Jason Jay Lee isn't first terrorist inspired by Al Gore's screeds

Wednesday, a gun wielding, bomb toting, eco-terrorist-who claimed to have been "awakened" by Al Gore's Oscar winning film, An Inconvenient Truth-was shot and killed by police after holding several people hostage inside the Discovery Channel headquarters in Maryland.

Sadly, it's not the first incident of someone going berserk after taking in Gore's work.

This time it was Jason Jay Lee. In a manifesto posted online, Lee stated, "Focus must be given on how people can live without giving birth to more filthy human children since those new additions continue pollution." He also declared we must "Find solutions for global warming, automotive pollution, international trade, factory pollution, and... the destruction of the planet!"

Lee's rant sounds similar to other eco-screeds that surfaced in the Nineties. One uttered, the "assault on the earth is breathtaking, and the horrific consequences are occurring so quickly as to defy our capacity to recognize them, comprehend their global implications, and organize an appropriate and timely response. Isolated pockets of resistance fighters who have experienced this juggernaut at first hand have begun to fight back in inspiring but, in the final analysis, woefully inadequate ways."

Still another warned, "One of the effects of the intrusion of industrial society has been that over much of the world traditional controls on population have been thrown out of balance. Hence the population explosion, with all that it implies...No one knows what will happen as a result of ozone depletion, the greenhouse effect and other environmental problems that cannot yet be foreseen."

The first eco-screed noted above was written by Al Gore in his book, Earth In The Balance. The latter was typed in a 120-square foot Montana shack by Ted Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber. Also found in Kaczynski's hovel, a copy of Earth In The Balance.

Kaczynski apparently was quite taken by Al Gore's missive. His copy of Earth In The Balance was dog-eared, underlined, marked and well worn. He obviously saw himself as some sort of "resistance "fighter.

Kaczynski terrorized the nation for 17 years, killing three people and wounding 22 with his mail-bombs. But it could have been much worse. He managed to sneak a bomb onto American Airlines Flight 444 from Chicago to Washington D.C. It exploded but only caused a small fire; otherwise the Boeing 747 passenger jet might have fallen out of the sky on Nov. 15, 1979, killing all onboard. From his cabin in the Montana woods, the reclusive mathematician anonymously sent out bomb after bomb, followed by letter after letter haranguing victims who had survived his attacks and taunting the media.