Dear HCN,


It is my policy not to comment on news coverage of me, but in this case I have to correct the record. A letter you mailed out to potential readers with the lead article on The Wildlands Project seriously distorts history (HCN, 4/26/88). I did not ever agree to not "speak out about monkey wrenching" as part of any deal with the government, as you claim. No one tells me what to say or what to think. Not the FBI. Not anyone. (Well, actually, my wife sometimes does.) At the end of my trial in 1991, I had long left Earth First! and John Davis and I had already published two issues of Wild Earth. My arrest in 1989 and trial in 1991 did not cause my changed approach. I had already made the change. By the way, the Department of Justice later moved to dismiss all charges against me, showing that the FBI never had a legitimate case.


As far as your article goes, you might have let your readers know that the critics of The Wildlands Project, whom you quote, are the John Birch Society. Remember them? They claimed President Dwight Eisenhower was a conscious agent of the International Communist Conspiracy. Now they claim that Newt Gingrich and George Bush are in this plot with The Wildlands Project to hand America over to the United Nations. Hardly credible critics, I would say. In my sidebar interview, I did not say that the modern Earth First! had been started by the monkey wrenching types. I said "direct-action types." There is a considerable difference.





Dave Foreman


Albuquerque, New Mexico