CHET TCHOZEWSKI. Born 1954.
TRANSCRIPT OF OH 0926 A-B
This interview was recorded on audiotape on May 7, 1998, for the Maria Rogers Oral History Program, at the office of the narrator in Boulder. The interviewer is Dorothy Ciarlo. The interview was transcribed by Dorothy Ciarlo.
NOTE: Interviewer’s questions appear in parentheses. Editorial comments appear in brackets.
ABSTRACT: Chet Tchozewski discusses the development of his environmental and peace activism with respect to the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant. He talks in detail about his involvement with the 1978 protest, how the “Truth Force” resistance on the railroad tracks of Rocky Flats evolved, the reaction of the protest organizers, and long-range perceptions of the efficacy of the protest.
[A].
00:00 (This is an interview with Chet Tchozewski. This is a part of the Carnegie oral history series, and we’re talking on May 7, 1998. The interviewer is Dorothy Ciarlo. Chet, for the purposes of the tape, can you spell your last name?)
Certainly. Yes, I would never expect anyone to guess. It’s T-C-H-O-Z-E-W- S-K-I, it’s pronounced Tchozewski.
(And can you tell me, when and where were you born?)
Sure, I was born on January 25, 1954, in Shelby, Michigan, near the town where my family lived, Montague, Michigan. And incidentally, my name Chet is a nickname, it’s my father’s name actually. My legal name, which I rarely use anymore, is Daryl. I’ve used Chet almost exclusively for 25 years or so.
(Can you tell something about your family, and what your growing-up years were like?)
Sure. As I said, I grew up in western Michigan, town called Montague in a family with seven children. I was the second to the oldest. I had an older sister, all of us born within ten years; I look back on that now, I think my mother—I have a two year old now myself and its about all I can handle! She had seven kids under ten years old. But my mother and father met in high school, in Montague, and raised their family there and lived there until just a couple of years ago. My brothers and sisters, four sisters and two brothers, are scattered mostly across the country now. I’d say it was a pretty typical mid-west family life. Maybe it’s noteworthy that it wasn’t at all politically active.
(What did your father do?)
02:50 He was a painter when I was born, as in painter of buildings, not art. He worked then in a chemical factory, part of Occidental Petroleum. He worked there for I think 25, 30 years. And an interesting connection in that respect is that it was a plant that produced chlorine which is—some people would say an indispensable chemical, I just would point out that it’s incredibly toxic and causes a whole lot of problems in the environment. The plant where he worked is now a Superfund site and has been one of the country’s worst toxic dumping problems. And many of the people he worked with, including my father himself, have suffered all kinds of unexplained health problems, probably some of which are the result of working around such toxic chemicals all during the 50s, 60s, and 70s, into the early ‘80s. So he was a factory worker; my mother was mainly a mother and housewife, obviously. She worked some later when the kids were gone. And then after Hooker Chemical closed down in the mid-80s, my father went to work at a paper mill, another pretty toxic environment, the kind for which parts of the Rust Belt and the Great Lakes states are noted. But my parents are retired now, and living out West.
(Was he aware at the time of the dangers?)
No, I don’t think so, I think very few people were. And those who were had very little public opportunity to discuss their concerns. In the 1950s and ‘60s, of course, I think historically there was very little—apart from the Sierra Club—there was very little organized environmental movement other than the kind of traditional conservation ethic. But concerns about chemical industry were very rare, even with things like Rachel Carson’s book, “Silent Spring,” coming out in the early ‘60s; no one really took it home with them. At least, I don’t remember any kind of concern about the environment or the pollution from Hooker or—Dupont had a plant immediately adjacent to it, doing the same kinds of things. Actually, they produced Freon, which of course later turned out to be one of the main culprits in depleting the ozone layer. That’s shut down as well.
But I don’t remember anything until maybe 1971 or ’72, the first Earth Day. It was celebrated even in our school, which was pretty rare given how little political activism there was.
06:02 (What brought you out here? Where did you go from Michigan?)
After a few years in college—Michigan State in 1974, I had some friends living in Colorado and it seemed like a great place for adventure. Never having traveled much, or been to Colorado, I just loaded up my car and landed in Georgetown, about 75 miles west of Denver, where I spent the next few years learning to ski and enjoying the mountains, hiking, camping, that sort of thing.
(You were in your early 20’s?)
That’s right.
(Were you still in school?)
No, I had quit in my junior year, thinking I’d go back after I saved some money, but I started having so much fun I never—I didn’t make time for it for a long, long time.
And so it was in those early —my early 20’s, in the mid-1970s, 1974 until 1978, I spent a lot of time reading on my own, when I wasn’t in school, having the ability to read what political literature I could find in the local Georgetown library and for the first time getting out of the sort of insulated life I led in western Michigan—meeting interesting people who could connect me with a more progressive political and social community—which while it existed was fairly limited in a small town like Georgetown, there were only I think maybe 7 or 800 people living there. But it was still a fascinating place; lots of travelers coming through, and it provided an opportunity for me to start to look at the bigger picture in the world.
And much of that time I—as I said my main goal was to enjoy skiing and enjoy and mountains. And so I worked in restaurants and got by on very little money. And after a couple of years of that I went to work as a paramedic at the Eisenhower Tunnel, which was under construction at the time, the second bore of the tunnel, the first bore was completed in the early ‘70s, and then they started working on the parallel bore. And just through a series of—I think of it as good luck, I guess, I was offered a job to work there and offered the opportunity to work night shift, which for me at the time being single and young and full of energy was great, because it meant I could spend my days doing what I wanted. And the job also enabled me— since I was simply on call in the event of an accident or something, which there were some—it enabled me to spend a great deal of time at work reading, reading whatever I wanted.
So that’s when I started reading more about environmental issues, particularly nuclear power and later nuclear weapons issues. It was a growing concern in the country at that time because—I think of a couple of things. One is the nuclear power industry was growing very rapidly, and it was also the time of the first oil shock. There was a great deal of concern about oil from the Middle East being embargoed and ultimately running out altogether. Everyone knows that it will, we still know it will, even though we use it at increasing rates. But those two things, concern about energy was definitely on the national agenda, during the Carter administration. He was giving it lots of attention. And there was a growing grass roots movement opposed to nuclear power, which captured my attention.
10:02 (Is that what brought your interest to Rocky Flats?)
