By WILBUR WOOD
For The Outpost

NPRC weighs environmental concerns

“We don’t want to be victims. We want to be survivors.”

These words by Lois Gibbs sounded a personal note that reverberated throughout the annual meeting of Northern Plains Resource Council on Friday and Saturday, Nov. 13-14, at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Billings.

In 1978 Gibbs was a housewife in upstate New York, in her mid-20s, “a full-time mom with a high school education, a house, a husband gainfully employed, a 1-year-old child, a picket fence, a station wagon.”

The only problem was that her house in the LaSalle Section of the city of Niagara Falls - later known as Love Canal - was three blocks from a waste dump full of chemical and radioactive toxins that were making people sick. Especially the children. This included Gibbs’s son and, later, her daughter.

In her keynote speech at Saturday’s lunch, Gibbs detailed her journey to becoming a full-time activist, founder of the Center for Health, Environment and Justice” (headquartered in Falls Church, Va.) and her commitment to resisting and reforming “a system established not for public participation, but for public control.”

Northern Plains annual meetings - this was number 38 for the Billings-based group - often feature speakers who are controversial and panels that can become contentious. Topics over the years have ranged from the ravages of coal and hard rock mining through the ways that giant agribusiness corporations can drain the life out of rural economies.

This year’s topics did not lack bite, but again and again it was personal stories that spoke louder than socio-economic analysis or political rhetoric.

These were the stories of people rolled over by large and impersonal institutions – corporations, governments – and of how they stood up to assert their rights.

Sandy Weiss introduced Gibbs with a story about how she and her neighbors were poisoned by the water they drew from chemically contaminated wells in Lockwood, east of Billings.

During the question and answer period after Gibbs’ speech, a woman who said she had been chemically poisoned in 1979 by Malathion spraying called people in her predicament “the invisible ones.”

Invisible people become visible

Gibbs responded, “Invisible people can become visible, if we help them become visible.”

Once Gibbs had learned about the toxic pollution of her neighborhood (the dump was situated directly under a school playground) and about the plague of ailments afflicting her neighbors - asthma, epilepsy, urinary tract infections, damaged livers, weakened immune systems, leukemia, various tumors, miscarriages, babies born dead, babies born with an array of birth defects - Gibbs still believed what she’d been taught at home and in school: “All the government needed was to know the problem; then they’d act on it.”

Instead, the homeowners’ association that had formed to deal with the Love Canal crisis was brushed aside by authorities anxious to avoid an expensive cleanup and evacuation. When members of the association filed a lawsuit to force a remedy, they were shocked when their attorney informed them that “in America it is not illegal to poison people.”

In fact, Gibbs said, licenses and permits are issued every day “to poison us, a little bit.” The question then becomes how much?

Gibbs compared the issuing of permits to power plants, refineries, incinerators, herbicide or pesticide spraying operations to the issuing of hunting licenses.

Hunters are allowed to take a certain number of animals, but not so many that the population is threatened with depletion. Which means that “you’re never allowed to take the babies.”

But with toxic pollution, Gibbs said, “babies are the first victims.”

Far from diluting the social, economic and political message, such personal stories only made them stronger.

Plenty of personal tales were circulating, in and outside of the panels: about people shoved aside to make way for pipeline or powerlines, about damage to soil and water from coal bed methane development, about how the Tongue River Railroad - if it ever is built - would slash through hay fields and cut off one side of a ranch from the other. (The lead story in the Saturday Billings Gazette was about how the state Land Board will “revisit” leasing state-owned coal on Otter Creek to Arch Coal of St. Luis, which would necessitate building that railroad.)

Not all negative stories

Not all stories were negative. Through persistence and creative political action, Gibbs and her Love Canal neighbors eventually won court-ordered settlements. When asked how her son and daughter were faring today, Gibbs said they are healthy and her daughter has presented her with two healthy grandchildren.

A panel on “Tapping into the Wealth of Energy Efficiency on Your Farm or Ranch” was filled with success stories on cutting electricity and fuel bills, as related by Vicky Lynne of the National Center for Appropriate Technology in Butte, and also on cost-effective solar electric systems, described by Henry Dykema of Sundance Solar near Luther.

