“‘This is your worst nightmare.  It’s like being married to me.  I can do what I want, when I want and how I want.’  The evidence in this case, Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, will show that those words were said to my client, Beth Anderson, on March 19, 2004, by Ace Sanders, the president of a company called MethZap, a defendant in this case,” I said, pointing to the short, skinny, red-haired man sitting at the defense table.  I glared at Ace Sanders for a moment or two, making sure that the jurors’ eyes took hold of him.  Just as the uncomfortable stares defined him, I smiled and nodded at Beth, a tall, dark-haired, green-eyed, former Wyoming rodeo queen, as beautiful at fifty as she was at twenty.  Beth had a self-assured air about her – almost regal – and as the jury altered their gaze toward her, Beth reached over and grabbed her husband’s left hand.  Butch Anderson, a fifty-six-year-old man of medium build with graying, brown hair and bright blue eyes, patted Beth’s hand and nodded to the jury in a rancher’s fashion.  Not his customary tip of the cowboy hat, but a gentleman’s nod.  Several members of the jury nodded back.

“Before I tell you more about this case, let me introduce myself.  My name is Mary MacIntosh and I’m one of Butch and Beth Anderson’s attorneys.  My senior partner over there,” I said, pointing toward the plaintiffs’ table, “is my law partner, Andrew Harrison.  Everyone calls him ‘Harry’ and he’ll be talking to you over the course of this trial also.”  Harry deftly grinned at the jury with his broad smile.  He’s tall and fit with twinkling hazel eyes and dark hair.  A former Stanford football star prior to becoming a successful lawyer, Harry was handsomely dressed in one of his high-end Italian business suits, which fit right in with the venerable courtroom decorum of posh cherry wood paneling, fancy millwork and trim, and the elaborately carved judge’s bench.  Federal courtrooms were notoriously more grandiose than state courts, and this Federal Building was no exception.  Listed on the National Registry of Historic Places, it consisted of as a massive three-story Classical Revival style office building brocaded with unique red pressed brick.

“During voir dire when we asked you questions about your past, some of you indicated that you’d never served on a federal jury before.  You might be nervous about your role in deciding justice for the Andersons.   Well, I have to share a secret with you.  I’m a little nervous today too.  This is the first time that Harry has allowed me to give the opening statement at trial.  I’ve earned his respect after working for him for ten years, and I hope to earn your respect also.   Respect is important, and it is an underlying theme to this case.  You see, Butch and Beth Anderson are here because their land was not treated with respect, and no matter how hard they tried to get MethZap to respect their land, MethZap not only refused to oblige, but deliberately and callously defaced the Anderson’s land, livestock and livelihood.

“But let me back up a bit and give you some history about the Andersons.  Many of you may know of Butch, as he is world-famous on the rodeo circuit.”  Many of the jurors nodded in Butch’s direction, acknowledging his fame.  Dressed in a brand new pair of Wrangler jeans, boots and a light blue, pressed, button-down dress shirt, Butch looked the part of the modern-day born-in-the-saddle cowboy.  His face was weathered from a lifetime of being outdoors, but it still held the glow of sunshine.  His light brown hair matched his thick mustache and his light blue eyes sparkled under the courtroom fluorescent lights.  He looked strange to me without his cowboy hat, but he understood that courtroom decorum disallowed it.  

I continued describing Butch to the jury.  “Now that he is in his fifties, he can no longer withstand the aches and pains of being thrown from a horse, as many of you can relate.  Butch used to travel all over the United States giving seminars and training classes on barrel racing and other rodeo maneuvers and that sort of thing.  He was raised by a foster family in Montana, and when he met Beth, he fell in love with her and married her.  After years of saving money from Butch’s rodeo circuit and Beth’s teaching salary, the Andersons found the perfect ranch outside Sheridan, out on the Powder River, and they poured their own blood, sweat and tears into fixing up the ranch and calling it home.  They raised their two sons, Wyatt and Greg, on that ranch and they even built a stadium-sized arena on the property so that Butch could hold rodeo seminars at home, instead of traveling all over the place.  He wanted to be near the things he loves – his family and his ranch.

