Read Online Lentil Underground by Liz Carlisle - Free Book Online Page B

concerned a floral description of native forests in Micronesia—to join the ranks of the “better living through chemistry” good old boys who were typically tasked with advising farmers. That was all yet to come, of course. But in the meantime, AERO celebrated another major political victory.
    In addition to the joint resolution on sustainable agriculture research, the 1985 Montana legislature also passed an organic food definition law—the fourth in the country, behind only California, Oregon, and Maine. Even before the ink dried on the bill, Jim and Dave were already putting together a steering committee to write Montana’s first organic standards. Dave hadn’t forgotten the labeling roadblock he’d hit in his attempt to retail organic beef, and he wanted to make sure Montana’s future sustainable farmers had a market. He and Jim became founding board members of the first statewide certifying organization, and they worked hard to foster its strength and grassroots character. Meanwhile, AERO—heavily populated with Timeless farmers—formed the state’s original organic growers association in 1987. At each turn, Bud Barta, Tom Hastings, and Russ Salisbury joined the new groups, rapidly building a critical mass that gave the organizations legitimacy and impelling energy.
    While it may have seemed to some onlookers that Montana’s organic farming movement came out of nowhere (or worse, California), the truth was that it had very deep, local roots. And although the Alternative Energy Resources Organization may have been the place to
start
digging up these roots, you had to keep going to get anywhere near the bottom. Indeed, AERO traced its own origins back to an even older, fiercer citizens’ group: the Northern Plains Resource Council.

    In 1972, a group of rough-edged cowboys and cowgirls crammed into the living room of a tiny ranch cabin in southeast Montana’s Bull Mountains, home to the son of a member of Butch Cassidy’s Hole in the Wall Gang. The US Bureau of Reclamation had justreleased a plan to site twenty-one new coal-fired power plants in Montana, and the ranchers were concerned that such drastic development would destroy their land. Determined to stop the ghastly strip mining, they promised one another they wouldn’t let the coal companies buy them out. And to make good on their word, they formed a nonprofit council.
    The rancher’s group—the Northern Plains Resource Council—proceeded to organize their neighbors. They went from living room to living room, explaining the implications of the proposed mining and urging their neighbors not to sign away their property. When Consolidation Coal started knocking on those same doors, contracts in hand, they were astonished to find landowner after landowner uninterested in their lucrative offers. They were even more astonished when these stubborn ranchers helped convince the Montana state legislature to pass a series of environmental protection statutes. But the most incredible underdog victory came in 1977, when the Northern Plains Resource Council united with like-minded groups across the country to drive a strip-mining regulation bill through the US Congress. In a short five years, Montana’s ranch families—led by a particularly resolute group of women—had delivered an unequivocal message: Coal is not the future we want.
    When the dust settled and a substantial share of the proposed power plants had been successfully blocked, the niece of one of those forceful women asked a thought-provoking question: If coal is the future we are against, what is the future we are for? This sparky thirty-year-old—Kye Cochran—was one of several countercultural young people whose volunteer labor had supported the crusade of their more traditional agrarian parents, uncles, and aunts. While the Northern Plains Resource Council continued its advocacy against dirty energy (as it does today),