Montana News
Episode 03: Sue the Bastards
(upbeat music) Doug Peacock lives about a half hour south of me. I popped into his house on a sunny afternoon last spring, the final white of a late season snowstorm melting in his yard. - Hey, come on in. - Hey, Doug, how's it going? - Okay. - Doug's an author and an activist, a bit of a wildlife icon in my neck of the woods. He was a green beret medic in Vietnam. When he came back, his way of dealing with the horrors he saw was to disappear into the back country. - When I got back here, I didn't want to see anybody. In the one place I've always been comfortable all my life is a wilderness. - On these solitary trips deep into the Northern Rockies, he became entranced by grizzly bears. - The grizzly bear in this country is one animal that can remind the most arrogant species on earth, which is homo sapien of their place, in the biological record, on the food pyramid or anywhere else. - He's had hundreds of encounters. He documented grizzlies with an old film camera as they were sliding towards extinction. And those years leading up to their endangered species protections. - Up there, you're not in charge. You're not the boss. You know, diddy bop down the trail, thinking about your bank portfolio or your girlfriend. It's an enforced humility. And, you know, humility, I believe is, you know, the emotional posture behind reason. It's good. - Grizzly saved him in those years after the war. And ever since, Doug's been trying to repay that debt. - My take is that would climate change the grizzly in particular among countless other species can never be recovered. That's a lifetime fight. - I reached out to Doug because he's behind those four billboards I started this series with. They proclaimed that the grizzly bear should keep its federal protections, but it shouldn't be delisted from the Endangered Species Act. Another pro-de-listing sign had gone up first and Doug wanted passersby to see the other side of the story too. And that's a really curious thing to me. Because Doug's life has been embroiled in the environmental movement in one other way. That's not grizzly related at all. For a time, when he was back from Vietnam. - I was a hippie mailman and I wrote a motorcycle then. - I take that to mean he was a hippie, who was also a mailman. Not part of some special kind of mail service who only delivered to hippies. Anyway, he found himself at a party one day and he rolled up a cigarette. - I was so cold I couldn't light my cigarette. So this guy reached over and gave me a light. That was Ed Abbey. - Ed Abbey, the infamous activist and author. And that smoke spawned a friendship that would last for decades. Ed Abbey's 1975 book, The Monkey Wrench Gang, remains one of the most controversial and influential works about environmental activism. In the novel, characters poured sand into the gas tanks of bulldozers and plotted to blow up dams, all in the name of saving the environment. The main character was a foul mouth Vietnam vet named George Washington Hayduke. That character was based on Doug. - Well, we did all the little tiny things, not the big things. You know, we should kind of regularly take on billboards. - They cut down billboards like they were trees. This kind of eco-sabotage inspired a wave of activism and an organization called Earth First. That group took monkey wrenching into the real world with acts of sabotage like tree spiking or hammering nails into tree trunks to thwart the chains of saws slated to cut them down. - Ed wrote that book, at least with a hope that it would inspire lots of little cells of Earth First or everywhere. - Today, that legacy is still around. Hayduke lives is scrawled in bars and campgrounds across the West. But Doug, he was older than the Earth Firsters and liked to solitude. He kept focusing on grizzly bears. - I didn't have to be someone's character scribbled on barroom bathroom walls, you know, Hayduke lives. I had my own work. - Driving by those billboards, you know, monkey wrenching features so prominently getting rid of billboards. - I know, after you put them up. - 50 years of chopping them down or tearing them down, I put up for them my own. - From Montana Public Radio and the Montana Media Lab, this is The Wide Open, season one, threatened. I'm Nick Mott. The rest of this episode, we're leaving Doug Peacock behind and focusing on what he inspired. This time, a group of monkey wrenching young activists put on suits, go to court and change the playing field when it comes to all things Endangered Species Act. Stay with us. After this nail-darter saga, the Endangered Species Act sort of simmered on the back burner for a while. That all changed starting in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This time, we're focusing on a group that took the playbook Zig pioneered in Tennessee and ran with it, setting up the legal and emotional battles over Endangered Species we see today. That group is the center for biological diversity. They have a tree frog logo and a staff nearly 200 strong. Just about any major lawsuit over any controversial species, if you start looking through the court filings and the press releases, their name is there. [MUSIC PLAYING] Peter Galvin is a co-founder of the Center for Biological Diversity. He grew up in the Northeast, and he went West for the first time in the 1980s to go to college in Portland. He marveled at the enormity of the landscape in this part of the country, along with its vast swaths of public lands. On a