by Noel Perrin
Next came the tree. The mother had had her eye on that for a whole year. It was a furry young spruce that had come up in a corner of the lower pasture. Sooner or later the father would take it down anyway, since what you want in a pasture is grass, not evergreens. Right now it was a graceful young tree just about the height of the mother herself – that is, five feet five inches.
For a Christmas tree, the whole family goes out. Marek carried the bucksaw and cut the tree; his parents carried it back between them. Three dogs formed an escort: the two family dogs and the dog from the last house on the road, who found life more interesting down here with the horses and the chickens and the boy.
We hardly had the tree up when two things happened simultaneously. First, the already dark sky grew darker, and it began to snow. And then the phone rang for Marek. The call was from two cousins known to him as Sam ’n’ Eli. They live a thousand miles away with their mother, but spend their vacations in Barnet. Their father lives two miles up the road with his second wife, two stepdaughters, and a baby. That place is a sheep farm, too.
Marek, who had thought he would probably die unless he put all the really important decorations on the tree himself, now realized that a far likelier cause of death would be if he didn’t see Sam ’n’ Eli immediately. Amy drove him over through the now fast-whirling snow. And decided, since she was out anyway, to go once more into St. Johnsbury (it’s only five miles), where there are stores and public Christmas decorations and even a small amount of city grime.
The rest of us went on decorating the tree, occasionally sneaking off to wrap another package. Our plan was to finish the tree, take a walk in the woods to enjoy the new snow, have an early supper, and then go to the seven P.M. carol service at the Congregational church in Lower Waterford. Midnight services sound wonderful, but in farm country seven P.M. draws a much better crowd.
The plan did not work out, because soon the snow thickened. The first truly heavy fall of the year came sliding down. One result was that Amy’s car did not make it back from St. Johnsbury. Crow Hill is very steep, and its roads are full of curves. With three inches of wet snow, you almost inevitably slip into the ditch if you have a two-wheel drive car.
Amy had a good walk home in sneakers. Her father took the little farm truck with the winch and winched her out, but they made no effort to bring her car back up to the farm. They left it in a neighbor’s level pasture, down by the brook called the Water Andric. Everything was now pure white, and the road the purest and whitest of all. No car had been up Crow Hill for hours, and even the tracks of my little truck soon faded. In places where there were fields beside the road, but no fence, it was beginning to be hard to tell where the road was. Not a night to take grandmothers on back roads to Lower Waterford.
It turned out to be a good thing we didn’t go. Because about eight P.M. there was suddenly singing outside, and the light of candles. The five cousins from up the road and their parents were standing outside in the fast-falling snow. Everyone but the baby held a candle, and all but the baby were singing “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” We hadn’t heard them come, because there is a very sharp uphill turn where the end of our driveway meets the town road, and even though they had come in a four-wheel Bronco, they had gotten stuck. Never mind that now. We had them in for hot cider and more carols.
Then it was too beautiful to stay in. We found more candles. Eleven people and three dogs walked through the silent snow to the last house on the road – the grandmother stayed home – and sang “Good King Wenceslaus.” The eleven-year-old, who had been allowed to open one present early, and who had headed unerringly for his new bugle (he feels packages, and we suspect him of having a hidden x-ray machine) blew a sort of fanfare. It didn’t sound too bad in the soft snow. Then we got the farm truck and winched the cousins’ Bronco back onto the glistening road. Tomorrow would be as white as Christmas can get.
[1989]
The Lesson of the Bolt Weevils
PROBABLY THE SHARPEST QUESTION facing an environmentalist in the 1990s is what to do about the law. Does a good environmentalist stay law-abiding and work within the system? Obviously the traditional answer is yes, of course. That’s what democracy means.
But what if the system seems to be corrupt? What if the very people in the system who are charged with protecting the environment are the ones who betray it? What if the Forest Service itself builds roads at taxpayer expense in order to facilitate the clear-cutting of great swaths of our national forests? What if high officials of the Environmental Protection Agency simply announce that they’ve decided not to enforce the laws the environmentalists got passed? This deadline for atmospheric clean-up they’ve unilaterally decided to extend for three years; that regulation for strip-mining they’ve decided to ignore indefinitely.
Does the good environmentalist sigh a little and start gathering signatures for a new petition? Go back to court yet again? Or does he or she turn militant and stage a sit-in in the national forest? Maybe even drive spikes into the great, helpless trees, so that when the loggers come, their chainsaws will chatter to a halt?
It’s a hard decision, and one the environmental movement has by no means come to a consensus about. At one extreme are those who say that ecosabotage is criminal behavior, to be treated like any other crime. And not only criminal, but counterproductive – it forfeits public sympathy. Dangerous, too. Hidden spikes may endanger loggers’ lives. At least once, they already have.
At the other extreme are those who say that ecosabotage is the only way left, at this eleventh hour, to save our planet. Yes, it’s dangerous, but it’s also dramatic. So far from forfeiting general sympathy, the ecosaboteur brings it into being. Spiked trees get the public’s attention in a way that petitions never have and never will. Court cases have their place – a major one – but what we as a people are really moved by is stories, not lawyers’ arguments.
