welcome and encourage development without adequate consideration of the 

 consequences and without thought of necessary protections. Other states 

 are the opposite and are well aware of the hard choices facing them. I 

 think it is generally recognized that Montana is in the forefront of such 

 states. 



The other element in the picture are the corporations, the syndicates 

 and the speculators. And here one must take nothing for granted. 

 Whether we like it or not, our country was founded and built on the 

 premise that if there is a dollar to be made there are going to be a lot of 

 people make it and they are going to use every method possible in order 

 to make it. Nothing has changed in that regard since the time of 

 Alexander Hamilton and John Adams, both of whom felt that this country 

 would be built and would become great because people would have freedom 

 to pursue their* natural human avariciousness and would be checked only 

 when they violated a law, went to such an excess that they outraged the 

 rest of society or when a competitor or harmed person hauled them into 

 civil court and as a private matter made them stop what they were doing. 



From the evidence so far, the rush to develop the West and to exploit 

 its energy and other resources has been, and still is characterized too 

 often by oldstyle robber baron and cut-and-run methods. The largest as 

 well as the smallest corporations, together with the land and mineral 

 speculators have so far behaved with a minimum of social responsibility. 

 The tricks of the snake oil salesmen have been used again and again to 

 gull or to try to gull landowners, state legislators and newspaper readers 

 to acquire permits, leases, chunks of land, water rights, rights-of-way 

 and favorable legislation. Information has been concealed or calculatingly 

 distorted. There are already many grievances in the West against 

 corporations and there will be many more. Outwardly, the major cards 

 would seem to be held by the corporations. Anyone who resists them, who 

 tries to make them maximize the protections and minimize adverse impacts, 

 can be charged with crippling our attempts to solve the energy crisis, to 

 mine and use our abundant coal, to provide employment and to strengthen 

 the USA. Nothing is said however, about the more hobbling problems that 

 the corporations face today. Their own lack of capital, transportation 

 problems, the absences yet of adequate markets for their coal and the 

 uneconomic status of coal vis-a-vis other sources of energy. Nor does one 

 hear about the competitive importance of being able to list coal reserves 

 and water rights even though still unused, in annual stockholders' 

 reports. I will not belabor this point except to reiterate that the agencies 

 and forces that are industralizing the West must be treated for what they 

 are, and even though they must be allowed to put their marks on the land 

 in a necessary response to the perilous situation in which our country 

 finds itself, they must not be permitted the uncontested freedom to wreak 

 irresponsible and wholesale damage to the West. 



I began by talking about native Americans and will I close with the 

 same subject. In this matter of guaranteeing every reasonable and 

 possible protection and limiting destructive change, many of the Indian 

 tribes appear now to be forging ahead of the non-Indians. Twenty-five 

 tribes united in the Council of Energy Resource Tribes are attempting, 

 like governments, to assert maximum control and decision making over the 



