J. Zane

Alabama farmers were dirt poor in the late 1920&s, but my Grandpa, Wad Walley, had a few acres of rich bottomland and scrub mountainside alongside the mighty Tennessee River. With a couple of old mules and a brood of hardworking sons he managed to scratch out a fair living by raising corn, sugar cane and shipping a few cows up the river to auction at Chattanooga, Tennessee by stern-wheeler riverboat. Nothing fancy, just enough to keep the family fed and buy everyone a set of clothes and a pair of brogan shoes each year.

Something new is in the wind. Newspapers have begun refusing to run attack ads from radical environmental groups.

May God love ?the environment? and guard it from those who claim to be protecting it. CNN&s Ted Turner likes to fancy himself as the world&s greatest environmentalist while he massively, massively profits from the true earth-enemy, the mindless, gluttonous beast of advertiser-driven consumerism.

Is the United Nations threat to America freedoms genuine? For years, I shrugged such a farfetched notion off. I would listen patiently to very earnest folks who spouted a seemingly endless stream of dire warnings about global and one-world government. I reckoned they had fallen under the influence of the conspiracy conjecturers and spent too much time reading spy thrillers and watching science fiction.

Rainforest Action Network is in the headlines again.

Luther Wallace "Wally" Klump recently marked his 70th birthday. He could not celebrate his threescore and ten on the family ranch in Arizona with his wife, and children and grand children. The old rancher turned 70 in a penitentiary cell with only convicts to commemorate the juncture.

The modest village of Cuba lies in northern New Mexico at the base of the Nacimiento Mountains and at the edge of the Navajo and Jicarilla Reservations. Cuba (named from the Spanish word for water trough, cubeta) is a tidy jumble of adobes built in the 1800s, prefabricated steel buildings and mobile homes. The one main street has a few mom-and-pop restaurants, motels and feed stores.

PFNS, Alamogordo, NM ~ According to a recent assay report, twenty million dollars in fine gold lies beneath the ground on a few acres at Jicarilla, New Mexico. Miner Jerry Fennell owns the mining claims and for about thirty years he has made a living and raised a family by panning the dry gulch and working a swimming pool size pit behind his home with a pick and shovel. Fennell has no bulldozers or dump trucks. A wheelbarrow and a gentle burro appropriately named "Dusty" haul most of the ore.

"Enviros play a very dirty game. Theirs is the politics of personal destruction on a major scale. Do I think the members of most 'environmental' groups support this? No. I think that if the average citizens who belong to one of these organizations understood the group's true agenda, they would be outraged. But they haven't watched their leaders. Where you don't have checks and balances you have abuses. There is no question that the environmental movement has discredited itself and in so doing has done a grave disservice to the country." --Jan Michael Jacobson, GladesGuru@aol.com