class trip, a professor showed him clear cuts for the first time. Peter saw what to him looked like the consequences of putting economics before the planet. So he started advocating for those wild spaces. At first, that took the form of-- Tree sitting was a lot of tree sitting. He means perching up high on the thick limbs of old growth slated to get cut down, creating a human barrier to the jagged saw blades of loggers. He wanted to save the trees, but it was a frustrating endeavor. They'd save some trees here and there, but nobody paid much attention. He remembers reaching out to a newspaper. And the environmental reporter at that time said, ancient forests are not news. Click, hung up on me. Peter had gotten involved in a small local environmental group. It was his first step in a journey that would take him from those dirtbag tree sitting days to one of the most powerful forces in environmental causes. At the time, Earth first, the movement inspired by Doug Peacock's Hey Duke shenanigans was growing. Peter got on board with their rowdy and your face style. Instead of just sitting in trees, he started what he calls more confrontational protests. These were things that drew the public eye a lot more than hippies sitting on tree branches and also things that could get you in legal trouble. My first civil disobedience arrest for an environmental protest was blockading the entrance to the bull run watershed and the Oregonian published an article on it. And when you're arrested, usually your home address is printed in the newspaper. The next morning, a woman shows up, knocks on the door, and she has baked a cake for us because she's read the article and thought the issue was so important that she wanted to show her thanks by baking us a cake. And I remember thinking, wow, what an amazing response. So just to pause, it seemed like the media at the time wasn't interested in old-growth forests, but they were interested in activists padlocking themselves to gates. Yeah, that's right. And the takeaway to the story is, over a couple of years period, we did a bunch of these types of actions. Eventually, the media got very, very interested to the point where we would send out a press release and say the media meet us at the plaid pantry or the convenience mark at 6 a.m. And we will caravan from there because we didn't want the authorities to know exactly where we would be. So I think that's right that while old-growth forests weren't newsworthy to the Oregonian, people getting arrested for trying to preserve old-growth forests were newsworthy. Peter dropped out of college eventually to commit to saving old-growth. You mentioned your first time getting arrested. How many times did you get arrested for these for actions? I've been arrested about 20, 25 times. I've lost count. I could probably recreate it about 20 to 25 times. A lot. I think the longest time I've spent in jail was maybe five or six days at a time. For me, it was really a coming-of-age kind of thing. I really became an adult in essence through this endeavor. In time, he began to change the course just a bit. The feds were cracking down on Earth first. He said there were surveillance vans around. After years of activism and arrests, his lawyer, his parents, they were all telling him to do something else. So he did. He went back to school in Arizona to Prescott College. My thought at that point was to move more mainstream. Still good for the Earth and good for the world, but maybe something a little less controversial, maybe something just a little more state, I guess we could put it that way. But it didn't work out that way. Many histories of the Endangered Species Act focus on the northern spotted owl, a bird that would take the timber industry to its knees and make headlines across the country in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But when Peter moved south, he was suddenly on the other end of the country from the old growth of the Northwest. But there were still ancient forests to be saved and in them dwelled another owl. This one was called the Mexican spotted owl. Nobody knew much about it at the time, but as Peter got into his second stint at university, he did an independent study on the bird. So he reached out to the Fish and Wildlife Service for some information on the Mexican spotted owl. And they told him this local rabble rouser named Robin Silver had already filed a formal request for the very same information Peter was asking for. So the fed said, "Why don't you just get in touch with that guy?" So he did. They arranged to meet up at Robin's house. - You know, modest kind of mid-century home in North Phoenix, but it's got these blackout curtains and barred windows. And I knock on the door and just barely the curtain opens just a little bit. He opens, lets me in, and his house is like a war room. There's just these fax machines. This is back when fax machines still existed. There's fax machines going off all the time, the sound of the fax machine. You know, young people today don't even know what that is, but it's this, the eee. Anyway, the whole time I was there, it was just a constant stream of fax. - Robin was a former college jock turned emergency room surgeon. - Most emergency room doctors have other lives. And I think notoriously we fly planes, we drive race cars, we get into all kinds of social trouble. - But his second life was wildlife photography. And that evolved into doing everything he could to protect the critters he was photographing. At the time