At 1:59 AM -0400 6/4/01, Ed Newbold wrote:
>
>It?s a sad commentary on America, where we have nothing to fear from
>open political activism, that people choose to romanticize
>themselves in this way as though they faced the dangers that Chico
>Mendez, Ken Saro Wiwa, or the two recent Guatemalan environmental
>officials who were killed (among many others) for fighting to save
>the environment in the third world.

Ed, have you ever heard of Judy Bari? Let me summarize briefly: Judy
Bari was an environmental activist in California. In 1990, a bomb
went off in her car, nearly killing her. Within three hours of the
blast, the local police and the FBI had investigated, and arrested
Bari for being and ecoterrorist. In information given to the press,
they claimed that the bomb was in the back seat, that Bari had to
know it was there, and that therefore she was the bomb maker.
Independant investigators, however, determined that the bomb was
*under the front seat*, the case was dropped for lack of evidence,
and the real bomber was never caught. Want to see for yourself?
http://mediafilter.org/MFF/S37/S37cointelpro.html Bari (who has
since died from breast cancer) sued the FBI to find out why they lied
in the first place, and what else they knew beforehand. The FBI has
fought the case ever since, and as far as I know, it's still in court.

Nevermind Leonard Pelltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Martin Luther King Jr.;
saying that "we have nothing to fear from open political activism" is
just a little too glib for me.

Now, let me give you a quote from another California environmental
activist, Derrick Jensen: "For years, among other things, I filed
timber sale appeals that stopped illegal federal timber sales on
public lands. The government response to our efforts across the
country was to pass a law essentially exempting federal timber sales
from enviromental regulations. Every one of the approximately ten
thousand acres I helped save in several year of activism was clearcut
over the next fifteen months." (Hope magazine, #26, p.68)

Are those who are responsible for this kind of thing "people who *do*
have enough courage in their convictions to allow themselves to look
their opponents in the eye"? No, they are people who use their money
and their connections to manipulate the system to their advantage, a
tactic that their opponents, generally, can't even dream of using.

I want to be clear that I don't condone the tactics of the ELF. The
perps in the UW case were so addled that they couldn't even pick an
appropriate target; as Deborah said, the person targeted was using
the same propogation techniques as Linneus. But the damage being done
by the corporations and their politicians is orders of magnitude
greater than that being done by the ELF. Exxon Valdes, anyone? George
Grubya and ANWR? Anyone who can't distinguish between the ELF and
other environmentalists is not someone with a strong commitment to
the environment in the first place, in my opinion.

Requisite avian content: fledgling juncos, chickadees, and nuthatches
all seen in the past week. Also a garter snake taking a not quite
fledged winter wren out of it's nest. Ah nature, that one was hard to
leave alone.

--
Rob Saecker
Olympia
rsaecker at thurston.com