Go read Jim Scarantino’s column on the decline of environmentalists in public opinion (Enviros’ sinking credibility starts at home); I’ll wait. Done? OK.

I appreciate Jim’s thoughtful concern over this supposed decline and its implications to the future well-being of the environment. And I celebrate Jim’s rarity as a Green Republican (about as welcome as a Log Cabin Republican to the True Believers).

For local color, Jim points out that former founders of the Weather Underground and Earth First! live in Albuquerque. He neglects to mention one has long been a teacher who changes the world through sweat instead of bombs. The other in involved in numerous organizations that no one sensible would call radical. Hey, Jim, don’t you know any young radicals? Well, who does.

As long as we’re looking at New Mexico as microcosm, perhaps Jim can explain how ranchers, a small and declining group, can thwart wolf reintroduction when a very large part of the public favors it. And, how is it that this group is so powerful in the Gila and powerless in the Four Corners, where they oppose the environmental degradation caused by drilling?

Nobody does hyperbole like Jim. He sounds like a mainstream conservative when he slickly moves from the “hype” over arsenic to the implication that “enviros” are just as wrong about mercury (and 10,000 other pollutants) and massive species die-off. No, he assures us, “we’re doing fine.” Worse, those incompetent enviros who cry wolf have no one but themselves to blame if the public doesn’t listen if the enviros ever get it right. (Jim would be thrown out of any truly conservative group by allowing that enviros might be right about something.)

While some damage has been done to the Environmental Movement by Earth First or the Earth Liberation Front — or even PETA — it pales in comparison to that other force that Jim doesn’t give it’s full due: the Radical Wrong. It has been 35 years since the first Earth Day, but it has been more than 40 years since Big Tobacco began denying a connection between smoking and cancer and industry sang the praises of DDT (your death is their profit). It has also been more than 20 years since Ronnie Raygun blamed smog on trees and James Watt said Christians didn’t need to worry about the environment because god gave it to them to use as they see fit. These aren’t just fringe wackos — these are pillars of their community. And their message hasn’t gotten a whit friendlier to the environment or your health and well-being. Welcome back, DDT. Hello, nuclear bunker busters!

Even today, hordes of writers, deluded or paid, crank out messages about the uncertainty of “global climate change” (instead of Human-caused Global Warming) and science in general. The destroyers ridicule “little creatures we’ve never heard of” and the tree-huggers who care. Along the way, the Radical Wrong has pissed in every well they can to convince us that everything is a matter of opinion, all of equal standing (except when it comes to the Constitution and Bible being immutable truth subject to no interpretation ever). Who profits when people are uncertain, confused and deceived? Not the environmentalists nor the environment itself, that’s clear.

Ultimately, even 50 million environmentalists can’t stop the selfish profiteers or alter that sense of entitlement — of Manifest Destiny — that is the real threat to the earth. It’s my land and I can do anything I want with it. Now git. mjh