the two met, Robin was already working on a petition to get the Mexican spotted owl listed as an endangered species. He'd also been fighting a $200 million observatory that could threaten a population of red squirrels that live only on a single mountain in Arizona. And he'd made lots of enemies, hence the barricaded house. Robin, you might have guessed by now, is another one of the co-founders of the Center for Biological Diversity. And their journey together, which continues to this day, started here in this bunker of a house. The two got to talking and found a certain kinship over owls and wildlife. Robin offered to subsidize Peter's research. - It was a natural fit. You know, I could provide some resources so he didn't have to worry about dumpster diving and could do more research. - All that research eventually led Peter to getting a gig with the Forest Service. He was a crew leader for a team surveying for Mexican spotted owls. - The job paid $9 an hour, which in 1988 wasn't bad. And every spotted owl you found, it resulted in the protection of 1,500 acres. They felt like a really impactful thing. - Peter had to hire his crew, so he wrangled together a bunch of Earth-first buddies and created this gang of surveyors working for the government, but also working against it, since any owl they found would limit logging. They'd go out in the forest and hoot to see more or less who was home. So when you say hoot, you're actually trying to call the owl to get a response. Can you still do the hoot? - Oh yeah, it's a... (dog barking) - At the time, it was just this, the contact call, they called it. And this is where another activist would cross paths with Peter. Chiron's suckling is go-teed and bushy eyebrowed with a graduate degree in philosophy. He's the current executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. He's another of the co-founders. He'd gotten involved with Earth-first while living in Missoula, Montana after college. The group hosted a big national rendezvous every year, capped off with a bout of civil disobedience, and Chiron traveled to one down in New Mexico. Along with hordes of other activists, he chained himself to a machine to stop a timber sale. Everybody got arrested. But the jail is too small to handle all the protesters. - They took us up to Los Alamos laboratories and temporary locked us in the center of this big warehouse. - The upside down is that if you're in a normal jail, they segregate the genders. They weren't able to do this in this warehouse. So I met this woman, as I like to say, I met this woman in jail. And we hit it off and we get let out of there eventually and I was planning to head back to Montana, but she was a spot-in-house server down in the Gila National Forest. Chiron followed her down and joined the crew. Her boss, Peter Galvin. Chiron's romantic relationship didn't last, but his friendship with Peter did. They started a small environmental group of their own out of a remote cabin they were renting. Chiron, a bit of a tech wizard, rigged up a solar panel that could power their fax machine. Robin kept subsidizing their work. At some point, they officially rebranded as the Southwest Center for Biological Diversity. Along the way, the Forest Service recognized their own crews were the ones working to legally sabotage their projects and stopped rehiring them. But the group was born. Here's Robin. There was a kind of a symbiosis that came together. A chemistry that was bigger than any one of us as individuals. The group filed an early notice of intent to sue, the first step in bringing this kind of lawsuit against the government in 1990, taking on the fish and wildlife service and the country's armed forces. That issue was the possible reintroduction of Mexican gray wolves. Here's Chiron. Got this law called the Nature's Species Act. And the law says in it, every federal agency will recover and dangerous species. Every, not just the Forest Service, not just the BLM. So that includes the Department of Defense. So Chiron suggested, why don't we just sue him? This idea, as he put it, just sue the bastards, set the course for so much that would come next. And we held the press conference. We were selling our kind of Earth's first vote. So we rented Tuxedo's. But we just wore them from the top up. We had shorts in the waist down. - Wait, so you were like sitting at a table with reporters around with a top half in Tuxedo bottom half shorts? - Yeah, but then we sat down behind the table. So that was the funny part, which is so, they knew how they ended for these guys. But yeah, here were the cameras out. And we were looking like, you know, much more professional people, not exactly. Because people about actually wear Tuxedo's for filing lawsuits. (laughing) Years of meetings had made basically no progress on the reintroduction of Mexican gray wolves, Chiron says. But after the threat of a lawsuit, the Fish and Wildlife Service settled and agreed to reintroduce wolves as expeditiously as possible. Lawsuits got things done where protests and advocacy didn't. And then in 1993, the Mexican spotted owl made the endangered species list. Suddenly, the law required that the Forest Service consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service on how their projects affected the owl. But that wasn't happening. So the center sued. Here's Peter. - Basically, the Forest Service was in a straight jacket. The Forest Service had lost control of their logging program. And now everything had to be