I may love my mother, but if the economic system—and more broadly civilization—demands it (or hell, even hints at it) I’ll screw her over and leave her for dead.”
Martin was clear on the source and solution of the problem: “We built all the way across North Dakota and we had one person protesting it. That was solved when the law enforcement—he did some damage—and the law enforcement there initiated the action to put him in prison, or jail. And pretty soon he said, ‘I’ll be a good boy, I won’t do anything more,’ and they let him out, and we built a transmission line. We didn’t have any problem in North Dakota.”
But, he continued, in Minnesota, “The law enforcement refused to enforce their own laws. We would go out and try to survey, and they would simply pull up all our stakes, they would destroy everything we had out there.259 And there was never anything done. President Norberg, who was president of the cooperative, and I were out there at many meetings. I drove a car with an escort in front of it and back of it with guns going off, sticking out the windows.
”
The farmers said the transmission lines would come in over their dead bodies. They filed more lawsuits, which went to the Minnesota Supreme Court. The Supreme Court decided against them. This journey through the courts radicalized many of the farmers, who up to that point had believed in the system. One farmer stated: “I had the feeling that it was all decided. The courts weren’t acting as courts at all, they were just a front. And it was just a terrible, terrible shock to me. I thought, gee, this can’t be.”260
That November, construction started in western Minnesota. When farmers protested, the corporations filed $500,000 lawsuits against them.
The farmers found allies, from former Vietnam War protesters to Quakers to musicians. The corporations, of course, already had allies in the court system, and now the governor, and through him police with guns. For all of his rhetoric, when push came to shove, the governor, as representative of the state’s economic system, shoved the power lines down the farmer’s throats. He said, “You know, this is a nation of laws. And there are a lot of things that I don’t like, you know, and I’m sure there’s many things that you don’t like, but there’s a process that we can work, it’s a process that’s open. It’s a process that people in November go and they make that mark on that ballot.” Let me translate: “It does not matter whether this or any other particular law or action is good for humans or the landbase. It does not matter whether you like what happens to your landbase, to your children, or to you. It does not matter whether I like it. It does not matter if the laws were designed by and for the rich, and the same is true for the courts and law enforcement. It does not matter if we lie to you and put you through processes of sham public participation. Your participation in processes that affect your life, the lives of your children, and your landbase begins and ends with a checkmark on a ballot in a meaningless election. The only thing that matters is the growth of the economic system. If you don’t like it, we will send in people with guns to put down resistance.”
Farmers broke up construction sites and corporate representatives said construction would not continue without police protection. The governor sent in state troopers, with up to ten cars and twenty cops protecting individual dump trucks.
The state legislature considered a moratorium on construction until further health studies could be performed. It was already known that electrical lines can lower conception rates and milk production in dairy cows. And the state’s own guidelines warned farmers against refueling their vehicles under the transmission lines, and warned school bus drivers against picking up or discharging children under them.
Across the state, people overwhelmingly favored the farmers over the utility corporations. But, as a corporate attorney argued, “The critical question for you as legislators is, is this a government of law, or of men?”
Think for a moment about that question, and think about its implications.
The legislators thought about it long enough to kill the moratorium.
By now the cops (who may have sympathized, but who were too enthralled to the machinery of civilization to follow their human hearts) were behind the power lines one hundred percent. They told farmers they couldn’t assemble, couldn’t drive county roads, couldn’t stop on township roads, couldn’t speak. When a farmer asked why cops were stopping farmers on county roads, the officer responded, “We will do whatever we can to get that power line through.” The farmer made the point that the officer did not say, “We are there to protect you,” nor even “We are there to protect the workers.”
In August, someone loosened the bolts on one of the 150-foot steel transmission towers. Soon after, it fell, and soon after that so did three more. People cut guard poles in half, they cut bolts three-quarters of the way through, then replaced them, waiting for someone to step on and break them.
The governor called out the FBI. A helicopter soon guarded the power line, presaging the sort of surveillance that is now familiar to the poor in many parts of the country. There were more than seventy arrests in one county alone. But home-cooked justice prevailed this time, as even the two people convicted of felonies were sentenced only to community service. In some cases, everyone refused to testify against the farmers.
A reporter asked one farmer whether he agreed with those who were bringing down towers. The farmer responded, “I wish a few more would come down, and I think they will, as time goes on. They shouldn’t have done this to us in the first place. We did everything we could lawfully. We went to Minneapolis, got lawyers, went through the courts. But either the judges are paid off, or they just don’t realize what’s going on here. I think there’s a lot of different laws and ways you can look at it. There’s moral laws, too. I don’t know, I don’t figure it’s wrong what we’re doing out here. Sure, people think you gotta stay with the law, but what is the law? Who makes it? We should have more of a say with what goes on in this state too, you know. They can’t just run over us like a bunch of dogs.”
