As such, Arnold and a loose confederation of allied individuals and organizations serve as a counterweight to the exertions of the environmentalist left. Precise and professorial, the native Texan has written six books, edited six others, testified on numerous occasions before Congress and published more than 300 articles in newspapers and magazines on a variety of topics.

But of late he has become best known for his well-documented probes into the inner workings, financial re-sources and ideological undercurrents of the environmentalist movement. These efforts include Trashing the Economy (coauthored with Alan Gottlieb in 1994), an encyclopedic look at the largest and most politically potent green groups, and EcoTerror: The Violent Agenda to Save Nature, a 1997 investigative look at Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and other greens who have employed terror to further their agenda.

His latest effort to peel away the bunny-hugging veneer of environmental groups is titled Undue Influence: Wealthy Foundations, Grant-Driven Environmental Groups and Zealous Bureaucrats That Control Your Future, which exposes a web of interrelated interests that finance and steer government policy on the environmental front. The book's revelations have to date resulted in at least four congressional hearings, Arnold tells Insight, and at least one committee investigation into potential illegalities.

Insight: You're often identified as a guiding light of the "wise-use" movement. For those unfamiliar with that movement, what is it and how did it evolve?

Ron Arnold: It's essentially about providing grass-roots support to everybody who provides America with its food, clothing, shelter, manufactured goods and basic transportation. Just as the environmental movement evolved in response to Industrial Age abuses, the wise-use movement evolved as a response to environmentalist abuses - especially its attacks on rural America. Wise use isn't as strong or as rich as the environmental movement, but we're definitely growing because more and more people are being hurt by government environmental policies. And every time the government hurts a person, it creates another one of us wise-use activists.

Insight: You write in your latest book, Undue Influence, about a phenomenon you call "rural cleansing." What is rural cleansing and what does it have to do with the environmental movement?

RA: It's essentially the deliberate use of environmental laws - by appeals, lawsuits and administrative actions - to remove all the resource workers from rural America. All of them. It's essentially an effort to dismantle rural America so that there no longer are loggers, miners, fishermen, ranchers or farmers, with the intent of "offshoring" these jobs and industries to other nations.

Insight: Is there some explicit master plan against rural America, or is all this just a consequence of environmental regulations hitting some areas of the economy harder than others?

RA: As far as whether there is a master plan that everybody is following, that would be a conspiracy theory and all conspiracy theories are false, in my opinion. If it's a conspiracy, it's a conspiracy of shared values, more than anything. There certainly is a cause-and-effect relationship between the economic hardships we see in rural America and the literally hundreds of thousands of environmental appeals of timber sales, appeals of grazing permits and other lawsuits brought by environmental groups. Today, if you take any environmental agenda item, there is a coalition of groups behind it and one or more major foundations bankrolling them through their grant-making process. And yeah, people in these groups do talk about having to "speed the transition" from a resource-based economy to what they call a diverse economy. What they're talking about is boutique economies - with the result that rural America would be filled with high-dollar retirees or modem gypsies with a money umbilical to some urban area, but no real working people. We see it happening in many states.

Insight: One point of the book is that wealthy foundations, through the funding of green groups, are exercising an "undue influence" over the environmental agenda. Can you explain to our readers a little more how this works?

RA: There is a cluster of wealthy, well-known foundations, about 200 of which are in a loose confederation called the Environmental Grant Makers Association. These foundations and individuals are not only writing the checks to environmental groups these days, they're also issuing the marching orders to go with them. So they've got a blueprint of what they think society ought to look like - which is essentially the postindustrial vision that Daniel Bell wrote about years ago in a book called The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, which advocated the offshoring to foreign countries of hard American industries and goods-producing sectors of the economy.

Insight: A lot of readers might not realize, until they read your book, how much funding for the radical environmental movement comes from a seemingly unlikely source - namely, corporate foundations. Why is this happening?

RA: This is largely the result of Internal Revenue Service regulations that, structurally speaking, almost make it inevitable because the law requires that there be no self-dealing by a foundation, whether a corporate foundation or any other foundation. What that means is that these foundations can't do anything that would benefit the donor or donors. That's why the wise-use movement gets almost nothing from industry, and why the total corporate donations received by the whole wise-use movement - all 3,000 or 4,000 grass-roots groups - is not as much as one environmental group gets in that same year. But it's also a result of the overall liberal cast of American society, which has thoroughly permeated many big foundations, so you find that $3 out of every $4 given by foundations go to left-leaning groups rather than to right-leaning groups.

Insight: What hopes or indications, if any, do you have that a Republican administration in the White House would mean a major shift away from Clinton-era environmental policies?

RA: I think what George W. Bush could do is to undo some of the worst problems [created by the Clinton White House] and introduce some really good programs to make our federal lands both productive and accessible to the average person. One of the things he could do is open up a lot of the national parks, which are supposed to be for public use and enjoyment but essentially have been shut down in bits and pieces by this administration. He should open those places back up again because they do belong to everyone and you should have a right to go in there, whereas environmentalists have been saying: "This is everybody's property so let's lock the lands up and kick people out."

Insight: You talk about a chasm that seems to exist between rural America and urban America. Is there also an understanding gap in this country between Easterners and Westerners concerning federal environmental policy?

RA: That is a problem, but the turn of Easterners is coming because things like the Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act and wetlands regulations affect major population areas in the East just as much as in the West, and maybe more so, given population densities. I think that when it comes down to fundamental liberties it doesn't matter where you live - you still get angry if the government won't let you live in your house, won't let you put a new porch on your home or rebuild it if it burns down because of some endangered species. The love of liberty is not regional. I think it's just that people in the East haven't been kicked in the teeth as much [as people in the West]. But I believe that you're going to have the same kind of sagebrush rebellions here as we do there once all these misguided policies begin to affect whole Eastern communities, rather than just one person here and one person there.

****PERSONAL BIO***

PERSONAL: Born in Houston, 1937. Wife, Janet; three daughters, six grandchildren. CURRENTLY: Executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise in Bellevue, Wash. EDUCATION: Studied business administration at the University of Texas and the University of Washington. CAREER HIGHLIGHTS: Founded Northwood Studio, a consulting firm for business and industry, in 1971; produced more than 130 films on natural-resource and social-conflict subjects; 1979 magazine series "The Environmental Battle" (winner of the American Business Press 1980 Editorial Achievement Award); author of EcoTerror: The Violent Agenda to Save Nature, voted in 1991 one of the 100 most important books of the 20th century in a Random House/American Library readers poll. FAVORITE NATURAL SETTINGS: The Grand Canyon; the Southwestern desert and Alaska's Glacier Bay.