“Not long after the Andersons put the finishing touches on their brand new arena, they got a call from a ‘landman’ named Rowdy Rodiger who told them that he worked for MethZap.  He said that MethZap had purchased the mineral rights underlying their ranch.  Rowdy told them that there was methane gas under the ranch and that MethZap intended to mine the gas and that the Andersons would be entitled to receive large royalty checks from the gas mined from underneath their property.  MethZap assured the Andersons that the ranch would be returned to its pristine condition after the initial wells were drilled, and that MethZap would only come on to the ranch occasionally to make sure that the wells were working properly. 

Now, let’s be honest.  Butch and Beth were not happy that MethZap had purchased the mineral rights beneath their ranch, but they understood from talking to their neighbors who were going through similar mining operations that there wasn’t much they could do about it.  Their neighbors encouraged Butch and Beth to get along as best as possible with MethZap so that MethZap would keep its promises about respecting the ranch and Butch’s rodeo business.

“Unfortunately, MethZap didn’t keep its word to the Andersons.  The evidence will show that MethZap built roads all over the ranch and drove big rigs and other heavy equipment in the pastureland, tore out fences, mutilated the grassland, and scattered unnecessary pipes and paraphernalia everywhere.  Cows escaped, sheep got entangled, goats ate everything in sight and horses broke legs and had to be put down.  Sludge oozed from the well sites, and the smell of sulfur permeated their home.  It was the Andersons’ worst nightmare.  Or so they thought.”

I walked to the plaintiffs’ table and took a sip of bottled water.  I turned the plastic water bottle around in my hand and read the label, hoping the jury would focus on the purified water for a second.  I sat the water bottle down next to a pitcher of water on the table and continued.  “As it turns out, loose livestock was only the beginning of the nightmare.  What happened next will shock your conscience . . . and may even make you think twice before you drink the next glass of tap water flowing from your kitchen faucet.”

I walked back to the plaintiffs’ table and picked up a cake that I’d brought with me to the courtroom that morning.  I’d made the cake the night before.  It was a round, double-decker cake frosted in chocolate — perfectly symmetrical.  I held the cake in my right hand and paraded it before the twelve jurors and continued.  “As I grew up as a little girl, my mother taught me how to make a cake from scratch.  She was the Betty Crocker-type and she never used a box recipe for anything.  The three drawers near her stove held tin canisters that fit perfectly in each drawer.  One of them was full of flour; one was sugar; and one was salt.   When she made a cake, she would take sugar from the sugar container and flour from the flour container and put them in the bowl.  Then she would a pinch of salt from the salt container.  Her cakes always turned out perfectly, just like this one in front of you.

“But suppose I played a trick on her.  Suppose I took those canisters out of the drawers and mixed all the salt and sugar together so that it was one conglomeration and put them back in the drawers.  Suppose that my mom came into the kitchen to bake a cake and when she dipped out what she thought was a few cups of sugar, she was really dumping in a bunch of salty sugar.” 

I walked my perfect chocolate cake back over to the plaintiffs’ table and set it down.  Harry leaned over and picked up a second cake, which had been sitting on the floor behind Butch’s chair, and handed it to me.  This cake was flat and sloped so that the icing clumped on the plate.  “This is how my mother’s salty cake would have turned out.  Now, my mom would have been perplexed as to why her cake was sloping and ugly.  She would have thought that she had mismeasured some ingredient or had forgotten to add an ingredient.  She would never guess that her cake was loaded with salt.  But once she tasted it, she would know for certain what had happened.  It would taste awful.  It might even make her sick.

“Well, this is essentially what has happened on the Anderson ranch.  You will hear expert testimony in this case that thousands of years of soil segregation out there in the Powder River Basin left this fertile land with very low salinity.  You may think to yourself, What does salt have to do with the land?  We will prove to you that having a low quantity of salt in the soil helps plants grow.  That is why ranchers have prospered in this area for centuries, because we have low salinity in our soil.  You can think of it as a cake with just the right amount of salt in it,” I said, pointing to my beautiful cake. 

