It's only speculation, but I think that I have reconstructed the scene in my mind fairly accurately: Earth First! holds a clandestine meeting amongst the trees and the spotted owls, deep within some darkened forest, and their goal for the night is to form ulate a coherent and intellectual argument against the Mt. Graham telescope.

"I got it," the brain of the group says, "we U-lock our heads to Jim Kolbe's chairs, and dance on his tables." Recognizing the sheer brilliance of the scheme, the entire pack erupts in howls of delight, and they run around on all fours for a while.

We may never know exactly how the actual meeting went, but as the Daily Wildcat reported, Earth First! did invade Mr. Kolbe's office, and danced around and locked themselves up until they were all arrested, presumably to be taken back to the zoo. Of all t he various left-wing groups, radical environmentalists have to be my favorite, if only for their imagination.

I own a U-lock (I use it to lock up my bicycle), and to be honest, the thought never even occurred to me that it could be used to lock myself to a chair. But after reading the Earth First! story, and out of a true sense of journalistic devotion, I decided to give it a try, first double checking to see that nobody was watching. I am proud to report that the U-lock did fit around my neck with only moderate pain and minor asphyxiation, which I will keep in mind in the future, whenever I'm afraid that I might be stolen.

But, I refuse to protest with one. I don't know about you, but whenever I see Earth First!-like groups, I find myself rooting for dirty water and toxic waste. And that is why it is truly unfortunate that environmentalism has been captured by extremists. T hese people not only marginalize themselves, which I could care less about, but they also marginalize their cause. Most people are nature and animal lovers, but nobody in their right mind is going to align themselves with a bunch of freakish, childlike l awbreakers.

And certainly, nobody should align themselves with this crowd, because they are not just eccentrics who have taken a noble cause to excesses. Rather, they are a group of people with dangerous, and in some cases, offensive and sick ideas, who are fanatical about their agenda.

Back in high school, there was a group called EWAG (Environmental Wildlife Action Group), which is essentially a minor-league Earth First! Last year, they trotted out a guest speaker whose basic tenant was that all life is equal, which is really what it b oils down to for all of these people. The speaker talked about things like species-ism, which she said is no different from racism or sexism - the victims are just animals instead of people (feeding your dog dog food, for example). And chicken farms? Equ ivalent to the Jewish holocaust, according to a pamphlet she passed out - an idea which should deeply offend just about everyone.

More than any other group that I have ever seen, radical environmentalists seem to be driven by blind, irrational emotion. Granted, some people might be genuinely concerned about the Mt. Graham telescope, but there have clearly been more important and mor e moral causes in the history of the world. And as far as I can recall, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. never danced on any tables fighting for civil rights, which should tell you that there is something to be said for dignity, integrity, and credibility.

Now, some free advice to Earth First!: For starters, lose the exclamation point. If the exclamation point was so effective, I'm sure that other groups would have picked it up by now: MEChA! NAACP! Democratic Party! Every club would be exciting.

Or, Earth First!, if you are convinced that punctuation in your group's name is really the way to go, perhaps we could see it changed to something more appropriate - like 'Earth First?'. As in, "Earth First? That's the group of environmental nuts." Or, "E arth First? Yeah, I hear they were raised by a pack of owls."

One other tip to Earth First!(?): Pack up the U-locks, boys, because my sources tell me that there is another telescope, a huge telescope, being built ... somewhere in the ... Ordos Plateau region of northern China. So you better get moving.

Note to everyone else: There is no telescope in China, but with any luck at all, these people will leave Tucson, go U-lock themselves to something, and hopefully lose the keys. If all goes right, we should have one more endangered species on our hands, an d we can all sleep better at night.

Clinten Garrett is an economics freshman. His column appears every other Tuesday.