Perhaps this "freedom mist" isn't so freedom-y after all?
Buried way at the bottom of
this piece on the increasing death rate of honey bees:
But Mr. Adee [the South Dakota owner of the nation's largest beekeeping company), who said he had long scorned environmentalists’ hand-wringing about [pesticide use in crops], said he was starting to wonder whether they had a point.
Of the "environmentalist" label, Mr. Adee said: "I would have been insulted if you had called me that a few years ago. But what you would have called extreme — a light comes on, and you think, 'These guys really have something. Maybe they were just ahead of the bell curve.'"
I'm going to do some stereotyping and assume that a South Dakota farmer who scorns "extremist" environmentalist is a Republican. It's not much of a stretch. So like Sen. Rob Portman's conversion on marriage equality because of his gay son, or Sen. Mark Kirk's conversion on health care services to the less-wealthy because of his debilitating stroke, Adee decides that maybe the dirty fucking hippies are onto something when he, himself, is directly affected by unfettered degradation of our environment.
It's par for the course, of course. If there's a trait universal to all conservatives it's a distinct lack of empathy. That self-centered egocentric outlook is the root of all their evils, from their greed, to their bigotry, to their warmongering, to their rank distaste for diversity, be it ethnic, racial or religious.