On December 19, 2008, 27-year-old University of Utah student Tim DeChristopher waded past the throngs of picket-wielding protesters surrounding the Salt Lake City Bureau of Land Management (BLM) office and headed upstairs to the auction room, where the drilling and mineral rights for 149,000 acres of some of America's most coveted and pristine publiclands acreage were to be sold to the highest bidders. DeChristopher signed up as a bidder, hefted auction paddle number 70, and proceeded to place the highest bids on 13 of the 116 parcels of Utah land totaling more than 22,500 acres. He also successfully drove the price up on other bidders by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yet, what separated DeChristopher from the oil, gas and other private-interest bidders in the room was that he had zero intention of actually ponying up any money for those leases.

When auction officials realized what was happening, DeChristopher was removed and questioned by federal authorities. After his release, DeChristopher started the website Bidder70.org. Support poured in, and over the course of the next few weeks, the renegade environmentalist raised the $45,000 down payment for the leases he had won, mostly through small donations.

Branded by conservation groups as an eleventh-hour fire sale and dismissed as routine by the BLM, the December 19 auction sparked protests and lawsuits from U.S. politicians, conservation groups and philanthropic celebrities.

On January 19, U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina issued a temporary restraining order to indefinitely block the oil and gas leases that resulted from the auction. In early February, newly appointed Interior Secretary Ken Salazar scrapped 77 of the pending leases (including DeChristopher’s) near sensitive areas, saying the Bush Administration rushed the parcels to the auction block without proper review. Although no charges have been pressed as of yet, DeChristopher’s fate remains uncertain. I sat down with him to get the skinny on his modern- day monkeywrenching.

Why risk your criminal record for something that you weren’t sure would have any real effect? Anything else, whether it’s prison, or missing out on school, or whatever, is not nearly as big of a risk as just continuing on this path of destruction that we’re on right now. I didn’t know that it would be effective at the time, I just knew that there was a chance that I could protect the land. I knew that I could live with the consequences, but I couldn’t live with knowing that I saw a chance to make a difference and didn’t take it.

What was going through your mind when you actually started winning these parcels? Well, I started out just kind of bidding, just to drive up the prices. [Trying to win the land] was something I struggled with a lot, to go that far knowing there’d be no turning back. But once I had made that decision and I started winning those parcels, I felt really calm. All the conflict I had been dealing with was over, and I was on this path, and the only way to go was just to keep going forward.

Do you think there’s a vital balance to be maintained between big groups like the [National Resources Defense Council] and grassroots activists like you? Yeah, and I think that’s what’s been out of balance for so long, that people have seen [big groups] as the only part of the environmental movement, or the only way to be an environmentalist is to send in your donation and sign the internet petitions and let the lobbyists sort it out. The people who are pushing the boundaries have really been lacking. Progress has to come from those of us willing to take direct action and willing to take risks, so the big groups can follow along behind and make that change more general throughout society.

How have you seen the impact of your actions change since the auction? At the time of the auction, it seemed like the real effectiveness that I could have was protecting those 22,500 acres. And now, after seeing people’s response to it over the last month, I’m seeing that the real effect is other people being inspired to take action on their own and stand up and make sacrifices.

Are you cool with becoming the poster boy for a new environmental movement? If it’s people out there like ‘I’m glad he’s out there doing it so that I don’t have to,’ then I’m certainly not comfortable with that. I don’t want people to view that as, like, I did something extraordinary that other people can’t do, because I don’t see it that way. But as far as being the poster boy, if that means people see me as someone who set the groundwork for a role that other people need to step up and play as well, then I’m comfortable with that.

Is this more of a jumpstart or a revival for civil disobedience? For the environmental movement, I do think it’s something pretty new. The kind of civil disobedience or monkeywrenching that we’ve had in the past has been Edward Abbey-type stuff of sneaking in the night, or destructive, ELF-type stuff. Not people standing up in a very public way and saying this is unjust and I’m going to stand against it and deal with the consequences if need be.

Why do you think it took so long to find a middle ground between signing petitions and blowing stuff up? At the same time that the environmental groups have been trying to convince us that the way to be an environmentalist is to send in donations, there’s been this whole push since the Reagan years of making people afraid of their government and making people think that we didn’t have a role to play. The public opinion in the past month has reinforced the idea that this was a fraudulent auction, and that people were upset about it. So many people seem like they’ve been somewhat oppressed by the environmental movement in the last 20 years, and they’re ready for grassroots action. They’re ready to get out in the streets and defend their own future.

Do you think you’ve lit a fire under people’s asses? I hope the role that I play in this whole thing is more like the match. The match lights the tinder and gets the fire going, and from what I’ve seen over the past month, there’s a lot of dry tinder out there.

Andy Anderson is a freelance writer based in Salt Lake City, where the snow is deep and the beer is weak. His work has also appeared in Conscious Choice magazine. This is Anderson’s first story for the MG.