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Zinke trying to ignore climate change?

It is unfortunate that Ryan Zinke, in his Aug. 12 guest opinion, chose to exploit the suffering resulting from climate exacerbated mega fires for this administration’s anti-environmental agenda rather than address climate change.

Unless I missed it, he didn’t even mention climate change in his Inter Lake piece. In an interview about the same time, Mr. Zinke did however tell reporters that the West’s fires have “nothing to do with climate change.” And “It doesn’t matter whether you believe or don’t believe in climate change. What is important is we manage our forests.”

Yes, Mr. Zinke. It does matter if you believe in climate change because the science tells us that the only thing that will save forests and glaciers, and the very earth as we know it, is ending our dependence on fossil fuels as quickly as possible. And yes, thinning and reducing forest fuels at the wildland-urban interface is work well done, but addressing climate change and forest science are moral imperatives for anyone who is sincere about understanding wildfire. —Bob Muth Sr., Kalispell

‘Monkey’ IS a racist reference

In a letter published on Sept. 2 titled “Monkey is not racist reference,” one of the Inter Lake’s most pontifical letter writers attempted to dismiss a long and sad history of overt racist rhetoric by contending that the use of the word “monkey” in association with people of color does not have legitimate racist connotations. As is the case with many letters to this newspaper, the writer could not be more wrong.

The use of words and illustrations to link people of African descent to simians — monkeys and apes — has been used over many centuries to dehumanize this ethnic group. Recent examples?

In 2006, Republican Sen. George Allen of Virginia was considered a frontrunner in the GOP presidential campaign until he singled out a dark-skinned man at a rally and called him a “macaca.” It’s telling that even though the term is Portuguese for “monkey” it had worked its way into the lexicon of Southern racists.

Two years ago, a Republican candidate for the state Senate and the bishop of an evangelical church in Kentucky posted internet images of President Obama and the First Lady altered to sport ape-like physical features. Dan Johnson also said a photo of a chimpanzee was a baby picture of the president.

Unfortunately, these are not isolated examples. Recent robocalls by a white supremacist group to voters in Florida, where the Democrat candidate for governor is an African-American, used narration by a man speaking in a caricature of a black dialect accompanied by screeching monkeys and other jungle sounds in the background.

Anyone in 2018 who would deny that associating African-Americans with apes and monkeys is anything but vile racism is clearly clueless. —Mark Holston, Kalispell

‘No one raised their hands’

As usual I attended the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem meeting as an audience spectator, this one held May 9, in Kalispell. I have attended these bi-annual conferences on the status of protecting grizzly bears for about 15 years.

At the conclusion of the meeting there was a Q&A session for the audience and I asked this question of the entire committee membership that was obviously prejudiced against grizzly bears and wanted them de-listed (removed and unprotected) from the Endangered Species List so they could be trophy hunted with paid-for licenses: “Who among you, personally, does NOT want to see grizzly bears de-listed and hunted? Raise your hands.”

I carefully looked around the conference table at the members and peered into their eyes … and no one raised their hands! It was astounding that the entire body of government employees on the committee could be so evil as to not care about the survival of the grizzly bear species. It is my tax dollars paying their salaries but I want the grizzly bear spared to share the planet Earth with us humans ... the good ones.

Why doesn’t this evil group want the same as I do? Could it be because their managerial job appointments and career paths are at the behest of the Republican Party demanding the grizzly bear be (falsely) considered “recovered?” Here are their names for everyone reading this to ask that question of:

Jeff Mow, Glacier National Park superintendent and NCDE chair; Bonnie Stahr, assistant to NCDE chair; Jim Williams, Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks supervisor Region 1 in Kalispell; Chip Weber, U.S. Forest Service supervisor for Flathead National Forest; Randy Arnold, NCDE vice chair and Fish, Wildlife and Parks; Paul Frame. Alberta Fish & Game Association; Tabitha Graves, U.S. Geological Survey; Hilary Cooley, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service tech adviser; Cecily Costello, Fish, Wildlife & Parks tech adviser; Kraig Glazier, U.S. Dept. of Agriculture APHIS Wildlife Services; Sonya Germann, Dept. of Natural Resources); Mark Albers, U.S. Bureau of Land Management in Great Falls; Bryan Donner, Forest Service in Kootenai-Eureka; Scott Jackson, Forest Service tech adviser; Gary Bertelotti, Fish, Wildlife & Parks in Great Falls; Ron Wiseman, Forest Service L&C in Helena; George Edwards, Montana Livestock Loss Board; Stacy Courville, Consolidated Salish Kootenai Tribes; Holger Bolm, Ministry of Forest Lands & Natural Resources in British Columbia; Dan Casey, Blackfeet Nation.

Please acknowledge those people listed above for their attempted destruction of revered, iconic grizzly bears. Myself and others in attendance in the audience at the meeting will do all we can to prevent their evil efforts …with lawsuits as necessary. —Bill Baum, Martin City

Keep the gun debate honest

Over the past year, many area high school students have joined the gun-violence debate. I am delighted to see that as gun violence is an ‘all hands on deck’ issue, and no one’s thoughts, perspectives, or ideas should be left out.

Some of these new voices represent the “pro-Second Amendment” side of the debate. Case in point — the 100 or so students from Columbia Falls High that participated in a walk-out to show both their concern for gun violence and their support for the Second Amendment, as well as the Kalispell students who organized a rally at Depot Park.

But I want to call attention to what was NOT heard when those students spoke out. No one disparaged these kids as “crisis actors,” “puppets,” “tools” or any of the other names that the right-wing press and talking heads called the Parkland students who organized marches and rallies following the Valentine’s Day shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. Nor have the pro-Second students been labeled “anti-progressive NRA stooges,” in the manner that the right-wing media tried to viciously and falsely connect the Parkland kids to George Soros, CNN, and so-called anti-gun groups.

While the pro-Second kids are genuinely expressing an understanding and concern for gun violence, some are also bringing a false premise to the discussion — and that is my only quibble with them. When they say, “…the Second Amendment is under persistent attacks by the liberal media…”, that is a misconception that only detracts from the discussion. First of all, no one (with any credibility anyway) has even mentioned repealing the Second Amendment. The dialogue from the gun control side has been about closing the gun show loophole, better background checks, and (possibly) banning certain types of battlefield weapons. Second, if there ever was, there now is no such thing as “the liberal media.” There are liberal-oriented media outlets, like MSNBC and Huffington Post, but the “mainstream media” as we called it 10 years ago, has stayed pretty much where it always was as the conservative media (led by Fox News) has gone off the deep end to the extreme right.

So in conclusion, let’s all contribute our ideas to the gun-violence debate because those diverse ideas fuel and inform the dialogue. But let’s not lose our focus for a constitutional amendment that isn’t being targeted by anyone anyway. And above all, let’s actually DO SOMETHING about gun violence in America. —Robert Horne Jr., Whitefish