John Block Reports from Washington

If my voice sounds different, that's because I'm calling this program in on the phone from Big Sky Country -- Montana. The sky is wide and blue, the forest green and, I think, the streams brimming with trout. I'm on a ranch and have been riding horseback every day, just enjoying the magnificent scenery. These United States of America so diverse. "Oh beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain. For purple mountain majesties, above the fruited plain."

Our people are just as diverse as the country, too. Out here in the West, in rural and small town America, people tend to be more self-reliant. Concerned about property rights. They want their guns. And they resent some city slickers that want to take their guns away, tell them how to manage their property and how to live their lives.

Of course the critics of the traditional rural lifestyle think they know best. They're so arrogant. People out here are very angry at the environmental know-it-alls for putting their forests at risk by not allowing the thinning necessary. They have limited the logging, costing thousands of jobs. I don't know how many sawmills have been closed. You have to wonder how many spotted owls have really been saved.

We're so rich here in the U.S. that people have the luxury and time to meddle in someone else's life. If they had a spotted owl in Zimbabwe where people are starving, they would eat the sucker.

I do believe that the rash of forest fires across the West has put the greens on the defensive and we can expect the forest service to adopt a more balanced approach to managing the people's resources. I hope so. Rural America has a lifestyle worth preserving.

Until next week, I am John Block -- on a horse in Big Sky Country.