‘Bidder 70’: Wily Tree Hugger Does Time for Disrupting Eco Crime
In 2008, the soon-departing Bush administration placed the oil and gas rights to 116 parcels of pristine public land in Utah’s wilderness up for auction. Environmental activist Tim DeChristopher attended the auction and, wielding auction paddle number 70, bid nearly $2 million for drilling rights to 22,500 acres. DeChristopher had no intention of paying for his purchases. His bids were a classic act of civil disobedience.
During DeChristopher’s subsequent trial on two felony counts of interfering and making false representations, supporters of the environmental activist viewed what they saw as a grotesque misuse of the legal system, culminating in DeChristopher’s 2011 conviction and two-year prison sentence, and lamented: “This story isn’t being told!”
Filmmaker George Gage, with his wife Beth, aims to remedy that lapse in the new documentary Bidder 70, which opened theatrically in New York recently and will play across the country in the coming weeks.
“The real story certainly wasn’t told in the trial,” George tells TakePart.
The Gages initially conceived of Bidder 70 as a short profile of DeChristopher. The former wilderness guide was a wily, outside-the-box thinker with a knack for outsmarting the entrenched power of a too intertwined government and private sector—an excellent subject for a 20-minute exploration.
However, once the Obama administration pursued a case against their charismatic subject, the Gages saw the profile piece grow into a feature.
At the beginning of filming, in January 2009, the couple never could have predicted the rollercoaster trajectory of DeChristopher’s trial, postponed nine times over the course of two years, a span of time in which the very auction DeChristopher had disrupted was deemed by the government to be illegal.
. . .
http://www.takepart.com/article/2013/05/20/bidder-70-tim-dechristopher-disrupts-eco-crime
= new reply since forum marked as read