Although the farmers ultimately lost—the power lines have been operating for two decades now—over the next two years they knocked down ten more towers, and shot out thousands of insulators.
Dissatisfied even with victory, the power corporations wanted to make sure no one would ever again challenge their hegemony. In the words of Philip Martin, “We got the federal government to pass the law” that it’s a federal crime to take down a tower transmitting electricity across state lines.
I’m sitting again by the cell phone towers, and this time I’m thinking, I could do this. There are, as with so many activities we may find intimidating, several categories of barriers to action. There’s the intellectual: I must convince myself it’s necessary. There’s the emotional: I must feel it’s necessary. There’s the moral: I must know it’s right. There’s the consequential: I must be willing and prepared to deal with the effects of my actions. Related to this, there’s the fearful: I must be willing to cross barriers of fear, both tangible, real, present-day fears and conditioned fears that feel just as real and present but are not (e.g., if I wanted to go waterskiing, which I don’t, I would have to face not only whatever fears I might have of speeding behind a boat, but my visceral repulsion to waterskiing based on beatings associated with it when I was a child: there is no longer any danger of my father hitting anyone if I were to go waterskiing, but it still feels like there is. How many of our other fears have been inculcated into us by our families or the culture at large?). There’s the technical: I must figure out how best to proceed. There are undoubtedly others I can’t think of.
For someone to act—and this is a generic process, applying as much to asking someone out as to weeding a garden as to writing a book as to removing cell phone towers as to dismantling the entire infrastructure that supports this deathly system of slavery—each of these barriers to action must be overcome or sometimes simply bypassed in moments of great embodiedness, identification, and feeling (e.g., if someone were attempting to strangle me [with bare hands, as opposed to the toxification of my total environment] my movement through these various barriers to action would of necessity be visceral and immediate: no pondering, just reaching for the pen to stab into his eye).
Sure, I don’t know how to take down a cell phone tower. But that’s not why I don’t act. A purpose of this book is to help me and perhaps others examine and, if appropriate, move past these other barriers to leave us only with the technical questions of how to, because so often how to is actually the easiest question, the smallest barrier.
I could take out a cell phone tower. So could you. We’re not stupid (I’m presuming no members of the current Administration have made it this far in the book). And while our first few attempts may not be pretty—you’ll notice I don’t show you the first stories I ever wrote (at the time, my mother said they were good, yet now we both laugh when she says, “They were terrible, but I could never tell you that”) and even now I don’t show you my first drafts—but we would learn, just as we learn to do any technical task. I’m cer
tain that if I made as many birdhouses as I write pages, not even David Flagg could laugh at them.
Practice makes perfect. This is as true of taking down cell phone towers as of writing. And fortunately, there are a lot of cell phone towers (I bet you never thought you’d see me append fortunately to a statement like that!). According to some estimates there are 138,000 cell phone towers in the U.S. (more than 48,000 of which are over two hundred feet tall261), plus radio and television towers. And the number of American cell phone users went up another 23 million between 2000 and 2001, leading to the erection of 20,000 new towers.262
That’s a lot of practice. If we just put our hearts and minds and hands to it, it probably won’t take very long before we get pretty good at it, so that taking down towers becomes something natural, like breathing, like taking long deep breaths of cool fresh air. Soon enough, we’ll wonder what took us so long to get started.
A teenager approached me after a talk. His eyes were on fire with intelligence and eagerness. He said, “I want to help you bring down civilization. I want to burn down factories.”
Sometimes when people say things like this to me I distance myself from them. This is partly in case they’re feds trying to entrap me—it’s a classic trick: the feds suggest the action, entice you into doing it, provide the materials, and when you acquiesce you find yourself saying good-bye to your life for the next sixty years. It’s partly because I don’t know these people, and they could very well be crazy: the last thing I’d want to do would be to associate myself with some pyro who gets off on the flames, and who masturbates in the corner as the building crumbles (well, that’s actually the second to last thing I’d want to do: the last thing would be to associate myself with a fed agent provocateur who gets off on putting people in little concrete cages). And it’s also partly to protect myself from people with bad boundaries: to come up and semi-publicly tell a complete stranger you want to burn down a factory would seem at the very least to be a fundamental breach of security.
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