Ray Ring’s bizarre exercise in contorted logic raises the bar of non-sequitur journalism to dizzying new heights. But then, that should have been expected, given the fatuously malignant banner lead on your Feb. 21 cover: "Have Environmentalists Failed the West?" What’s next, HCN? "Did Seismologists Fail the Sumatrans?" Or maybe ... "Did Firemen Fail the World Trade Center?"

Jim Jensen of the Montana Environmental Information Center blew the whistle and got the Seattle press on the case. But the Montana Wilderness Association and other groups had been working hard for that area’s economic and social interests for years, in spite of the hostility of a community totally propagandized by monster extractive exploiters who made big money by deceiving working people and making them complicit in their own betrayal and, ultimately, their own destruction.

As to the "Death of Environmentalism" intoned sepulchrally by the two young undertakers, that notion is pure rot, as anyone with actual human contacts among energized, burgeoning grassroots movements will attest. They need to get out of the Big Green office suites and get dirty. Reports of environmentalism’s death, as Mark Twain remarked about reports of his, are greatly exaggerated.

Paul Edwards, board member,
Montana Environmental Information Center, Montana Wilderness Association
Helena, Montana