Fear and loathing in the warming world

Stumps and slash piles are all that's left after a neighbor allegedly stole Al Kesselheim's trees for fuel. Photos courtesy Al Kesselheim.

22 December 2010

The author returns to his land to find his trees poached for fuel. 'My propane bills killed me last winter,' offered his neighbor - the culprit. In a carbon-constrained, resource-pinched world, is this our future?

by Alan S. Kesselheim 

for the Daily Climate

BOZEMAN, Mont. - We hadn't visited our 20-acre property north of the Yellowstone River in central Montana all summer. It was Labor Day before we headed over to camp. Driving up the final hill to the top of the property, we all leaned for the first view. Our tires burred across cattle guard. There it was.

A field of stumps and brush piles. 

It felt like a sucker punch. The same feeling I remember when we drove up after the wildfire that consumed our land six years earlier. Then it was the carpet of ash and the stark black trunks of trees our kids had climbed. This time it was personal. Someone had been on our land, cutting trees, heaping up unsightly brush piles, hauling off timber. 

We walked through the carnage, shaking our heads. "Who did this?" Marypat kept saying. She started counting stumps, pointing at deep ruts where heavy equipment had criss-crossed the property. 

"Seventy-eight stumps," she said.

We heard a pickup truck pull in at our neighbor's place. We walked over, asked if he knew anything. He hesitated, then turned to the truck, where a man hunched in the driver's seat. 

"We can ask my friend here," he said. "I gave him permission to cut some trees on my property."

The man got out. We pointed. He admitted that he had been cutting trees over there for several months. We all walked to the clearly marked corner post, then made our way along the roadway to the far corner, again clearly marked.

"My propane bills killed me last winter," he told us. "I went to wood. I cut along the neighbor's property, and then I kept cutting." 

The shock of the scene, and the bland admission, ambushed us. Before we could gather ourselves, he drove away to the place he would be heating with our wood, miles up the road.

All night, camped amidst the piles of brush, I stewed. I pictured this man working at his leisure, waving at the trucks passing by, stopping to have lunch, sitting on a freshly cut stump, mentally calculating the bills he wouldn't have to pay. 

Another thing kept me awake, a foreshadowing of things to come. I thought about the actions people will be driven to by the ripple-effects of climate change and the gathering desperation for cheap, sustainable fuels. What acts will erupt out of the desperation to heat homes, power vehicles, feed families when, for example, cheap oil is no longer cheap, or even available? Never mind the mad scramble from rising oceans, horrific storms, and abrupt climate shifts. 

Our culture loves to indulge tantalizing apocalyptic visions - Y2K, the Mayan calendar, delicious disasters that fuel Hollywood and have folks building bunkers. And yet we don't pay heed to the real brink we are accelerating towards, and the extent to which we are unprepared. We assume technological bandaids will materialize. Only, the harder you look, the less likely that appears. 

Oil will get scarce. It will become harder to extract and refine. It will be more and more onerous for the environment. It will be concentrated in more and more politically tenuous parts of the world. The peak of production has already passed. But we continue to build car-dependent suburbs, to produce food with petroleum-based fertilizers and agribusiness monoculture, and to assume affordable, petroleum-powered travel is our unassailable right. 

Alternative energy is only one facet of the environmental juggernaut bearing down on us. We are no better prepared to deal with the other consequences of climate change and carbon glut. That the planet also can't take it anymore becomes more obvious by the day.  

The trespass, property damage, and theft we experienced may be a harbinger of this climate and fuel-stressed era, a time when vegetable gardens will need guards, when shade trees will be firewood, when seasonal assumptions become a frightening crapshoot, when all bets are off in terms of ethical behavior. When it comes to staying warm, securing shelter or feeding your children, appalling cultural transgressions become reasonable. 

In the morning I walked across the road to the neighbor's. I asked if he would see if his friend might come down to talk. 

"I called him," he said, half an hour later. "He says he's doing chores. He'll come down if he has time."

The morning passed. "I think I know where he lives," I said to Marypat. 

Several miles up the road we found his gate. His place came into view, a large, rambling log home, some substantial equipment sheds and outbuildings. Closer up, we saw a small, high-tech wind generator, a 'tree' of solar panels, a Toyota Prius. We found him in his equipment shed. 

"What do you want me to do?" he said, when I confronted him. "I can't tape the trees back together."

The conversation escalated. Never once did he hint at an apology. Marypat took the tone down a notch, she opened the door for a neighbor-to-neighbor negotiation. He never walked through.

"You know," she finally said. "We aren't just going to let this go."

Two days later I sent him a certified letter. Our preferred course was to work together to restore the damage, build the fence we never thought was necessary, do some planting. Option two, if he chose, was to come to some financial settlement. He picked up the letter. Weeks passed. Silence.

I sent a second certified letter, a terse reminder. It came back unopened. 

We talked to a lawyer. Montana takes private property very seriously, she told us. "If you had come to your property one day while this guy had been cutting away, and you pulled out a gun and shot him, you would have been within your rights."

I don't own a gun. But I know how to use the telephone. I called the county sheriff and initiated bringing charges. A week later I shook hands with an affable man, the undersheriff for the county, and we climbed into his rig to tour our property, which had been transformed from a quiet, untrammeled family retreat to a crime scene.

Photos and text © Al Kesselheim. All rights reserved.

Alan Kesselheim is a freelance writer and teacher who lives with his family in Bozeman, Mont. 

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