sue whenhe wrote, "In order to get our message before the public with some chance ofmaking a lasting impression, we've had to kill people." There have been, as we know, strands of the environmental movement that havebeen too often linked to an anti-human mindset. Regardless of his renunciationof EarthFirst!, Dave Foreman did at one time oppose famine aid to Ethiopia,saying "the best thing would be to just let nature seek its own balance, to letthe people there just starve...." Up here in Canada, naturalist John Livingston, inhis Governor General's Award-winning _Rogue Primate_, refers to AIDS dispassionately as "a natural response to human overpopulation...." I thinkenvironmentalists are people who understand that humans are part of nature,and they seek to live accordingly. Unfortunately, it sometimes seems that we are impatient for the rest of humanity to figure this out, and pessimistic tht we as a species are smart enough to make it happen. Some environmentalists, I think, find other humans (the more, the less merry) as basically troublesome. All this led me back to Thoreau. Was there anything in his writing that could have led Kaczynski (if he is the Unabomber) -- and maybe all environmentalists astray? On first glance, of course, Thoreau can be seen to be radically pro-nature and anti-society. He looked around his America and saw a civilization in which everyone was so intent on business, trade, and industry, so intent on eking out a living, that they forgot how to live. _Walden_ is a back-to-the-land how-to book, a carefully-crafted naturalist's diary, a witty response to Ben Franklin-industriousness, and a philosophical treatise on self-reliance. A Ted Kaczynski could draw inspiration from it. But Thoreau does not renounce society in _Walden_; he takes a trip from it to experiment with isolation, to learn more about himself and his surroundings. When his experiment is completed, he moves back to Concord and announces, "I left th...