I think so. I think it was several things. And again, Dotty, this was 20 years ago now! But I think back, there were several things happening in Colorado that were interesting and attractive to me. One is—nationally, of course, it was the tail end of the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement, the most active parts of those things, which I didn’t participate in because I was too young and not involved in a family which participated in it. And so I felt a little like I had missed something; the ‘60s were pretty dramatic from the point of view of a teenager watching it on television but not being part of it and feeling some regret about that. I was open to the next similar thing to come along. In moving to Colorado in the early ‘70s, I was aware that this state had just turned down the opportunity to host the Olympics, which seemed like a remarkable and very—personally I thought thoughtful and brave thing to do. The next thing I remember is there was an effort to pass a bottle bill in Colorado, to impose a deposit on glass containers, which was also pretty new. In retrospect it was pretty mild; I think it failed—I was involved for the first time—I don’t remember what I did, probably put a bumper sticker on my car or wore a button or something like that. That might have been ’75 or ’76. And about the same time—and this is where I’m not really sure, there may have even been a ballot initiative in the state concerning nuclear power. At the time Fort St. Vrain was the only nuclear power plant in Colorado. It’s now been converted to natural gas by the public service company, actually. It’s not the only reactor in Colorado; in the subsequent years I learned that there was, and maybe still is, a small reactor at the Federal Center in Lakewood, of all places.
But the growing public concern and knowledge about the dangers of radiation and the various ways in which it was being spread in the environment was certainly part of the public debate in the mid’70s.
And then in 1977 in Seabrook, New Hampshire, some 1400 people were arrested protesting a nuclear power plant under construction on the coast of New Hampshire, which captured national attention at a time, as I said, when there was a lot of concern about energy. And that seemed to be a catalytic event to me for the anti-nuclear movement. And for me personally, it really made me long to be involved in something like that. And about the same time there was for the first time ever, really, public discussion; I wouldn’t even say it was debate, but public discussion in the press in Colorado about this large federal facility west of Denver which 5000 people worked at but nobody ever talked about, which was because it was built in the early ‘50s and through all the 1960s it was top-secret, but it was a secret plant, the press tacitly ignored it and until the mid’70s when the press started to ask some questions of public health officials about what went on there and whether it was anything the public should be concerned about in terms of public health.
And it turns out of course indeed it was a very serious threat, and it seems every year we learn more about how much more serious it was than we ever thought before. Particularly after a fire at Rocky Flats in 1969—I don’t want to get too far off of you question—there was a major fire at Rocky Flats in 1969, which at the time was the most expensive industrial fire in the history of the United States. It burned a bunch of plutonium; every estimate for the twenty-five years since has increased the amount of plutonium that was burned, and much of it escaped through air ducts at the plant. That cause a little bit of concern, and a local Boulder scientist who worked at NCAR, Ed Martell, took it upon himself to go out there and just scoop up some soil and test it for plutonium. Indeed, he found plutonium in the soil.
15:05 That was when the Jefferson County Health Department Director Carl Johnson started to take notice and look at what impact might that have on the public health of people living downwind. So 1977 and ’78 that was beginning to be discussed and in that same time period generally, maybe even as early as ’74, Governor Lamm—who was elected of course after the Olympics debate and the successful campaign to turn down the Olympics— was elected governor and Tim Wirth was elected to represent the Second Congressional District. In the wake of Watergate there was a real reformist atmosphere. And they appointed what was called the Lamm-Wirth Task Force, which produced one of the first public documents exploring the dangers of Rocky Flats.
So that sort of set the stage for the first major protest at Rocky Flats which occurred in 1978, organized largely by the American Friends Committee. That's the event we celebrated the 20th anniversary of this last month.
16:20 (Do you recall how you learned of the protest that was to be?)
I remember a couple of things. One is reading a book called "Unacceptable Risk”, which was by a guy named John Berger. It was not about Rocky Flats, it was about radiation and about —at the time the main US agency responsible for radiation was the Atomic Energy Commission, considered to be an acceptable exposure level and what Berger did in this book was point out other experts were saying, really, that exposure level is not healthy. That kind of debate was going on.
And reading things like that made me pay attention to articles about nuclear issues in the local press. So probably it was the Rocky Mountain News or Denver Post that I first read that a group I'd never heard of before that I later worked for, the American Friends Service Committee, announced that they were organizing a protest at Rocky Flats in April 1978. And they probably announced that in January or February in 1978, and that was the first I'd ever heard of such a thing. I simply looked them up in the phone book, called them up and said, “What are you guys all about, and how can I help?” And so during the course of the month or two preceding that, I came down once or twice to Denver from Georgetown where I was living and working, taking a day or two off from skiing to come down and meet these folks and find out what they were planning, and later joined almost as my very first act of political involvement, I volunteered to be part of a civil disobedience action at the tail end of that first protest at Rocky Flats. I went to a two-day training held by the Friends Service Committee at the Unitarian Church in Denver.
(Can you describe how the protest—what happened then?)
Not knowing anything about the internal organizational politics or dynamics of the anti-nuclear movement except for what I’d read in the papers, I quickly realized that the Friends Service Committee was the foundation of this protest in Denver. They had somehow or other seemed to collect a lot of what seemed like reliable information about Rocky Flats and published it in a booklet called "Local Hazard, Global Threat", produced a slide show, did lots of media interviews, and came across as very well-informed, if not expert, and in many cases, provided other experts to talk about the issues. So it was clear that while they were the lead organization, they weren't the only one. There were other individuals, other organizations like the Rocky Flats Action Group, which again I had never heard of, the Mobilization for Survival, a Boulder-based group that seemed more youthful and probably more militant in their organizing approach. By going to this training organized by AFSC I met a couple of hundred individuals who had volunteered the same way I had, half of whom seemed very experienced. They were to my astonishment—I had imagined they would all be fist- shaking students, but they were not, they were largely gray-haired, 70-year old Quakers who had been through the anti-war movement, and the civil rights movement, and now were focusing their efforts on the disarmament movement in particular. The other half were young student activists, and the combination was really energizing, very electric, a lot of passion, a lot of knowledge, a lot of courage, it seemed to me, to take such a dramatic act as being involved in a civil disobedience in a nuclear weapons plant.
20:56 So I really was very impressed with the people I met, with the organizational effort, and it changed my life, really. It caused me, Dotty, to go back to my job and look at my life and think how much I loved skiing and how good a job I had for the kind of life I wanted to live, I was in the Teamsters Union, making good money, I was about 24 years old, very content largely but feeling the absence of real meaning in my life. All at once, meeting these folks in a very short period of time, a total group of strangers seemed to me to represent the kind of meaningful life and had lived a meaningful life, many of them, that I longed for.
