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Wallace, Idaho – Well, enough of travelogues
and Christmas fables, at least for awhile, although
in future I may tell you about how I disarmed an army officer and a
militiaman in the parking lot of an exclusive brothel on the outskirts of
Medellin, Colombia.
True story. You'll just have to stay tuned. And
please consider my bona fides:
I was raised up a Conservationist. My splendid
parents were early members of the Sierra Club, and both of them graduates of
the University of California at Berkeley – hardly a hotbed of
Republicans, even in the 1940s. We had Sierra Club books on our coffee table
since my earliest memory. My mother took on a bunch of loggers for tearing
down old trees so a subdivision could improve its view, and prevailed. My
father took me to the woodshed for letting a 20-lb Ling cod I'd caught rot in
the sun to be devoured by cats while I went in search of a beer.
You do not waste, or despoil, Nature. That was the
lesson of the Conservationist.
To be a Conservationist is a great thing. It means
you respect the earth that nurtures you with the grain and flesh from its fields,
the timber from its forests to the silver and lead hidden in its rocks. Think
Theodore Roosevelt. Think Gifford Pinchot. Think Ed Pulaski.
Conservationists are at their core tolerantly
libertarian. As such they allowed a rotten sprig to sprout from their midst
and become a secular religion, and its name is Environmentalism.
The Environmentalist movement is, like most
religions, a fraud and a sham and a cruel effort to, using fear, confuse, tax and enslave. It has nothing to do with being
a Conservationist.
What was being done to the whales on this planet, to
the Cuyahoga River
when it caught fire in 1969, to Love Canal (which was not
Hooker Chemical's fault, but that of a greedy school board, but nevermind – do your own research) to the London
Fog-grade crud Los Angeleans were breathing in the
1950s – well, we as Conservationists had to do something!
And now the whales are vigorously protected. The Cayuhoga runs clear. Los Angeles breathes (except during
thermal inversions) relatively decent air. We created a federal agency, but
more importantly, a market for a clean environment, that
demanded that things get fixed and cleaned up. And they were.
Environmentalism as a religion sprung up about the
time the Vietnam “war” ended and Richard Nixon (creator of the
EPA) resigned in disgrace. We couldn't hate Nixon and the war anymore, so we
turned our hatred inward, to smokers, to men, and to the invisible
“industrialists” who were hell-bent on consigning this planet to
the netherworld.
Three separate events inform my conviction that
environmentalism is a fraud and that its advocates are zealous hypocrites
bent on destruction. They're
phonies. They'd rather lie when the truth would serve them better. And I, as
a Conservationist, despise them.
Angry epithets? Hardly. I mean what I say. As a
reporter I've caught these people in their lies. I
would like to light a fire under them and challenge them on their
pseudo-facts.
I'd like to take you on a reporter's journey. It
began in Alaska long before I'd met Bob Hopper, and they have nothing to do
with him or Bunker Hill.
It started with a phone call . . . to Greenpeace,
who told me they didn't care that the North Pole was being polluted, unless
the pollution was coming from Prudhoe Bay, which it wasn't. (It was coming
from Russia and China.So much for mercury in
walruses, or PCBs in the mothers' milk of Eskimos.)
Earthworks, it turns out, doesn't care that an
entire lake was about to be sucked dry to be mined for diamonds in Canada's
Northwest Territories – fish and wildlife be damned. Earthworks, whose
benefactor, Tiffanny CEO Michael Kowalski was
bankrolling that phony “No Dirty Gold” campaign to shut down a
copper mine in western Montana, told me “We have no position on diamond
mining,” even as Tiffany and partners in the Diavik
mine tore up the tundra and murdered millions of fish.
And then there was that Sierra Club lawyer in charge
of pushing the Sierra Club's agenda to end logging who clear-cut his own
timberland in eastern Washington – in violation of his own organisation's guidelines and over the protests of the
logger he'd hired – because he had to pay for a divorce.
All this is in the public record. Only a secular
religion could be this creepy. See you next week!
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