DAMN GREENIES!

For a decade, I was one. I worked for "Social Change Media" and almost was a professional campaigner for the Wilderness Society... but they ran out of money!

It is not an idealism, it is a zealotry! Being a greenie is a psudo-religion! Never let the truth get in the way of a 'higher calling'. The end justifies the means... Saving the planet from the sins of hte un-believiers is more important than the truth...

The "belief" is more important than the truth! Look at the Victorian bushfires... Forget the humand and the property.. think about all the fluffy animals. Killed by the Greenies!

If they had been allowed to conduct regular and extensive hazard reduction burns, then there would have been regular cool, winter fires, forming a moasic, a patchwork, of recently burnt, less-recently-burnt and distantly burnt bush... and teh fluffy animals could have moved from one area to the next - for examp;e moving from the small cool winter hazard-reduction fire to a safe place... and return once the food re-appeared in the recently burn patch.

However the greenies with their zealotry about 'saving the fluffy animals' have prevented cool winter fires, and as a result created less-frequent but Extensive Hot Firestorms! The poor little fulffies cant excape this sort of holocaust.

Even if they did survive the flames, the bush that used to provide their food is now ash... and because the holocaust was hundreds of square kilometres, instead of hundreds of square METRES... the Greenies, with their emotional, irrational zealotry, are guilty of habitat destruction and slaughter of the small fluffy animals they are trying to save!

Hypocrites. At least organised religion like Christianity had a couple of thousand years to adapt to reality and generally did "good" rather than misguided evil

Yes, the Greenies, like the socialists and feminists are religious fanatics.

It's just that their religions don't have a God... and now that they have so much power, and particularly, so much funding, they have no sense of balance...

I think the author - executive director of a politically motivated lobby group - is wrong to point the finger at conservationists using the tools of politics and publicity to achieve environmental outcomes. It's not extremism of environmentalists and conservationists that's the real heart of these issues, it's the complete failure of mainstream politics and vested interests to deal with issues like sustainability, environmental destruction and climate change in any meaningful way. He may feel that his deceptively named Australian Environment Foundation is merely responding to extreme environmentalism but it's just one more advocacy group that misleads and deceives to preserve an unsustainable - and extremely damaging - business as usual, whilst failing to address the great issues of our times.

When I read an article where two opposing 'camps' are pitted against each other, I look for some kind of assessment as to what extent each one's position is flawed and/or what kind of tactics they use.

Here however, I didn't see any acknowledgement that there are industry or lobby groups that also engage in deceitful campaigning when it comes to the environment.

Thus, when Rheese puts forward his message that environmentalists are engaging such behaviour, I'd expect any reasonable commentator to place this in the context of an ongoing dispute where both sides are engaging in unethical practices.

What's more, I'd expect there to be some acknowledgement that there are a wide variety of environmental groups and each have differing ethical standards by which they abide.

In failing to even acknowledge this reality, Rheese's otherwise reasonable hypothesis that *some* environmental groups engage in such behaviour deserves to be binned as more propaganda, this time coming from the other side.

In targeting groups for presenting one-sided, biased commentary, without acknowledging multiple approaches and the similar tactics employed by their opponents (although generally several orders of magnitude greater and for financial gain) Rheese opens himself up to well founded accusations of hypocrisy.