They must be true stories, too; they must really have happened. There are hundreds of novels about nuclear disaster, some of them masterpieces, like A Canticle for Leibowitz. There are dozens of movies. None has had even a fraction of the conversionary force that Chernobyl did, or Three Mile Island.
Or think back to abolition days. Abolitionists petitioned and held public meetings for thirty years. What finally aroused the nation was a criminal act. John Brown, that abo-saboteur, had to raid the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, and be caught, and be put to death before his fellow Yankees moved against slavery in real earnest.
Not only that, some environmentalists insist, ecosabotage often is productive. The spikes will often save the actual trees they’re driven into. The timber corporation will be disgusted at the costly delays. It will be fearful of all the publicity now attached to its turning a stretch of national forest into a sorry mass of stumps. It will withdraw its crews.
What continues to surprise me is that neither side in this long debate seems to look much at the one major example of ecosabotage we have had so far in the United States. A pity. Because it offers profound lessons for both sides. And, of course, an exciting story, too.
That story begins in Minnesota in 1972. The opening scene is quiet enough: we see a small and very private meeting. Officials of two Minnesota power companies (both technically co-ops) have gathered to plan a giant new coal-burning power plant. It’s going to be a pretty good polluter. They decide to put it in the middle of North Dakota, next to the strip mine that will feed it.
They will then build a 430-mile power line, cutting across North Dakota and Minnesota to just outside the suburbs of Minneapolis. It will be the largest direct-current line in the United States, carrying 800,000 volts of electricity. It will run on a strip of land 160 feet wide. A strip 160 feet by 430 miles will consume about 9,000 acres of land. Along that strip the companies will erect a long row of steel towers – just under 1,700 of them. Each will be 180 feet high. At the very top the big wires will run.
Almost no one likes to live under high-voltage lines. So how do you per
suade them to? The answer, if you’re a utility company, is that you don’t have to. You can force them to. Utilities are generally able to borrow the government’s power of eminent domain. They send the appropriate agencies a projection showing that the power will be needed. After a number of hearings, approval is usually forthcoming.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be loud outcries from those who wind up under the line. In a democracy, such cries are expected. To counter their effect, the Minnesota companies decide to site the line “objectively.” They hire an out-of-state firm to do it by computer. The computer is given a point system to work with – the more points a piece of land is awarded, the less danger of its having a power line across it. Land owned by the state of Minnesota gets five points, woodland is worth three points, and so on. Farmland, however, gets no points at all. Zero. Naturally, the computer plots the line, often diagonally, across one farm after another. Many of the farms will be cut in two.
The farmers, of course, know nothing about these plans – not even that there’s going to be a power line. There’s a good case for power-company secrecy, too. If word got out, wouldn’t speculators be buying up possible right-of-way land, hoping to get a high price? You bet.
Two years go by. The power companies complete their plans. They ask for and get the largest loan ever given by the Rural Electrification Administration. They award the first $150 million in contracts.
Now it’s time to start acquiring the right-of-way. At this moment the farmers learn what is about to happen. They are outraged. The way they see it, everything has been kept secret until so much money has been committed that there can be no serious question of not building the line. At most, you might hope to push it over onto someone else’s land.
But it so happens that this new plant will produce far more electricity than the customers of the two companies will be able to use for many years. It further happens that both companies have inverted rate structures – the more you use, the less you pay per kilowatt. And both actively promote what many consider to be inefficient uses of electricity, such as electric heating for houses in a cold climate. All this sets some farmers thinking. Maybe the line isn’t needed. Maybe if the companies promoted conservation instead, it would never be needed.
Thoughts turn to action. In two of the counties the line is scheduled to cross – Pope and Stearns – the farmers do what farmers seldom do. They organize. They decide to oppose the line – legally, of course. At that time, anything even faintly illegal would have shocked them. Many of these farmers are Norwegian-American, and incredibly law-abiding. Many have never had so much as a traffic ticket.
Very soon, they score a success. In Minnesota at that time, the right to use eminent domain was granted county by county, with state supervision. And in Pope County, the commissioners do something unheard of. They deny it.
But the law is just in the middle of changing. Power is to be centralized in the state Energy Agency. By a quick legal coup the power companies are able to transfer their request, and they shrug off the authority of Pope County. One down.
So the farmers hire a lawyer of their own and go to court. They are going to present two arguments: first, that the line is unnecessary, and second, that it may be dangerous. There are as-yet-unknown hazards in so huge a direct-current voltage. You could safely bury the big wires, of course, as the companies already plan to do when they near Minneapolis – but the whole line? Ridiculous, the companies say. It would cost seventeen times as much.
To the farmers’ surprise and indignation, they are not allowed to present their arguments. Neither one is relevant, the judges say. What would be relevant? Well, if some farmer could show just cause why the line should not cross his land and therefore should cross some neighbor’s land, that would be relevant. Appealed to, the state supreme court agrees.
