"Heaven is a fiction we construct around real places, a way of imagining that says my time and stories are not meaningless."
– William Kittredge

I recently attended the Freedom 21 conference in St. Louis. The conference was put together by a coalition of groups including Sovereignty International, Eagle Forum, American Policy Center, Environmental Conservation Organization, and The Heartland Institute. There were lots of important people there, including Representative Roscoe Bartlett, Phyllis Schlafly, Henry Lamb, Dr. Michael Coffman, a host of experts on various topics, and John Fund of the Wall Street Journal.

But the really important people were the ones from Texas, New Mexico, California, Wyoming, Montana, Illinois, Ohio, South Carolina, and just about every state in the union. The important people were the folks on the front lines of a war, a fight, a continental divide about who owns the land, what should be done with that land, and whether we are a sovereign people or not. They ask if America is still a "sweet land of liberty." I spent hours talking to them before, during and after the various meetings.

At the conference there were wonderful talks by various individuals on U.N. Agenda 21, on the Cornwall Declaration, on free market environmentalism, on law and property rights and what is really best for the land. There were talks about treaties that will have the force of law on what we can and cannot do with our native land and what the future holds in that regard.

There was a mind-numbing blizzard of information, however, on the steady erosion of freedoms of the people who live on the land – erosion also affecting people who live in high-rises in Chicago and New York as well. After all, the statist agenda is also about education and other liberties contained in the Bill of Rights and Constitution. The fact is that larger agenda will impact on everyone's ability to own private property or move freely from place to place in private transportation without papers and massive amounts of data.

At the rate our government and certain special interests are going, those who might someday want to build, own or live on the land will not be able to do so. The reason is that land will have been legislated, set aside and regulated out of existence. Much of it will have been turned over to the command and control of a super-state bureaucracy that will make promises. In the end these promises, like the promises the great white father made to the Indians, will be broken. The land will be offered to the rich, to corporations and to international control in one form or another, or given in tribute to the well-connected or some new green religious group as a bribe to keep them quiet. It is happening now.

Mostly it will mean that this country will no longer be sovereign nor its people truly free.

People in the high-rises in big cities, or those who live in suburbs outside Boston and San Francisco, have not been touched by the great change in land laws – yet. They may have regulations to contend with, but their livelihoods do not depend on growing food or raising livestock or trees or digging in mines for iron, gold or minerals.

The new rich living in the suburbs of Minneapolis run the paths around the lakes and send in their dues to the Audubon Society and Sierra Club. They turn a blind eye to the lower classes and poor near Portland, Oregon, or Aspen and Vail or Denver. The rural poor and lower classes learn the hard way about a U.N. and environmental construct known as "sustainable development" and its bohemian cousin, the Wildlands Project. Both concepts will lock them out of a home and property ownership. As less land is made available for sale at reasonable prices, most of them will never know the thrill of having a place of their own.

Sustainable development is the latest pointy-headed and institutional answer to all of nature's problems – especially those involving land. It is a buzzword, a concept which bespeaks some kind of commonsense approach to the contemporary evil known as urban "sprawl." But this solution to urban sprawl is not approached in a free market or sound environmental way. The answer offered by the agenda setters and the corporate state is a top-down, command-and-control, centrally planned approach with input by adherents to the new religion of environmentalism. Included are the central planners – i.e., European and international failed busybodies, American foundations and mega-corporations that fund the green movement, which then leaves them alone.

The only ones who end up with nothing are the rural poor. They have been run off the land or done to death by legal wrangling and regulation.

There is an almost medieval feel to it. The corporate environmentalism sucking off the entire system keeps the faithful happy by validating the new green religion. Meanwhile, new crusades and crises are built from the ground up, crusades which are tightly planned and infidels defined who must be fought, challenged and destroyed.

The system has witches it burns and heretics it eviscerates. The victims are rural America and anyone who dares challenge the environmentalist myths and propaganda. Who among the rural poor and middle class has the king's ransom to fight the crusaders marching under the banner of the green cross? Certainly the farmers and ranchers, miners and loggers don't have the wherewithal. The new feudal barons have lots of money and they have the entertainment industry and the media to tell their side of the story and their side alone – a story that is often lies based on myths.

In a recent Sacramento Bee report, investigative journalist Ted Knudsen discovered that both monetary and moral support of the green movement and the subsequent destruction of the West are more about wealth and power than about science and the environment. Environmentalism has a religious element – the holy grail of our times. "Many, many people feel almost religious about the environment," said Patricia Schifferle, former regional director for The Wilderness Society in California. "It really does touch their inner souls."

