The Good Fight | Web design and development | Six Pony Hitch

12/14 The Good Fight

When I was younger, I believed that a few committed people could change the world.  Then I got older and learned a lot of life lessons and, unfortunately, started to let doubt sneak into my heroic visions of lone activists bearing mighty (figurative) swords.  It happens to the best of us.  Anyone who watches the nightly news or reads a paper or follows enough blogs is bound to sink into overwhelming despair.  But sometimes, if we are lucky and keep a little glimmer of hope alive, heroes appear.

That’s just what happened to me this summer.  Just as we were starting Six Pony Hitch, I came across a group of dedicated folks who had decided to take on the biggest and baddest of Goliaths – Exxon Mobil.  For those of you who aren’t spending every waking hour wondering how in the world it is possible that the wild and scenic rivers and jaw-droppingly beautiful drives of western Montana are about to be turned into a permanent industrial corridor the likes of which even New Jerseyites would fear, let me tell you a story.

As one of my new heroes, David James Duncan, describes it, the earth has two lungs.  One is the rainforest in the southern part of our continent and the other the Boreal Forest to our north.  Up in Alberta, Imperial Oil and its parent company, Exxon, are quickly cutting out this northern lung and feeding it to the monster that is the Tar Sands. The proposed High and Wide corridor that big oil is trying to build on our tiny little mountain roads is all about carrying oversized - and by that I mean as long as a football field and as tall as a three-story building – loads on roads that are meant for kayakers, and honeymooners, and bears and deer, and rural fire departments, and tourists from Atlanta, and cross-country skiers, and tubers, and ranchers, and hot springers, and anyone who has ever just needed a glorious Sunday drive. 

So there are the bad guys – Exxon, Imperial, the government officials in four states that are rolling over and letting the oil company’s ship South Korean equipment through our most precious places to Canada to destroy our air, our fish, our water, our birds - our climate for God’s sakes – only to pump it back down through 30 states where it will wreak even greater havoc in faulty pipelines that will leak their way across our country. 

And then there are the good guys who are doing everything they can possibly think of to save what we sometimes forget is the heart of our very existence.  Suzie Estep.  Trish Weber.  Zack Porter.  David James Duncan.  Rick Bass.  Steve Hawley.  Frederic Ohringer. Ian Boyden. Bob Gentry.  Laird Lucas. Natalie Havlina. Borg Hendrickson.  Linwood Laughy.  Pat Ford.  Sam Mace. Roy O’Connor. Bart Naylor. John Wolverton.  Marty Cobenais.  Summer Nelson.  Annick Smith.  Melissa Hayes.  Alex Johnson. Layla Turman.  Pat Smith.  Ryan Sudbury.  And a remarkably huge list of others who have all come together to prove that maybe, just maybe, a few committed people can change the world. 

All this is to say that when heroes arrive, you’d better do as they ask.  So it is our great pleasure to present, as requested, the All Against The Haul website.  Please check it out. It’s got a fresh, up-to-the-minute blog, event updates, photos from community members and business owners, a petition that goes straight to our elected officials, a plethora of information about all things related to the monsters, and constantly updated comments from the growing crowd that is all against the haul. 

So take a look.  Sign the petition.  Leave your comments.  Get involved.  Join us.

• Posted by Mike Zens
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