Posted 8/8/02

Jan Michael Jacobson, an environmentalist and Everglades expert who is part
of a battle against the government's habitat policies in South Florida,
claims the leadership of the environmental movement has betrayed both its
core constituency and the U.S. Constitution.

In an exclusive interview with The Paragon Foundation, Jacobson, the founder
and director of the Everglades Institute, described himself as "something of
a constitutionalist."

He was asked his views on the environmentalist movement and its impact on
America and the Constitution.

"The Greeks dreamed of creating a society their philosophers called 'the
shining city on a hill,'" he explained. "Our Founding Fathers believed in
ownership and protection of private property, and that sovereignty by grace
of God resides in the individual. From those beliefs the framers of our
Constitution created a system of government which far exceeded the Greek
dream of 'the shining city on a hill.' Unfortunately, the environmental
leaders are what could be described as hard-core socialist psychotics. They
are the lunatic fringes of socialism, and they are killing the American
dream.

"Enviros play a very dirty game. Theirs is the politics of personal
destruction on a major scale. Do I think the members of most 'environmental'
groups support this? No. I think that if the average citizens who belong to
one of these organizations understood the group's true agenda, they would be
outraged. But they haven't watched their leaders. Where you don't have
checks and balances you have abuses. There is no question that the
environmental movement has discredited itself and in so doing has done a
grave disservice to the country."

Jacobson sees no contradiction between environmentalism and private-property
rights.

"There should never have been an argument between the environmental movement
and the private landowner," he said. "The Enviros' agenda is to destroy
private land ownership. If America is to survive and prosper as intended by
the Founding Fathers, her individual citizens must be allowed to own
property.

"The media compete for readers or viewers and a crisis brings in readers and
viewers. Therefore, they keep looking for a crisis. However, in the natural
world, things proceed at the speed of mammalian evolution. There are no
great instant crises in the biological world, but if the media require one
and someone is willing to pay, there will be one."

The Everglades expert demonstrated his point with an example from the
Antarctic.

"People used to bleep hideously that if you wipe out any single species,
even impact the population, the whole world would be destroyed because the
whole world is linked together.

"Do you know it's possible that the fluttering of a butterfly in Africa
could start a wind circulation that could build into a hurricane? Well, it's
possible. It's also possible pigs will fly and the price of bacon will be
sky-high. But do you really want to count on it?

"Consider this scenario: The population of great whales in the Antarctic is
reduced to somewhere between slim and none. The single biggest appetite for
krill (mini-shrimp) that ever existed was gone. The krill are now swarming
the oceans. Nothing happened in the Antarctic - the sky didn't fall, the ice
cap didn't melt, and no population crashed except the whales. There was not
the slightest detectable change except the whales were not around. In due
course, when we quit sticking sharp explosive charges into them, they came
back, too. So the ecology turns out to be profoundly resilient."

Jacobson sees the original environmentalism movement as a worthy cause that
went bad due to its leaders' desire for power.

"Environmentalism was hijacked," he said. "The original people in the
movement could arguably claim to be the largest grass-roots movement in
America, and one of the greatest. People joined together to do good. Then
they made a crucial and critical mistake: They gave power - unchecked
power - to their leaders.

"We allow the Enviros to write critical legislation. We elected many to the
House and Senate who just blindly accepted that what the Enviros were doing
was good. Now we're unwilling to examine what the Enviros say and do to see
if it is flawed.

"It is one thing for the Enviros to say, 'We are going to do good,' but if
what they do creates profoundly negative impacts on the habitat and turns
out to be unconstitutional, it is proof that the power handed to their
leaders has corrupted them.

"Right now, taxpayers are paying for 'Green Bureau-babble,' which equates to
power. The people who come up with these ideas are power perverts. They
don't want to stand for election. They want the power without the
responsibility. These people are a perversion of the republic."

J. Zane Walley is a spokesman for the Paragon Foundation, Alamogordo, N.M.,
The Paragon Foundation is "dedicated to preserving the constitutional
principles established by the Founding Fathers."  The Paragon Foundation can
be reached at 1-877-847-3443.