Monday, on Democracy Now!, Amy interviewed Tim DeChristopher, the University of Utah student who "disrupted" a last-minute fire-sale auction of wilderness land held by Bureau of Land Management the previous Friday. She also wrote her weekly column about DeChristopher and what he did.
He didn't pour sugar into a bulldozer's gas tank. He didn't spike a tree or set a billboard on fire. But wielding only a bidder's paddle, a University of Utah student just as surely monkey-wrenched a federal oil- and gas-lease sale Friday, ensuring that thousands of acres near two southern Utah national parks won't be opened to drilling anytime soon.
Tim DeChristopher, 27, faces possible federal charges after winning bids totaling about $1.8 million on more than 10 lease parcels that he admits he has neither the intention nor the money to buy -- and he's not sorry.
"I decided I could be much more effective by an act of civil disobedience," he said during an impromptu streetside news conference during an afternoon blizzard. "There comes a time to take a stand."
The Sugar House resident -- questioned and released after disrupting a U.S. Bureau of Land Management lease auction of 149,000 acres of public land in scenic southern and eastern Utah -- said he came to the BLM's state office in Salt Lake City to join about 200 other activists in a peaceful protest outside the building Friday morning. But then he registered with the BLM as representing himself and went to the auction room.
All sorts of people and groups were up in arms over the sale, thrown together with customary Bush Administration disregard for, you know, rules, regulations, environmental laws and the like. But DeChristopher's action was the only thing that actually stopped any of the sales from going through.
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