By Claire Wolfe
© 1999 Claire Wolfe

Readers keep asking, "Just where is Hardyville, this little town you always write about?" Well, you know I'm not going to tell. I will admit to this, though. Hardyville is bordered by the Territories of Montana and Wyoming, the Kingdom of Deseret and the Federal Occupation Zone of Idaho.

Now, you might think all those places are actually States of the Union. But you would be wrong. States are independent. Look it up in the dictionary. None of these places are states. Wyoming is simply the haven where the creme de la establishment runs to escape the taxes they've imposed on the rest of us. Montana is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Turner Broadcasting. And both places do the traditional thing colonies do -- provide raw materials and adventurous destinations for distant empire builders.

The Occupation Zone of Idaho you know about. A dozen years ago, the feds discovered a handful of white supremacists up there, mostly led by one senile (but eerily undying) old fart, and ever since then the place has been the big career-maker for fed agents. There are so many feds there now that you see ads in the Sandpoint and Bonners Ferry papers saying, "Wanted: One certified white supremacist. Eleven FBI agents wish to form conspiracy."

Poor Idaho.

Deseret is a different case. Under its more familiar name, Utah, it gets treated as a colony, too -- like when Clinton snatched 1.7 million acres of its land, cheering up Greens and Indonesian coal moguls and robbing the locals of a billion bucks in government school funding. (Well, what do you expect from one foreign government to another?) But don't let anybody fool you. Deseret is a kingdom. Those wise and wily Mormons put up with this nonsense only as long as it's pragmatic. Come the crunch, they know we need them more than they need us Gentiles -- and independent they are famously prepared to be.

Still, all these places -- and occasionally humble little Hardyville -- have to put up with a bunch of foreigners who know we exist only to please them. One of the things they're very big on is our "environment."

Now, don't get me wrong. We care about our environment, too. After all, we live in it. But these people have the notion that our whole part of the world is some big park that should be kept nicey-nice in case they might want to camp here some summer. Here are the kind of letters that show up in newspapers like the Casper Star-Tribune and Billings Gazette:

My family just drove through Wyoming and we didn't see a single buffalo!!!!! This is terrible! My son was so disappointed I had to promise him a complete set of new Star Wars action figures to keep him from throwing his sister out the window of our minivan. You people there are all horrible destroyers of the environment and everybody in your whole state should be relocated to Kansas!

Signed, A New Yorker

I drove through Montana once, 15 years ago. I saw a wolf. It was the most natural thing I ever saw. Wolves are beautiful. They are spiritual and non-violent. You people there are all horrible destroyers of the environment and everybody in your whole state should be relocated to someplace where there's no ecology for you to ruin, like Kansas. Leave the wolves alone to live in peace and harmony!

Signed, A Californian

I'm not kidding, either. And after they get done writing indignant letters to our newspapers, the really bad thing is that they go home and join really indignant groups, who get regulatory agencies to write really bad legislation messing up our lives while -- wouldn't you know it? -- not doing one useful thing for the wolves, the buffalo, or any other critter that just wants to be left alone.

You can see how this sort of thing would get on a person's nerves. Especially considering the source. Heck, if these people are so interested in "the natural environment" why not fix their own Buffalos or San Joses first, before worrying about whether our rabies-carrying, bubonic-flea-bearing, horse-crippling prairie dogs are happy little campers?

Seriously, what about the places they've already ruined?

Now, as you know, Hardyvillians aren't big on interfering with others. But we figure fair is fair. As you saw last week, we are very big on asking people to live by their own principles. If coast-folks keep insisting that our whole world should be turned into their depopulated "buffalo commons," we figure they ought to be equally willing to restore the "natural environment" of the places they live.

So the ad hoc and completely non-existent Hardyville Committee for Environmental Justice has proposed the first of several Other-People's-Places Restoration Projects. In order to draw widespread public support, we're kicking off with a project all good people can surely get behind.

There once existed, at latitude 38:54:18N and longitude 77:00:58W (look it up in an atlas) a great, vast wetland -- one of the vastest and grandest on the North American continent. This wetland was rife with ... oh, lots of birds and things, I'm sure. But all that natural life was viciously eradicated. And today, the peaceful Anopheles mosquito, and its wholly natural and organic companion, Plasmodium, that once dominated that eco-system are virtually extinct in their once-magnificent domain.

As always happens (at least, according to the preservationists) when one natural species is eradicated, some "junk species" comes in, takes over, and has an entirely destructive influence on the environment. If you look at an atlas, you'll see that it's certainly happened here. The species currently dominating that spot is as useless, vicious, predatory and parasitic as any in the known universe. AND IT IS SPREADING!!!

We say, wipe 'em out! Restore the wetland! Bring back Anopheles and Plasmodium which, after all, have the same right as any natural species to live -- and which are benevolent when compared with the species that has replaced them. Get rid of this usurper species and its destructive influence!

We urge you to join the Great Wetlands Restoration Project today! Because we're just beginning, you can even have a say in exactly how we should go about restoring the fertile, fecund and benign wetland at 38:54:18N/77:00:58W to its pristine state.