“The evidence will show that MethZap mixed up the sugar and the salt tins on the Anderson ranch when drilling for methane gas back in 2004.  They sucked up all the salt from deep within the earth and mixed it with the Andersons’ topsoil.  Now, the Andersons have a lop-sided, salty cake to feed their livestock with.  The wheat doesn’t grow.  The animals don’t graze,” I said, pointing to the ugly cake.  “But this isn’t the worst of the Andersons’ problems.  No.  See, it is possible to haul in thousands of cubic yards of new topsoil to make the grazing land good again.  The land will never be the same, but MethZap could do the right thing and pay for the topsoil to be repaired.  We will certainly be asking you, the jury, to make them pay for that.  But there is something far worse than the salty topsoil. 

“Ladies and Gentlemen, the evidence will show that in dredging the methane gas out from the bedrock beneath the Andersons’ soil, MethZap pumped hundreds of thousands of gallons of salty water onto the rangeland, which inevitably flowed into the Powder River and its tributaries, Clear Creek and Piney Creek.  The ecosystem has suffered greatly because no longer do these creeks exhibit high levels of biological, chemical and physical integrity.  The cottonwood trees are dying, encroached by noxious weeds and salt cedar that are taking their place.  The increased salt loading from MethZap has and will continue to kill off bald eagles, western wood peewees, great blue herons, deer, wild turkey, sage grouse, and other species. 

“Worse yet, the salty water that was left sitting in big pools on the Andersons’ property attracted mosquitoes – the kind that carry the West Nile virus.  The evidence will show that one of Butch Anderson’s prize colts died of West Nile virus last summer.

“The evidence will show that MethZap tried to cover up the salty soil by dumping extra fertilizer all over the ranch in hopes that this would fix the problem and help the grass grow back.  Well, the fertilizer just made things worse.  MethZap still denies that they put extra fertilizer on the ground, but we will prove to you that they did,” I said, walking over to the plaintiffs’ table.  “See this black box,” I said, pointing to a shoebox sitting on the edge of the table near Beth.  “This box contains two plants.”  I held them up.  “This one in my right hand was planted in uncontaminated soil from the Anderson ranch.  This one,” I said, holding up the plant in my left hand, “was planted in soil flushed by methane runoff and then fertilized by MethZap.  I’m going to leave these two plants in this black box with the lid off during the course of this trial.  These plants will receive the same amount of sunlight and water and will be placed in the window of the judge’s chambers.  During the closing argument at the end of the trial, you will see with your own eyes what happens to the plants and that this excess fertilizer, mixed with the toxic salty topsoil, created a condition called fertilizer toxicosis, which, some of you may know, can cause ‘mad cow’ disease.  We will conduct an additional experiment with this soil near the end of trial, which will prove to you what happens to plants that try to survive in contaminated soil.” 

I walked over to the white board near the judge’s podium and wrote down these words:  Destruction of Topsoil:  Mad Cow Disease:  Toxicosis:  West Nile Virus:  Dead Livestock:  Contaminated Water.

“There are things that have happened out on the Anderson ranch and the other class action plaintiffs’ land that money can’t replace.  MethZap’s big city lawyers will tell you that there is a value for these items, but we all understand why this is wrong.  We’ve all had a pet that meant nearly as much to us as a human.  We all have things that we hold near and dear to us – sentimental things that money can’t replace.  Most of us Wyomingites hold our pristine land dear to our hearts.  Once the land is destroyed, what will we have left? 

“All of this has been caused by a few government entities – the Bureau of Land Management and the Army Corps of Engineers, who are also defendants in this case, because they jointly have violated the Clean Water Act by negligently and wantonly issuing permits for coalbed methane operations in Wyoming.  These unlawful permits that the Army Corps and the Bureau of Land Management have issued allow operators like MethZap to dump millions of gallons of polluted water into the Powder River and its tributaries.  These permits do not consider the impact on landowners, ranchers and Wyoming’s natural environment.  Due to these unlawful permits, ranchers like the Andersons and the other class action members have had their lands flooded, their water rights eliminated and their fields poisoned by MethZap.  And you, ladies and gentlemen, will be asked to make the defendants pay.  If you don’t, the water, like the dinosaurs, will be gone from Wyoming forever.

“This case is about respect.  Respecting the spirit of the law.  Respecting other people’s land.  Respecting the environment.  During the course of this case, I urge you to think about the theme of our case often and ask yourselves, have Butch and Beth Anderson been treated with respect by MethZap?  I think that you will come to the same conclusion that I have.  MethZap has not treated the Andersons or the rest of the class of plaintiffs with respect.”