1 Fire, Coal, and Climate in Montana

1It was the height of wildfire season in the West as I took off, a record-breaking year, and the air got smoky as I reached Montana.

A few days into my trip, I woke up at a campground south of Missoula to find a thin layer of black-and-white ash covering my truck and camper and the nearby pine trees. Driving in search of breakfast, I heard on the radio of the death of several firefighters in north-central Washington.

The smell of burning trees had followed me across Washington, Idaho, and into Montana along with the haze and the sting in the eyes and throat. An older couple I met at a coffee shop that morning told me that fires are common, but this fire season started earlier and was more intense than any they could remember.

A storm may be coming through in a few days, a young clerk at a run-down gas station and convenience store told me. Business was slow, and he had time to talk. It could bring winds that would blow the smoke away, he said. But it could also bring lightning strikes and set more fires in these bone-dry pine forests.

We risk passing tipping points where climate change takes on a life of its own, and it will be too late for humans to dial it back. We may have already passed some of these tipping points.

When more forests burn as a result of shifting climate patterns, and the burning releases more carbon, causing additional warming, we see this vicious cycle in action. Likewise, when receding ice cover in the Arctic leaves behind darker ocean waters, those waters absorb, rather than reflect, heat. Scientists have identified more than a dozen of these so-called positive feedback loops.

I thought about the salt waters where I live in Suquamish becoming acidic from the excess carbon, and the sea life that is dying. Then high in the Rockies as I crossed the Continental Divide, I saw evidence of the glaciers shrinking, year by year. For parts of the world that rely on runoff from mountain snow-packs, this is dire. I felt like I was witnessing a planet shift in real time. Instead of climate change being an abstraction of graphs and charts, I was seeing it in the changing waters, breathing it in the smoky air.

Journalists, scientists, policy makers, teachers, and other professionals are supposed to be dispassionate. We are trained to push aside our grief in favor of analysis and unbiased observation. Such practice is useful. But when we stand by as life on our beautiful planet dies, as one miraculous species after the next winks out, this stance turns from a professional calling into a pathology.

Cautiously, as I traveled, I let the lid off my grief.

Coal, from the Otter Creek Valley to China, and what happens in between

In Montana, I was looking for reasons to believe we can turn things around before we hit a climate Armageddon. I started with the people who were resisting plans for a giant new coal mine.

I first learned about the plans for the Otter Creek mine when controversy erupted about the transport of coal from the Powder River Basin in Montana and Wyoming to a proposed new coal export terminal in the Pacific Northwest.

The Gateway Pacific coal export terminal would be the largest in North America. It would be located some 100 miles north of Seattle on the traditional land of the Lummi Tribe. The terminal was designed to handle 54 million metric tons per year, most of which would be coal, according to the Washington State Department of Ecology.¹. Mile-and-a-half-long trains and giant ships, many from Asia, would cross waters and lands considered sacred by the Lummi people. SSA Marine, half owned by Goldman Sachs, was pushing the project.

The Lummi Tribe opposed the terminal. If any doubts existed about the strength of their opposition, they were laid to rest in September 2012, when tribal leaders stood on the beach of their homeland and set fire to a large facsimile of a check from port developers they stamped “non-negotiable.”

Lummi tribal members, like most of those in Indian Country, are not wealthy. But the tribe made it clear that money would not buy their support for a project they believed would threaten the clean water needed to support their fisheries and the sanctity of their traditional lands. The tribe has treaty rights to fish in these waters, which gives it the legal standing to block the terminal.

Lummi tribal members aren’t the only ones who would be affected by this massive new coal mine and port project. Large numbers of Bellingham residents also oppose the project, and they elected a slate of county commissioners who were out-spoken opponents to the terminal. The coal would be cheap enough to make it attractive to Asian nations, such as China, where toxic pollution is causing 1.6 million premature deaths a year, according to research cited in The Guardian.². And it would add still more carbon to the atmosphere, worsening the climate crisis.

Then there are those who live adjacent to the source of this coal, the residents of the Otter Creek Valley in southeast Montana and the neighboring ranchers and members of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe. Arch Coal proposed to strip-mine this area, creating the largest such mine in Montana. The mine would yield 1.2 billion tons of coal over 20 years and be located in what is now a quiet valley of ranches and creeks near the boundaries of the Custer National Forest.

Arch Coal and its partners, including the Burlington Northern Railroad, would build an 86-mile railroad spur to get the coal to the main train line. The new rail line would follow the Tongue River, which borders the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, and cross ranches, many of which have been in the same family for generations.

“The only way the railroad spur can be built is to force it on the ranchers,” Dawson Dunning told me when I sat down with him at a coffee shop in Livingston, Montana, just outside Yellowstone Park. Dunning, age 32, is a member of a family that has operated a ranch in the Otter Creek Valley since 1890. He has a round, open face, blue eyes, and a short beard. Instead of the stereotypical cowboy hat, he wore a baseball cap and shades, and he plans to return to that remote valley to operate the ranch when his father retires. To him, the Otter Creek Valley is home, and he doesn’t want it destroyed.

Dawson Dunning comes from a family of Otter Creek Valley ranchers.

Those ranchers and their organization, the Northern Plains Resource Council, along with the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Sierra Club, are at the core of the resistance to the mining project and railroad spur.

In support of this resistance, Lummi carver Jewell Praying Wolf James and his crew carved a totem pole and announced they would offer it as a gift to the Northern Cheyenne Tribe. I decided I would be there when it arrived on the reservation on August 30.