coordinated with the Fish and Wildlife Service. This spurred a long legal back and forth that culminated with the massive order from a federal judge. Essentially, a stop order on all commercial logging everywhere in the Southwest. This is a huge deal. There was, of course, backlash. Some of it personal. Somebody pooped on Chiron's car. A wanted ad appeared at the local courthouse with Peter and Chiron's image and crosshairs. With his barricaded bunker of a house, this is a sentiment Robin had been dealing with for years. You know, there's this rich doctor in Phoenix that doesn't care about humans, you know? And he's trying to destroy our lives. And in fact, there was a courtroom scene in Tucson where I didn't talk to the judge. I turned around and talked to the loggers that bust in for that hearing and got to say to them directly to their face that they're full of shit. So whether you're a logger or you're a rancher in the air at West, you're destroying public property. These are people that are understandably threatened because they're getting inflated wages to destroy public lands. And they think that that's, you know, that that's their God-given right. Well, it's not. And they're gonna have to change their lifestyle and that makes them very uncomfortable. And so then they target the rest of us. - Eventually, thanks to the tension surrounding the case, the judge ordered behind closed doors negotiations. Nerves had worn thin. In fact, Robin and Peter told me the tension boiled over during one hearing. After this heated exchange, the other side's attorney snapped and attacked Robin and Peter's attorney. - He's like, I've spent, you know, 15 months, at this point, it's 15 months, 15 months of my life. He mutters something, grabs him by the lapel, shars shaking him, breaks his glasses. Robin Silver is a black belt in judo. He goes over to him, puts the Forest Service lawyer in a full Nelson. He says to the other US attorney, you need to calm this guy down. You need to calm this guy down. - Robin remembers things similarly, kind of like a kid in a recess fist fight. He says the DOJ lawyer, this guy named John Marshall, started it. - He was not very skilled, but nonetheless, when the FBI agents who were also in the building came through the door, they saw me holding Marshall down by this throat on the table. They thought I was assaulting Marshall and they were ready to kill me. - Fortunately, with no more chokeholds or near deaths, they reached a deal in the end. Logging could resume, but in a very limited way. The owl would get nearly 5 million acres of critical habitat. This is an ESA term that raises hackles for private landowners all over the country. Critical habitat to some is almost like zoning for an endangered species. It was a crippling blow to the logging industry. In the late 1980s, forest service sales in the Southwest generated more than 350 million board feet of timber a year. By 2000, it was about 100 times lower. Down to about 35 million. The industry still hasn't recovered. Outside the desert Southwest, this spotted owl saga flew largely under the mainstream media's radar, but it became the center's origin story. The founders realized the power that the endangered species act held. It was a radical transformation that emerged directly out of their activist past. - What you end up doing is, "Well, come on the street and we'll hold the protest signs and we'll speak truth to power." But there's a real limit to that, 'cause you're speaking truth to power, but power still has the power, right? And when we started doing environmental litigation, we were saying like immediate and rapid success where we were no longer speaking truth to power. We were seizing power and seizing enough power that we were able to challenge the pre-existing power structure and succeed. - They changed their tactics. They'd come of age with earth first. And Kiran said, "It had been a fun, carnival-like, creative environment, but tree-sitting and chaining yourself to logging equipment could only go so far." - We came to see how powerful, inefficient, and capable of overcoming political barriers, litigation was. So, the point is that was born out of earth for, it wasn't an abandoned man of earth for us, that was literally born out of it. We were doing it in a way that was very unusual, very creative, filing the kind of suits that people had not never filed. - Soon, they dropped the Southwest from their name, and they started filing lawsuits that would spam the country. And as the center's cases piled up, so did their enemies. That's after the break. - The wide open is supported by the Murray and Jan Ritlin Fund, the Cinnabar Foundation, Humanities Montana, and listeners like you. Ways to contribute and make this kind of journalism possible at mtpr.org. - The center's lawsuits quickly inspired venom from the industries they litigated against. They didn't just protect ecosystems, they impacted livelihoods and families and communities. They were called radical, fanatical, uncompromising, extremists, obstructionists, thugs, bullies, downright Machiavellian, the environmental equivalent of drive-by shootings. One critic even alleged that their approach amounted to the end of the West. They've been called anti-jobs, anti-human, and they've been blamed for everything from making wildfires more intense by stopping forest projects to exacerbating the affordable housing crisis by putting a wrench in new development. - We didn't come into this blindly. We knew that we were