An Inclusive Litany

9/13/93

California state senator Tom Hayden, a former SDS leader during the sixties, has announced that his marriage vows to actress Barbara Williams, exchanged before a Buddhist priest, included a pledge to preserve old-growth forests. Williams told the Associated Press, "Marriage is similar to old-growth—you have to be especially loving and vigilant to help it survive and grow."

Hayden's ex-wife Jane Fonda is now married to media mogul Ted Turner, who offered this view on logging: "What we have to do is just go back to quit using chain saws and mechanical equipment and cut the trees and let them cut the trees the old way with a crosscut saw, and by God you would have to have five times or ten times as many people to cut the same number of trees as today. So you would employ more people and also you wouldn't be using, uh, you wouldn't be putting, uh, the stuff into the atmosphere because you wouldn't be running equipment."

[Ed.: On another occasion, Mr. Turner told a forum of foreign journalists that Americans include "some of the dumbest people in the world."]