Environmentalist Creates Uproar at Oil-Lease Auction by Running Up Prices

"If we'd have put it up for a vote in the room that day," said BLM spokeswoman Mary Wilson, "the other bidders might have put together a lynching party."

Among some environmentalists, however, DeChristopher was hailed as a hero. A blogger helped set up a Web site, http://www.bidder70.org, and a pass-along e-mail request for $5 contributions turned into an online fund drive that, by Friday, raised the $45,000 that DeChristopher needed to pay the BLM in the hope of retaining a claim on the leases -- and improving his odds of avoiding jail.

The West Virginia native, 27, said he raised paddle No. 70 fully aware of the implications. It took him half an hour to screw up the courage to bid, he said, and another half-hour to start winning parcels.

"It came down to, if worse came to worse, I'd go to jail," DeChristopher said. "And I decided, yeah, I could live with that. . . .

"But seeing all the disastrous effects of climate change in our future, I didn't want to have to live with that."

His actions impressed Patrick Shea, a Salt Lake City lawyer who headed the BLM during the Clinton administration and who decided to represent DeChristopher.

"I interviewed him twice, just to make sure what I saw on the news was the real McCoy, and it was," Shea said. "He's really a very bright, upstanding and principled individual who was rightly upset about some of these leases being offered."

Along with a criminal defense attorney, Shea is working behind the scenes to persuade federal authorities to recognize DeChristopher's bidding as a well-intentioned political, rather than criminal, act.

"I didn't want to see somebody with that kind of virtue mangled by a Kafkaesque kind of system," Shea said. "I think responsible civil disobedience has been forgotten since the '60s and '70s."

If so, one reason might be reforms rooted in the activism of that era. Full-time advocates pointed out that the BLM auction was originally scheduled for two years earlier but that lawsuits from environmental groups forced the agency to first complete management plans required by federal statutes aimed at protecting the environment.

"It was a decision we got in August 2006 that held up the BLM for this long," said Steve Bloch, conservation director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. "The fact that it took a sale at the last minute of the last hour is in large part due to the efforts we've been making."

Protests from the National Park Service also had an effect, persuading the BLM to pare its original offering of 360,000 acres by more than half. Bloch noted that all the parcels DeChristopher bought were among the 80 that conservation groups specifically sought to preserve. But the student said there was no particular strategy to his bids.