Orion Magazine - January/February 2012

where she was turning it inward — but the depth of her emotion justified the depth of my own emotion, and was something that pushed me to act. When Agent Love — TERRY: Not to be confused with Bishop Love, from Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gang . . .

TIM: Exactly. No, but when Agent Love was talking about how I was looking at my phone, he said that I was sending text messages. But I’d never even sent a text message at that point. What I was doing, once I was winning parcels, was pulling a phone number out of my phone and writing it down on the back of a business card and handing it to my roommate, who was sitting next to me, and saying, “You need to go call my friend Michael and tell him that I need help.” TERRY: Paying for these.

TIM: Yeah. [Laughing.] TERRY: Did you think about the consequences?

TIM: Yeah.

TERRY: And it was worth it.

TIM: Mmhmm.

TERRY: So you were there because of the wilderness. Was climate change part of it? Or did it become a larger issue afterward? Because I’m interested in how stories change, evolve.

TIM: It was much more climate change than the wil-
derness. For me, the wilderness was the third most
important issue. The first was climate change, the sec-
ond was the attack on our democracy, and the fact that
people were locked out of the decision-making process
with this. And, you know, something I realized last year,
when I was on a panel with Dave Forman and Katie
Lee, and they were talking about their motivations for
protecting wilderness, doing this for the coyote, and all
that stu=. And I realized that I was coming from a com-
pletely di=erent place than them. I would never go to
jail to protect animals or plants or wilderness. For me,
it’s about the people. And even my value of wilderness
is about what it brings to people. I have a very anthropo-
centric worldview.

TERRY: And do you think that goes back to your basic spiritual perspective that set you out on this path with Christianity?

TIM: I don’t know. I don’t think so.

TERRY: Because that is a much more human-centered philosophical starting point.

TIM: Yeah. Well, I think it goes beyond that. I think it’s just what I’ve learned to value in my life. I’ve spent a lot of time with people, and I’ve spent a lot of time with animals and the wilderness, and it’s the people that I really value, at a totally di=erent level than anything else. And that’s when I started wondering whether I was actually an environmentalist. [Laughter.] TERRY: Again, we go back to language. What does an environmentalist mean, anyway? What does a Christian mean? What does an activist mean? I mean, if we took away all these loaded words, or even stopped using war terminology . . . I’m aware of the aggression of language, of “fighting” or “combating” or “war.” How do we take the violence out of our language? How do we become less oppositional and more inclusive in how we talk about these issues? I don’t know. This is what I struggle with. Because I would say that your approach is confrontational.