and to privatize the National Park Service. The first edition explored the origins of the organization in 1988 and its covert support by the administration of U.S. President George H. W. Bush. Helvarg identified its funding and the multinational corporations and other powerful figures with which it was associated. He catalogued the use of violence that he believed to be organized by the movement against environmental activists, and the ineffective response of law-enforcement agencies. A revised edition published in 2004 extended this to cover the early years of President George W. Bush's administration. Wisconsin Stewardship Network News described it as a book that "provides a fascinating and frightening insight into the violent fringe of the anti-conservation Wise Use movement [… and recommends it] in its entirety to readers who want a detailed examination of the origins, development and violent tendencies of Wise Use." The opposing view was put by Jesse Walker who, reviewing the book for American Enterprise, wrote that it "offers environmentalists a conspiracy theory to account for the populist backlash against their movement". Helvarg had accused Wise Use of astroturfing; Walker described his book as "a weapon in a propaganda war". War against the Greens is widely cited by activists inside the environmental movement (for example Community Rights Counsel and Land Tenure Center ) and gave rise to numerous rebuttals from Wise Use and its supporters (including Ron Arnold). Blue Frontier—Dispatches from America's Ocean Wilderness Helvarg's second book, Blue Frontier— Dispatches from America's Ocean Wilderness (2001, revised 2006), was named on the Los Angeles Times "Best Books of 2001" republished in 2006. In it Helvarg explores the effects of human activity in general, and of commerce and policy in particular, on marine life. He postulates a trend towards destruction, and suggests that it is possible to reverse this. He then describes some of the people and groups that are working to preserve or enhance the marine environment. This book prompted Senator John Kerry to observe that "David Helvarg underscores the full measure of the challenges before us: If we hope to explore the Blue Frontier, we must travel cautiously, repairing the damage we have done, understanding before we exploit, and always preserving the natural systems that have created it." It was also one of the catalysts for the establishment of the Blue Frontier Campaign and has become a definitive text for US marine conservation (characterized as 'the Seaweed