Forks panel speaks to the Wild Olympics Campaign, Reintroduction of Wolves, and UN Agenda 21
Posted 8/6/2011
by Sue Forde
Citizen Review Online
Forks, WA - 8/2/2011 - Several speakers were invited to help educate Forks citizens about the Wild Olympics Campaign, the reintroduction of wolves on the North Olympic Peninsula, and UN Agenda 21, at the local community center on August 2, 2011 at 6 p.m. Local residents Bill and Karen White sponsored the event, and Bill served as moderator.
Carol Johnson of NOTAC [North Olympic Timber Action CommiNttee] gave a presentation about the Wild Olympics Campaign and why NOTAC is against it. Ten environmental groups are actively trying to get 145,000 acres added to the wilderness designation in the Olympic National Park (ONP) and 400 miles of rivers designated as “Wild & Scenic”. There are 37,000 acres of privately owned land that the Park would be approaching as potential “willing sellers” as a part of the plan. Norm Dicks has backed the plan, as have the 3 County Commissioners of Clallam County. (See “Wild Olympics program planners move forward with support of county commissioners, environmental groups” ) Many individual citizens are fighting it.
Economic impacts of “wild and scenic” rivers: zero impact for those added within park boundaries; there are one-quarter mile buffers in a wild and scenic designation area, where absolutely nothing can be done with the land. Johnson said that Wild & Scenic Rivers designation has happened all across the US; and has not been successful. No dams can be built on rivers with that designation, she said. She reviewed the maps with the various designations currently in the park, and showed the areas that would potentially be added. There are “rings” around the national park where the expansion of wilderness would occur.
NOTAC opposes the wilderness designation because it “forever” forbids activity, she said. The Sierra Club and the PEW Environmental Group are two who are funding the promotion of wilderness area. NOTAC attempted to negotiate with the groups, but the negotiations failed. “We have given up enough” land, she asserted. Some of the adverse results of placing land into wilderness would be blow-over, which would become diseased and/or fire hazards.
The 37,000 acres of private and state timberland includes the Lake Ozette area. In designating wilderness area, there would be resulting job losses from timber, estimated at 113 to 226 jobs lost. Also lost would be tax revenues of approximately $2-4 million a year, and salaries at five mills, where payroll now is approximately $40,551,000 (part or all of that would be gone). We’re trying to keep the “wood basket” alive, she said. It’s ironic that Park management funding is short, yet they can find money to buy up more land, she said. The State has made no comment on the matter, so the Port of Port Angeles resolved to pay for an economic study on the matter.
Johnson said the NW Forest Plan is coming up for a rewrite in 2018.
Scott Roberts, Property Rights Director of the Freedom Foundation (formerly Evergreen Freedom Foundation), offered information about the history of private property rights (which includes all a person owns, not just real estate). He said that individual stewardship is better than government regulations. He quoted John Locke about natural law, one of the underlying ideas in what our U.S. Constitution was written about. He compared freedom to what is written in the Communist Manifesto, which tells how to convert a free society into a communistic society. One of the main planks of the Manifesto is the abolition of rights to private property.
Roberts introduced Glenn Morgan with the STOP Thurston County! Group. Individuals have joined together to fight the pocket gopher regulations there, and Morgan explained what people are doing to try and take back their individual rights. “Our local governments have become more aggressive over the last 3-4 years,” he said. We have to get organized and push back and roll back ordinances. “Apathy is our greatest enemy”, he said. He offered several suggestions for how to work toward reaching our representatives with the message, and shared several stories about people who have been harmed by the oppressive regulations.
Bill Pickell, past president of Contract Loggers Association (www.loggers.com), spoke next about the Wild Olympic Campaign and the proposed reintroduction of wolves to the North Olympic Peninsula. He talked about the environmental groups involved and referenced the website www.workingwildolympics.org.
He then spoke about the wolf issue, saying that he agreed with the minority report against the draft wolf plan except for the portion that speaks in favor of “translocation” – the moving of wolves from one State to another. He said we already have hybrid wolves in the Park. There are approximately 30 wolves in our State now, he said, and within 18 years, there will be approximately 210, based on a reproduction rate of 24% per year. An average wolf can kill 30 moose every year, per a study with the Washington Dept. of Fish and Wildlife; and 10 elk per year per wolf. The reality is around 30 elk per year per wolf, Pickell said. Last year, 7,300 elk were killed, of which 6,000 were wolf kills. That’s a loss of $4.5 million in money that could have been gained through hunters. With fewer wolf kills, there would be more elk available for hunters, with all the accessory businesses who would gain as a result, boosting the economy.
