SEPTEMBER 1999 · VOLUME 20 · NUMBER 9
The September 1999 Lawrence Summers Memorial Award* goes to Steve Young, a former Republican U.S. Senate candidate linked with the Center for the American Experiment, a right-leaning Minneapolis-based think tank.
"We're not arguing that the Forest Service has become a believer in this religion," says Minnesota attorney Steve Young.
"But we're arguing that their failure to raise these religious questions has forced them to become an agent of religious purpose. If these [environmental] groups are saying that trees are fundamentally inviolate and sacred, that there should be some bioreserve that humans should be kept away from, my response is that, no, that's just your particular religious view and you can't force the government to impose that idea."
This is the rationale Young offers for a lawsuit on behalf of the Associated Contract Loggers in northern Minnesota against the U.S. Forest Service and two environmental groups.
The suit alleges that the Forest Service has become a "tool" of environmental groups that are motivated by a deep ecology "religion." Thus, the suit contends, the Forest Service's actions are in violation of the U.S. Constitution's separation of church and state.
Young adds that the deep ecology religion has penetrated the top of the government hierarchy. "I read Al Gore's book and I said, no shit, there's a coherence here, and that coherence is deep ecology. So we're [filing the suit] to establish new law-new ways of thinking about the environment."
Source: "Holy War: Minnesota loggers take the U.S. Forest Service and the tree-huggers to court on the unlikeliest of gripes," Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages, September 22, 1999. Thanks to Ned Daly for forwarding this story.
*In a 1991 internal memorandum, then-World Bank economist and current Deputy Secretary of Treasury Lawrence Summers argued for the transfer of waste and dirty industries from industrialized to developing countries. "Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs (lesser developed countries)?" Summers wrote. "I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that. ... I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly under polluted; their air quality is vastly inefficiently low [sic] compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City." Summers later said the memo was meant to be ironic.