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The Wildlands Project Comes to Hidalgo County (Part
13) A Country Girl’s Musin’ by Judy Keeler 1/25/03
Since I jumped in with both feet in my last article, I thought I’d follow through with another thoughtful piece this week. I used to avoid discussing the United Nation’s connection with the Wildlands Project. I was concerned most people would be overwhelmed by the magnitude of the agenda and consider me a little "tetched" in the head. However, since wild land proponents enjoy challenging the truth, I thought I’d give them more ammunition with which to shoot at me. The Wildlands Project is not being implemented in just New Mexico. It was the basis for the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity, also known as the treaty of Rio de Janeiro since it was ratified at the United Nation’s 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. When it was presented to Congress in 1994, they never ratified it due to some outstanding work by a few individuals and organizations that were concerned with it's impacts on our society and ability to use our land. However, the Clinton administration developed its ecosystem management policies to comply with the treaty. These policies are currently being implemented through agency rule changes, as directed by executive order. According to Henry Lamb, Eco-logic online, “Executive Order 13158 signed by former President Clinton provided the authority necessary to comply with the treaty, including Section 7 which states: ‘Federal agencies taking actions pursuant to this Executive Order must act in accordance with international law…’ The Bush administration reviewed this Executive Order, and decided to keep it in place.” The Clinton administration was so intent on stopping all resource production in our nation they were not above using the United Nations. Alston Chase, syndicated columnist and environmental author, noted in one of his articles, “In September (1995), the Clinton Administration, fearing U.S. law would not prevent a planned gold mine near Yellowstone National Park, invited a UN committee to declare Yellowstone a World Heritage Site ‘in danger’”. On December 5th, the World Heritage Committee of the United Nation's Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) complied with the Administration’s request. A strong supporter of biological diversity, heritage sites and conservation according to the Wildland Project’s design, The Nature Conservancy has come up with a new campaign to protect and preserve biodiversity. Launched October 31, 2001, according to ENS news, “The Heart of the West campaign” is one of the “largest and most comprehensive conservation programs in Colorado’s history”. The Conservancy’s goal is to generate “$75 million to protect more than a half million acres of habitat for Colorado’s imperiled species”. More than a million had already been raised in both cash and donations of land and “easements” at the time of publication. The article continues, the Heart of the West campaign will be steered by the Nature Conservancy identifying “the state’s most threatened habitats and species” and by developing a “comprehensive conservation blueprint for ensuring their long term protection”. It will also draw upon “scientific research to identify and conserve the full spectrum of species, natural communities and ecological systems native to Colorado”. “This approach, known as ‘conservation by design,’ considers nature on nature’s terms”. According to Mark Burget, state director for the Nature Conservancy, “We’re looking beyond county, state and even national boundaries to set our conservation goals, as Colorado’s ecosystems are co-dependent with other natural environments around the world”. Never known for its modesty or lack of involvement, The Nature Conservancy in Arizona, was flattered when the United Nations wanted more information on their efforts to “solve water issues on the San Pedro River”, according to Holly Richter, Nature Conservancy’s Upper San Pedro program manager. Testifying in Sweden during an international symposium, Richter “briefed representatives from 34 nations on the San Pedro River”. Although the article goes on to claim that it “is recognized around the globe” that “local issues have to be solved by local people”, I have found very little evidence that the United Nations, our federal agencies or nongovernmental organizations like the Nature Conservancy will allow that to happen. It appears to me, they prefer top down decision making via executive order and agency rulemaking which serves to force compliance with the agenda. Let’s take a look at how the UN is promoting the Wildlands Project in Canada. The following article explains the issue very well.
