Excellent story. It's nice to see the courts used to fight the watermelons for a change.

The only sad thing is that the little-guy ranchers don't have the same capacity to defend themselves.

Heh heh. This reminds me of the suit Streisand lost. I read the whole long article, and I'd say the award was justified. They did lie and distort.

Russ, after reading the article I started thinking. I used to give money to various environmental groups, but now they have taken to some pretty odd tactics. Maybe the thing to do is to fund some anti-environmental groups, so that someone will be scrutinizing the evidence they present. Checks and balances do work. A few more of these lawsuits would do a lot to make these people more careful.

Anyway, loud cheers for Chilton from this direction.

Yes, nice story (and, yes, for a change). I used to be lulled into some sort of insipid state by the environmental groups' pleas (I now regard them as spam and delete them unread and that includes the gunk from the Sierra Club and other more high profile groups), after I realized by reading ELSEwhere the last two years or so that most (if not all) the environmental groups are ACTUALLY fundraising fronts and voter solicitation fronts for Democratic candidates and the DNC itself. If not directly related, they certainly are indirectly involved in a DNC process...encouraging voters to write, call, donate in the name o' the environment (name your distress here) but actually leading you to enable quite often very damaging legislation if you "act" as a trusting dolt who just wants fresh air.

They are incredibly crafty and misleading front groups and I now feel quite awful for ever having supported any of them. No longer.

I still say that the biggest problem we have as a nation today where our natural resource are concerned is that the majority of Americans now grow up in urbanity and haven't the faintest idea of how to manage and preserve resources, nor what "the environment" is beyond their protestations of diesal buses outside their windows or down the blocks. It's a sad thing, it truly is. The so-called environmental groups cash in on an emotional panic, which, also, most urban people without reference or familiarity with anything else are easily incited by. SOME of the groups can and have raised awareness about SOME issues but most of them today are simply fund and voter raising efforts by Democrats with quite non-environmental issues and candidates profiting.

And I studied Biological Sciences! But, my ranching/farming-community younger years disproved to me when I later, as an adult, heard/read so much of the indoctrination by liberals who are hired by the U.S. Dept. of the Interior and particularly by the Forest Service and Fish&Game (blame our universities, actually, but many of them graduate as "environmentalists" and are hired by our federal agencies and the result is that the departments harass individual ranchers and farmers just as in this article -- unfortunately, most farmers and ranchers do not have the legal muscle available to them as did this guy [the article] in Arizona). Speaking from firsthand experience here, about it all.