EYE ON THE WEST

Documentary Filmmaker Champions Wild Places Running ‘Out of Time’

By David Frey, 12-15-06

	Coal Bed Methane Rig near Rifle, Colorado. Photo by Joel Sartore and courtesy of A Land Out of Time (www.alandoutoftime.com)

In Aspen filmmaker Mark Harvey’s new documentary, he tries to get his audience to see the West through Tom Bell’s eyes. Even with his vision in his right eye lost after his bomber was shot down over Germany in World War II, the Wyoming rancher and environmentalist looks out at his beloved Red Desert with a contagious affection.

“Following my return from World War II,” Bell, who wears a patch over one eye, says in the film, “I had to regain a sense of balance and a sense of place again, and one of the places I retreated to was that great place just south of us in Wyoming called the Great Empty. When I went off to war and came back, I looked up at that red butte and said, ‘I’m home.’”

But when Bell looks at federal lands across the West, he doesn’t like what he sees. Precious landscapes, he says, are being carved up and drilled in the pursuit of oil and gas.

Bell, the founder of the environmental newspaper High Country News, narrates Harvey’s documentary “A Land out of Time.” It was Harvey’s first major foray into film, but not his first effort crusading for the environment. Harvey’s mother Connie is lauded as one of the “Maroon Belles,” a trio of Aspen women who fought for Colorado wilderness protection in the early days of the Wilderness Act. Fighting for public lands has become something of a family business. For Harvey, it’s never been more important.

“This was a labor of love – or a labor of frustration,” Harvey says. “I just got very frustrated watching how our government treated public lands. I’ve never seen the bullying that I’ve seen in the last five or six years.”

The film, which has made the round of Western film festivals from Aspen to Anchorage, tracks oil and gas development on public lands across the West. It hits close to Harvey’s home on western Colorado’s Roan Plateau, where the Bureau of Land Management is preparing to lease the surface of the vast tabletop mountain above Rifle, Colo., for energy development. But the Roan is only a piece of the Western landscape being threatened with drilling. Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front. Wyoming’s Red Desert. Utah’s canyon country. Mexico’s Valle Vidal and Otero Mesa. In all, Harvey tallies more than 30 million acres of federal land leased for drilling, and millions more under pressure.

“It’s a huge part of our heritage and our psyche and our identity as Americans,” Harvey says. “It’s not just about the Roan Plateau or the Red Desert. It’s about what’s up ahead for the West.”

The film is nearly as much about the people who fight for these wild places as it is about the landscape itself. They are the mix of diverse figures who have come to represent the new battle lines in defense of wild places. Some are traditional environmental activists, but they are also ranchers, outfitters, teachers, even former public land managers who see the places they care about under threat.

“Five, 10 years ago, you couldn’t have gotten me into a room with environmentalists,” says Colorado outfitter Keith Goddard, who joined the fight to protect the Roan Plateau.

“Now,” he says, “I feel actually privileged that I got to work with some of these people.”

The film paints a loving portrait of these wild places – towering buttes lit up with alpenglow or buffeted by Montana winds. And there are more disturbing images: vast landscapes cut into what New Mexico rancher Tweeti Blancett calls a “spider web” of roads and pipelines.

“Here’s what I once believed,” says Blancett, who helped manage President Bush’s first campaign in New Mexico before becoming an activist for protecting key lands from energy development. “If the president knew about the damage done to our land by the energy industry, the damage would cease.”

For Blancett, the damage didn’t cease, and she and her husband have given up ranching, saying they can’t compete with the impacts the industry has wreaked on their land.

Harvey’s film lays much of the blame on the Bush administration’s rush to expedite oil and gas exploration. Drilling on public lands preceded Bush, but it was Executive Order 13212, signed on May 18, 2001, that Harvey’s documentary blames for directing land managers to get out of the way of the drill rigs. The Roan Plateau became one of about a dozen places on a “fast track.”

The casualty, Harvey says, was not just the land but the people who were shut out of the process.

“When it’s the oil and gas industry, it’s not a democracy,” Goddard says in the film. “It’s a dictatorship.”

But the film is not an obituary for lost places. It’s a call to arms. There are success stories: drilling bans in the Valle Vidal. A lawsuit that saw the protection of Utah’s Canyonlands. A recent bill to make permanent a drilling ban on the Rocky Mountain Front.

“I don’t like to fight,” Bell says, “but I will if I think I’m right. When it comes to the land that has given so much to me, I will fight with everything I’ve got.”

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