It always astounds me to read periodicals and books intended for the environmental extremist crowd. These ignorami often refer to themselves as the New Druids, or as Archdruids. They sprinkle Gaelic words in an effort to identify with the ancient Celtic religious leaders. The Celts of antiquity were animists, worshipping nature as the provider, but would have had no understanding of the anti-human religion called environmentalism.

Scholars of the Celts and their Druids know that the first European mining was done by Celtic peoples seeking salt. From that expertise grew a prosperous economy know to archaelogists as the Hallstadt Culture. As their knowledge and wealth spread across Europe, they began mining copper and, eventually tin, which when combined, created bronze and the civilization known as the Bronze Age. Celtic metalworkers wrought exquisite artforms on ordinary, everyday tools and utensiles. Their gold and silver artifacts garner the admiration and the respect of the art world.

The same culture discovered the secrets of iron and steel and thereby brought about the Iron Age. The renowned miners of Bohemia, Italy, Germany, Wales and Spain are descended directly from ancient Celtic miners in those countries. Of course, we know how enviros regard mining.

The Celtic peoples of the Neolithic lived in large round houses with walls of stone and steep thatched roofs. The timbers needed for those homes were planted, cultivated, and harvested specifically for the purpose; silviculture is not a modern innovation. The sacred groves where the Celts held their religious festivals were planted and tended by the Druids. Just how would the Old Ones have viewed the modern tree-spiker who murders to preserve a North American forest that exists in an alarmingly unhealthy state created by a century of suppression of natural wildfires?

Commencing in distant prehistory, and continuing today, Celtic peoples have grazed sheep and cattle in the highlands, especially in Scotland and Spain. The extreme environmentalist despises ranching and yet identifies himself with ancient cultures that invented it. The very words range, ranch, rancho, rancher, and ranchero are of Gaelic origin. The oldest piece of Western European literature is the Tain Bo Cauilgne, (Cooley's Cattle Raid), an epic Celtic saga celebrating cattle.

The extreme environmentalists' attitude is reflected in the rantings of the Una-bomber. These warped minds hate science and technology and many resort to violence to express that hatred. But the ancient Celtic peoples expected their religious leaders to know everything about science and tachnology. As that religion was replaced, the attitude remained, which is one reason why more patents have been granted to inventors of Caelic surname than any other.

These so-called New Druids perfected the 29 cent appeal, the use of bureaucratic administrative appeals to halt mining, timbering, and ranching. They love the power and influence that massive centralized government gives to their few, but loud, voices, while the county movement drives them berserk because they cannot win local elections in the outlands. Environmentalists are the vanguard of the defenders of the American Leviathan, though they fantasize that they are the rightful heirs of Druidic mantles. In fact, the Druids of the ancient Celts were often in the front lines of combat against the imperial forces of Persia, Syria, Greece, Rome, and England. Celts have always fought heroically for local government and their communities' rights to self-determination.

By trying to revive the Druidic religion as the basis of the environmental political movement, the Green Left reveals and embraces the spiritual poverty and the intellectual famine that condemn it to a slow death.