Plant your bombs to bomb the plants

Nature lover that I am, I receive no less than two nature magazines. These excellent and thought-provoking journals, My Big Backyard and Ranger Rick, not only provide my children with endless fodder for paper snippings but also introduce them to such backyard friends as the humpback whale and the harp seal.

Today's mail brought letters from both magazines urging us to renew. Most pointedly, they argued,

"Renewing promptly saves you further notices and conserves paper."

The threat that, should I fail to renew, I will be harassed by further notices and thereby guilty of killing trees gains its full irony when you consider that they would have me subscribe to a paper magazine. Seems to me I saw a moose on one of those magazines recently.

But the incident reminded me that I have intended to mention a bizarre spin-off of Ray Moose's early radical years, ecoterrorism: terrorism to save the environment. There is even a non-organization to support this movement, the Earth Liberation Front, whose thesis is that we must fight to free planet earth from her human invaders. While they have no power structure or leader, they provide a cover name for Moose-alikes:

Any individuals who committed arson or any other illegal acts under the ELF name are individuals who choose to do so under the banner of ELF and do so only driven by their personal conscience.

(If you choose to visit their site, I should warn you that they also peddle viagra. Get the connection? I don't, either.)

Long ago, when Ray Moose first saw that the sober notion that we do not live in a trash bin could be transmogrified into the engine of a rock'n'roll, drug-promoting, counter-culture hippy movement, he tried the rebel alliance look. He bombed the didn'ts and sneered at the dids and noised his noise the globe over. It didn't take, and neither did his slogan, "ELF-help", so now he plays the other side by enforcing environmentalism through Big Brother government.

Thus Ray forged the last link in a chain well described by a priest here at the university: we have gone from "Yes to Christ and no to Church" to "Yes to man and no to God" to "Yes to the whales and trees and no to man."