gonna cause economic and cultural changes in smaller towns. - The center has challenged just about every industry that utilizes the country's public lands. But we're going to zoom in to one conflict with one industry because it speaks to the pushback they've received all over the map. For years, there'd been a movement to end cattle grazing on public land. Spearheaded, of course, by Earth first. Ranchers, the argument went, relied on government welfare to graze on public land all over the West. And those cattle trampled stream banks left cow pies and waterways and eighth to four, each other species relied on. Ultimately, the debate was about what and where is a cow's role in the landscape. One rancher in far Southern Arizona found himself at the center of it. - I am Jim Chilton of Chilton Ranch in Arabok, Arizona. I have a 50,000 acre ranch run about 1,000 head of cattle. - Jim Chilton comes from a ranching family five generations deep. You had a lucrative career in the investment world in California. The ranching was in his blood. He retired back to the family business in the late 1980s. - I produce about 450,000 quarter pound hamburger patties. - He means enough meat to make nearly a half million burgers per year. - And so I'm doing a great service to people who are in urban areas who think that all you have to do to get food is to go down to this local store and buy it. - I wanted to talk with him about a thorn in his side for 30 years running. Where did you first hear about the Center for Biological Diversity? Do you remember when that was or when you first encountered their name? - About 1994, the Arizona Game and Fish Department discovered a little minnow that had swum under the international boundary, north into the United States for about a quarter of a mile. And it was on the endangered species list. (upbeat music) - That minnow was called the Sonora Chub. And it came into the U.S. on a little tributary that filled with water some years that ran dry much of the time on federal land that Jim had a permit to graze on. That land was called the Montana allotment. By 1995, the Center had published allegations that the Chiltons were overgrazing there. And by 97, lawsuits from the Center had forced the stream to get fenced off from cattle. There's some weeds we have to huff through here to understand Jim's story. Every 10 years, Jim's grazing permit had to get renewed by the Forest Service. And for that to happen, the agency has to consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service over endangered species that might live there. To do that, the Fish and Wildlife Service issues something called a biological opinion. This one claimed that cattle grazing had adversely affected the Sonora Chub and that continued grazing would likely result in killing more of the species. - Bottom line, the Center for Biological Diversity, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife, the Forest Service, treated it as though God had come back. And the U.S. Fish and Wildlife wrote a biological opinion and it severely restricted my grazing rights. - Jim was furious. To him, his cattle were good for the landscape. He managed his herds carefully so they weren't hammering the land. Carefully controlled grazing, he thought, could make the landscape healthier. Jim saw something else too, a war brewing. And he started a campaign of his own to get ahead of things. He hired some of the top rangeland scientists in the field. Folks who had in the past tried to stop ranchers from overgrazing to assess his property. He held PR events with the Forest Service, scientists and politicians. He did everything in his power to show that his cows weren't fish killing monsters. On the other side, Jim said. - The Center for Biological Diversity was in the middle of this during the nap. - There was a drawn out back and forth over the biological opinion. Meetings over the document got heated. Jim repeatedly stood up and yelled that he'd rather go to jail than be part of this government fraud. And as this bureaucratic saga reached fever pitch. - I went in to see the district ranger and I said, Larry, who do you wanna be sued by? You wanna be sued by the Center for Biological Diversity where they will have great literature, theology and bullshit. Or do you wanna be sued by me who have 11 grazing use studies, a soil study, a repair and study and grazing capacity, mate? - We can't know for sure why the district ranger did what he did. But in the end, the Forest Service upheld Jim's grazing rights. It issued a finding of no significant impact. That meant that Jim could keep on grazing. Now it was the center who was up in arms. They sent a photographer to the Montana allotment to take photos and document what they deemed was evidence of mismanagement. They also appealed the Forest Service's opinion on the allotment. - The center was mad, they wrote this awful press release saying that I was a lousy rancher and that my wife who is chairman of the board of Arizona Game and Fish Commission and she was a hated wildlife. Then they attached 21 photos to the press release, sent it out to over 150 medias and I read it in my local newspaper and I was outraged. - The photos showed cattle lying in what looked like a moonscape. The message in the release was clear. Jim's cattle were overgrazing this public land. But Jim, who devoted his life to the well-being of this cattle and the land on which they relied, saw things a lot differently. She told a writer, pictures can lie and