Up Front -- Strength is production and self-sufficiency.

Ford Foundation gives Audubon $5 million and Earthwatch $5 million. Toyota gives Audubon $500,000. The Nature Conservancy (TNC) runs on an annual budget of about $400 million (including $37 million of your tax dollars thanks to generous feds). According to Tom Knudson of the Sacramento Bee, federal support of environmental groups is substantial and growing. “Last year,” he writes, “about $137 million flowed to 20 major environmental nonprofit groups – an average of $377,000 a day.”

While much of that money is used to destroy resource users and American self-sufficiency, TNC brags about protecting “The Last Great Places.” The places they covet are often western ranches belonging to families that have worked the land for generations. American Land Conservancy offers to buy Klamath Basin farms in Oregon and California – destroyed by enviros like themselves, federal rules and a suckerfish – to put them out of production.

Audubon wants to make sure government continues to finance enviros through the Dept. of Education budget “to help” with curricula. When ABC-TV’s John Stossell interviewed young schoolchildren about the environment, the propaganda they parroted was so shockingly biased the embarrassed green groups lobbied the parents to withdraw consent for their children’s’ interviews. Then they put pressure on ABC to fire Stossell.

Safeway stores made a deal with a foreign government and will only sell subsidized imported lamb. No U.S. Lamb will be offered and U.S. sheep ranchers are in jeopardy.

Ranchers on the Idaho/Oregon line are fighting for survival. Relentless pressure is being put upon good stewards of the land by a mean-spirited enviro, a lazy judge and, once again, feds (see “Aloha” page 66). An Owyhee rancher says, “Last summer a member of the Sierra Club in a fancy red sports car flagged me down needing directions. He was lost and said they were camping and ‘striving to save the Owyhees.’ I gave him a few facts, pointed to the knee-high grass my horse was standing in and the hills waving in grass all around and asked him just exactly what needed to be saved. He sheepishly agreed and said, ‘More people need to hear the real facts.”’

I drove through Idaho in September. The National Forest north of Salomon was a tight-packed checkerboard, dark green and orange, with half of the trees dead or dying. This is typical of western forests, many of which are dangerously close annihilation. Too-dense forests are rotting. "Don’t’ use forests,” enviros and former Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck say proudly. "let ‘em burn."

The facts are simple. Cattlemen are being forced off lands they have worked and earned with generations of muscle and blood (see “Trespasser” page 73). Ranch families have been pressured by Park Service regulations that make no sense (see “Unwilling Sellers” page 22). Unregulated, cheaper, less-safe food arrives at our borders daily while our farmers and ranchers comply with strict rules and regulations that are expensive and unfair. U.S. regs do not apply to foreign products that are filling U.S. supermarket shelves and putting our own food producers out of business.

America has always been the symbol of freedom. Problems around the globe (see page 84) caused us to leave what we couldn’t tolerate at home. My sister lives in Australia. Soon after the 9-11 horrors she forwarded a rash of anti-U.S. prose, written by Americans. She enjoyed it. She is a pacifist, a socialist and a member of Australia’s Green Party. She calls George W. Bush “un-Christian.” With the exception of a few weddings and funerals I cannot recall her ever going inside a church.

She ignores all positive words about us, including a letter from a U.S. sailor which said the German warship, Lutjens, recently saluted the USS Winston Churchill (our only warship bearing the name of a foreign national). The Germans passed the U.S. ship near Plymouth, England, their entire crew manning the rails, a U.S. flag flying at half-mast and the sign, “We are with you.”

Freedom is intoxicating, which is why so many have fought, for centuries, to get to these shores. In England, when I was 15, my headmistress wrote to my parents. “Caroline is uneducable,” she said. “Please remove her from school.” Soon after that I came to America, which promised opportunity I was previously denied. “If you want to try, we’ll let you,” was the attitude I discovered in New York City back in the late ‘50s. I was willing to learn, worked hard, so I was taught, with no jealousy or reservation. I love this country.

I have learned to admire (and with RANGE to be an advocate for) all real producers – farmers, ranchers, loggers and miners. They grow food and supply products for homes, computers, cars, musical instruments, watercolor, oil paint, medicine, movies, chocolate and ice cream. They all make our lives better.

