Wiebo Ludwig went to his reward today. There's an unseemly amount of ink being spilled dissecting the man's legacy. Who was Wiebo Ludwig?
No less an authority than the National Post has declared that the world is a safer place without him. I'm not so sure.
A lot of the anti-Wiebo diatribes focus on the fact that Ludwig was the leader of a fundamentalist cult that held archaic (by contemporary liberal standards) views on the role of women in society. That is neither here nor there. Rural Alberta is home to many cult-like religious communities who hold archaic views on the role of women in society.
For the most part, the rest of Alberta doesn't have a problem with them.
What made Ludwig different than the other misogynistic cult leaders was his unwavering opposition to Big Oil practices. Ludwig didn't stop at petitioning his local MP and appearing at local meetings to blow off steam about energy industry practices that even his critics agree were wantonly negligent of the health and safety of local communities.
That's what eventually made Wiebo a direct action kind of guy. He didn't just complain about sour gas wells. He did something about them.
Aware that taking on billion dollar multi-nationals through the legal system was a non-starter, Ludwig became an amateur oil-field terrorist. Amateur is the key word here. Littering gas well access roads with roofing nails isn't exactly al-Qaeda country.
In the course of his direct action campaign Ludwig managed to turn a spotlight on industry practices, something that even his most virulent critics must give him credit for.
The tragic death of Karman Willis may have had a lot to do with raising Ludwig's profile, but it wasn't directly related to either his supposed cult or his battle against Big Oil, other than giving Ludwig and his extended family the reputation of being local weirdos who were therefore fair game for a gang of local teens.
So who was Wiebo Ludwig?
By all accounts he was a neighborhood bully.
He was also a radical Christian environmentalist who truly believed that the wholesale rape of the land by Big Oil was a sin before God. He gave gas-well safety a profile it never had before, and all rural Albertans can thank him for that.
Let that be his legacy.
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