And Dan McClendon, manager of the Delta-Montrose Rural Electric Cooperative (DMEA) in western Colorado, talked about how his 30,000-member co-op decided to tap into clean renewable energy and invest in energy efficiency.

New people moving into the area, and becoming DMEA members, “looked at things a little differently” than many of the co-op’s old time members – particularly those who served on the co-op’s board. These newer members also wanted to see the co-op become “more efficient,  more environmentally positive.”

Ultimately this resulted in a change in the board’s composition and philosophy. Delta-Montrose REC began replacing inefficient light bulbs, furnaces and other appliances, began “smart grid” improvements to waste less energy, established “net metering” systems for members who installed renewable energy systems.
“There’s not a lot of wind in our area,” McClendon said, but solar, small hydro, and biomass systems work well.

Now the co-op is installing “Green Heat” systems that take advantage of earth’s own subsurface “constant temperature” of 60 degrees Fahrenheit, using a “closed loop” system of sealed water pipes buried near the building to collect and transfer this heat indoors via a heat pump. The customer owns all the internal plumbing and other equipment, but the co-op builds and owns the “loop” and charges the customer to access it.

For a 2200 square-foot house, McClendon said, the cost of this “geo-source” heating can average about $600 per year. This is far cheaper than heating with propane or electricity, but possibly more expensive than natural gas at the moment (this varies with the fluctuating commodity market). Since natural gas is a fossil fuel, however, it not only pollutes when burned but, since it is finite, will only get scarcer and thus more expensive.

Earth’s heat, on the other hand, is inexhaustible, like the sun and the wind. Unlike the sun and the wind, it is not intermittent. While the co-op aspires to provide “affordable energy” it does not simply look for the lowest cost, McClendon said, but for “the best value – and that includes ‘green’ value.”

“What drove us to this craziness?” McClendon asked. “Our owners!” That is, the co-op members.

Co-op chooses green energy

DMEA is one of 44 “distribution co-ops” served by Tri-State G&T (Generation & Transmission) and DMEA kept recommending that Tri-State commit to a program of efficiency and renewables throughout its system. But Tri-State instead decided to build coal-fired generating plants in Kansas.

The DMEA board said no to coal (this brought a cheer from the audience), convinced that, while the initial price for coal-generated electricity might be relatively low, “the environmental costs will be added on eventually” and make coal too expensive.

Tri-State threatened DMEA – and another co-op in New Mexico that also said no – with the prospect of paying higher rates. “So far,” McClendon said, “this has not happened.”

All this resonated with people in the audience who are members of one of five co-ops that formed the Southern Montana Electric Generating & Transmission Cooperative (SME). SME then invested millions of dollars in a failed attempt to build the 250-megawatt Highwood coal-fired power plant east of Great Falls.
As that effort began to falter, one of the co-ops, Yellowstone Valley REC, withdrew its support for the project, and at least two others, Beartooth and Fergus Electric, have seen their bills jolt upward to cover the costs of a project that never generated a watt of electricity.

The personal element in all this resides in McClendon’s lifelong connection with co-ops, and his belief in their democratic ideals. He considers Delta-Montrose – and even Tri-State G&T - to be “family.”

“Bless them,” he said of the G&T, “they are part of us. Good people, but ...” His voice trailed off. Eventually, he implied, this part of his “family” would see the light.
Meanwhile, how can other rural electric co-ops see the light?  McClendon offered a strategy:

• Push the change.
• Attend co-op board meetings, deliver the message.
• Attend co-op annual meetings, advance resolutions.
• Be courteous but strong.
• Encourage member surveys.
• Encourage new candidates for the board.
• Focus on openness in board processes.
• Expose closed or secret processes.
• Put the co-op staff on the sport.
• Publicize positive steps, get stories in the press.
• Emphasize the long-term savings of green energy

“I’ve been challenged by our members on a lot of things. I haven’t agreed with them all,” McClendon said. For example, the co-op takes no position on global warming. For some members it’s still controversial. “But energy efficiency is just good business.”

