Tim DeChristopher talking:
I was primarily motivated by the threat of climate change. I saw that what we were doing as a movement wasn’t working, and we needed to be taking more serious action. And I honestly can’t say that when I got into this in 2008 I understood everywhere that it would lead and the impact that it would have on me. And now, in retrospect, I’m even more glad that I did it. It’s been a more positive experience than I ever could have anticipated. And it’s been a great growth experience for me, including my time of incarceration.
that day in 2008, I showed up at the auction and walked in and decided to do whatever I could to stand in the way of it and thought that might be, you know, making a speech or disrupting it somehow. But when I walked in, they asked me if I wanted to be a bidder. And so, I said, “Yes,” and saw right away that there was an opportunity to have a serious impact on it. And so I took that opportunity and started bidding, started outbidding all the oil companies. And that caused enough of a delay then that it drew a lot of attention to the auction and to the laws that the government wasn’t following in holding that auction. So it was ultimately overturned by the new Obama administration. And then, a few months later, I was indicted on a couple of felony charges. And that led to a very long legal process and also my new role as an activist, traveling around the country and kind of developing a new skill set for myself.
The Bureau of Land Management just decided not to accept my payment when I offered it to them a couple weeks after the auction. They said that I wasn’t a normal bidder, so they simply didn’t accept it. And that’s also something that I wasn’t able to tell the jury during the trial.
Most of the parcels that I won were right around Arches and Canyonlands National Parks in southeastern Utah. A few of them that I won were in the Book Cliffs area in eastern Utah. They’re kind of the red rocks area that Utah is famous for around the world.
It was overturned because they didn’t follow some of their own standards. The one thing that was never really looked into in the government’s own investigations of what was wrong with the auction was the fact that they never followed a secretarial order, a law that was passed in 2001, that was put into effect in 2001, requiring the BLM and other agencies of the Department of the Interior to weigh the impacts of climate change whenever making major decisions like this, particularly ones involving resource development. That law has been on the books since 2001, that every agency within the Department of the Interior has to weigh the impacts of climate change in making their decisions. And it’s been completely ignored ever since.
I was actually charged during the Obama years. I was charged in April of 2009. I was arrested during the Bush years, and then the entire course of my legal process developed under the Obama administration.
I was in five different institutions altogether. First I went to Davis County Jail, the day of my sentencing. I had been told that since I had spent two-and-a-half years on pretrial on personal recognizance with no bail and had no problems during that time, that I would probably be given a date to self-surrender to a prison. But the judge didn’t really like the things that I said in my sentencing hearing, so he took me into custody right there and sent me to county jail. And I sat there for a month.
I spoke for about a half an hour at my sentencing. It was the first time that I was able to speak openly in a court, so I had a lot of things to say. And primarily, I told the judge why I did it and that I would do it again and that I had no regrets and that nothing he was going to do was going to change that. So, he certainly didn’t like that, took me into custody right there.
And then, after Davis County Jail, I was sent to a private prison in Pahrump, Nevada, run by the Corrections Corporation of America, and I spent a few weeks there, and then was sent to federal prison in Herlong, California, and was there until May of 2012, and then was sent to Englewood prison in Littleton, Colorado. And then, at the end of last October.
the first couple of moves were simply because I was taken into custody before I was assigned to any prison. That’s the—that’s why most people who aren’t a danger to society are allowed to self-surrender directly to a prison, because it takes some time for the Bureau of Prisons to decide where they’re going to put somebody and to find an open spot for them. So, my time in Davis County and in the facility in Pahrump was just a holding pattern.
As far as why I was sent to Pahrump, Nevada, that’s a special deal that CCA has, the Corrections Corporation of America. All the inmates in the West, when they’re being transferred from county jail to a federal facility, spend at least a few weeks in that private prison. I couldn’t tell that there was any reason for anyone to be there, other than the fact for CCA to make some money off them for a few weeks.
