The overriding theme of the Earth Summit was that crippling poverty and humans forced to live hand to mouth is good for the environment. Unemployment in California may have resulted in less crowded highways, but I don't think that most people out here believe that tradeoff to have been a good one.

California, and the rest of the United States is nowhere close to out of resources. What they are is out of resources that the environmentalists will permit us to use.

Human activity results in change to the environment. That's how our species works, unless you think you would last very long naked in the woods eating grubs. Environmentalism has stopped being about changing the environment safely and cleanly, and has become about no changes at all to nature.

California has plenty of oil, especially offshore. The environmentalists won't let us drill for it. When you show them it can be done safely, they tell you they don't like looking at oil platforms.

The orange groves and farms you liked were purchased at the price of the dams and reservoirs you don't like. I am drinking water from the Hetch Hetchy aquaduct even now. When I turn on a faucet at the right time of year, I get to drink snowmelt. Other times I get well water, which isn't as good. The underground aquaduct itself runs a few blocks from my house. The environmentalists want to blow the Hetch Hetchy dam and bring back the valley, though why a beautiful valley has any more esthetic value than a beautiful lake is problematical. They could give a rat's ass about the farmers or the people who need drinking water. The most revolting slug has more value to them than all of the human population of California combined.

As for redwoods, coast redwoods cover about 1.74 million acres out here, of which about 350,000 acres are permanently protected on public land, and 200,000 acres owned privately by non-industrial interests. This leaves 1.2 million acres in the hands of about seven logging outfits. The reason that redwoods are ON these logging lands is because they are used for logging, otherwise they would probably have been totally cleared for farms decades ago.

There is no reason these trees, which are a permanently renewable resource, could not be logged indefinitely with the right management. But that's not good enough for environmentalists, which now only like untouched, virgin forests. Second growth trees are wrong, and evil, and probably don't absorb CO2 like good, old growth trees.

There are 86,000 acres of old growth redwoods. Of these, 80,000--93 percent--are on protected reserves, which is why when environmentalists made all that noise about the Headwaters Forest (only a tiny fraction of which is old growth), they have to talk about the largest unprotected grove of old growth redwoods.

Of course there are fewer redwoods than there were thousands of years ago, but there are still quite a few. And I LIKE civilization. It hurts a lot less than the alternatives. Poverty kills hundreds of times more people every year than pollution does, certainly more than "visual pollution" does.