Pay articles suck
Published by Jeff, December 20th, 2003 in EnvironmentWell, I was going to comment on Rick Bass’s article in Mother Jones, but there’s no online link to the article, and I haven’t actually read it. So yeah, that hampers it a bit. Mostly, I just wanted to make fun of him. Even though it’s a good article, according to the synopsis I listened to, he’s kind of an ass.
He’s an environmentalist, and a bit strange. This is the guy who was part of the group who was trying to stop the cutting down of some dead trees in an area near here, because they said they were actually alive. Evidence? Well, they were green at the top. Of course, they wouldn’t actually cut into the tree to see if there was still sap running (the best way to check), because that would hurt the tree. But, other people did, and there was no sap running, the trees were dead, and the green left would disappear soon. This is also the guy who shot an elk, thinking it was a moose (maybe the other way around, I can’t remember exactly). You can make your own judgement about the hunting part (and his mystical connections to animals, which apparently don’t deter him from shooting them), but he can’t tell the difference between those two? Quite the environmentalist.

MoJo has grown increasingly uneven in the last few years. They’ve even started printing specious articles written by wingnuts.
He’s definitely a wingnut, but from what I know of the article it was decent. It basically said that Bush is anti-wilderness because he grew up in Texas and doesn’t know what the kind of wilderness out here is like. Which is dead on, I think (and the source of the synopsis thinks as well, and he’s by no means anti-Bush). I don’t really ever read Mother Jones, but the issue the article is in looked pretty good.
I’ve got the article here. You’re not missing a great deal. It’s throbbingly passionate in the way that kills causes. It’s kind of like finding out that humorless Maoists want to back your run for office.