Jim and Terry Fitzgerald were giants in the oil and gas accountability movement that took root in La Plata County in the late 1980s. They both died on Dec. 30, when their home in the HD Mountains of Southwest Colorado tragically caught fire. Their loss is profound – not only for those of us who loved them, but for this community and for countless others shaped by their courage.
I first encountered Jim in January 1988, after front-page headlines announced plans to drill 1,000 gas wells in La Plata County. I was 24 years old, a brand-new community organizer for Western Colorado Alliance and San Juan Citizens Alliance, fresh off a short campaign to get a stoplight installed at Elmore’s Corner. Clearly, we were ready to take on one of the most powerful industries on the planet for the next 30 years.
Jim left a message on my answering machine: “Gwen, we’ve got to do something about this drilling thing – and we’ve got to do it now.”
I eventually tracked him down at his office at Fort Lewis College. The rest, as they say, is history.
The gas drilling fight consumed decades of our lives. We went to court and to the State Capitol. We ran bills, testified at hearings and wore grooves in the pavement between Durango and Denver. When the state oil and gas commission was stacked with industry insiders, we decided to make that visible.
So Terry put on a chicken costume.
I put on a fox suit.
And we chased each other around the county courthouse and the Capitol to show that the fox was, in fact, guarding the henhouse. We had fun, and we laughed. We had to. Terry even wrote letters to the editor signed by her lamb, Dinah. Dinah Lamb had strong opinions about gas drilling.
La Plata County became the test case for the industry’s massive experiment in extracting gas from underground coal seams – coal bed methane development. The pace of drilling and fracking was dizzying. Water wells ran dry. Industrial operations were permitted within 150 feet of people’s homes. Methane gas migrated into crawl spaces; a house in Texas Creek spontaneously combusted. An entire subdivision near Bayfield had to be abandoned and torn down. People could light their tap water on fire.
We fought for the most basic rights – for landowners to have a say in what happened on their own land, or even to be notified that drilling was coming. In 1999, Jim, Terry, Travis Stills, Dan Randolph and I – along with others – founded the Oil & Gas Accountability Project, now Earthworks, to support communities nationwide facing drilling and fracking. What La Plata County endured became a blueprint. We worked alongside communities across the country to help residents understand their rights and push for protections. In Alaska, drilling was stopped on 600,000 acres in the Mat-Su Valley. New York banned fracking.
Progress was real, even if it was incremental. And yet, many residents here and in other drilling boom communities are still living with the impacts of that rush and frenzy from the late 1980s through the early 2000s.
Terry often reminded us that we were ordinary people standing up to multinational corporations. And somehow – together – we won real victories. We protected vast landscapes from being drilled and safeguarded the HD Mountains they loved so deeply.
But perhaps most importantly, Jim and Terry built community – locally and far beyond La Plata County. They embodied participatory democracy – not the abstract kind, but the real, gritty, show-up, do-the-work kind. They didn’t wait for permission. They showed us that lasting change comes from ordinary people who care deeply, act boldly, and refuse to look away.
We are all standing on Jim and Terry’s shoulders.
Gwen Lachelt is a former La Plata County commissioner, a founder of Earthworks and Western Leaders Network, and the political director of the Western Organization of Resource Councils.