And then, once I went to Herlong, I was sent to isolation for an email that I had sent to a friend of mine. And to get out of isolation, I had to let my friends know what was going on. And they organized a massive call-in to the Bureau of Prisons. They were calling the whole chain of command with thousands of phone calls asking why I was put in isolation. And so they had to release me, because they had to admit that I had done nothing wrong to be put into isolation.
what I said in the email. I was asking a friend of mine—I had heard a rumor about a company that had supported my legal defense fund. I had heard a rumor that they were cutting all their U.S. manufacturing jobs and shipping those overseas. So I sent an email to a friend of mine asking her if she knew anything about that and asking her to look into it. And I said that I would write a letter to the owner of that company asking him if it was true. And also in the—I said, in the letter, “I’ll threaten to give the money away if this is in fact true.” And that word “threaten” set off some kind of red flag, and the lieutenants there at the prison said that they were getting requests from Washington to put me in isolation because I was making threats in an email.
And the guard had the email, a copy of the email that I had sent, in his hands. And I said, “You can see right there that I’m clearly not threatening anyone; I’m talking about giving away money that was given to me.” And he said, “But you used the word ‘threaten.'” And I said, “Well, I could have said there was a threat of rain; it doesn’t mean I’m going to hurt somebody.” And he said, “Well, when I get these requests from Washington, I’ve got to do something about it to make it look like I’m responding to it, so I’ve got to lock you up.”
And that was the end of it, until they started getting thousands of phone calls. But it definitely made them nervous once they got all those phone calls. I think the thing that worries bureaucrats like that most is that people are paying attention to them, and they didn’t like that attention. And then, also, once I got back into the general population of the prison, all the other inmates found out what happened, and their response was kind of like, “Wow! You can fight back against these people.” And so then I had a lot of inmates coming to me and saying, “Well, what do you think we can do about this? And how can we get more attention on these issues?” And I don’t think the prison officials liked that, either. So, shortly after that, they transferred me to Colorado.
I think that’s something that we shouldn’t necessarily shy away from telling people, from telling other activists, and especially from telling young people, that, you know, there’s a lot of things that we’ve tried, and most of which hasn’t worked, especially on climate change, and especially on trying to get our government to do something about climate change. So, you know, mostly we need people taking action, and nobody can really tell you what that action should be. You know, I think most professional activists and most experienced activists, if I had told them what I was going to do beforehand, they would have said, “No, that’s a bad idea.” And, in fact, most professional activists told me afterwards that it was a bad idea. Most professional environmentalists reacted very negatively to what I did. And yet it had an impact and turned out to be a very positive experience for me. Despite the fact that I had to deal with some negative consequences, it’s something that was a great learning experience for me and something that I’m grateful for. And so, I think we need to take more of those risks and have more experimentation in this movement.
I’m trying to support Peaceful Uprising and other efforts in the movement in any way that I can. I’m just trying to plug in. You know, the climate movement, I think, has made a lot of progress in the past four years. I think we’re in a much better place now than we were in 2009 as a movement. I think we have a serious movement that’s not impeded nearly as much by the big green groups that are in the Washington bubble, which was our problem in 2009. And, you know, I’ve been relatively isolated for the past couple years, and a lot has happened during that time. I mean, the Occupy movement didn’t exist when I got locked up. You know, the biggest social movement in this country in my lifetime happened when I was behind bars, and I only saw it on TV, you know, so I can’t necessarily tell people exactly what to be doing right now, because I’ve kind of been on the outside—or on the inside, so to speak. But, you know, now I’m just kind of taking my cues from other folks and seeing where I can plug in and how I can support the activists that already have things in the works.
– source democracynow.org
Tim DeChristopher, environmental activist who has just been released from federal custody after serving 21 months for posing as a bidder to prevent oil and gas drilling on thousands of acres of public land in his home state of Utah. Tim is founder of the climate justice group Peaceful Uprising. He is the subject of the documentary Bidder 70, being released in New York next month.