Pickell urged the people to get comments to the Fish & Wildlife committee against translocation. He said according to the Dept. of Fish & Wildlife, it would cost $12 million to manage wolves over a 20-year period. Some $40 million has been spent already. Wolf diseases are also a concern.
The entire panel agreed that the Wild Olympics Campaign and the reintroduction of wolves was as result, at least in part, of UN Agenda 21 and the Wildlands Project.
Sue Forde, editor of the Citizen Review Online, gave a history of Agenda 21 and the Wildlands Project, and offered information about how “sustainable development” and “sustainability” are the buzzwords for moving them forward.
She explained that the term “sustainability” was born at the 1992 Rio Conference (Earth Summit II) of the United Nations, along with Agenda 21. According to “Agenda 21: The Earth Summit Strategy to Save Our Planet (Earthpress, 1993), “Agenda 21 proposes an array of actions which are intended to be implemented by EVERY person on Earth…it calls for specific changes in the activities of ALL people…Effective execution of Agenda 21 will REQUIRE a profound reorientation of ALL humans, unlike anything the world has ever experienced…”
Agenda 21 promotes changing consumption patterns, achieving significant changes in the consumption patterns of industries, governments, households and individuals; promoting human settlement development, which promotes moving populations away from rural areas and into cities. Maurice Strong, socialist and senior advisor to the Commission on Global Governance and driving force behind promoting the concept of “sustainability”, said when introducing the term at the Rio Conference, that industrialized countries (Americans) have “developed and benefited from the unsustainable patterns of production and consumption which have produced our present dilemma.
“It is clear that current lifestyles and consumption pattern of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, consumption of large amounts of frozen and convenience foods, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work-place air-conditioning and suburban housing – are not sustainable. A shift is necessary toward lifestyles less geared to environmentally damaging consumption patterns.”
Strong also explained in an essay that the concept of sovereignty has to yield in favor of the “new imperatives of global environmental cooperative.”
Forde also reported that according to the Agenda 21 website in the UN’s Biodiversity Assessment Report, “Ski runs, grazing of livestock, plowing of soil, building fences, industry, single family homes, paves and tarred roads, logging activities, dams and reservoirs, power line construction, and economic systems that fail to set proper value on the environment” are not sustainable.
“Sustainability” – UN Agenda 21 – has been implemented through federal and state agencies since President Clinton formed his “President’s Council on Sustainable Development” after the Rio Conference. It’s another word for “socialism”, couched in “you want to save the environment, don’t you?”
At the local level, many cities and counties across the US (and around the world) are implementing Agenda 21 through a program called “ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability.” Clallam County pay dues to belong, as does the City of Sequim. Forks and Port Angeles have not joined – yet. The ICLEI website states: “Our programs and projects promote participatory, long-term, strategic planning process that address local sustainability while protecting global common goods. This approach links local action to internationally agreed-upon goals and targets such as: Agenda 21.” At least eight counties or cities have withdrawn from their partnership with ICLEI at this time, and many others are in the process.
The Wildlands Project goes hand-in-hand with UN Agenda 21. It was the foundation for the UN Biological Diversity Treaty – written by Earth-First Dave Foreman – and calls for 50% or more of the United States to be placed into “wildlands” where animals can freely roam – and people to be moved into city centers with a buffer zone around the cities for limited human “impacts”.
“The Olympic National Park is a UN biosphere and a World Heritage Park,” Forde said. “Several years ago, I heard Penny Eckert speak at the Dungeness River Management Team (DRMT), now the east-end “watershed council”. She was doing her master’s thesis at the time on our UN biosphere. She said she chose to do it on the Park because of all the UN biospheres, ours was the only one where people actually live in the buffer zone.”
With the removal of an increasing amount of land from private and/or state ownership, from working forests to untouched “wilderness”, the Wildlands Project moves forward, hand-in-glove with UN Agenda 21. An excellent website that has compiled tremendous (and interesting) data that shows how this affects each of us as individuals is http://www.takingliberty.us/TLHome.html.
UN Agenda 21’s “sustainability” is promoted in our children’s textbooks and classrooms. They are being taught the importance of becoming good “global citizens”, while the idea of sovereignty is put aside.