Furthermore, the report adds, "In June 1998, The Nature Conservancy spent more than $1 million on a single fund-raising bash in New York City's Central Park. Carly Simon and Jimmy Buffett played. Masters of ceremonies included Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Mike Wallace and Leslie Stahl. Variety magazine reported that the 1,100 guests were treated to a martini bar and a rolling cigar station."

"The goal was to raise [our] profile among high-dollar donors," Conservancy spokesman Mike Horak said in a statement. And it paid off: $1.8 million was raised.

"If we have to get big donors by spending money that average, dedicated members think is going to the parks, we've lost," he said. "We're no longer environmentalists. We're party-givers."

Stories to Tell

Life is stories. Stories about real people, people whose lives are not statistics but real things, with real joys and real pain and defeat. I heard a lot of them at the conference. I heard dozens of stories from real people. The humanity of the stories can crush you if you let it, because so many of the stories are the same at their core. Stories of families who have worked the land for generations. Stories of new laws and new uses and ways to look at the land. Stories about heartfelt attempts to obey laws that are handed down from people who don't know the difference between one place and another and one person and another.

The stories tell themselves, really, but no one seems to be listening – certainly not Congress, not even the Republicans who promote bills like CARA, which will in effect put rural America out of business. Certainly not East Coast politicians who are more interested in more important issues like campaign finance or which state gets the next pork barrel project. They don't have time for old-fashioned notions like property rights or, more Importantly, the Bill of Rights.

Meanwhile, the states allow these rules and mandates and agendas to dictate to them. The states have acquiesced, whether those laws make sense or not. It makes one wonder how easily they have agreed to strangle the 10th Amendment and the 14th. Once upon a time sovereign states put up some kind of fight. These days they simply roll with the agenda and the leftward drift of the nation. At the local level, occasionally, you will find county commissioners, sheriffs, local citizens who will fight back. But most don't – most just see an inevitable end to their way of life, and they wait. But a few will never, never give up. Those are the ones who told their stories to me at the conference.

On Saturday morning shortly after the conference had reconvened, my friend and fellow journalist Jay Walley of New Mexico called me out of the room to give me the news. The Klamath farmers had turned the water back on in the Klamath Basin so that they're farms, the topsoil, and their lives would not be blown away.

I spoke to a couple of these folks on the phone and they are not Aryan Nation skinheads, nor do they hate anyone. Their ancestors came to that land in southern Oregon and northern California in order to work it. They came because of promises made and an invitation by the federal government and the Bureau of Reclamation. They have been good stewards of the land for generations. But now another utopian vision has taken hold in the brave new world of America, a vision created in hothouse policy centers in environmental organizations and corporate boardrooms. Decisions coming out of that vision are made in Washington by those who don't make their living on the land.

All of these new utopians, the powerful, and others have decided that the Endangered Species Act supersedes the Constitution. At its root that is exactly what it has done. It has broken treaties and other laws which were made so that these people of the Klamath and elsewhere could create living stories about lives well-lived. Stories about community that any city dweller might not understand because they are so simple, so complete and so real. They are stories about producing the food and fiber their city cousins and East Coast brethren take for granted.

The green elites and people who don't care much one way or the other about the Klamath farmer, people like Hillary and Ted Kennedy, Joe Lieberman and Lincoln Chafee, people who don't make their living on the land and aren't affected, can feel good as they sip their Starbucks on a Saturday morning listening to Public Radio go on about whatever. They have won. They are the new General Sheridans. They are the recent incarnation of the 7th Cavalry taking down one Indian village at time. Only this time it is one farmer, one rancher, one logger, one guy in a cabin on a remote river at a time.

Who speaks for these new Indians? Certainly not Congress and certainly not many Republicans. It is, after all, a throwaway issue because it only affects those people who deal in the kind of dirt in which things grow rather than the kind that forces you to tell children to leave the room.

Last week seven Republicans joined Democrats to break a treaty with the new Indians, the new hostiles created by Washington politicians and the "let them eat cake" attitude of our technocrats and SUV-driving soccer moms in Marin County. Soccer moms and others who never hear that less than 5 percent of the nation's land is developed and three-quarters of the nation's population lives on 3.5 percent of the land area. Foolish people who will never find out that 75 percent of states dedicate 90 percent of their land to rural uses.

Nor will they bother to find out the truth of these issues in time to make a difference to the people of the Klamath Basin. After all, the new catalogue from Patagonia is in the mail and they are thinking about shopping for fall clothes. These uncaring ones will never notice that in the Klamath area the so-called endangered species, the sucker fish, had at one time been a target for elimination by the same federal government that has shut off water to the farmers. They won't ever be told that the Klamath Irrigation System built in the '30s was paid for by the farmers. Nor will the Starbucks crowd read in the glossy letters from The Nature Conservancy or Sierra Club that the fish in question is not native to the reservoir.

