Desperate Defenders of Nature

Ric Valois knows the Blackfoot River. He knows where the deep pools lie and how the eddies swirl around the rocks. He knows some of the fish by name. Like legions of fishermen, he makes the pilgrimage from his home outside of Great Falls several times a year to stand along the cottonwood banks, scan the current of water over ancient stone and wait for a trout to rise.

Valois roams Montana these days with a 9-millimeter sidearm holstered on his hip. When he fishes the Blackfoot, it is with a scout’s eye on the land near its confluence with the Landers Fork--where the Phelps Dodge Mining Co. and Canyon Resources Corp. want to blast a mile-wide pit, 675 feet deep, into the hills. It is the largest gold bonanza ever discovered in Montana, 3.7 million ounces worth at least $1.8 billion, and twice that much silver.

A coalition of environmental organizations has unleashed a campaign to stop the mine, seen as an economic hope for nearby Lincoln, a source of 390 new jobs, millions of dollars in tax revenue, $45 million a year in goods and services--and, by some, the beginning of the end for a fabled river already devastated by decades of mining.

Valois isn’t counting on the “Save the Blackfoot, Stop the Mine” bumper stickers and public hearing testimony organized by mainstream environmental groups. He sees his outfit of Environmental Rangers as the last line of defense, an army of citizens that will stand along the Blackfoot after the lawyers and the lobbyists and the peaceful environmental protesters have gone home in defeat.

“That mine is not going in,” Valois said recently. “They’re not getting these places without a war. And I mean a real war. . . . We’re the ones who will put our lives on the line if that’s what it takes.”

Across the West, the environmental movement--cornered by a series of crippling losses on the political and legal fronts--is girding for a last stand, in many cases on the frontiers of the forests themselves.

Conservationists have seen traditional avenues of protest diminish. A Republican majority has closed many options on the legislative front. And a legislative “salvage” rider approved last year--authorizing logging of dead and dying trees in federal forests--has opened up the region’s first large-scale logging in many years on federal lands exempt from normal environmental protections.

A series of court decisions has been almost as momentous, clearing the way for logging in old-growth forests that until recently had been protected as spotted owl habitat. After years of compromise and negotiation, the old timber wars are underway throughout the Northwest.

Valois and his band of khaki-outfitted, armed warriors--undertaking reconnaissance missions in the Montana mountains--are the most extreme edge of an environmental movement that in recent months has turned to more radical tactics.

Conservation groups that spent much of the past decade in legislative hearing chambers and courtrooms have begun flocking to the forests, chaining themselves to gates and holding hands across logging roads. More than 100, including Carter administration Transportation Secretary Brock Adams and former Rep. Jim Jontz (D-Ind.), have been arrested in southern Oregon since early fall. Smaller protests have been launched in Idaho and Washington state.

Trouble in the Forests

And while most groups have renounced violence in favor of political activism or civil disobedience, some say the uneasy climate brewing in the Western forests could make conflict inevitable.

“We’ve lost 70% of our ground water, 70% of our topsoil. It doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots, and we’re dead,” said Tim Hermach, head of the Native Forest Council, which has launched passive-resistance protests against wide-scale new logging in the Northwest.

“I think of Thomas Jefferson, who says when a government is no longer representing the people, it’s time to take up arms and throw the bastards out. Now you’re starting to see it,” he said.

“I don’t think we’re going to win this issue or any other issue with the barrel of a gun. But I carry a weapon myself. . . . I’ve had guns pointed at me, I’ve had my life threatened and I’ve had my wife and children threatened. I’ve never been shot at but I don’t like being afraid.”

In Montana, the Zortman-Landusky mine complex in the Little Rocky Mountains has increased security in response to veiled threats from Environmental Rangers, who have appeared at public meetings wearing military-style uniforms and sidearms.

“We have seen them in the hillsides around the property, taking pictures, snooping around. They have showed up at public hearings and . . . one might interpret from some of their statements threats of violence,” said permits coordinator John Fitzpatrick of Pegusus Gold Co., which operates the mine.

