Dear HCN,


I was disappointed to see Ken Toole's essay, "How the far right spreads its "wacky" ideas' (HCN, 12/8/97). In publishing this article, you clarified for one and all that your agenda is a political and lifestyle one, not environmental. You have just alienated the conservative fringe of your readership at a time when you should be inviting them in.


I am a University of California and Cal State alumni, an environmental professional, and I now live in northern Wyoming. I also hunt and am a gun owner. As a student of the U.S. Constitution and the historical context that created our nation, I am also opposed to gun control. I would guess that I am also politically more conservative than your staff. So, are we here to find out what common interests we have in protecting our wild places, or are we here to make generalizations about anyone who "doesn't think and do exactly as we do'? Does Mr. Toole and your editorial staff assume from my politics that I am, for example, anti-Semitic or anti-black?


I am not a "radical right-winger," a militia type, nor am I looking over my shoulder for black helicopters. But I'll bet some of your readers are. What are you going to tell them when they cancel their subscriptions? That your publication's stated goals for our nation's environmental, wildlife and public lands are only for the "politically correct'?





Bo Bowman


Banner, Wyoming