And so it was easy enough to go back to work after that first weekend of protest and think, gosh, I don't really want to do this my whole life. And took the opportunity to quit my job and work for almost two years as a volunteer for organizations like the American Friends Service Committee and the Rocky Flats Coalition, the Rocky Flats Truth Force which became a sort of community for me, all at a time when the Rocky Flats controversy was rocketing into public consciousness. And I was at a time and a place in my life where I could become part of that and get a tremendous amount of personal satisfaction, even though it was not popular, generally, with the public at that point. It’s an interesting thing for me now to look back on it. I can say more about this later. In recent weeks, doing press interviews with young reporters who have been around Colorado for, say, only five or ten years, during the period of time when Rocky Flats went from embattled to closed, they treat it as if it were always a foregone conclusion that Rocky Flats would close. But when most of us started trying to get the plant closed —and we were told by virtually every elected official it was impossible, what we were trying to do was hopeless—that’s how much things have changed. But as hopeless as it seemed to me at the time, it was emerging to try, and to try with other good people who had confidence that even if they didn’t succeed, they would contribute to progress.
So I left my job about a month or two later and spent much of the next year traveling around the country going to other nuclear facilities, to Seabrook, NH, I went to Washington, DC, just sort of loaded up my Volkswagen van and took some friends along and we went around working with anti-nuclear groups around the country, spent time in Washington both lobbying and protesting. Complete novice, I had no idea what I was doing except I felt passionately that I had to do what I could and I figured out what to do. I’m sort of glossing over a period of my life that was intensely powerful, and parts of it I have vivid memories of, others, it’s getting more hazy! Later, I decided to move, I still lived in Georgetown technically, but found at community in Boulder that I really liked, so I moved to Boulder later, in 1978, and have been here more or less ever since. I spent a few years in San Francisco doing much the same kind of work.
24:59 But then after a year or two of working mostly as a volunteer I got a staff position at the American Friends Service Committee and later helped to form the Rocky Mountain Peace Center in Boulder and worked for other environmental groups like Eco-cycle and later, for Greenpeace in San Francisco. So, since that somewhat risky decision to leave my job, I've managed to make a living doing what I think of as progressive social change work.
25:36 (It sounds like your initial strong interest or passion came you’re your concern with respect to environmental issues—?)
I guess so, although I would say that now it’s probably—my concern about the environment is on equal parts my concern about nuclear war and war in general, about peace issues. I’ve gone back and forth, probably half the people who know me would say they associate me more with the peace movement than with the environmental movement, and vice versa, which is exactly how I feel and where I prefer to be. It’s enabled me to work more effectively with groups that are exclusively one or the other. I think of them as intertwined in very complicated and significant ways.
26:33 (Can you describe that first 1978 protest at Rocky Flats, what was it like for you, in terms of a participant?)
I had driven past Rocky Flats maybe a dozen times going to Boulder, but there was nothing to see, there still isn’t much to see, and that was no accident. But having been to a couple of meetings and trainings in Denver was my only formal exposure to people who had taken sides in the issue. So it was in late April of 1978 in which the Friends Service Committee had announced they were holding this protest, and they had gotten the necessary permits from the Department of Energy, the State Patrol, whatever was necessary. They didn't know exactly how many people to expect, but in the past there had never been more than a few hundred people at any protest at Rocky Flats, and this time they knew it would be thousands.
It turned out to be about 6000 people who came. I think that day actually began at a smaller rally at the Federal building in downtown Denver, in order to do something in a more visible public place that would allow people who weren't able to go out to Rocky Flats, because it was a more serious commitment. Even in one day, you had to drive out there, some people couldn’t do that, others said it was for health reasons, especially pregnant women and nursing mothers shouldn't go near the plant. And so they held the protest in downtown Denver at the Federal Building so that people who wanted to could participate there.
And I went to that, too, I was committed for the whole weekend, which at the time seemed like a big thing, later, it was just the first of a much bigger commitment. Hearing speakers, musicians, but mainly speakers, people whose political writing I'd read, they were really impressive to me. And later that same day, the much larger rally happened at the West Gate of Rocky Flats, the road there which had been closed down, and the police were reluctantly, hostile-ly helping keep traffic moving. But the organizers had clearly— had open communication with what would have been seen as their opponents in this, the Department of Energy had a strong visible security force of their own, intimidating people, really, which I have mixed feelings about. They certainly have justification to guard the place, it’s a dangerous place, but they were guarding it from people who didn't mean it any harm in that way. So those were some of the more memorable parts of it. The speakers, people like Helen Caldicott, Daniel Ellsberg, Sidney Lens, folks who were at the forefront of the national and international debate about nuclear weapons and nuclear power and were eloquent spokespersons at that event. So I knew only a few people there, none of my friends from Georgetown wanted to take a day off skiing to go, which was fine. It was clear to me that they had other priorities in their life.
30:09 But the people I'd met who had committed to be part of the civil disobedience were really people who I wanted to get to know better. I'd met them, spent a few hours with them a week earlier, and met them again that day. We were formed into what was called affinity groups, small groups that could be mutually supportive and help make large group decisions together during the course of the protest. At the end of the maybe three or four hour legal protest on the west gate road, a smaller group of about 250 out of the 6000 people split off from the group with plenty of awareness —and the plant security people were informed of this, too, and had apparently tacitly agreed to allow this group of 250 people to leave the larger group and block the railroad tracks with their bodies, just sit on the railroad tracks near this protest for a period of like twelve hours, or twenty-four hours.
31:23 (Could you explain what the symbolism of the railroad tracks was?)
I think it symbolized one of the three ways things came and went from Rocky Flats, the two access roads, the east and west access roads where people in their cars and trucks with nuclear materials came and went. Both of the roads were more indispensable; they were used—especially with one west gate road shut down that day, Saturday, when there was very little going on at the plant anyway. It probably wasn't all that inconvenient to them, but railroad tracks were the place where we think that the actual pits, the detonators for nuclear weapons may have been shipped out in railroad cars to head to the Pantex plant in Amarillo, Texas, where they were assembled into nuclear warheads.
So it was symbolic, but it was even a little more than symbolic, and this became central to the debate that followed about leaving the railroad tracks after the agreed-upon symbolic time period. It was symbolic as long as we were there on a weekend, when there were no trains coming or going anyway because it wasn't regularly done. But the best guess at the time was that there were three times each week when trains would come and go from the plant, probably bringing in plutonium maybe from the Hanford reactors in Washington state, where it was processed at Rocky Flats, bringing out waste that might head to the Idaho National Engineering Labs near Boise, Idaho, and the plutonium pits, the triggers that were the final product of Rocky Flats that went to Texas. It wasn't clear; it was secret, whether what material moved in what way and when, and so forth. But it seemed as likely as anything that blocking the railroad tracks at Rocky Flats would actually prevent the further escalation of the arms race by enabling the US to continue to build and deploy more nuclear weapons at a time when we had tens of thousands of them already.