Valuing the Elk River country

“Why the Tongue River Matters” was the final panel of this day, and it brought together Steve Brady of the Northern Cheyenne tribe, local rancher Irv Alderson and Brad Schmitz, the regional supervisor for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, based in Miles City.

The Northern Cheyenne Reservation borders the Tongue River on the west, and Brady – who consults on tribal sacred sites – is working on historic preservation in the Tongue River region. He was instrumental in getting the Wolf Mountain and Rosebud battlefields designated as Historic Landmarks in 2008 by the National Park Service.

“Why do I work in historic preservation?” he asked. “Because of my great-grandparents.” They were among the people forced to move to Oklahoma after the Indian Wars ended here in 1878, and they were among the people who broke away and headed back to their home country, persevering through enormous hardships to return and homestead along the Tongue River, and eventually win themselves a reservation in 1884.
It was a miracle of cultural survival.

Photos of the graceful Tongue River Valley and its environs were projected on a large screen behind the speakers as Brady spoke of the entire “Elk River Country” (Elk River was the native peoples’ name for the Yellowstone) and especially the Tongue River as a place of sustenance, for both body and spirit, for his ancestors and now for the present-day people.

Irv Alderson told how his ancestors came to this area in the 1890s, homesteading where they found two live streams – ”where the East Fork runs into Hanging Woman Creek” – a couple of miles south of Birney. The family expanded the holdings into the present-day Bones Brothers Ranch, where Alderson grew up and has lived all his life – except when he traveled the rodeo circuit, competing as a world-class calf-roper. Part of the time the ranch was a dude ranch – the writer Mary Roberts Rhinehart was one visitor; she called this ”great riding country.”

Alderson said: “The ranch’s man assets, along with grass and water, are my neighbors.” He gets hay from Bunny Hayes, pellets from Roger Muggli, and “if Roger Steele ever goes out of business it would sure make a hell of a difference to me. “

An early member of Northern Plains, Alderson considers this “the only organization that cares about my property rights.”

He said: “If we ever have to diversify our operations, it’ll be awfully difficult to do it in the middle of an industrial park or with a railroad running through.”

He also said: “The land tells us what we can do and, more importantly, what we can’t do. There are more relationships and realities than you can find in an Environmental Impact Statement.”

Brad Schmitz said he shared the sense of community that Brady – whose Cheyenne name is Night Wolf – and Alderson spoke about. Raised on a “third generation” ranch in Southern Alberta, he is pleased to be here, working for an agency whose task, as he sees it, is to “preserve fish and wildlife – and the habitat that makes them possible – and allow Montanans to enjoy them.”

He said the agency has very few tools. “We manage by regulation,” he said, but changes in our society have made it clear that “this is a poor way to do it. Instead, we need to work on relationships.”

He spoke of raising the Tongue River Dam by four feet, a project in the late 1990s “to accommodate Northern Cheyenne water rights,” and how that led to projects to enable fish to move freely up and downstream as they had not done in many years.

He cited Roger Muggli, an irrigator who is passionate about keeping fish out of irrigation ditches and fields, and in the river, and how Muggli spearheaded a cooperative effort to install fish screens to make this happen.

One thing Schmitz knows: “If the landowners are gone, we also lose the wildlife.”

He showed a photo of Tongue River Reservoir and a “sea of aluminum” - campers parked around its edges, to illustrate how important this is as a place of recreation. Showing a picture of three jubilant men in a boat, displaying their catch, he said, “It’s “a good family fishery.”

He showed more pictures of red bluffs and sagebrush, meadows and pines, and the winding river, and said: “Take out motorized vehicles and some gravel roads and I believe this valley would look about the same as it did one hundred years ago.”

He talked about access for river floaters, access for hunters in the fall and fisherman in the spring. “We need to give people the opportunity to get out into this pristine, relatively untouched prairie ecosystem” so they can appreciate this land’s importance.

We can circle back to Lois Gibbs for a final comment. She said, “Everybody’s voice counts. If we’re going to win, we need to think politically. Not just put good people in office, but politically, on the ground. Whose voices – voices that are not in this room – do we need?  Everybody’s voice counts.”