A roll call vote in the Senate on July 12, 2001, on whether to table the Klamath Falls issue won by 52 to 48. Of course some Republicans voted against the farmers and for another treaty being broken, another covenant torn in half. Why conservatives bother voting for Republicans is in question. Last year we had Republican Trent Lott supporting CARA in the Senate, and in the House, Republicans Tauzin and Young.

On top of that, according to American Land Rights Association, Republican James Hansen of Utah, chairman of the Resources Committee, has shot Westerners in the back. He appointed a task force to look into the Endangered Species Act, the one impacting the Klamath farmers and others. However, he placed five liberal Democrats and one RINO Republican on the committee, which means that those who do not want any changes will control the agenda. Liberal Republican Congressman Wayne Gilchrest was appointed – and he is endorsed by the Sierra Club every year. Republican Gilchrest tips the balance in favor of the Democrats.

The Resources Committee had a field hearing, but Chairman Hansen was too busy going to Paris on congressional business to deal with it.

Hansen also gave only a few days' warning on another hearing that will impact the Klamath farmers, set for July 25. The working stiff will be hard pressed to get expensive plane tickets in time and settle his affairs in order to attend. However, it will allow the richly funded Sierra Club and others ample time to pay extra for that plane ticket to Washington.

Only one hearing was held on H.R. 701, CARA. American Land Rights says, "Hansen shut out over one hundred people who requested to speak in opposition to CARA! The deck was stacked – speakers at the hearing were ten to one against property rights, ten to one for more grants to enviro groups and more condemnation of private land."

CARA allows state and federal land acquisition agents to condemn private property for nearly any reason, including wildlife protection, land and water conservation, historic preservation, urban parks, or parks restoration. It will provide one billion dollars every year to accomplish this great land grab of all times. But people be damned, because when they run them off they will bulldoze the dwellings and human imprint will be expunged.

The Problem of the West

In 1896, Frederick Jackson Turner wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly. In it he stated, "The problem of the West is nothing less than the problem of American development . . . the West, at bottom, is a form of society rather than an area. It is a term applied to the region whose social conditions result in the application of older institutions and ideas transforming influences of free land . . . freedom of opportunity is opened, the cake of custom is broken . . . the West has been a constructive force of the highest significance in our life. To use the words of that acute and widely informed observer, Mr. Bryce, 'the West is the most American part of America. . . . The self-made man was the Western man's ideal, was the kind of man that all men might become. Out of his wilderness experience, out of the freedom of his opportunities, he fashioned a formula for social regeneration – the freedom of the individual to seek his own. He did not consider that his conditions were exceptional and temporary.' "

The red zone, Bush country, conservative Republican country needs your help. They are not getting it from Republicans who could make a difference. Their issues are crucial to maintaining our republic. Unless we do something about them, U.N. Agenda 21 and the end of U.S. sovereignty is near – maybe 10 years off at the most.

Don't look to Washington to lead. We all have to lead or the farmer of the Klamath, the ranchers in Nevada, Idaho, New Mexico and Arizona are doomed. The rest of the West and then the farmlands of the Midwest and East will follow. All the stories in each of those states will fade and die out.

The old home places in the backcountry will be torn down because the new order does not like to think that a single man or family once owned that land. That memory will be erased lest some child ask in some distant future, "Whatever happened to the cowboys, Mama?" By then we may be too fearful to answer that child truthfully, fearful that the child will learn we didn't listen when the stories were being told.

But worst of all, we didn't care. Perhaps because we didn't care, when it is our turn the child also will not listen to our pleas for help.

An old Navajo Wind Chant goes: "Remember what you have seen, because everything forgotten returns to the circling winds." That in itself is the same old story.

To find out what is happening in the Klamath Basin, go to http://www.klamathbasincrisis.org.

Please check out www.aldenchronicles.com. The following are aides to the key decision makers on Hansen's personal and Resources Committee staff for you to ask the questions. Ask them to vote for liberty and what Frederick Turner called "the man of the Western waters."

Contact:

mary.musselman@mail.house.gov; (801) 393-8362
mike.dunn@mail.house.gov; (801) 393-8362
lynn.cook@mail.house.gov; (801) 393-8362
bill.johnson@mail.house.gov; (202) 225-0453
nancee.blockinger@mail.house.gov; (202) 225-0453
allen.freemyer@mail.house.gov; (202) 225-2761
lisa.pittman@mail.house.gov; (202) 225-7800
tim.stewart@mail.house.gov; (202) 226-7400
linda.livingston@mail.house.gov; (202) 225-2761

Faxes:
202-225-5929
202-225-5857
801-621-7846
435-634-9289

Every congressman and the Resources Committee may be reached at the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 225-3121.

***