33:44 So all of that was stuff that I learned in my first 12 hours there from the people like Daniel Ellsberg, who was not just another militant student or pacifist nun, it was someone who had come up through the Pentagon infrastructure and knew personally better than I can ever know, exactly what the nuclear arms race was propelled by. And so he and others who had certain moral gravity— there was a Catholic nun, several, and a Mennonite minister—who were part of this group of 250 who went out to block the railroad tracks.
And as soon as that happened, there was a small enough community, especially with the affinity groups, to have these kind of intensely political and moral discussions at an exhilarating time. It was complicated by the fact that late that day it started to rain, it actually was pretty cold, and not too many people were very well prepared for that. That was the part I was better prepared for, maybe, than the political part. I was young and strong and healthy, I was used to being outdoors, it was no problem to me and so that seemed like a useful thing for me to contribute, to try and help people cope with it. Many of them left, even before dark that night, because it was clear that it would have been one thing to spend the night on the railroad tracks if it were good weather, but in bad weather— it was a pretty serious rainstorm, sleet and later that week, it actually became a raging blizzard which is a significant factor in re-discussing it with folks at this reunion last weekend, it really was something. It created a political opportunity that no one could have planned.
35:51 To just step back, and quickly come back to this point, after that night there was a smaller group still of 35 people who had been having these discussions about the symbolism versus a direct impact on the plant. Everyone was grateful that the organizers had created the opportunity for the symbolic blockade of the railroad tracks, but others were saying, we can do more, and if we leave, we're giving our consent to the continuation of the arms race, whereas if we stay, no matter what the risk, primarily being arrested and jailed—and they told us, actually, Dotty, in the briefing from some sympathetic lawyers at this training, that no one had ever done this before, they didn't really know what we'd be charged with, but that the charges from their professional point of view could range from trespassing to treason. I took that very seriously because it hadn't happened. And they pointed out how the experience at the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant in New Hampshire was different in that it wasn't a nuclear weapons plant. While it was a bold act, it wasn't stepping on national security, and [it was] that national security exemption that had kept Rocky Flats insulated from environmental and other laws for decades could be used to prosecute people who simply sat on the railroad tracks, and charge them with treason.
37:50 Which was a frightening thought. But once again, it helped to have the experience of people who had been through similar situations, and there are very few similar situations, but people who'd engaged in civil disobedience during the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, knew the dynamics, they knew the fears, they knew the threats, and they knew the probable outcome was not as great as it could be, on the one hand. On the other hand, again, people like Ellsberg who'd faced treason charges and been acquitted and in many people's minds became a national hero as a result of his courage in releasing the Pentagon Papers, at a point six or eight years earlier, he stood trial facing 115 years in prison. So it wasn't like— I had to count on the experience of my co-protesters and it was that group of people who said, even if they do charge us with treason, it would contribute, we hope, to the de-escalation of the arms race by raising issues that aren't being discussed now.
38:56 So at any rate, we decided to stay. And I say we because I joined the smaller group of 35 and stayed over the first Saturday night when most people left. And during the day on that Sunday, debate raged between— and passions raged—between those who had planned and organized and got permission from the DOE for the symbolic blockade felt betrayed by this group, when we said, I'm sorry but we can't leave. And that, I've known all along, but re-discovered recently, is still a very painful memory for people on both sides. It was very healing recently to have people come back together who hadn't spoken in twenty years and talk about it.
39: 49 (This was re-hashed in the recent re-union?)
Absolutely. It still is, Dotty, that was two weeks ago and I have to say that I've been talking to people almost every day since from all over the country who are saying, “I never knew, or I didn't realize how strong my feelings were.”
People want to continue, and are processing, there's an e-mail discussion going on every day among people we brought back together. And several key people, in particular Judy Danielson who was one of the main organizers, who worked for the American Friends Service Committee at the time, and who I later worked with and have a great deal of respect for. I haven't seen in quite a while, she and Daniel Ellsberg, who I think I've described his role in this smaller group, haven't spoken since then. And there was a good bit of pain and even bitterness.
40:46 But it’s amazing the changes— in the context of today's world, with Rocky Flats shut down, the nuclear arms race seemingly abated a bit, and looking back on twenty years of history of protests, it’s a terrific case study in how citizen action can actually contribute to social change. It’s so profound that as I said earlier, reporters now treat it like it was always a foregone conclusion. But Judy and Dan spent time together last weekend, rehashing things, and the tears just flowed. People still, like I said, on the phone are talking about getting back together again soon.
But the context of this today, Dotty, is that we succeeded to a large extent. Now, the protest movement isn't the only contributing factor. In fact, there are people you’ve probably talked to or some who you yet will, who will say that's absolutely wrong, that it was quite the reverse, that Rocky Flats helped end the arms race by forcing the Soviet Union into bankruptcy. And they have a case to make. But so do we, and I think its a very, very good one. And at some point maybe we'll bring together those various points of view and lay it out.
But the point I’m trying to make here is that among the protesters, these are people who are allies, who agree that Rocky Flats should be closed but have a difference of opinion about how that would be accomplished twenty years back.
42:30 (Can you say just a little bit about what it meant to each of the groups with respect to the symbolic versus—?)
Right. Well, the AFSC —the American Friends Service Committee— which Judy Danielson worked for and another person, who was key in all of this and also very significant to me in my learning about these issues and about organizing, Pam Solo—Judy and Pam were the principal organizers of that protest and they, I think, felt that there were two primary impacts, that the civil disobedience was symbolic because, while it was symbolic, it seemed really militant and very radical at the time because there had never been a major protest at Rocky Flats. They were taking a more conventional approach to— with a combination of lobbying lawmakers, helping get funding for scientific studies in health effects, organizing neighborhoods, even organizing workers. And they felt, quite simply, that the civil disobedience, if it were any more than symbolic, would alienate the necessary elements in the middle class that it would take to change things. It was a strategic difference of opinion.
43:56 And looking back now—this is one of the interesting things is— people have changed sides. People who thought that it would set the movement back by alienating the middle class were right, it did, and at the same time it helped mobilize an entirely different group of people who were even more militant. And the combined effect, I believe, and I think many people have to agree now, helped make Rocky Flats a national issue, and I believe brought earlier closure to the debate. Only 11 years later was when the FBI raided the plant, and the Justice Department and EPA decided that Rocky Flats would be held accountable for its environmental violations. That wouldn't have happened so soon if it hadn't been for the protests growing more militant so quickly, I believe.
