The Land Was Everything to Bill Barlow

by Deb Sutton, news editor, Gillette News-Record (excerpted with permission)

After hearing of Bill Barlow's death March 29, someone asked me who he was.

A remarkable man, I told them. He was a rancher, conservationist, recycler, historian and gentle fighter with the kind of persistence I will never know.

I don't remember when I first met Bill Barlow but it was sometime after I started covering energy issues here in the early 1980s. It wasn't long before I became accustomed to seeing Bill's inquisitive eyes peering out from under a cowboy hat during nearly every environmental assessment, air quality, coal mine expansion or coalbed methane meeting.

He was there not just because he was a founding member of the Powder River Basin Resource Council or because he tended the same land as his father and grandfather before him.

He was there because the land needed him. And he needed it. He appreciated it, he sustained it and he protected it.

It didn't matter how big the energy company was or how tenacious a government proved to be, he persisted. When the first big mines started opening around Gillette in 1973, Bill and a few others organized a group to safeguard the land from the impacts of strip mining.

"Water has been our underlying concern for 20 years," he told me in a 1992 interview.

"I don't think we're holding them up," he said, asking about new mines and those that wanted to expand.

"I worked and lived in Asia for a time. That experience has made me paranoid about wasting resources. Need is a matter of definition."

He had solar panels in his home before they were en vogue. He was proud of the artesian wells on his place. He likely offered you a drink if you stopped by.

Coalbed methane development was among the recent issues in which he was involved, calling the drilling "an unwise burden on aquifers."

But when a community is in the middle of a boom, the most popular person in the room is not the guy who wants to slow it down, to wait, to understand.

Bill didn't care. With patience and kindness, he carried on.

His wife, Bernie, calls it courage.

She was raised in Cambodia, he in Wyoming.

"It took a lot of courage to bring me home," she said. "I knew it was not going to be easy with family and friends. Although it turned out beautifully, he had enormous courage to say, 'Let's make a life together.'"

When Bill looked at the land, he would see others who lived there before him. He'd come home and show an arrowhead he had found.

"It was like he found a treasure," Bernie said. "History came alive. Somebody had been there before him."

"He was working from some foundation that was stronger and more powerful than...anything I know," said his cousin, Jenifer Morrissey of Aguilar, Colo.

"I was blessed to see Bill shortly before he died. We stood in his corrals talking about cottonwood trees, a favorite subject for us both. We talked of porcupines and watched an owl settle in a tree. We reviewed his feed stores and visualized his plans for the calving season."

"This time of year for him was like a renewal," Bernie said. "He would come home and say, 'I've seen such little flowers.' He knew things-wild celery and wild onion. He would have that on his breath when he came home. He would talk about the first meadowlark he saw or bluebird. He was constantly looking at the land and his environment.

"The spring and all the rain, like what we've had, gave him a sense of joy," she said.

Maybe these rainy days are for him.