Sacrificial Rituals

A county librarian is forced from her job for distributing reports on a polluter that wants to move into town. A county attorney is intimidated into not prosecuting a felony because someone put a butchered pig’s head in his pickup. An editor of a dissident newspaper is hunted down and assaulted. And a prominent attorney dies under mysterious circumstances in a plane wreck. The setting is Baker, a small town in southeastern Montana, where its community leaders have decided they would sacrifice anything for economic development. Chronically low commodity prices are afflicting local farms and ranches, and Main Street businesses, their suppliers, are going broke. Young people have to leave because they couldn’t make a living. As a result, local leaders are ready to listen when a Wise Use organizer comes to town and tells people that environmentalists are the cause of their problems. Environmentalists are launching a “war upon the West,” or at least it’s people, who will soon all be displaced by a “Buffalo Common’s,” a plan by some eastern intellectuals to buy up all the private land across the plains, tear down all the fences, and turn buffalo loose to graze the land like they did before. To prevent this, the organizer says, the community needs a company to come in and put people to work. But Baker is far from any markets, transportation costs are high, and so about the only thing left to it is to take a company nobody else wants, a polluter shunned by everyone else. The community leaders soon find what they want in Ross Electric, a toxic incineration company with a very bad environmental record. Ross is looking for a new place to set up operations because it is banned from operating in Washington, where it was a responsible party to two different Superfund sites, and had been caught allowing children to play in the incinerator ash contaminated with PCBs and dioxin. Discounting all the concerns raised by environmentalists across Montana and Washington, Baker’s community leaders promptly invite Ross Electric to move in, warmly embracing them. However, some in the community were not so willing. When they object, things get very ugly. Sacrificial Rituals explores the sacrifices we offer up to keep a civilization that is destroying the planet functioning. At times a simple report of what happened in a small community, at other times a more philosophical investigation of the ideas underlying events, Sacrificial Rituals is an intense and emotional effort to change the way we walk upon the earth.