45:06 In this rehashing a couple of weeks ago, people who for years believed that it was a setback, now believe otherwise. And vice versa, there are some that go both ways. People who protested on the railroad tracks now think that they were naive, arrogant young protesters and that it might have—certainly the personal relationships that were damaged are regrettable to them. And the political debate, of course, will never be entirely settled.
45:37 But I would say that was the essence of it, that the more moderate and more established organizations were concerned about that political impact on the campaign, and they were concerned personally. And the other possibility was that protesters could have been shot by the guards, and that also seemed like, on the one hand, as absurd as being charged with treason, on the other hand, they were walking around with big rifles poking them. I remember them walking right outside my tent, using the rifle to open the tent door and see who's in there. That was really terrifying for someone who's never been around guns.
46:30 (That required restraint on the part of the protesters?)
Absolutely. And that's where the non-violence training was critical. It was very well thought out and we were told to expect that. I had never been in a position like that, but those who'd been through the civil rights movement in the South, or the anti-war movement in the '60s knew that the police were likely to behave that way. And at Rocky Flats it was unique in the sense that it was an almost unaccountable police force. We were told it was the third biggest police force in the state, just guarding that one plant, and they were not — At that point, I had little— [first side of audio tape ends here]
47:08 [End of Tape A.]
[B].
00:00 [Beginning of second side of audio tape cut off]—police officers to know they don't smile, don't communicate, they won't answer questions, they won't look you in the eye.
(Were they the security force that were employees of Rocky Flats?)
Yes. You know, Rocky Flats is run for the Department of Energy by contractors. At the time the main contractor at the plant was Rockwell International. I don't really recall, Dotty, whether there was a sub-contractor that was responsible for security. I don't think there was, I think Rockwell had their own version. In more recent years, the primary contractors have changed from Rockwell, which walked away from the plant when they were threatened with criminal indictments; they paid an 18 million dollar fine and walked away a week later. Then a company called EG&G came in and ran the plant for a few years; now its run by a consortium called Kaiser-Hill, and they—since Rockwell left and maybe somewhat before —have hired sub- contractors. The main sub-contractor for security has been Wackenhut, a security service that does security and protection stuff all around the country, probably all around the world, and at other nuclear facilities, basically a private security guard agency, the kind you might see in a 7- Eleven or something like that. But these folks hopefully are better trained, certainly they're better armed because the threat of— the big threat they have to be concerned about there is that terrorists, somebody with unsavory goals, would get into Rocky Flats and get out with some plutonium and make themselves a nuclear weapon. So that's their moral mission, is to protect that plutonium from the enemy. And for all they knew, we were the enemy. And even if we weren't foreign terrorists, we certainly were unloyal, unpatriotic traitors, maybe.
02:15 (I believe that the civil disobedience lasted for quite a length of time?)
Well, it did. That's why I said earlier that the group that started it inspired an even more militant generation of activists who then— without going into all the details which is really significant for someone wanting to understand the history of Rocky Flats— but in the subsequent days and weeks and months, the protesters were arrested, removed, put in jail, and went back again and were replaced by new people inspired by the actions of those who'd been removed. Some of it happened just completely spontaneously, some of it later was better organized by people who had said, if you're arrested I'll come out in your place.
What started as a symbolic 12-hour blockade later became an almost constant 12-month occupation of the railroad tracks, that led to hundreds of arrests, dozens of trials, years of jail-time, millions of dollars in fines. And where every time a train would come, the police would be forced to arrest the people on the railroad tracks, they would be taken away, sometimes released with a ticket, sometimes put in jail, and some of them would go back repeatedly, other times new people would be recruited to replace them. And that's when I got involved in organizing for that kind of continuous presence at the plant, blocking the railroad tracks. It contributed I think over- all to awareness about Rocky Flats that could never have been achieved in any other way. Rocky Flats was from that day on in the paper every day. And sometimes on the front pages everyday for weeks at a time. The trials of the protesters brought in experts from around the world to discuss what went on at Rocky Flats, the health risks which were debated by opposing experts, but at least we felt like it was being debated. And we knew ultimately Congress would have to decide. There was focus on lobbying in Congress, working nationally with other anti-nuclear groups.
04:54 At any rate, it became a mass movement in a very short period of time, largely because of this vanguard of militant protesters. No one knows for sure how it would have turned out otherwise, it could have happened just the same or maybe better, but it happened how it happened, and I believe it led to the closing of the plant in a comparatively short time.
As I said, I worked full time on Rocky Flats from 1978 until about 1985, and all of that time I had no expectation that the plant would ever close. It was growing that entire time, it was building new bombs, the neutron bomb, the new generation of nuclear weapons, the Pershing and Cruise missiles, Reagan was in office, the budget was increasing, they were hiring people. Despite what seemed like the strength of our movement, we were losing ground, and that didn't dampen things. It did for some people, but for many of us, it meant nothing, it meant that we just had to try harder.
And then as I said, by 1979 [later corrected to 1989] to the astonishment of even those of us who were glad to see it happen, to the greater astonishment of those who were not glad to see it happen, one day in June of 1979 [corrected to 1989] the FBI pulled into the plant with dozens of FBI agents and stopped production in place, told the people working with plutonium to leave the room and not come back—it turned out they didn't, that plutonium stayed in exactly that same place for more than a year in some cases. They seized truckloads of documents; much of the debate at the time was around the illegal operation of an incinerator in which they were burning mixed toxic wastes that was unlicensed. I can go through what little I know of the litany of environmental pollution and violations of laws governing toxic waste primarily, and some radioactive waste, still not really touching on the whole issue of, are nuclear weapons necessary or good, or is radiation good. It was more around enforcing toxics laws that had been passed in the early '70's.
07:37 It was another part of the strategy which most of us hadn't focused on, but I believe it was a side-effect created by this growing climate of disapproval of Rocky Flats that emboldened some federal agencies to say, “Hey, we can enforce the law here,” and later say, “We have to enforce the law here,” and of course it led to a grand jury and so forth. It wasn't how I would have predicted it to come out, it wasn't even how I wanted it to come out, I wanted the US to say, “Nuclear weapons are evil and we are going to get rid of them.” But what they said was, “We're making a mess of things building our nuclear weapons, let's try and do it cleaner.” And so, it was very mixed emotions, but it led to the permanent closing of the plant in 1991.
08:36 (Going back to the different particular protests, I think there was a very large one in 1983, the Encirclement. Were you a part of the planning for that?)