liars can take pictures. - All the pictures, all 21 were misrepresented. - Jim is a fierce defender of cowboy culture and his investment in years meant he had the resources to handle a lengthy battle with the group. To me, it sounds like more than the direct threat to his livelihood, the center stood for a threat to his way of life, what he calls his culture and roots. So he turned the center's own strategy against them. He sued, he said that press release was deliberately misleading, it amounted to defamation. It turned out that some of the photos weren't even on his property. Others were zoomed in to particular impacts. A zoomed out photo in the exact same spot would show a much different scene. Some of the impacts were from people, not animals. There'd been a gathering of hundreds of people where the photos had been taken just weeks before, for example. In fact, the center's photographer had been at that party. So Jim took photos of his own. The case went to trial. Jim told me the West had changed. It used to be problems were solved with fists or with a revolver. - During my dad's deposition, he was asked, what do you think of the center for biological diversity? And he said, I'd like to take him out the barn and beat the hell out of him. - Today is the legal system that settles disputes and ultimately Jim prevailed. The jury unanimously decided that the center had acted with malice. They awarded Jim $100,000 in direct damages. And they went well beyond that. To discourage the center from this kind of behavior, they awarded him another $500,000 as well. The center, of course, appealed. And during that process, Jim says their lawyers offered him a deal. Jim can give them 35 grand and it's all over and done with. Here's what Jim told his lawyer at the time. I said, give them the Saguaro sign. - I don't know whether my people in Montana understand that symbol. - What does that mean? Yeah, I don't know what that means. Oh, I think I do know what that means, actually, now that I think about it. If you don't know what that means, I'll say this. Imagine a Saguaro cactus, those iconic long green stock shooting skyward. And one of those spiny stocks, like a finger on a hand jutting up right in the middle. Jim did not settle. And you won it, and you won, you won that fight. - One big time. - In 2005, Jim and his lawyers received their payment from the center. About $664,000. Back then, Kiran, one of the center's co-founders, told a Phoenix newspaper, this is a very wealthy California banker, but the jury bought into that good old boy rancher thing. It shows that a bitter little man with a very large bank account can wage war on environmental groups in the courtroom. - It is my personal opinion that they have a religion and it isn't based on science. Religion, essentially, is that there was an Eden at one time and then man came along and messed up what Mother Earth had created in their minds. I presume that they're trying to save the Earth, that man is bad, that people are bad. - This is an idea that lots of people I spoke with for this piece, not just Jim, came back to. That the center and many other groups like them separate humans from the environment in a way that just doesn't make sense. Nearly two decades later, the center's lawsuit still ruffled Jim's feathers, but their run-ins with the Chilton's in Arizona became but a footnote in the center's history. They were far from done. Stay with us. The center's story started as a sort of David and Goliath tale, a ragtag group of hippies taking on the federal government. Here's Robin. - We're looked at outsiders. We're looked at, you know, as in their minds, you know, environmental terrorists when here we are, just trying to protect public lands. - Today, the center has grown up and that David and Goliath story is, in a sense, turned on his head. The center is, by their own measure, the most prolific endangered species act litigator in the country. That value of saving a native species is what was the deepest, most universal values of demanding. You know, the very first NOAA story having to save all the species. That's a Sumerian tale, 1500 years older than the Old Testament. And you find stories like that all around the world. - Today, by their own assessment, they've increased protections on more than 600 million acres of habitat through their more than 1400 lawsuits. - More than any other environmental group in U.S. history. - That metric, Peter says, isn't the group's goal, but they do see it as a badge of honor, in part because of their astounding success rate. He says by their own calculations, they've won or settled 87% of their cases. - To name but some of their efforts, they used frogs, snakes, condors, and cacti to fight sprawl in highways. The Southwestern Willow Flycatcher targeted cattle grazing, and a California Natcatcher was a way to curb relentless suburban growth. Logger had sea turtles shut down California fisheries. Monk seals provided a way to target the Hawaiian lobster industry. They challenged de-listing attempts and stopped wolf and grizzly hunts. They've sought protection for innumerable tiny creatures, too. Milk vetch and butterflies and bats and earthworms and burying beetles. Their petitions are responsible by Peter's estimations for more than a third of the total number of species protected by the ESA. - By focusing on different species that represent different niches in the ecosystem, one can more comprehensively help enact ecosystem-level protection through a building