At a hearing last year on proposed mining claims in the Sweet Grass Hills, Rangers were accused of making threatening statements to the Bureau of Land Management’s area resource manager, Richard Hopkins.

“They said if you make a decision to allow exploration or eventual mining, we know where you live, and we’ll take care of you in our own way,” Hopkins said.

“Their statements on all of these things is that they’re going to be there with guns in front of the bulldozers if this [mining] ever happens. Valois has made the statement, ‘No more holes in Mother Earth.’ So that’s what we’re dealing with,” he said.

The Rangers, whose nationwide membership is estimated at just several dozen, have videotapes showing members walking through woods carrying assault weapons. “It’s scary when people are carrying guns around like this,” Hopkins said. “You never know when these people are going to . . . lose control.”

Violence as Last Resort

Valois said the group’s policy is to avoid violence except as a last resort. Most operations so far, he said, have been “recon” missions in regions of proposed development.

Rangers have appeared with holstered guns at some protests. No violence has been reported.

“When you tear down a forest and kill everything in it, is that not violence? We want to draw the line so we can tell people, ‘Proceed at your own risk.’ Empower yourself to do the right thing,” Valois said on a recent evening in his hand-built log cabin outside Vaughn, Mont. “There has to be some element there that says, ‘No, we’re going to hold the line right here.’ We’re not politically correct. We get right to the point.”

The Rangers have ties to some Native American groups in Montana that also have spoken out against mining. Yet in their rhetoric there is an echo of the antigovernment groups on the opposite end of the political spectrum, like the Militia of Montana and the Freemen. The Rangers often talk about the failure of government, and about how the end of government and society as we know it is near.

Many in the mainstream environmental community say they haven’t heard of the Environmental Rangers, and nearly all express deep skepticism about their tactics.

Yet nonviolent civil disobedience is catching fire throughout a region where the environment has again become a flash point. Passive-resistance workshops have been underway in recent months throughout Washington state, and others are scheduled in Montana.

“It’s an all-out assault on the forest now. Six hundred-year-old trees are falling right now as we speak in the Siskyou National Forest [in Oregon]. We have to put our bodies on the line,” said Mike Howell, Seattle director of Earth First! which for years has been a leader in organizing protests.

Brett Clubbe of the Cheetwoot Wilderness Alliance in Washington state, battling proposed new logging of 6.6 million board-feet of timber in the Olympic National Forest, said that mainstream environmentalists are expected to join the ranks of activist groups that for years conducted protest actions.

“People under the banner of Earth First! have kept the tradition of civil disobedience alive at a time when a lot of the mainstream groups were using the legal avenues to try to protect ancient forests,” Clubbe said. “Now that those legal avenues have been taken away from us, I would hope that those who had once taken to the courtrooms and the negotiating tables will don their boots and go out into the woods and make their stand there.”

In Montana, two salvage timber sales in the Kootenai National Forest authorize the harvesting of nearly 60 million board-feet--including one 1,000-acre clear-cut, where a forested area is completely cut down. Much of the region is grizzly bear habitat. Two billion board-feet are to be salvaged throughout Montana and Idaho, where 145 miles of roads and about 200 clear cuts will be sliced through central Idaho’s huge roadless areas--5 million acres of untouched wilderness that is the largest remaining in the continental United States.

Robert Amon, a Missoula, Mont., activist with the Cove-Mallard Coalition, which is fighting the introduction of roads and timber harvests into the area, said the Rangers have joined their protests but were ordered by mainstream activists to leave their guns at home.

“I always say forge ahead and we can win this one,” Amon said. “But sometimes it feels very, very frustrating to see that you’re out there in the middle of the wilderness fighting, and the people that live there don’t appreciate it for what it is. They just want to use it. And the people who appreciate it, who live in New York City, don’t even know what’s going on. In my darkest moments, I sometimes feel like, yes, this is like the hours before the Civil War.”

Gold Mining Boom

For all the activism over logging, it is the Montana gold mining boom that has sparked the greatest controversy and, environmentalists say, poses the greatest potential devastation to the landscape.

