Christopher Muller

1949 - 2024

Christopher Muller

November 17, 1949 - December 6, 2024

A Celebration of Life will be held for Kit Muller June 7 at 11 a.m., Mayflower Congregational Church, 2940 Poly Dr., followed by a reception.

A founding staff member of Northern Plains Resource Council, Kit was born in Great Falls to Bill and Caroline Muller. The family moved to Billings in 1953 where Kit attended schools through the 9th grade. He attended high school at Colorado Rocky Mountain School in Carbondale, CO, graduating in 1968. Kit graduated from Harvard University in 1972 with a Bachelor of Arts, cum laude in social anthropology. After Harvard, Kit was drawn back West by the struggle emerging over rapid expansion of unregulated coal strip mining in the Powder River Basin. He helped organize NPRC, became its research director, and lobbied the Montana legislature during 1973 - 1975, which passed bedrock environmental laws: the Montana Major Utility Siting Act and the Coal Tax Constitutional Trust Fund. He is credited with the idea to make the coal tax a percentage of the sale price of the mined coal: as the price of coal increased, the tax would also increase.

Kit entered the Goldman School of Public Policy, UC, Berkeley in 1977 and graduated with a double Master of Public Policy and Economics in 1979. He moved to Washington, DC where he began a 38-year career with the Bureau of Land Management. He helped establish the system of National Conservation Lands with BLM, a system that now includes over thirty million acres of protected areas. He also served on the coordinating committee of the Network for Landscape Conservation, a nonprofit group that he helped create in 2012. The organization was a natural extension of his BLM work: promoting conservation by working across ownership and jurisdictional boundaries in order to meet the landscape-scale changes caused by climate change, the spread of cities and suburbs and industrial development.

He is survived by his wife, Glee Murray of Washington, DC (originally from Chester, MT). Other survivors: sister Jessica Muller (John Mergendoller), Mill Valley, CA; brother Brian Muller (Joan Hay), Boulder, CO; niece Julia (Aaron Byrd) and sons, Oakland, CA; nephew Jacob Mergendoller (Ali Zelisko) and daughter, Brooklyn, NY.