block strategy of if you protect the Southwestern Willow Flycatcher and the yellow-billed cuckoo, then you're helping protect riparian ecosystems. - Back in their early days of fighting for the Mexican-spotted owl, a local newspaper reported the co-founders were making about $1,000 a month, working tirelessly in what they described as living like penniless monks. Fast forward a few decades and the group had revenue of more than $36 million in 2021. Their co-founders Kiran, Peter, and Robin e-turn more than a quarter million dollars a year, according to their latest tax filings. Far from penniless monk status. By just about every metric, they've gone from outsiders to part of the endangered species establishment. They have nearly 200 staff members and it's not just lawyers. They're scientists and PR professionals. The rise of the center tracks nearly directly with the rise of the controversy around the ESA. Here's Kiran. - People have often described the center as, you know, uncompromising. It's a nice slogan. But in reality, it's not true at all. Like, we do lots and lots of compromises and legal settlements. So where the victories have come through legal settlements, which are compromised was right. But the difference is we don't start out from a point of weakness and hope to negotiate against the powerful force. We change the power balance. - They've also become PR masterminds. They've testified in front of Congress, put ads in Times Square, and gotten into hundreds of stories in the New York Times. I didn't think much of it at the time, but I do remember my first encounter with the center back when I was in college in Kansas. They were handing out and endangered species-themed condoms on campus. They were doing it all over the country. The idea was to raise awareness of the link between human population growth and species decline. They had illustrations of animals and fun slogans on the wrappers, like when you're feeling tender, think about the hellbender. I've talked with loads of critics of the center. Lots more than you'll actually hear on the show. To many folks, they stand for this much larger issue. The way litigation clogs the works of conservation. Then much of the pushback on their approach comes down to a handful of fairly specific details. For example, there's an obscure federal law that enables the center and groups like them to get paid their attorney's fees back by the government when they win. And that, those critics say, make litigation a money-making scheme. Also, they allege the shotgun blasts of lawsuits can destroy agency morale, waste money on lawsuits instead of conservation, and make it impossible to get urgent work done on the ground. I want to be clear. Not every endangered species-act litigator is a former Earth-firster who found more effective sabotage in the legal system. But the center, to me, represents this weird state of the ESA today. And as I think about them, I keep coming back to Jim Chilton's story. I actually talked with his wife Sue, too. Just a minute here, trying to adjust the hearing aid. She told me about this time, back in '98, when the Sonora Chubb drama was just starting to cause them some heartburn, when she first got fed up with what the group is all about. They were suing over the pygmy owls, attack its origin as pygmy owl to be specific. The owl had been recorded near their house, and the center had sued, potentially stopping or delaying all kinds of stuff, even the building of a high school. Anyway, I was maximally annoyed. There was a hearing over the owl, and the secretary of the interior was going to be there. Sue had been teaching English as a second language at a local school, and she'd found that poems and songs helped students pick up the language more than anything else. So she'd become a bit of a poet, and she did what she knew best. She put pen to paper. Here's how it goes. Folks of labor shaped the state, brought forth water, filled your plate. It starts with this sort of idyllic picture of cowboys and settlers. And then she writes, the center enters the scene. Coped in righteous shade of green, thieves of culture, thieves of land, full of venom, scorn for man. Just anything you hope to do, we have our plan. It's Sue, Sue, Sue. They sue the government that you, for every snail and flea, citing technical infractions or agency inactions. They're taxing you and me. The poem goes on, but you get the idea. I was really curious how Sue looks back at the drama now. In the years since 1998, you've obviously had your own run-ins with them. And then in the decades since that, you know, they're still around and bigger than ever. Reading this now, does it still ring true to you? Do you feel the same way? Yes, yes. Your question is quite admirable. This happens to be a currently well-oven piece of poetry. They are suing the Coronado National Forest for harm to the yellow-billed cuckoo. Now, excuse my diversion, but not the one in the White House, the one supposedly out here. I'm going to pause here for a second to say that Sue and Jim are a total married couple. Jim made almost the exact same joke. I thought all the cuckoos were in Washington, D.C. Anyway, the cuckoo makes for a complicated story. But here's the gist. The Chilton's ranch is on the border, and Sue says cows are crossing up from Mexico to an area where the cuckoo could supposedly live. The center's suing over the cattle, and once again, Sue says. The center has taken pictures of them, which fortunately proves they aren't