Boyd Norton, EPA (source: National Archives Catalog 549218 and 549231)
ArchCoal’s ongoing bankruptcy compelled it to announced in early March that it would suspend its pursuit of a strip mine in the Otter Creek Valley, located in the Powder River Basin of Montana and Wyoming, taking with it the proposed Tongue River Railroad. Victim of the receding tide of capital that has deprived coal of the market conditions it needs to be profitable, ArchCoal, like other coal companies, is folding due to decreased global demand, increased competition from abroad, a global supply glut and rock-bottom prices. The rise of alternative fuels and increased pollution safeguards have only increased pressure on an industry that is now answering to unique coalitions forming in response to the consequences of fossil fuel use and extraction.
Over the course of over 60 million years, a convergence of geologic forces have slowly given shape and content to the arid grasslands that we know today as the Powder River Basin. In its present form, the Basin - formed by the Black Hills in the east and the Hartville uplift in the southeast, the Laramie Mountains in the south, the Casper arch in the southwest, and the Bighorn Mountains in the west - has a beauty not appreciated by outsiders.
“This is a very rural region, sparsely populated and in a part of the state no one really considers stunning,” explained Mike Scott, the Sierra Club’s senior organizer Montana. It was Scott who would become a crucial figure in remapping the landscape to include all the people who live in it and appreciate it, as well as bringing media attention to what was taking place.
“Another challenging aspect of this campaign was the fact of how isolated Otter Creek is from the rest of the state,” said Scott. “This is a very rural region, sparsely populated and in a part of the state no one really considers stunning.”
Overlaid by the boundaries of southeastern Montana and northeastern Wyoming, the Basin doesn’t have multitudes of people, but those who cohabit in and with the Basin have, over the course of its human history, enriched the cultural heritage inscribed onto the land itself, a heritage Scott wanted to highlight to show what was at stake if the region were stripped of its antediluvian coal deposits.
“I don't know how many hours I spent in a pick-up on two tracks with reporters, teaching them how to see antelope, how to watch out for rattlesnakes, or what a burial site looks like and what petroglyphs mean,” continued Scott. “We were able to get journalists from all over to see what the people who live there see in this region.”
At an earlier point in the Basin’s history, some 100 million years ago, a massive body of water known as the Western Interior Seaway submerged the region in a transcontinental inland sea. As continental plates pushed upward, the Seaway receded to leave behind a lush subtropical swamp. It was out of this swamp that the Basin’s organic material coagulated into peat bogs, and after 25 million years of sedimentation and pressure, mineralized into the coal seams that have brought so much strife for everyone living in the region today.
“Coal was coming and it was going to destroy the culture and livelihoods of a diverse and unique set of people, people who deserved better,” said Scott. For many, the daunting task of bringing together a multiplicity of communities with opposing interests, historical animosities, and even revulsion toward conservation and environmental causes might have been an unsurpassable obstacle. But Scott found lines of flight to get around these obstacles and make of the Basin not an isolated backwater, but a new common territory for those who called the region home.
“We had ultra-conservative, multi-generational ranchers, Amish, Northern Cheyenne, and Crow tribal members all engaged and organized,” said Scott. “No group that could be brought to bear on this issue was overlooked or written off.”
Such was his success in bringing journalists to a region where residents were banding together to trace their own map and write their own stories of the Basin, all to keep Otter Creek from becoming a toxic pit, that their struggle became a central storyline in a documentary based on Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.
But what initially made Otter Creek unattractive to media coverage is precisely what powers feverish interest in the region by deep-pocketed interests seeking profit. In the course of writing this story, a search for the geologic history of Powder River Basin revealed more about the profitablecoal seams and other fossil fuels, but little about the people living and breathing in it today, or how they continue to shape the life and history of the Basin as much as it shapes theirs. There has even been interest in the region as a dump for radioactive waste, despite acknowledging the dangers to its residents. The plan was ultimately scrapped, not on the basis of the residents’ health and safety, but because even though “only small amounts [of coal] are now being mined, its future use should not be impaired.” As the report laments in its conclusion, “[t]he sparse population of the area favors the Powder River Basin as a waste disposal site, especially because, at least at present, slight use is made of groundwater for water supply.” 54 years after that report, and the region's inhabitants are still an afterthought, at best.
Scott found that where institutions and the industry demonstrated callous disregard for the region’s inhabitants, he could chart a new way to bring everyone together.
“The key is meeting people’s needs and building trust and community, and not expecting immediate reciprocity,” said Scott. “The Crow tribal members that came to the table were there as a result of our helping them out years ago on an issue [the Sierra Club wasn’t] really working on - the Crow Water Compact - but out of working on that issue, we built relationships and trust that brought them to the table on Otter Creek when we needed their help.”
Other groups, some revulsed by environmental causes or in historic friction with their long-established neighbors, required more creative tactics.
“For landowners along the route of the railroad, we organized a landowner group that was independent from any environmental organization, we helped them find legal counsel, and then worked together to develop strategies and implement tactics that fit with their interests, “ said Scott. “The Northern Cheyenne organizing was very similar and out of it came EcoCheyenne, an independent group that is now shifting to renewable energy as their primary issue.”
What resonated with Scott was how groups, once on common ground
“To me, the most interesting part of all of this is over the course of 6.5 years, we went from organizing all of these groups in separate silos, and then once they were organized, we integrated,” said Scott. “Northern Cheyennes and ranchers living on their ancestral land worked together, traditional Crows and traditional Cheyennes - adversaries since as long as anyone can remember - spoke at the same hearings and cooperated. Even the Amish community attended events, hearings, and worked with the broader group through proxies.”
Though the Sierra Club helped organize resistance to the mine for the last 6.5 years, Scott himself has devoted just over eight years of his life organizing resistance to Arch Coal’s mine and the Tongue River Railroad, the struggle becoming as much as a part of him as the landscape he and the residents banded together to defend.
“It’s a strange feeling to be rid of Otter Creek and the Tongue River Railroad,” said Scott. “There are too many people to thank for their time and support on this fight, you know who you are, so many thanks from Montana.”
Within the perspective of our limited lifetimes, so much hard work over such a long period of time should be enough to erode or create a mountain, but it was just enough to help bring down a coal company’s schemes, and bring together the communities who call the Powder River Basin their home.