The hypocrisy of Texas environmentalists was on full display in a new PBS documentary. After discussing the legal fees associated with he and his wife willfully getting arrested multiple times in protest of a pipeline in West Texas that is now in service, Texas environmental leader Mark Glover complained that his anti-oil and gas activism prevented him from being able to afford gas for his four cars:
“Felonies are expensive. The local lawyers are not into pro bono. We’ve been fighting this thing two and a half years and some of the locals are a little worn out. So we get what’s called a ‘low bono’ and that’s about ten grand in legal fees per felony, and we got – I believe we’ve got five or six already in Presidio County. We’ve got four kids and the youngest one is 8. I have four cars and the average age is 23 years old, none of them have gas in their tanks right now.”
There were 19 total arrests over several months of protests of the Trans-Pecos pipeline in which protestors often locked themselves to construction equipment on behalf of a protest camp owned by the Glovers. Among those 19 arrests, Glover was arrested once and his wife, local Sierra Club leader Lori Glover, was arrested twice.
The Glover’s protest camp shut down shortly after it was revealed that one of their camp leaders, Pedro Rabago Gutierrez, was a fugitive registered sex offender wanted in California for a parole violation after serving time in prison for rape, sex with a minor, selling drugs, and assault with a deadly weapon. Despite the Glovers claim in the new PBS documentary that their protest camp “cut him off,” many in the camp came to his defense at the time, including Mark Glover calling Gutierrez and “honorable man” and Lori Glover stating that she was “very privileged to have worked with [Gutierrez].”