ours. They're not smart enough to know that their pictures are the proof that it isn't us. Isn't that wild story? So that makes this poem, once again, current news. This is center co-founder Robin Silver. To say that lawsuits get in a way of the progress, you know, that's just flat out bullshit. And, you know, who wins these lawsuits? Not the people that are feeding reporters like you. They're, you know, their wheel barrels full of bullshit. It's us. I talked with all three co-founders about some of the pushback they've gotten. Here's Peter. You've gotten a lot of people who don't like what you do too. You've heard this stuff for 30 years. What's your response to that? You know, it's just -- it's a bunch of hot air. We're very reasonable people dealing with a very chaotic and unreasonable world. We speak for the -- the trees, and someone needs to. And I mean, have we been right on every issue at every moment in time? Probably not. But as I look back, I think about these criticisms. And the fact is, if these agencies weren't so serially addicted to serving the corporate interests that they're supposed to be regulating, then they wouldn't be in this pickle. As the centers groan, they've taken a national stage. This isn't new. They were even getting that kind of hype a decade ago. Like in 2014, when Chris Hayes aired this segment on his show on MSNBC. When the U.N. General Assembly meets in New York every fall, it brings all kinds of people together. Foreign dignitaries and dictators, protesters, security personnel, and polar bears. On the screen, there's an image of some guy who's doing this. A polar bear costume getting arrested at a protest. There he is, paw cuffed. But there is good news to report tonight. Frostpaw is out on bail, and he'll be here for a worldwide exclusive interview. The camera zooms out to show this hulking, masked figure. All white and furry. The interview starts, and Chris Hayes shakes the polar bear's hand. Or I guess paw, and the mask comes off. And with me now, Frostpaw, the man behind the camera, Peter Galvin, you can reveal yourself, Peter. One of the founding members of the Center for Biological Diversity. Peter's hair is matted back and his face is sweaty from the bulky polar bear mask. There's this dissonance here. There's the farce of the costume. He's talking with Hayes as basically a sweaty, headless polar bear. But then, there's the utter seriousness of what he's saying. Peter dives into the policy and the demands he has for curbing global climate change. Well, we should be looking for specific things. And we don't have that yet. Seeing him and this polar bear costume on this massive cable news show, I think. Since the Center's early days in those tuxedo tops back in the 1990s, so much has changed. Peter Galvin, A.K. Frostpaw, a great pleasure. Thank you. And also, nothing has. Next time on the wide open, a monumental reintroduction sets off a debate about what recovery actually means. If you've ever been at a party and someone walks in and their vibe and their charisma changes everything in the room, that's what it was like the day wolves came back to Yellowstone. It became really sobering and discouraging in the early 2000s to see the endangered species act, along with other laws, Clean Water Act, National Environmental Policy Act, become very politicized. My goal was to get wolves recovered, get them delisted, and have them managed by the states, just like every other animal like elk and deer in the mountains of Blackbird. That was my plan. You know, the road to hell is paid with good intentions. This episode was reported and written by me, Nick Mott. It was produced by Mary Ald with editorial support from Jewel Banville, Lee Banville, and Corn Cates Carney. Our story editor is Lacey Roberts. Jessie Stevenson created art for the season. Our theme music is by Isaac Opatz, arranged and produced by Dylan Rodriguez, featuring Jordan Bush on Petal Steel. Other original music is by Dylan Rodriguez. Jake Birch mixed this episode with help from Alice Soder. Web design and marketing is by Josh Burnham, in fact, checking is by Victoria Traxler. Thanks to those who provided support for the wide open, the Murray and Jan Ritland Fund, the Cinnabar Foundation, Humanities Montana, Montana Public Radio, the Montana Media Lab, and the University of Montana School of Journalism. Special thanks goes to Leah Swartz for the conservation, education, and support. Thank you so much to everybody who's talked with me about this stuff. Way too many folks to name here, and thanks in particular to the people you heard in this episode. Peter Galvin, Robyn Silver, Kieran Suckling, and Jim and Sue Chilton. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts, tell your friends, leave a review, post on social media, help us spread the word. I'm Nick Mott. We'll be back in a week with another episode of The Wide Open. This project was produced in collaboration with the Montana Media Lab at the University of Montana School of Journalism. The lab is a center for audio storytelling and journalism education that elevates perspectives from underserved communities in the West. Learn more at MontanaMediaLab.com. The wide open is also a production of Montana Public Radio. MTPR enriches the mind and spirit, inspires a lifetime of learning and connects communities through access to exceptional programming. More information at mtpr.org. The wide open is supported by the Murray and Jan Ritland Fund, the Cinnabar Foundation, and Humanities Montana.