Yes, I was. In 1978 and '79, I worked mostly as volunteer with Rocky Flats Truth Force, that was the name taken by this group of 35 people who split off from the larger protest.
(And they were committed to continuing civil disobedience?)
That's right. And Truth Force, of course, is taken from the Gandhian term, Satyagraha, which means literally clinging to the truth, in civil disobedience, and many of the people involved were intimately familiar with the Gandhian tactic of civil disobedience and non-violence, and picked that name. That group then became synonymous with civil disobedience at Rocky Flats, and attracted more support than anyone ever imagined, material support in the first weeks when the rain and snow made life really difficult. It had the combined effect of discouraging some people and inspiring others, and inspiring many people to support those who stayed, even though they couldn't, they brought food and clothing and tents and mounds of material aid that came from the Boulder and Denver community, much of it from churches.
Which is another interesting side effect of all this, let me mention briefly, and then we can come back to it if you wish. Later on, in the course of these protests, I did personally get to know two of the security people in particular, Sam Thomas who was the head of security at the time, and one of his assistants, Sonny Cruse, both of whom are known to the guards. I was out there two weeks ago, I asked them, and many of them know Sonny, he was younger and he’s apparently now got a private security agency in Missouri, I was told. He and I met many times over the subsequent years planning in a very amiable way how to handle peacefully the protests. But anyway—and Sam retired shortly after this, he was older. But the reason I thought of it is, I'm told, I don't remember all this exactly, I’m told and remember from years ago, people talking about Sam's moral dilemma. He apparently was a Catholic, was a member of the St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic church in Boulder, and that church was incredibly supportive of the Truth Force protesters, and created quite a dilemma for Sam. He quit the church and left that congregation as a result, I'm told. I never talked to him about this.
(Do you know if he’s still alive?)
I don't. But it would be interesting to find out. He was there another few years. In fact, at the time in the late '70s and early '80s, there was so much protest beginning to happen in nuclear facilities including the 9 or 10 or 12 nuclear weapons facilities around the country. He was the most experienced with handling protesters, so he was always flying around the country to different sites where there were going to be protests helping them and advising them. And we used to joke, we should go together, and I could train the protesters and he could train the guards and everything would go just fine! So he retired, I think, in the early '80s and I don't really know where he is.
12:16 But part of the goal and part of the effect of the protests was to create moral dilemmas for people. And there are many stories, if you explore this long enough, you will hear and find the protester whose husband worked at the plant, and things of that sort. And a lot of people, churches with conflicts or dilemmas within all kinds of church congregations. Within a year or two of that first protest, the Catholic Archbishop called for Rocky Flats to be closed. And there's what, 50,000 Catholics in Colorado, something like that, and many of them work at the plant. I have a relative now, my wife's cousin, who has worked at the plant for 30 years, and I see him several times a year and we have a very amiable relationship. We don't talk about —I’m sure we each know what our respective relationships to the plant have been.
At any rate, let’s see, what was the question?
(I had asked about the Encirclement, but it sounds like you maintained—you had a deep involvement over a period of years—)
I did become deeply involved in 1978 in helping to organize support for the on-going occupation of the railroad tracks. I have to say, it’s my view, Dotty, that I was and am probably one of the more moderate militants, and helped to try to bring a human face and do better public relations work on behalf of the civil disobedience protesters, building alliances and bridges with the other movement groups later on.
14:12 So in 1979 then I worked for the Rocky Flats Truth Force as part of a coalition to organize another legal rally on the anniversary of the first one, to which 15,000 people came in April of1979. One of the contributing factors in all of that is that it happened that rally, while the movement was building through the course of the year because of the trials and occupation as I've described it earlier, I was working with the AFSC as well. They had an increasing amount of staff devoted to Rocky Flats, and were still disapproving of this other group but were willing to work together because they had the same goals; it was a different strategic approach. But they—I think also saw—first of all, there was nothing they could do to prevent it, and second of all, they might as well try and moderate it and make it have a more beneficial effect. And that was part of my role, I think, was to build bridges.
The demonstration in 1979, then, was more than twice as big as the previous year, partly because of the overwhelming public attention to Rocky Flats, finally. And partly because of two other things, I think. One was the meltdown of the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in March of 1979, which really was a pivotal event in turning American public opinion against nuclear power. They didn't then and still don't now really understand or differentiate nuclear power and nuclear weapons, but they knew that was a serious accident, and it was nearly catastrophic, and there was just nobody denying it. And so within 30 days, we had already been planning this demonstration, there was a lot of public anger about that, even in Colorado. The one other effect, it may be comparatively minor, really, but it was still potent, was the release that spring of a movie called "The China Syndrome", which maybe you remember; it was about a nuclear accident. The phrase ‘China syndrome’ comes from the sort of theory that a nuclear ‘reactor’ could go critical, in other words, become so hot that it would melt through its containment vessel down into the earth and just burn its way down until it hit ground water. The China syndrome, the idea was it would go all the way through the earth and come out in China, this ball of molten plutonium or uranium. But in truth the kind of accident that would happen if there was a meltdown that burned through the reactor core, it would go down until it hit ground water, then it would explode into radioactive steam. And that was discussed in great detail vividly and dramatically in this Hollywood movie that was one of the best pictures of that year seen by hundreds of thousands of people.
17:19 So it all kind of converged to mobilize 15,000 people. The other factor, I have to admit, is that we at that point had enough public support to attract more and more celebrities to events as speakers and performers, rock musicians and that sort of thing. That year, I think, Jackson Brown and Bonnie Raitt played and they were very big, popular musicians at the time. I have to admit that probably a third of the crowd came just to hear them. It was a free concert. And it had become less risky to protest at Rocky Flats because everybody was doing it, and so the spring of 1979 really kind of marked a new era where awareness was heightened. But then it just stayed there for the next several years. It was almost routine— In 1980 I got a staff position with the American Friends Service Committee, and worked there until 1973 [correction: 1983], and each year, each spring, sometimes in the fall we would do another major rally and attract, and in 1980 I think there was another rally with 15,000 people, on the north side of the Rocky Flats plant.