Because of America’s natural resources, she is rich. Because of her natural resource providers, she is strong. If resources are used wisely and our most productive citizens are encouraged instead of abused, we will be self-sufficient again. Foundations, feds and guilty corporations should rethink where they are sending their money.

Check these articles out! Earth First! says that they will OVERTHROW THE U.S. GOVERNMENT!

http://www.earthfirstjournal.org/feature.cfm?ID=92

The Road to the Underground... and Beyond

Want to be a revolutionary? Anarchist? Try this: Walk straight out your door into the night air... Climb a hill or something up high. Look out into the darkness at the dark sky. Then let your eyes look down at the multitude of lights flashing, porch lights, street lights, offices, cars and airports. Close your eyes and you can still see it... Ripeness for picking.

Want to be a revolutionary? Anarchist? Try this: Walk straight out your door into the night air... Climb a hill or something up high. Look out into the darkness at the dark sky. Then let your eyes look down at the multitude of lights flashing, porch lights, street lights, offices, cars and airports. Close your eyes and you can still see it... Ripeness for picking. Picture the thousands of cities, millions of cars... the rows of shiny jet airplanes, ready and fueled. Safety and security purchased cheap, on the market, hired guards with guns. How many bullets or light bulbs does it take to run a global consumer system, how many burn out each day? Bulbs are dying and guns are selling faster than young bodies are rotting (45,000 dead each day, 17 million a year to starvation and war). Hunger and starvation become investments in the game of Globalization.net. How much do I get for 44,000 extinct species each year? Can you feel inside of yourself the things you can’t express... the hidden pain? The broken filmstrip plastic slaps noisily as the techno-police state-nightmare keeps pounding its counter-mantra: “Pull the plug. Stop me! Before I hurt everything, more...” If we took a bunch of starving kids and endangered animals, and we just burned them in a big bonfire, would it make you flinch? Or will we soon just stand there as the bar-code programming replaces our eyes—or at least our vision. This dark monster that shines before our eyes is like The Matrix—only worse—it’s organic and it ends in the death of everything. It’s more than a game and more than a movie when this curtain closes.

Scrap the way you have viewed the world. All the key symbols and cultural concepts we use to define the world—the way that we think—have been corrupted and manipulated to delude us into ignorance and self-destruction. If the system hasn’t stolen your soul yet, nor sucked out your determination, then come along with us. Embrace the Underground.

We don’t need to hide behind words like democracy, reform or progress. Purge these constructs and replace them with liberation, anarchy and love from our hearts. We must be brave and believe in a world of sharing free expression and love for all things. It will be a long road through the Underground.

Moderates always play the game of holding back and diluting the radicals’ “condemnation of materialism.” From Jesus to Buddha and Gandhi to Che Guevara, moderates beg for patience and then redefine the truth.

These are the “end times” of mass movement protests and even riots may no longer be effective. These are the “end times” of passivism, patience and moderation. The Underground’s bonfires of celebration will burn through the veil of the media’s smokescreen. Praxis not posturing.

**************Bring the war home. We chart a new course for a life worth living. ***************There will be no more USA, corporations, technology or material affluence. There will be mutual aid, cooperation, decentralization, self-sufficiency and the liberation of desires—self expression—true anarchy and wildness. This is not just a revolution about power! Culture, spirituality, thinking and technology must all change radically. We believe that our way—the quickening way— results in much less suffering. We reach now to pull the plug on energy systems and all the toys of the greedy boys. All those shiny airplanes will become roofing shingles... and the skyscrapers will be greenhouses. We’ve got a lot of reducing, reusing and recycling to do, a lot to learn and to unlearn. Break the rules, trespass fate. Tune in to your deepest feelings, the wind on a rooftop during a reckless night of adventure, the roar of an unexpected kiss, the magic of your favorite songs lifting you up. Fearless against the darkness that the government plans for us, we are strong in our own desires. We come with stones and slingshots, the strange and untamed weapons of our imagination. For a world of wonder where anything is possible...

http://www.earthfirstjournal.org/feature.cfm?ID=87

http://www.earthfirstjournal.org/feature.cfm?ID=74&issue=v21n5

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