November, 2008. Barack Obama has defeated John McCain, and George W. Bush’s last, lame-duck weeks in office begin. Without the legally-required environmental reviews, Bush’s Bureau of Land Management rushes out 116 leases on public land. This last-minute fire-sale of our shared natural resources is an obvious giveaway to the oil and natural gas industries, strong GOP supporters, and it was equally obviously illegal.
A student activist named Tim DeChristopher, outraged, decides to disrupt the auction by placing fake bids on 14 parcels, several of which were right next to Arches and Canyonlands national parks. (According to DeChristopher, the decision was made suddenly, when he realized the tactic might work.) He succeeds in buying some time, during which a mainstream environmental group gets an injunction against several of the leases. Indeed, 11 of the 14 leases DeChristopher bid on are later withdrawn by the Interior Department, since they had lacked proper environmental reviews. In the end, of the 116 leases, only 29 are found to be legal.
Now, DeChristopher’s act was definitely a crime. A victimless crime, and an act of civil disobedience, but a crime nonetheless. The guilty verdict, delivered on March 3, was expected.
But the auction itself was also a crime. The Bureau of Land Management had ignored clear legal requirements for an environmental review. And such crimes are far from victimless: improper oil operations can have disastrous consequences. Earlier this month, an ExxonMobil pipeline spilled over 50,000 gallons of oil into the Yellowstone River, fouling the river for miles. It’s not a far reach to speculate that DeChristopher’s actions saved at least two national parks from similar kinds of pollution.
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via Jay Michaelson: Why Liberals Should Be Outraged by the Tim DeChristopher Sentence.