Although toxic compounds have polluted water near many of the state’s existing open-pit mines, the Legislature last year pulled back the state’s water quality standards, changing the health risk standard for human cancer deaths of 1 in 1 million over long-term exposure to 1 in 100,000, except for arsenic, which was set at 1 in 1,000.

The new law, already the subject of a citizen initiative campaign, could be a help to Phelps Dodge and its joint venture partner on the Blackfoot River. More than 15 million gallons of ground water a day in the early years, some of it naturally tinged with arsenic, will be pumped up from deep aquifers to make way for the huge pit. Silver and gold will be extracted by washing the dug-up rocks and dirt in 172 million pounds of sodium cyanide during the 15-year project.

In all, 980 million tons of rock will be hauled out of the pit, whose rim would be just 800 yards from the Blackfoot, immortalized by writer Norman Maclean in his book “A River Runs Through It” and a film of the same name.

Mine company spokesmen say they will use state-of-the-art environmental protection techniques and an entirely closed system that will not allow any cyanide to flow into the river or the ground water.

But critics say cyanide heap leaching, a gold extraction technique developed by the U.S. government in the early 1970s, has a history of spills and leaks at mines throughout the country. The state and federal governments have filed a major lawsuit over pollution from the Zortman-Landusky open pit mine in Montana, where cyanide leaking was discovered when a mining company engineer turned on a tap in his trailer and smelled the toxin. Can the Blackfoot survive a new test? critics wonder.

“What’s instructive about the Zortman-Landusky situation is the scientists hired by the company and the BLM technical people and the state technical people all said that the mine would not produce acid drainage. Their assumptions were absolutely wrong. And all they have to say about it is, ‘We learned from that.’ Great,” said James Jensen of the Montana Environmental Information Center.

Company regulatory manager Chuck Rose said the firm has put extensive studies into practice. Not only have tests over several years indicated “minimal chances” of acid mine drainage from runoff at the site, “our data shows that it will meet drinking water standards, will support aquatic life, and it would support a stocked fishery.”

Gambling on Jobs

Environmental impact studies for the proposed mining began last fall. And it is estimated that more than a dozen permits--which will take a least a year to acquire--will be needed before the project can begin.

Many Lincoln residents say they are ready to take a gamble that the mine will be as safe as its designers promise. In this former logging town of 1,200, the company has raised hopes of new high-paying jobs; millions of dollars spent at local shops and, when the project is over, a recreational lake in the pit that was once the mine.

“If they do everything they say they’re going to do, it could pretty much balance the need up here for jobs,” said Maureen Fisher, editor of the local newspaper. “There’s going to be some major changes in the looks of our beautiful valley. But if it’s going to end up looking like they say it will, then great.”

But Ida Caskey, who lives just across the river from the Phelps Dodge mine site, is suspicious. She has a box of chipped pieces of stone that she says is the mortar that fell off her fireplace when the company started test drilling. After leach tests began on a bermed site across the highway, she said, her well water started smelling bad, and now her dog won’t drink it.

Company officials say tests so far have been limited to pumping ground water. But Caskey fears she’ll have to pay for her outspokenness. On a recent afternoon at her small house on Hogum Creek, she said, Caskey answered the phone three times, greeted each time with a click and a dead line. “You see,” she said. “They’re trying to frighten me.”

Her next phone call was to the Environmental Rangers.

After Valois and another leader, Merton Freyholtz, met with her, Freyholtz said he wasn’t sure what the Rangers could do to help Caskey--or anyone else at Lincoln. He is disturbed by local press reports that have “made us look like a bunch of armed nuts.”

“We’re just like any other environmental group, trying to stop the destruction of the country,” he said. “We’ve tried everything. I went to court, I ran all over the country to these meetings, and I don’t know how the hell we’re going to make them listen. We ask people, ‘What can you do?’ They say, ‘Contact your representative in Congress.’ Well, we’ve done that. They don’t do anything. I guess we need to educate people. . . . But it’s probably too late to wake [them] up.”