I think it was that same year, there was also really the first and only— certainly the largest—pro-nuclear rally, organized by the workers, you'll hear some about that if you talk to people who were around then. I was there; it was quite antithetical to the protest. It was a celebration of American patriotism with lots of flags and national anthem and Bruce Randolph. But it didn't escape me that these were some very self-interested people. They weren't just patriots, this was where their pay check came from, and I don't fault them for that, but I would guess not more than a very small fraction of them would have gone to such an event if they didn't rely on it for their personal income, in contrast with the protesters who were not doing it for selfish reasons. At any rate, I don't mean to condemn them, they had every right to and I thought they did a good job of it, but it was sort of pathetic to me. And maybe that's when they began to see the writing on the wall. I’m sure it hurt very bad, part of what your reconstructing this history is about, is that there's been a shift from the workers’ feeling during the ‘50s, '60s and ‘70s, like they were the righteous patriots, saving the world from Communism. And then being challenged by some very misguided and maybe even evil protesters, to in a very short time having the moral questions, having their morality, their morals, their ethics, challenged publicly. They felt very embattled, very attacked, and they were. But not for malicious reasons, because it was a debate that needed to happen, and they were bound to feel attacked, and I'm sure some of them felt defenseless, because in my opinion they were in an indefensible moral position to build weapons of mass destruction. And they felt that and they tried to fight back by having these rallies.
21:13 Incidentally, this is where my memory starts to fade, during that time several of us were part of what was called almost ridiculously, the Pro- and Anti-Nuclear Coalition. We met, a group of maybe a dozen of us, six workers and six protesters, for maybe a year or two, we'd meet every couple of months, and we'd try to come up with things we agreed on, just to show there was some human connection. But it was almost ridiculous, to call ourselves the Pro- and Anti- Nuclear Coalition, what we could agree on maybe was baseball, but we certainly didn't agree about nuclear issues. But it was just one of the many forums and attempts— a guy named Gary Thompson, I think—at some point I probably should write some of this down, not for any other purpose than to give credit where its due. But some of the workers really did want to have constructive dialogue.
In l981, then, there was another demonstration. It was a time when Reagan had been elected, it was a very confusing direction, the peace and environment movements were both growing very strong, in part reaction to Reagan, with James Watt as Secretary of Interior, Alexander Hague as Secretary of State, really mobilized people in the peace movement and environmental movement maybe more than ever since. That political debate raged during the early '80s when the peace and nuclear freeze movement probably was as strong as it every was, so much so that in 1992 [correction: 1982] we decided not to do a big rally again at Rocky Flats, we’d done them 4 years in a row, I think. And there was a major demonstration in New York that year around the UN Second Special Session on Disarmament. It was a global focus on nuclear weapons issues, and many of us organized busloads of people to go there.
(That was in 1982?)
That’s right. In June of 1982. A million people showed up for that protest in Central Park in New York at the UN and at Central Park. It was the biggest political rally ever in this country, in the face of Reagan's belligerence and the Soviet's intransigence. I'm not an apologist for that period of Soviet history either. But then, [break in tape] Breshnev in the Soviet Union, hawks in the White House, seemed like they were leading us all towards nuclear war, it seemed like a real possibility. Civil defense planning was escalated, people were really getting afraid.
So the other thing that happened in 1982 was that because —I don’t know if it’s because of it, but we weren't doing a major spring rally at Rocky Flats, many people were headed to New York. But John Denver said he wanted to do something, partly again because of this growing belligerence between the super-powers. John Denver of course was a major superstar and we got together with him, he took advantage of the organizing experience of many of us, and used his connections to get other musicians like Jimmy Buffet and Judy Collins to come, people with Colorado connections, and John Denver was such a diplomat, he called the mayor and the governor, and said, we want to do this at the state Capitol, is that OK, and they were like, oh that's wonderful, John! It was the other end of the spectrum, really. John didn't want it to be a protest, it was an evening for peace, basically a free concert, more than any of the others, because there was very little political rhetoric, it was just singing peace songs. And 40,000 people came to that. It was a perfect evening in downtown Denver in June of 1982. Many people wouldn't exactly count that as a protest against Rocky Flats, but that's where all of the protesters were, were working on that.
25:32 Anyway, to bring it up to your question about the Rocky Flats Encirclement. That was in October of 1983, one of the last major protests there, and again it was an attempt to be creative and not just be yet another protest, because at that point, after five years of virtually constant protests, along with many other things, as elements of the campaign, people were getting bored with it. So we re-visited an old idea, of what would it take to just join hands around the plant, and the Rocky Flats Encirclement was the result. That year, I think, there were probably nearly 20,000 people, maybe 20,000 people. Estimates vary always, of course. I try to be honest about it. I don’t think there’s any advantage to exaggerate one way or another. But we didn't entirely encircle the plant because it was hard to get 20,000 people to stand evenly spaced for 20 miles, the plant perimeter is about 20 miles, four miles on a side, and we estimated that would take about 20,000 people. I think we had enough people, I think we just didn't have them all in the right position at the same time. But that was I think viewed by the public as a really creative response, a more moderate and appropriate thing to do at a time when the workers, while they were getting more support and also being pushed to work, they were building new buildings, huge amount of money, hundreds of millions of dollars into upgrading facilities at Rocky Flats for all these new bombs they wanted to build, workers were being pushed to produce more at the same time they were feeling really squeezed by growing public opposition.
27:22 So the Encirclement was really intended to keep the pressure on, but to be gentler about it and to include more people who don't want to just come and hear more fiery rhetoric from political speakers. There were no speakers, no music, it was just a symbolic— [Points to picture on the wall of people standing around Rocky Flats]—this picture is of the Encirclement, it was just symbolic and it was really, I think, very powerful and I still meet people who've never done anything before or since at Rocky Flats and they did that. I met a guy at McGuckins the other day, I have this T-shirt that we made last month for this reunion, and it was about the anniversary of the Rocky Flats protests, and this guy at McGuckins just about broke down in tears, thanking me. He said, “I never was able to go, I've been working at McGuckins for 19 years, and those things always happened on a Saturday when I had to work,” and he said, "But thank you." And I said to him, “What I love about Boulder, there's not many places in the world where you can go into a hardware store and have somebody say that to you.” For better or worse, just that he was aware of it and appreciative.
Anyway, that brings us up to 1983. After the Encirclement I left the American Friends Service Committee to help to start the Rocky Mountain Peace Center, now the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center. Actually, the first six months we called it the Boulder Peace Center, but changed that. Which is still around today, and is the center of much of the social change organizing in Colorado. I worked there just part-time for the next six years or so, until I went to San Francisco to be Regional Director for Greenpeace, and I made that move because it seemed like it was a way of taking advantage of my skills and interests. The arms race was still raging, although it was about to change dramatically, I couldn't have known that. The two things that changed most dramatically, the month that I moved from Boulder to San Francisco—and I never really expected to be gone from Boulder, I loved Boulder and still do, and I didn't really want to leave. But it was a great job for me at that time, at a time when Greenpeace as an organization was growing dramatically and opportunity to influence things globally was significant. So I jumped at the chance and left, and did come back a few years later. But the month that I left, just days after the FBI raided the plant and it was closed down, my head was spinning from it, I couldn’t imagine what was going on. But it seemed like it was better than nothing at all, and also working for Greenpeace enabled me to have enough resources that I could hire someone else to work on Rocky Flats and did that. And a Greenpeace organizer then worked on Rocky Flats for five years. At that point, I was less involved, though many more people through the American Friends Service Committee and the Rocky Mountain Peace Center and Greenpeace and dozens of other groups, some of whom had paid staff for periods of years or decades. This history isn't about only the Rocky Flats protest campaign, but if it were I would have to trace the history of who did what when, more than I am, but there were dozens of people who worked either as full-time volunteers or meagerly paid staff for anything from the Catholic Archdiocese to the Auraria student groups to physicians' groups like Physicians for Social Responsibility, dozens of people during the late '70s and '80s working to close Rocky Flats.
