PERSPECTIVE ON ENVIRONMENTALISM : Me First, God and Nature Second : With communism gone, the far right is seeing red in the green movement; public land preservation is under attack.

“We want you to be able to exploit the environment for private gain, absolutely. And we want people to understand that is a noble goal.”

So proclaims Ron Arnold, loudest spokesman for something calling itself the “wise use” movement, an anti-most-anything crusade of polluters, historic revisionists, and, it seems, ministers of the One and Only Word.

Based on their objectives, it’s clear they ought really to be called the “Me First!” movement. Their bible, “The Wise-Use Agenda,” calls for converting ancient forests into oxygen-producing “young stands (to) prevent the greenhouse effect”; weakening the Environmental Protection Agency; encouraging mining and drilling in national parks; opening 10 million acres of designated wilderness to motor vehicles and commercial development; introducing into national parks “private firms with expertise in people-moving, such as Walt Disney”; perpetuating an 1872 law that allows today’s mining companies to buy federal land at $5 an acre and resell it at mega-profits (subsidized by taxpayers), and dismembering legal safeguards for wetlands, clean water and vanishing species.

“Our goal,” says Arnold, “is to destroy, to eradicate the environmental movement” in a decade.

With avarice aforethought, Me First!ers are perverting history. In the first decade of this century, Teddy Roosevelt’s chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, introduced “wise use”--an antidote to privateering on public lands--into common conservation parlance. “(N)atural resources,” he wrote, “with whose conservation and wise distribution and use the whole future of the Nation was bound up, were passing under the control of men who developed and destroyed them with only one object in mind--their own personal profit.”

To generations of honest conservationists, wise use has always meant preventing the very abuses that Me First!ers hypocritically advocate, as did their recent ideological forbears, the James Watt-inspired “sagebrush rebels.”

A report by Canada’s Library of Parliament estimates that there are 250 Me First!-type organizations in North America. The names sound either vaguely environmental--National Council for Environmental Balance, National Wetlands Coalition, People for the West!--or very patriotic--Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, Citizens for Truth and Progress, and so on.

The report notes the groups’ use of “language that tends to deify (their) cause and satanize opponents.” Examples: A Mormon associated with the Wilderness Impact Research Foundation sees environmentalists as anti-Christian; a writer in Land Rights Letter identifies the supreme appreciator of nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson, as “a fallen-away Unitarian minister”; a Montana rancher can’t understand why “environmentalists want to go against the Bible, which says (in Genesis) Man shall have dominion over the Earth.”

“It’s a holy war between fundamentally different religions,” asserts Charles Cushman of the National Inholders Assn., evidently speaking for an angry God. “The preservationists are . . . worshiping trees and animals and sacrificing people. . . . “ He calls places like New York’s Adirondack Park “scenic gulags.”

Now that global communism has imploded, far-rightists need a domestic target, and so the color green has become red. Patrick Armstrong, a director of Our Land Society, asserts that environmentalism wants “to destroy or at least badly cripple industrialized capitalism.” Ron Arnold nominates environmentalism as “the third great wave of messianism to hit the planet after Christianity and Marxism/Leninism.” The John Birch Society has rung in, ranting about Marx and “planned” federal seizures of 26 million acres of timberland in the Northeast. Never mind that such plans do not exist.

At a hearing on that issue in New York, a man identified as a revival preacher (whose business stationery reads, “Wholesale Standing Timber--Low Priced Acreage & Lakefront”) shouted, “By the grace of God, the number of constitutionalists here will multiply . . . and outnumber the preservationists!”

Moonies apparently agree. The Canadian report reveals that the American Freedom Coalition, reportedly funded with $5 million in loans from the Unification Church, provides staff support to spread the anti-environmental gospel in the United States and Canada.

The Me First!ers have as their nexus the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, based in the Seattle area and run by Ron Arnold and Alan Gottlieb. Gottlieb is a mass-mailing wizard for far-right causes and a convicted tax felon.

With a cloak of “holiness” draped over the passion for wrecking America’s public lands and environmental laws, it’s hard to tell the priests from the money changers.

But this too shall pass. A certifiable conservation ethic, evolved over centuries, has rooted itself irrevocably in our culture and is growing globally. As Thomas S. Barrett, founder of the journal Earth Ethics, has said, “Maybe the day will come when we learn to love all of Creation as we love ourselves.”

A hopeful sign is the landmark “Joint Appeal by Religion and Science,” recently crafted by 115 leading scientists and theologians who “accept our responsibility to teach (about) the environmental crisis and what is required (morally and scientifically) to overcome it.”

Meanwhile, conservation will survive self-righteous opportunists who episodically appear, always loud and furious, always signifying the usual thing. Bona fide conservation will continue to consist of husbanding our natural inheritance for economic, ecological, aesthetic and spiritual purposes--an inheritance created by other-than-us, owned simultaneously by everyone and no one, and due on demand to trustees not yet born.

Society’s obligations toward this living trust are at once secular and spiritual, simple and complex. In “The Awful Rowing Toward God,” Anne Sexton wrote, “ . . . I can tell you where the well of God is/ . . . the well spoke to me./ It said: Abundance is scooped from abundance, yet abundance remains.” Therein lies the wisest use.

For proof, Me First!ers, who prefer things literal, need only read beyond “dominion” to the quieter injunctions of Genesis: Replenish the Earth, dress and keep the garden.