As you may have heard, Robert Redford and Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton have been trading potshots over conservation, with Redford like to think of himself as an environmentalist’s environmentalist. Which makes New York Times writer John Tierney’s op-ed on his experience at a Redford global warming retreat all the more hilarious,
The event began with a group hike up the mountain to a clearing where Mr. Redford made a toast to “healing the planet.” Then, after explaining that “Native Americans have a special understanding and relationship with the earth that we would all do well to learn,” he introduced two Indian chiefs to perform a ritual. As they recited prayers and lamented “the white people’s war on living things,” they built a fire out of wood and sprinkled tobacco in it.
It seemed a bit odd for a conference on cleansing the atmosphere to open with a ritualistic fire that wasted energy and spewed greenhouse gases mixed with the world’s deadliest carcinogen. But then, the chiefs’ profligacy was nothing compared with the audience’s. We had come from all over the world in oil-burning airplanes and driven 50 miles in rented cars that spewed exhaust into the Rocky Mountain air.