Wildlands and UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere Program November 1999 By Doug Hindson (Third in a series) Word Count 1091 Last time we discussed the origins of the "conservation" movement. You will recall conservation was used to close land to human settlement and restrict access to natural resources in the western United States. Associated with the term "conservation" was a fledgling eugenics movement whose purpose was to engineer the human population. In 1968 an International Biosphere Conference urged the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to establish a program that would manage the world's natural resources on a biosphere basis. UNESCO's program became known as Man and the Biosphere (MAB). A biosphere reserve or "eco-region" is a huge tract of land of several million hectares set aside for the exclusive preservation of nature--read natural resources. Over time human occupation and economic activity are gradually eliminated. While Canadians might participate in the management of these areas, policy is determined by UN treaty while Canadian sovereignty is severely eroded. Eventually private property is regulated out of existence. The economic benefactors include the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who later participate in running the bio-region, unelected bureaucrats, academic sycophants and transnational resource cartels. The Niagara Escarpment, Ontario; Long Point, Ontario; Riding Mountain, Manitoba; Mont. Ste. Hilaire, Quebec; Waterton Lakes, Alberta and Isabella Bay, Baffin Island, NWT. have been declared part of UNESCO's World Network of Biosphere Reserves. Across Canada, more reserves are in the planning stages including one that covers central British Columbia from Alaska to Wyoming. In a special 1992 edition of Wild Earth, plans were published for what the authors called "The Wildlands Project." Among the creators of Wildlands were Board members Dave Foreman, founder of the environmental terrorist group, Earth First!, Reed Noss editor of the journal "Conservation Biology" and Michael Soulé founder of the Society of Conservation Biologists. Foreman is also a Director of the Sierra Club. Harvey Locke, a Calgary lawyer and former president of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS) is also a director of The Wildlands Project. Wildlands will affect everyone in North America. According to Charles Mann and Mark Plummer writing in the June 1993 edition of "Science" magazine, Wildlands "calls for nothing less than resettling the entire continent. It calls for a network of wilderness reserves, human buffer zones and wildlife corridors stretching across huge tracts of land -- hundreds of millions of acres; as much as half the continent." Mike Coffman, Ph.D., President of Environmental Perspectives and author of Saviors of Earth says, "Under the plan, one quarter of (Canada and) the United States would be turned into wilderness where all human activity would literally cease. Another quarter of the land would be set aside in buffer zones where human activity would be severely limited." The migration habits of large mammals--wolves, bear, lynx or so-called endangered species--are employed as the reason to cease human activity in these bio-regions. In the October/November, 1996 issue of The Ottawa Times, an article entitled World Eco-Congress Suggests Depopulation restates the goal of Wildlands, "is to return at least half of North America to wilderness. . . " Reporting on Harvey Locke's presentation to the Eco-Congress, The Times said a map presented to Locke's audience indicated that "Calgary and Edmonton fall within a buffer zone and would, therefore, have to be significantly depopulated and their industrial and technological activity severely regulated." According to Wild Earth, an environmental magazine published by Foreman and his partners, "it exists to remind conservationists that . . all lands and waters should be left to the whims of Nature, not to the selfish desires of one species who chose for itself the misnomer, Homo Sapiens. Does The Wildlands Project advocate the end of industrial civilization? Most assuredly. Everything must go." Within the bio-regions, all roads are to be torn up. The land is to be returned to the state which existed before the arrival of Columbus. Incredibly, a program called "Road Rip" has been established with Foreman, Noss and Soulé sitting on the Advisory Board. Road Rip's goal is to close roads, have them removed and prevent the construction of new ones. In 1996, "The Seville Strategy," integrated The Wildlands Project into UNESCO's international Man and the Biosphere (MAB) program, linking it to the 1992 Earth Summit's Agenda 21 and the Convention on Biological Diversity. These two UN treaties bind the world to global governance as spelled out in the UN's Report of the Commission on Global Governance. [Oxford University Press, (1995)] Currently, Wildlands is now being implemented across North America as an integral part of MAB. In October, 1997, Prince Philip presented the North American Conservation Assessment/ North America's Living Legacy to a Washington D.C. news conference. After months of digging, a copy of the press package was obtained and a copy of the report was reviewed at WWF's Toronto office. The document was prepared by the United States and Canadian branches of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). What we found was alarming. The WWF document is a plan that would carve North America into 116 biosphere reserves or "eco-regions", in effect Balkanizing Canada and the United States. Most of the 116 "eco-regions" cut across one or more political boundaries, international, state or provincial. When implemented, Canada would cease to exist as a nation. The nearly 600 pages of the WWF report describe each "eco-region", its major habitat type, the size of the planned area, the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) responsible for pushing the agenda forward and a number of other details relating to the biogeography and biodiversity of the region. WWF's "Living Legacy" report refers to Ontario's plan as "eco-region 8". It covers more than 346,700 sq. km. (214,969 sq. mi.) of the resource-bearing lands of the southern Canadian shield in Ontario and Quebec and parts of western New York and eastern Vermont. Ontario has renamed Lands for Life, calling it "Ontario's Living Legacy." Interestingly, the WWF report assigns the task of implementing their "eco-region 8" to The Wildlands League, the WWF, The Federation of Ontario Field Naturalists, the ultra radical Earthroots and several other lesser-known environmental NGO's. Next, we will discuss what we have learned about how these "eco-regions" are being used in other countries in our hemisphere and in Africa. The public has been deceived not only by the Harris government, they have been used as pawns to help implement a revolutionary international program. The strategy used is a classic: the agenda is set by top down international treaty obligations; then upward pressure is applied by NGOs and a tiny segment of a well intentioned but dangerously misinformed public supplying the orchestrated "grassroots" support. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Doug Hindson passed away last year. He was geopolitical researcher and lived in rural northeast Toronto, Ontario. He was a regular contributor to the print media in his area, and was a panelist on "In Search of Understanding," a weekly television show. He was also a member of the Advisory Board of Sovereignty International, Inc. Reprinted with permission from Henry Lamb’s Ecologic Online: http://www.eco.freedom.org/el/ Related Articles: The Nature Conservancy's Use of GIS - http://gis.tnc.org/gisattnc.php Sovereignty Under Siege - http://cwfa.org/library/nation/1998-12_pp_un-biosphere.shtml These articles are being published in the Hidalgo Herald, a local
newspaper. If you would like a copy of the articles in this format
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