Born Again Environmental Spiritualist

While waiting for my ride to the Sundance ceremony, I couldn't help but write this for you, discussing several major concerns I have about the Nuclear Power Craze.

First of all, I think the Nuclear Boom caught most environmentalists with their pants down, being totally unprepared for this explosion on their psyches and environment, and then being borgified into believing that Nuclear Power is the "solution" to the global warming theory after watching the film "An Inconvenient Truth," depicting Al Gore as the proletarian superhero who'll save us from our ecologically destructive mass consumptive society. Frankly most environmentalists I feel have almost lost sight of their objective as a result of their borgification into this false belief: to protect the environment.

I come from South Dakota, a state rich in mineral resources such as gold and uranium; it is also a state with a very poor environmental record. Most of the river have been contaminated with mining wastes; in the north in the Slim Buttes and Cave Hills areas on the Custer National Forest, uranium mine tailings waste, agricultural chemical wastes, while in the south, the rivers and Black Hills are polluted with gold mining tailings wastes. To me, protecting our rivers and the Black Hills have become a major focus of my life, being a fisherman and an avid outdoorsman. As an ardent and somewhat vocal supporter of environmentalism, I feel that eventually if we yell loud enough, someone will hear us and come to help us in our fight against all of the mining companies in our state.

After reading much of material on the Internet about environmentalism, I also feel that most of these groups have got to become more active in terms of proposing legislation and actual improvements, rather than just having an outdoor meeting just to meet other men and women for dating; this is what MySpace is for. I am not sniping at any group in particular, but specifically all of these environmental groups have got to take one unified stand against the destroyers, rather than fall to the "Divide and Conquer" tactic used on Native Americans for hundreds of years. We have got to remember we all have our parts in this grand play, and at the show's end, the main actor that should take the applause is our planet Earth.