By now, the people in Pope and Stearns counties are beginning to distrust the system. If they could have known what the deputy director of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency would later say (just after resigning), they would have felt even more distrustful. He said he’d come to believe that his agency and the state Environmental Quality Council – both involved with the power line – were “set up to aid large corporations in getting around local government.”
In June 1976, when surveyors for the companies began to lay out the line in Stearns County, they were met by a crowd of about sixty farmers blocking their path. The farmers were polite but determined. A little angry, too. Angry, for example, that when they had taken an appeal to the Environmental Quality Council, the hearing was presided over by a brand-new state official – an employee of the council whose previous job had been with the consulting firm in Michigan that sited the power line in the first place. They considered that suspicious.
Some of the farmers had their tractors with them; a few were on horseback. The surveyors retreated.
They were soon back, accompanied by reluctant local law officers. Over the next few weeks, the blocking party grew to several hundred men and women. There was little violence, just a lot of civil disobedience. Almost all of it occurred on land actually owned by one or another of the demonstrators. Many farmers had trouble believing that it was an indictable offense to demonstrate on their own land. A few people got arrested; a few went to jail.
These demonstrations spread from county to county in western Minnesota, and for a time the surveying almost stopped. Then the companies struck back. They started filing half-million-dollar damage suits against individual farmers. Arrests are one thing, but a suit that could cost you your farm is another. A lot of demonstrators withdrew.
But in Pope County, among other places, the resistance continued, and it began to get rougher. Survey stakes tended to vanish as soon as they were planted. By January 1978, the survey was still incomplete, though more than two hundred state troopers (out of a total state force of five hundred) were now patrolling the power line rather than the roads. That month, the Pope County attorney resigned rather than prosecute a group of newly arrested demonstrators.
Two hundred troopers can patrol a lot of power line, especially if they are helped by three hundred newly hired security guards. By summer, the survey was complete, and the 1,685 steel towers were fast going up. It was then that the Minnesota bolt weevils appeared.
The towers that carry a high-voltage line are somewhat like things you’d build from an erector set, only much, much bigger. They are held together with huge steel bolts. Unbolt the base of one, and at considerable risk to yourself you may be able to bring it down. On the night of August 2, 1978, the first tower crashed. Within a week, three more came plunging down.
No one has ever been convicted of sabotaging those towers, though it’s not for lack of trying. The companies offered a reward of $50,000 for information, and later upped the price to $100,000. No takers. Instead the towers continued to crash. Over the next year, ten more came hurtling down, and many others were unsuccessfully assaulted. About midway in that year the companies gave technical ownership of the line to the federal government, so the FBI could come in. (The companies reassumed title in 1985. To the farmers, one more bit of legal sleight of hand.) The FBI caught no bolt weevils, either.
The farmers also didn’t stop the line. The full force of the state of Minnesota was too much for them. The line was energized ten years ago, and it has been in use ever since. A couple of more towers toppled as lingering acts of defiance – the final one on the night of August 2, 1983, the fifth anniversary of the first. All has been peaceful since.
So what did all those criminal acts accomplish?
Well, quite a lot. For one thing, the companies had originally intended to build another seventy-eight-mile line, the so-called Wilmarth Extension. It remains unbuilt, and most people in Minnesota agree that violent resistance to the original line is the reason. More important, any new power line in Minnesota would now have to be justified in advance far more rigorously than this one was. The man who was governor of Minnesota at the time the tow
ers crashed is on record as saying it is because of the farmers’ actions that his state now has what he claims are the best energy-control laws in the nation.
More important still, the ripple effect has reached well beyond Minnesota. Not in public perception, because there hasn’t been much of that, but in professional energy circles. It has reached Texas, for example. There, a similar 800,000-volt direct-current line has been killed by the Texas Public Utilities Commission. The Texas commissioners were swayed by a health study, done in Minnesota at the time the last towers were crashing down and undertaken because they were. That study was inconclusive – nowhere near proof enough to persuade Minnesota to take the line down again. But it raised enough doubts, particularly about ionized air, to stop the new one in Texas.
And then there is a final effect that is highly ironic. One of the arguments the Minnesota farmers wanted to make in court was that a high-voltage DC line may have special dangers – may be worse for people and animals living within its magnetic field than the more usual alternating current lines. Silenced in court, they resorted to ecosabotage; and one consequence of their expensive ($6 million in damage), destructive, risky, illegal action was to encourage a more careful study of power lines in general than had hitherto been done in this country. As a very indirect and indeed unprovable effect, research got funded that might not have otherwise.
It now begins to look as if DC lines are actually safer, though as the Texas commissioners point out, this is far from proven. But don’t relax: what that means is merely that high-voltage AC lines may be more dangerous than anyone has realized. A new study made in Denver suggests that up to 15 percent of the cases of childhood cancer in this country may be due to the electric and magnetic fields of high-voltage AC lines. If that is true, then the seventeen-times greater expense of burying power lines (if that power-company figure is correct) will come to look remarkably cheap.