Ray Ring’s bizarre exercise in contorted logic
raises the bar of non-sequitur journalism to dizzying new heights.
But then, that should have been expected, given the fatuously
malignant banner lead on your Feb. 21 cover: “Have
Environmentalists Failed the West?” What’s next, HCN? “Did
Seismologists Fail the Sumatrans?” Or maybe … “Did Firemen Fail
the World Trade Center?”
Jim Jensen of the Montana
Environmental Information Center blew the whistle and got the
Seattle press on the case. But the Montana Wilderness Association
and other groups had been working hard for that area’s
economic and social interests for years, in spite of the hostility
of a community totally propagandized by monster extractive
exploiters who made big money by deceiving working people and
making them complicit in their own betrayal and, ultimately, their
own destruction.
As to the “Death of Environmentalism”
intoned sepulchrally by the two young undertakers, that notion is
pure rot, as anyone with actual human contacts among energized,
burgeoning grassroots movements will attest. They need to get out
of the Big Green office suites and get dirty. Reports of
environmentalism’s death, as Mark Twain remarked about
reports of his, are greatly exaggerated.
Paul
Edwards, board member,
Montana Environmental
Information Center, Montana Wilderness Association
Helena, Montana
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Environmentalists didn’t fail Libby.
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