When power comes in
Parfit, Michael
When power comes in LAST STAND AT ROSEBUD CREEK: COAL, POWER, AND PEOPLE by Michael Parfit E.P. Dutton. 304 pp. $15.95. Colstrip, Montana, was the scene of one of the West's earliest and most...
...It was not the first public meeting on the subject...
...A power plant is a snake in that garden, a symbol to Parfit "of the oppression of technology, that the point has been passed at which technology that is intended to enhance human beings now controls, diminishes, enslaves them...
...Taking those who spoke at the hearing as his cast of characters, Parfit offers narratives of their lives before the hearing and after...
...I only wish Parfit had told us more about how that power was exercised in this instance and described the impact it had...
...It disturbs me...
...The battle actually was fought after the war was over, when the first two units of the Colstrip power plant were already built and the question was whether units three and four would be built, too, and after them perhaps units five, six, seven, and eight...
...there had been others, and there would be more...
...Carol Polsgrove (Carol Polsgrove, who became interested in the Western energy story after a visit to Colstrip in 1977, joins The Progressive with this issue as an associate editor...
...Parfit does not venture into the real halls of power...
...City people believe in the old and dubious notion that country-is-heaven and city-is-hell: that out there under the big sky, human beings are naturally good, at peace with themselves, other people, the Earth...
...Why should those who live in cities, choked by the car fumes of all those others who live in cities because there is no work or land for them in the country—why should they be saddened that rural air is polluted for their sakes, or rural land defaced...
...Last Stand is almost adamantly nov-elistic, a story—not a report...
...What Parfit provides is only the narrowest slice of life, intended perhaps as an elegy for life on the range...
...The rest of Last Stand illustrates Bailey's statement...
...And that is hardly a cause exclusively rural...
...The information might have been useful to warriors in energy battles of the future...
...There, in a tiny town that was barely even a town before Montana Power came, ranchers, Indians, and environmentalists tried to fight off corporate colonizers forcing an urban economy on a rural world, despoiling rural air, land, and water to meet city needs...
...Colstrip, Montana, was the scene of one of the West's earliest and most important energy battles, a prototype for conflicts elsewhere, past and still to come...
...I've seen a polarization of the rural community toward the working community and vice versa, and I don't think that this is going to lead to a healthy situation...
...In the closing statement of that 1974 winter hearing, Rosebud Creek rancher Don Bailey said sadly, talking over the rumble of the night's last coal train, "I have seen something develop as I've been on this—circuit, as we might call it...
...His characters, the local people who spoke at that hearing, including plant employes, were not the ones who made the decision to build Colstrip units three and four...
...By the end they seem not heroes making a last stand for Western virtue but feeble flies, buzzing in circles, darting futilely at each other, observed by gods in the distance with large swatters poised...
...Another reason, maybe mightier, for urban sympathy with the ranchers' plight is that the ranchers were resisting corporate/government power over their lives...
...As the center of his book, Parfit chose a public hearing on a snowy winter's night in 1974, when ranchers and company men packed the county courthouse in Forsyth to put testimony on record for the environmental impact statement for Colstrip units three and four...
...The battle over the building of units three and four is the story Michael Parfit tells in Last Stand at Rosebud Creek...
...Nor does he attempt to offer evidence on the environmental terms of the argument: the degree of air pollution the plant would inflict on the area, the damage the power plant's surface mine would do to land and water...
...In fact, those who went to the meetings were beginning to hear their own words as echoes and to feel their lives transformed into rhetoric...
...While Parfit refers now and again to those distant gods—corporate officers, judges, Federal and state officials who meet elsewhere to decide Colstrip's fate—the great weakness of his book is that he does not tell readers much about them...
...One answer is that rural life, as city folk imagine it, stands for something they long for and want always to be there, even if they can only drive out to look at it...
...The characters in Last Stand remain acquaintances, known from the outside, their speech recorded, their homes described, their lives written in language sometimes melodramatic and strained: Intent as Parfit is on creating sympathy for these people, he never confronts, to my satisfaction, an obvious question posed by his story: Why should unlanded city serfs, as most of us are, feel sorry for these landed ranchers who don't like construction workers...
...As that, it does not wholly succeed...
Vol. 45 • January 1981 • No. 1
