Rural cleansing
Progress of Wildlands Project implementation

By Ted Miller
June 2001

A little over ten years ago, the Wildlands Project was formed by EarthFirst founder Dave Foreman and deep ecologist Dr. Reed Noss. In their vision, over half of the continental US would be cleansed of human inhabitants and put off limits to almost all human use. Their vision was well funded and heavily promoted by a number of wealthy environmental groups. Now, after only a decade, their goals are very close to becoming a reality.

One of the most effective tools used in the environmental landgrab that is the basis for the Wildlands Project, are lawsuits brought under provisions in the Endangered Species Act. Already, such lawsuits have resulted in tens of millions of acres in this country being put off limits to most human use. Recently, over 4 million acres was designated as critical habitat for the California red-legged frog. The ESA has so far been used to list over 1200 species of plants and animals as endangered, with over 350 critical habitats designated. Environmental lawsuits are calling for over 300 more species to have designated critical habitats.

The tragedy of this abuse of the ESA is that the act is being primarily used to eliminate any land management and use of our abundant resources. ESA is based on environmental myth and not on sound science, According to the environmental myth now accepted by so many starry eyed preservationists and urban dwellers who've lost touch with their roots, wildlife can only survive in a habitat totally uninfluenced by humans.

This myth does not take into account that plant and animal species adapt to changing conditions, as they have over thousands of years, or they would have ceased to exist long before Europeans first came to this land. The peregrine falcons that make their homes on the Boston skyscrapers and caribou herds which have multiplied after the Alaskan pipeline was built offer an excellent example of animals adapting to human influence on the environment. The environmental myth does not take evolution into account.

As various plant and animal species lessen in number and go extinct, something else always takes its place. It is vain and foolhardy to try to save every kind of bug, spider, mouse, fly or weed whose numbers may or may not be declining. The environmental myth does not recognize the simple truth that every gardener knows. That truth is that with proper management, the land will be healthier, produce more, yield more diversity and better provide for wildlife than unmanaged lands. ESA does not take into account that resources can be extracted from the earth using methods that minimize or even eliminate environmental impact.

Besides their abuse of the ESA, proponents of the Wildlands Project have used their influence to have almost 60 million acres of government owned forest put off limits to any new road building, and to have existing roads removed from those areas. Although the environmentalists claim that those areas are being preserved for the people, the truth is that those areas are being preserved from the people. Directly affected are disabled people, families with young children, as well as the elderly, all of whom will lose access to those areas, in addition to those who simply enjoy motorized forms of recreation.

Indeed, it seems that the primary goal of hard-core environmentalists who have been so effective in eliminating multiple use from private and government owned lands is nothing less than removing rural people from their land, in effect, a rural cleansing. In recent years, they've succeeded in forcing an estimated one million or more rural people to move from the area they had called home after they were suddenly denied the ability to make a living off the land as had generations of their forefathers.

Now a bill has been introduced to Congress that would formally establish a large part of the Wildlands Project. The Wildlands Bill, H.R. 488 introduced by Connecticut Congressman Christopher Shays, has 69 CO-sponsors. This bill, sponsored mostly by Congressmen in the northeast and Atlantic states, would establish a wildland system across much of Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. This would result in creation of more wilderness designations, national parks and nature preserves in those areas, with wide corridors linking those new areas to existing preserves.

Any hope for restoring multiple use for the public would be gone. Also eliminated would be the remaining rural population in those areas. Those people would be forced to move. This most dangerous bill would assure that forest health in that area will continue to decline and will inevitably result in multimillion-acre fires that will eventually incinerate and lay waste to much of that area.

Attempts have already been made to create a new two million acre national park in the middle of Maine. Brock Evans of the Audubon Society led the spotted owl campaign that shut down the timber industry in much of the northwest and has now set a new goal, the elimination of the forest product jobs in the northeast. Evans, Foreman, Noss and the other preservationists are very close to achieving their vision of the extinction of rural Americans and throwing away the economic and environmental benefits of managing our natural resources.

If the Wildlands Bill goes through Congress, it is certain that soon after, a new bill will target the rural population living in the northeastern forest from the coast of Maine through upstate New York, as well as those who live in the forest in the upper Midwest. Rural people in the northeast and Midwest will then suffer the same fate as those forced to leave their homes in the northwest while their forest goes to ruin.

from Eco-Logic, http://www.eco.freedom.org/el/20010602/miller.shtml

Ted Miller lives in the White Mountains of northern NH. He is a bleach plant operator in a pulp mill, where he has worked for the past 17 years. Last year he testified before a Congressional subcomittee on how foundation grants are being used to drive environmental policy and eliminate jobs in rural areas.

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