31:32 Those of us involved, it seemed so obvious, we know each other, we worked together all the time, to those people not involved they may be shocked to hear that. Some of them probably figured there were thousands of people on the KGB payroll and others figured that we were all volunteers. But it was mostly volunteers but as many as 15 or 25 people were paid to do community organizing around Rocky Flats.
(Paid by either churches or—?)
Charitable or educational organizations, some more direct than others, like the American Friends Service Committee and the Rocky Mountain Peace Center as peace organizations raised money from the public and got small contributions, hundreds of $20 contributions. Others worked, say, for the University, and did studies of plutonium contamination, on some grant from somewhere or other. And they contributed in their own way, not directly and maybe not even intentionally. Jefferson County Health Department Director Carl Johnson—he lost his job as director of that health department because so much of his time went into studying the public health impacts at Rocky Flats. So, it was a variety of sources.
33:05 (Our tape doesn’t have much more time. Going back to you in particular, you said that your family were not politically active. Looking back, were there things in your own experience before you came out here that might have encouraged you to take this route?)
That’s a good question, one that I really wish I understood better, because it’s critically important to those of us who are concerned about social change organizing, to know why people get involved, especially those who it’s not predictable that they would get involved, those people who swing maybe even from one position to another, but mainly how to motivate people who are simply unconcerned or uninvolved or both. I don’t know, I can’t easily say. My family could have hardly been less involved or concerned. I suppose that I'd have to say that what my family was active in was the Catholic Church; my parents, my mother in particular, still is. It never meant much to me once I became an adult, but as a child it probably had an influence, certainly on my values. Catholic radicals like the Berrigan brothers, while I wasn’t very familiar with them, I was vaguely aware of them, and I’d have to say probably somewhat inspired. If anything, my parents probably would have commented on those crazy priests or something, which would have made me wonder, well, why is that? It’s one of those—it’s interesting to me when people do things they're not expected to do, like priests who break the law for some higher good, well what are they talking about? Even as a child, I had some exposure to that.
35:09 But I would say it was more maybe just the momentum of the '60s, and knowing that it was a significant historical event, we don't talk about other periods, other decades, quite like we talk about the '60s. And I was alive then, but I wasn't part of it.
(But you were at a time in your teenage years of having it have an impact on you?)
Yes, right. So I think I looked back somewhat longingly, where was I, why couldn't I have had that meaningful experience? So as I said, being open and even seeking it out, in the '70s, what remained of any kind of movement politics is what I found, the anti-nuclear movement primarily, and the environmental movement. So I can't easily say. Other people at this reunion—it was another great opportunity to hear people's various processes around this, some of which go back much longer than mine, some of which are much shorter. But people often can identify an individual who inspired them and Dan Ellsberg is another one who comes to mind. He talks very specifically about working at the Pentagon in the mid-'60s doing nuclear war planning and somehow or other having—I think actually he represented the Pentagon at a War Resisters League meeting, of all things. He met these very thoughtful draft resisters, Randy Kehler being one, I can’t remember the other, two young men who were going to prison for resisting the draft, who outlined their moral arguments in a way that was very compelling and inspiring to Dan. Most other people have similar stories about someone who represented moral foresight—clergy people—many times its indirect, they read about them or they see them on television or they hear second or third hand about them, but they feel in a way like I did, about meeting ordinary folks like myself that were going to do something that seemed extraordinary, and which though I wasn't sure was entirely right didn't seem obviously wrong given the circumstances. So just the opportunity to be part of a group that was that thoughtful and brave, even if they were wrong.
37:55 But it certainly provided me with something I can't quite explain, it’s rewarding and provides meaning in my life still. And the stories I hear from them are similar. There's a sort of mutual—we discussed this a lot. In opposition politics and movement politics and social change, no matter where in history or where in the world, I think, is fueled mainly by a sequence of individuals inspiring others. I'll just touch on Ellsberg, he was given courage by a couple of young men who had no idea who he was, who looking back now 30 years could not have imagined that how they inspired him would have changed history, and literally, ended a war, brought down a President, changed the politics of the country for the next 20 years, at least. And nobody can plan that, it just happens.
39:04 (Before we stop now, could you say just a little bit about what you’re doing now?)
Sure, having done all that was feeling a bit exhausted, not really, but— it’s not in my personality to want to play a very high profile role in these things. I'm pretty introverted, and so my ability to rise above that introversion is fueled only by my passion for the issues, but my preference is really to play a more low-profile role. And so as an organizer I realized that one of the things that I can do is help others that are better suited to high-profile position be better organized, and better funded, and more effective. So for the last five years I've been working for a foundation that makes grants to grass-roots environmental groups in developing countries. So basically what I try to do is grease the wheels of small grant-making for social change, and that puts me in a position to take advantage of the skills and contacts I've built with American environmental donors and third-world activists who can do an awful lot with a small amount of money. The Global Greengrants Fund of the Tides Foundation is the name of the organization that I started and work for. It mainly works with US foundations and donors who want to make tax-deductible grants to grass-roots environmental groups that I think of as being much like the Rocky Flats Truth Force, that are on the cutting edge of social change in places in the world that few people have heard of, let alone think much about or try and give support to. I think of that as critical to survival, really, that grass-roots citizens groups be empowered to build the infrastructure of civil society, especially in emerging democracies and especially in parts of the world where the environment and natural resources are at grave risk of abuse. So I feel like I'm still on the same path, it’s just a little easier; I don't have to worry about going to jail every day! But I can try to organize a little bit of support for those who do.
(Thank you very much, Chet. Is there anything that we haven’t touched on that you think is really important—?)
I think I've said way more than I expected to. So I thank you for the opportunity, and I don't think I do have anything to add.
42:05 [End of Tape B. End of Interview]