Ron Arnold on the Environment

[Nostalgia]

Ron Arnold is the Author of a book called "Freezing in the Dark" a book I just happened across today while searching the internet. He is also "the father" of the wise up movement an industry-front anti-environmentalist organization.
I then decided to do a quick search on this guy and came across his environmental views on sourcewatch.org , check it out...oh boy, this guy is a veritable anti-environmental nazi.

Arnold on Environment ('eco-terrorism')

In an interview for Playboy in 2004 Arnold recounted the key policies it espoused. "Number one was educate the public about the use of natural resources. Immediately develop petroleum resources in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Cut down remaining old-growth forests on public lands and replace with new trees. Cut down 30,000 acres of the Tongass National Forest each year to promote economic forestry practices. Open all public lands, including national parks, to mining and oil drilling. Construct roads into all wilderness areas for motorized wheel chair use. Stop protecting endangered species, such as the California condor, that were in decline before man arrived. Force anyone who loses litigation against a development to pay for the increase in costs for completing the project, plus damages. But the idea of wise use has become embedded. It's no longer a list like that," he said.[4]

"We want to destroy environmentalists by taking away their money and their members," Arnold told the New York Times reporter Timothy Egan in mid-December 1991. While CDFE IRS returns states Arnold works 20 hours a week without any compensation, Egan reported that in 1991 he charged $3,000 a day as a speaker or organizer of anti-environmental groups.

It was a theme he re-stated within days to Toronto Star reporter Katherine Long."Our goal is to destroy, to eradicate the environmental movement ... We're mad as hell. We're not going to take it anymore. We're dead serious - we're going to destroy them," he said. "We want to be able to exploit the environment for private gain, absolutely ... and we want people to understand that is a noble goal," he said.

According to Long, Arnold claimed that spotted owls weren't on the verge of extinction but preferred regrowth forests and said he suspected the hole in the ozone layer had always existed: "If chlorflourocarbons really destroy ozone, why isn't there a hole over chlorflourocarbon factories, he asks". As for the greenhouse effect he was emphatic: "There isn't any such thing".

While Arnold denies the reality of environmental problems, his has always been aimed - not at perusading the middle ground - but at mobilising those receptive to his polemical rhetoric equating policy debates as being a war. "We are sick to death of environmentalism and so we will destroy it. We will not allow our right to own property and use nature's resources for the benefit of mankind to be stripped from us by a bunch of eco-facists," he told the Boston Globe.

Arnold is credited with coining the term 'eco-terrorist', which he uses to position environmentalists engaged in non-violent civil disobedience as being the equivalent of those damaging property. [1] While he often states his fear that someone will be hurt as a result of 'eco-terrorism' he doesn't shy away from using inflammatory rhetoric himself.

In a 1993 interview with CNN, Arnold described the role of a 'wise user' as being akin to a warrior weilding a sword. "And that sword has two purposes: to carve out a niche for your agenda, to reshape the American law in your image; and, kill the bastards."[5] Asked to describe how he would like others to think of him, he said "People in industry, I'm going to do my best for you. Environmentalists, I'm coming to get you."

"We're out to kill the fuckers. We're simply trying to eliminate them. Our goal is to destroy environmentalism once and for all" Ron Arnold, as quoted in The War Against the Greens, p.7.

On a 1986 visit to New Zealand, sponsored by the Agricultural Chemical and Animal Remedies Manufacturers, Arnold described himself as the "Darth Vader for the capitalist revolution" and defended the use of the carcinogenic chemical 2,4,5-T claiming that chemical manufacturers wanted to make sure their chemicals were used safely (1).

Arnold warned New Zealanders that the US was experiencing a dangerous "upsurge in eco-terrorism. We have had power stations blown up, bridges burned, electrical transmission towers collapsed, forest trails booby trapped with wired shotguns, attacks on forestry pesticide application crews, Forest Service officers shot to death and numerous other acts of violence in the name of the environment", he told the New Zealand Herald.

In his book on the Wise Use movement - The War Against the Greens - David Helvarg reported that Arnold was subsequently cross examined on the claims he made in New Zealand as part of a lawsuit brought against the government by activists. The activists claimed that they were being targeted as marijuana growers because of their anti-pesticide work, which was an industry strategy suggested by Arnold.

When asked in the court for the sources of his claims, Arnold referred to a government report and claimed the incident occurred in Southern Oregon and was in relation to a marijuana patch. When pressed about the connection to someone involved in campaigning for the environment he referred to another article he had written years earlier in a conservative magazine. When the article was retrieved and examined it had no connection with marijuana growing at all or the claimed incident but Arnold said that the connection was the similarity between incidents such as damage to logging machinery and the ideological views of environmentalists who used marijuana. He gave up trying to connect environmentalists with the killing of a Forest Service official.

When a small group, Green Anarchists, organised a tour in 2002, Arnold latched on to their support of people such as the imprisoned 'Unabomber' Ted Kaczynski as a 'political prisoner' to call for the FBI's Domestic Terrorism Program to investigate the group. Arnold told the Conservative News Service (CNS) that the tour "presents probable cause for investigation. You do have people here recommending violence, murder, property damage, everything you can think of." [6]

The following year Arnold, long considered a fringe player, landed a role as an "expert consultant on ecoterrorism" to a University of Arkansas Terrorism Research Center project to study terrorism cases in the US. The project was funded to the tune of $343,885 by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ). [7]

In Arnold's view, the threat of 'eco-terrorism' warrants more far reaching investigative powers for law enforcement agencies than were even allowed for under the Patriot Act. "It's easy to throw rocks at industry, because everybody can think of a corporate abuse. But there are also problems with ecoterrorism, both in giving too much and not enough power to law enforcement. Under the Patriot Act the FBI can't keep a database of people suspected of being subversive or working with enviro-terrorists unless they've been convicted. Some nonprofits have assembled databases on ecoterror. The mink farmers have done it. We want to be able to make this information accessible to police," he said in an interview with Playboy magazine.[8]

More recently Arnold coined the term 'rural cleansing' in an attempt to starkly portray environmental movement campaigns as being only in the interests of urban elites. Arnold explained 'rural cleansing' as being "the deliberate use of environmental laws - by appeals, lawsuits and administrative actions - to remove all the resource workers from rural America. All of them. It's essentially an effort to dismantle rural America so that there no longer are loggers, miners, fishermen, ranchers or farmers, with the intent of "offshoring" these jobs and industries to other nations.[9]
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Arnold