They aren't masquerading, zealous power-seeking has always characterized the viro movement. The viros -- establishment and otherwise -- are waging a war against private property owners and industrial civilization. "Liking the environment" is not a reason to support them. The environment is our surroundings. The viros' demands to control the environment are demands to control everything around us, i.e., everything, i.e, everything we do personally and are not permitted to do under their ideological social controls. They have a totalitarian mindset on behalf of 'nature' regarded as a mystical, intrinsic value superseding human life and values, pretending that their ideology is "science". Those of us who personally enjoy nature as human beings have nothing in common with that.

The contemporary viro movement grew out of the radical, violent New Left of the 1960s and early 70s when they called themselves the Ecology Movement. The ecology movement was founded in the 1860s of counter-Enlightenment Germany by an anti-individualist Hegelian biologist, Ernst Haeckel, who regarded society and nature as organic wholes. They began with -- and continue to this day -- to demand rule by bureaucracy, paranoid for 'nature' in the name of 'science', in which even the most ordinary human activities can be done only by bureaucratic permission, when allowed at all. It is the opposite of individual rights protected by constitutionally limited government.

The viro movement consists of nature worshiping, misanthropic nihilists. It is about suppressing human values, not fighting pollution, except that they regard human activity as such as pollution. The leaders are living high off the hog with hundreds of millions of dollars a year for lobbying, litigation, and activism. It's no accident that the viro organizations and their leaders routinely support the worst statism of the progressive Democrats and the worst "liberal" Republicans, and have become entrenched in powerful government agencies like EPA, NPS, BLM, and their state equivalents.

For a comprehensive analysis of the viro movement, its goals, organizations, financing, and motives see:

1. Alston Chase, In a Dark Wood: The Fight over Forests and the New Tyranny of Ecology http://www.amazon.com/In-Dark-Wood-Fores...

2. Ron Arnold, Trashing the Economy: How Runaway Environmentalism is Wrecking America http://www.amazon.com/Trashing-Economy-R...

3. Ayn Rand first observed the nature of this movement in the early 1970s when it was still called the 'ecology movement' and most people were swept up by their rhetoric and giving them what they wanted politically. That resulted in the political creation of the dictatorial EPA under Nixon, a wave of mass eminent domain condemnations by the National Park Service for preserving other people's private property nationwide throughout the 1970s until Reagan mostly defunded it, and much more that is still destructive and worsening today, all of which resulted from the nihilistic New Left 'ecology' mentality observed by Ayn Rand. See the title essay in her anthology The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, later reissued and expanded as The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution http://www.amazon.com/Return-Primitive-A...

yes -- I'm a tree-hugging capitalist myself! -- j