At the 2023 Volunteer Appreciation Dinner, Wild Montana President Tim Lynch presented the Founders Award to Roy Jacobs for his tireless work fighting to protect the Rocky Mountain Front from oil and gas development.
There are many heroes in the story of the long fight to protect the Rocky Mountain Front, including the Badger-Two Medicine, from oil, gas, and mining. There is a long list of Blackfeet Tribal leaders, local conservationists, ranchers, and outfitters who never gave up. Last weekend, at our annual Volunteer Appreciation Dinner, we presented one of those stalwarts with Wild Montana’s Founders Award.
Roy “Jake” Jacobs is an outdoorsman woven into the fabric of the Rocky Mountain Front community and fiercely loyal to the land and the people who live there. Roy is a local boy, born and raised in Teton County, an outfitter, taxidermist, rancher, and all-around mountain man. He saw his first grizzly bear on the Front in 1962 while hunting with his dad, who would not abide shooting it. The bear - and his dad’s conservation mindset - made a deep impression on young Roy.
In the early 1970s, Roy worked on an oil and gas seismic exploration crew on the Front. They brought bulldozers and heavy equipment into Blackleaf Canyon, and Roy started scratching his head, wondering why they were putting in roads all over that beautiful, wild country. In 1977, the Forest Service announced that they would lease practically all the public lands on the Front, where Roy had lived his whole life. Even the Bob and the Scapegoat were vulnerable to development because of a clause in the Wilderness Act that left designated Wilderness open to mineral exploration for 20 years. The oil and gas exploration had shown that there wasn’t much oil or gas to get out of the public lands on the Front, so why destroy it? Why put in roads and pumpjacks? Why chase out the grizzlies, wolverines, lynx, and elk? Why tear up and pollute the headwaters of the Dearborn, Sun, Two Medicine, and Badger rivers in perpetuity for short-term gain?
Roy’s thinking resonated with Gene Sentz and a couple of other locals. They formed the Friends of the Rocky Mountain Front and jumped in with both feet, writing letters and holding public meetings, advocating alongside Wild Montana to protect the Front from all future development. And then, in 1981, Secretary of the Interior James Watt auctioned off 147,000 acres of the Front to oil and gas companies for $1 an acre, including 47 acres in the sacred Badger-Two Medicine.
Those were dark days for everyone who loved that land, but they persisted. They worked to protect the Front, using every tool at their disposal - grassroots advocacy, federal legislation, public lands policy, and litigation. In 2006, Congress banned new leases on the Front and created tax incentives for companies holding old leases to relinquish them. That same year, Roy co-founded the Coalition to Protect the Rocky Mountain Front to keep the Front wild forever.
For eight long years, Roy advocated tirelessly for the coalition by being a good neighbor and taxidermist. When folks brought their animals to him, he talked to them about the Front. What did they want the Front to look like for their kids and grandkids? He was all about building trust, but he wasn’t a formal guy. He was tough and determined and used his sense of humor to win folks over to the cause.
In 2014, the coalition succeeded. Congress passed the Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act. The Act protected over 275,000 acres of federal public lands. It added about 67,000 acres to the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex and designated the rest as a Conservation Management Area, allowing existing uses but preventing future development.
Roy could have put up his feet and taken a well-deserved break, but he did not. He persevered for the Badger-Two Medicine, which was still threatened by oil and gas leases, and his many Blackfeet friends. Roy volunteered for Glacier-Two Medicine Alliance, the Bob Marshall Wilderness Foundation, and The Nature Conservancy. They supported the Blackfeet Nation as they worked with leaseholders to voluntarily relinquish their leases in recognition that the Badger-Two Medicine was too culturally and ecologically significant to be drilled.
The last leaseholder was a Louisiana oil company called Solenex. The case went in and out of court for years. Finally, on Sept. 1, 2023, Blackfeet Tribal leaders, Wild Montana, other conservation groups, and the federal government finalized an agreement with Solenex to retire its lease in the Badger-Two Medicine permanently, the last remaining lease on the Rocky Mountain Front.
27 авг 2024
