Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on September 25, 2013.
Tim DeChristopher is a climate justice activist and co-founder of the nonprofit Peaceful Uprising. In 2008, Tim committed an act of nonviolent civil disobedience when he disrupted a government oil and gas lease auction in an attempt to protect fragile lands in southern Utah from long-term damage.
After being imprisoned for 21 months, he was released in April 2013 and is now on a three-year probation. The recently released documentary film, Bidder 70, tells DeChristopher’s courageous story. The fall of 2013, he began studies at Harvard Divinity School.
“… Those who write the rules are those who profit from the status quo. If we want to change that status quo, we might have to work outside of those rules because the legal pathways available to us have been structured precisely to make sure we don’t make any substantial change.”
–Tim DeChristopher
This event was part of the Lannan In Pursuit of Cultural Freedom series.
In this episode he is joined in conversation with Terry Tempest Williams. The companion Talk episode may be found here.
He then traveled to Chicago and on 27 September 2013 continued the conversation with Terry Tempest Williams at the Chicago History Museum, which may be found here.
Additional photos of this event are available on Flickr.
You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also listen to the audio recording of this event there.
You’ve got to be kidding me. Twenty-one months of imprisonment for actively doing something about the callous disposal of our natural resources? That’s just outright terrible. I’m definitely checking out the documentary and sharing it. Just another courageous story silenced by the power source.