For my money, Jim Stiles, along with a small handful of others like Charles Bowden and Doug Peacock, is one of the leading fresh, outside-the-box voices in the American West since Ed Abbey’s death (HCN, 5/29/06: Clinging hopelessly to the past). We need more of them.
Unfortunately, prophets like Stiles (here meaning not smitten-by-gawd predictors, but those who call society to account) tend to be reviled. In this case, it’s by the forces of group-think, mainstream big-business corpserate environmentalism.
Richard Ingebretsen terms Stiles a “fundamentalist” when Stiles is the one “a-busy being born, not a-busy dying,” as Dylan says, while the death-of-environmentalism knell has been tolling of late. No, mainstream environmentalism is where fundamentalism, or stultified, one-true-holy-and-apostolic creedalism, lives. True, as Ingebretsen also says, “most people do not like to be preached at” — but few, if any, do more preaching than the mainstream enviros. David Cremean
Spearfish, South Dakota
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Stiles fights corporate environmentalism.
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