John Fund keeps a "Political Diary" at the Wall Street Journal . Yesterday's entry touched, tangentially, on mining; the message, however, is global.

Fund tells of Gheorge Lucian, "a 23-year-old unemployed Romanian miner" who is starring in the film "Mine Your Own Business" by filmmaking Irishman Phelim McAleer. A self-described environmentalist, McAleer went to Lucian's "poor village in Romania where environmentalists are fighting plans for a new gold mine." In a tale reminiscent of the successful environmentalist mugging of a new saltworks in Mexico's Baja California Sur a few years ago, the locals thought the new gold mine would be a community asset where they now face unemployment of 70% and were hoping for the 600 new jobs the facility would bring. McAleer was "mugged by reality," so to speak, reporting to London's Daily Mail:

"I found that almost everything the environmentalists were saying about the project was misleading, exaggerated or quite simply false. The village was already heavily polluted because of the 2,000 years of mining in the area. The mining company actually planned to clean up the existing mess. And the locals, rather than being forcibly resettled as the environmentalists claimed, were queuing up to sell their decrepit houses to the company which was paying well over the market rate."

This led McAleer to question the basis for his environmental activism and, ultimately, to producing "Mine Your Own Business," starring Lucian in a global quest to protect others from the fate of his Romanian village. Fund offers a couple examples: first, "Belgian environmentalist Francoise Heidebroek pompously tells Mr. Lucian that he and his fellow Romanian villagers prefer to use horses rather than cars, and to rely on 'traditional cattle raising, small agriculture, wood processing' to live" and, second, "an official of the World Wide Fund for Nature (in Madagascar) who argues that the poor are just as happy as the rich and then insists on showing Mr. Lucian his new $50,000 catamaran."

An enlightened McAleer concludes:

"The biggest threat to miners and their families comes from upper-class Western environmentalists. This film will shock and upset those who, like myself, unquestioningly believed environmentalists were a force for good in the world. It is sad that my fellow left-wingers and environmentalists who often come from the most developed countries are now so opposed to development."

Lest the lesson be lost, Fund headlines the Diary entry: "Who's the Real Polluter?" Surprisingly, he resisted the imagined impulse to find some way to include Al Gore in the piece.