Hi Glenn,

Hey, they trashed my book when it came out too, with a lot of the similar blather (Wild to the Last: Environmental Conflict in the Clearwater Country, WSU Press, 1998). My book was about the beginnings of the latest round of forest preservation after the go-go logging years of the '80s. It also profiled the people who stopped the big corporations and the Forest Service-- basically dirt bags, people who appeared to be powerless, yet shut the USFS down.

That was just too much to bear for many mainstream reviewers-- the notion that the upper classes weren't in charge.

In the end, I compared the logging of our last forests with the Holocaust-- not so much in the sense of human catastrophe, but the cultural mechanisms of destruction. The fact is that Jewish people are educated, and have written a body of work about organized destruction that does not exist on any other subject, and when you read Andrew Goldhagen, he's telling all of us something about ourselves-- not just about the Nazis. And to ignore those lessons is to live in peril of repeating them.

This unglued quite a few reviewers, who then decided that my book was not a 'serious' book. I got the same kind of crap, on a smaller scale, as you are getting now. What many do not realize is that the country I wrote about, in Idaho, was a big part of the intellectual spawning ground of the current cretinous culture warriors.

10 years later, everything that I wrote in my book, predictively, has come true. In certain circles, the book is now considered a prophetic history and reflection on many things that have come to pass.

What you are doing is vital. You are shattering walls, breaking down the idiot complacency of the obvious, respected fools. Through all of this, the assholes will kick you, abuse you, and tell you that you don't matter. That MUST be expected.

But I can tell you, as an old warrior, you are one of the very best- better than I ever was. And I don't write you as another helpless person looking for you to save me, or this country. I haven't given up on my political causes. But I'm damn proud to keep company with you. You make me think that there might be enough of us to beat back the bastards.

I'm going to make the controversial statement that there is no downside to China's one-child policy.

Here's why. We are facing a species-survival level crisis as humanity. The fact that we in the U.S. absolutely refuse to acknowledge it does not make it any less urgent, nor true. We are faced with destruction of the life support systems that we rely on.

China is one of the few countries that is confronting the fact that this species-survival problem is rooted in population growth. Of course, this is an outgrowth of their resource and geography association-- it is forcing them to realize what the rest of us are in deep denial about. And believe me, we are. If you don't believe that we are, then look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself to name one thing that you've done proactively besides using fluorescent lightbulbs that you've done today to counteract climate change.

Think women's rights are important? Try attempting to preserve them in a world of collapsing societies. Think poverty and human rights are important? Try fighting either when we have masses of migrating humanity due to global warming. Think discrimination against races is a problem? Can you imagine what is going to happen when we start running short on enough protein to make everyone happy?

I'm not recommending that everyone drop their pet causes and work solely on the looming environmental crisis. But it's time for everyone to diversify their portfolio and put about 30% of their activist time into this one. Because when the climate and the planet start to really unravel, none of the rest of it is going to matter. China, by keeping their one-child policy, even in the face of a society with rising standards of living, is doing an amazing thing.