Synopsis
A thought-provoking expose+a7 of the "Wise Use Movement," a coalition of business interests and archconservatives, discusses the increasingly violent methods used by this anti-environmental movement and the failure of the law-enforcement establishment to address the problem.
Reviews
Dirty tricks, lies and violence are, according to journalist Helvarg, the mainstays of the anti-environmental movement. The picture painted here is a frightening one of death threats, pet mutilation and arson practiced against a wide range of individuals exercising their First Amendment rights on behalf of the environment. Even worse is the role allegedly played by law enforcement officials. Rather than prosecuting violent crimes by anti-environmental fanatics, the police seem more concerned about threats to society from "eco-terrorists" who lie down in front of bulldozers, claims the author. Although his worldview may seem extreme to some, anti-environmentalists' own rantings appear to fully support this position. To quote former President Reagan's interior secretary James Watt, "If the troubles from environmentalists cannot be solved in the jury box or at the ballot box, perhaps the cartridge box should be used." Helvarg demolishes the fiction that anti-environmentalism is a grass-roots movement by demonstrating its massive corporate underpinnings. This powerful investigative reporting should find wide readership.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
A carefully researched account of the antienvironmentalist ``Wise Use'' Movement, which has launched a ``holy war against the new pagans who worship trees and sacrifice people.'' Helvarg, an investigative reporter and documentary filmmaker, went behind the front lines to interview the movement's leaders, its grassroots supporters, industry and New Right backers, as well as the victims of the rising tide of antigreen violence. Helvarg brilliantly documents the creeping polarization in American life that we see also in such issues as abortion rights and gun control. As much as environmentalists want to preserve nature, some industries want to preserve unlimited access to natural resources, employees want to preserve their jobs, and property owners want to preserve their right to dispose of their land as they wish. The antienvironmentalist backlash, best exemplified by the ``Wise Use'' Movement, has received considerable attention from the conservative press and key figures such as Rush Limbaugh. But Helvarg faults sympathetic coverage in the mainstream press, particularly the New York Times, for giving the movement more credibility and respectability than its numbers and tactics warrant. His investigation reveals that Wise Use/Property Rights activists are few in number and need to resort to intimidation and violence to be effective in local confrontations. He visits an antilogging protester who was maimed by a car bomb, an antitoxics activist who was raped and tortured, and others who were beaten, shot at, had their dogs mutilated, cars run off the road, and homes burned down. He contends that these and thousands of other cases of harassment are effectively silencing many grassroots environmental activists. More disturbing is the lack of interest on the part of law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, in looking into these threats and acts of violence. A thought-provoking and timely expos‚. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
"Far fewer than a hundred thousand" Americans, Helvarg maintains, contribute to or actively participate in antienvironmental groups, yet the Wise Use/Property Rights philosophy these groups espouse has encouraged, if not caused, a "startling increase in intimidation, vandalism, and violence directed against grassroots environmental activists." Helvarg traces historical American attitudes toward the environment and the development, during the Reagan-Bush years, of the Wise Use Movement. He spells out the role in that movement of timber, mining, and grazing interests in the West and land developers in the East, and the Beltway contributions of free-market think tanks, New Right lobbyists, industry-front groups, and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. The success of this antienvironmental backlash in achieving media credibility and its legal tactics--SLAPPs (strategic lawsuits against public participation)--and theories (especially Richard Epstein's "takings" doctrine) are among Helvarg's more interesting subjects. His most sensational stories, however, give specifics on the harassment of and the violence against green activists around the country and the sorry tale of the FBI's simultaneous fantasizing about "ecoterrorism" and their reluctance to pursue antienvironmental violence. This is a revealing investigation of the people and the ideas at the heart of the numerically weak but politically strong Wise Use/Property Rights Movement. Mary Carroll
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