Taking Liberty
By Michael S. Coffman, Ph.D.
Dr. Michael Coffman had served as President of Environmental Perspectives Inc. in Bangor Maine. Earned a Ph.D in forest sciences and taught and conducted research in ecosystem classification, global warming and acid raid for 25 years. He was instrumental in creating the map below known as the "Biodiversity Wildlands Map". He is now deceased after battling Cancer (June 21, 2017).
*All maps (except for Wildlands Project map, below) created by Environmental Perspectives, Inc.,
produced and funded by American Land Foundation and Stewards of the Range.
~One hour before the U.S. Senate was to adopt the United Nations Treaty on Biodiversity,
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-TX) went to the floor with a 300-plus-page draft copy of
Chapter 10 of the United Nations Global Biodiversity Assessment and a 4 ́x6 ́ poster.
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| Since it is almost impossible to see on the original map where the "Human Settlement Zones" will be, here is a reverse hue image that better depicts their agenda. |
The poster showed the lower 48 states
overlaid with hundreds of red islands representing wilderness areas interconnected by
thousands of red ribbons called corridors, all
surrounded by yellow buffer zones. Small
green patches were “human occupation
zones.” The agenda was so outrageous it
would have been discounted, except that Sen. Hutchinson had the proof in her hands. The
date was Sept. 29, 1994, and the agenda was
called the Wildlands Project.
Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell
(D-ME), along with several other senators,
withdrew the scheduled cloture vote on the
treaty and a vote was never taken. That
should have been the end of it, but in reality it was only the beginning.
Follow the Money-
While environmental concerns may be legitimate in some cases, many of the accusations
made by environmental nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs) today are nothing
more than perceptions created to indoctrinate the public and cause unfounded fear that generates income for the NGO. Environmental fear has become a multibillion dollar business that preys on unknowing urbanites.
Seventy-seven percent of all Americans
live in about three percent of America’s land
area classed as urban by the U.S. Bureau of
Census. The number only climbs to a little
over six percent when all developed areas are
included. Activist NGOs have found it easy to
leverage legitimate environmental concerns
into profitable campaigns that have marginal or negative environmental benefits.
Hernando de Soto, a Peruvian citizen,
completed a massive study for the World
Bank in the early 2000s, the findings of which
were published in “The Mystery of Capital.”
De Soto’s team studied many nations for several years to determine why capitalism triumphs in the West and fails in Third World
nations. He found that strong property rights
are the basis of liberty and wealth creation just as was claimed by America’s founding
fathers.
This is not the case in Third World
nations. Because of arbitrary regulations
and corresponding corruption, de Soto found that it takes 10 to 20 years and many
payoffs to register property ownership in
these countries. Hence, impoverished citizens do not register their ownership so their
property rights are not legally established.
De Soto calls this real but unregistered
property “dead capital” because its equity is
not available for investment. No equity
means no capital to build wealth. Since citizens cannot build wealth, neither can the
nation, condemned to perpetual poverty or negative environmental benefits.
Why Property Rights Matter-
Because
urbanites out-vote rural residents by
a 3-to-1 margin, they can pass laws that harm
rural residents in the belief we need more
government land and open space. Yet, most
environmental laws strip rural citizens of
their ability to use proven management practices to provide goods and
services to urbanites. As a result, groceries, appliances, lumber
and other commodities cost more.
The higher cost of goods and services is
not the most dangerous threat to America.
Our founding fathers recognized the critical
nature of private property rights as they were
firsthand witnesses to the abuse of power that
occurs when government controls private property. James Madison and others even
claimed that the entire purpose of government is to protect private property. They
knew that private property is the foundation
to liberty and wealth creation.
For instance, equity loans on personal
homes provide the funding for 70 percent of
all small business starts in the United States.
Small businesses are the economic backbone
of America. This would not be possible without strong property rights. In turn, unencumbered legal property rights allow banks the
security needed to make the loan in a few
days or weeks.
Manipulating Property Value-
Loss of liberty to faceless bureaucrats who use
a corrupt and arbitrary regulatory system to
their own advantage is happening to more
and more rural citizens in the United States.
Rural citizens are not alone. A growing
number of communities are faced with arbitrary regulations under the umbrella of
“smart growth” and “urban-growth boundaries.” Depending on who draws the arbitrary
boundary, low-value agricultural land can
instantly be worth millions. Immediately
across the urban-growth boundary, these
arbitrary regulations prohibit development and the value of the land remains low. Within
100 yards, one landowner reaps millions and
another gets nothing. Arbitrary regulation—
no matter how noble the intent—always
breeds corruption.
Studies conducted by the Harvard Institute of Economic Research clearly show this
enormous economic impact. Quarter-acre
lots in cities with minimum smart-growth
regulations average $10,000 to $40,000 per
lot, while similar lots in cities imposing heavy
smart-growth regulations average $200,000 to
$600,000 per lot. There is a strong correlation
between the time it takes to get a permit and
the cost of the land, just as de Soto found in
Third World nations.
Harvard economists Edward L. Glaeser
and Joseph Gyourko, in their paper “The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability”
(March 2002), emphasized that the entire
increase was due to smart-growth regulations. These “feel-good” regulations represent
a huge drag on the future urban economy.
Little did I know when I prepared the
map Sen. Hutchinson used on the Senate
floor, that environmental operatives were
already in key positions of our government,
ready to implement the anti-property rights
directives of the United Nations Treaty on
Biodiversity. Although the treaty did not pass
the Senate, they were able to shift gears, developing the authority necessary to implement
the Wildlands agenda under an administrative cloak that didn’t require congressional
approval. It has been just over 24 years [now] since
they actively began transforming America
into a Wildlands. What is most frightening is
how much they have accomplished in that
short period.
For anyone who doubts that environmentalists are serious about destroying private
property in America, redistributing the
wealth, and reducing the use of our natural
resources, those doubts should be put to rest.
They are more than halfway there.
The Wildlands Project-
Under the Wildlands Project, the United
States would be transformed from a land where people can live where they choose and
travel freely, to a Wildlands dominated landscape where people live in designated population centers with limited travel allowed
through highly restricted corridors. The
Wildlands Project is the master plan for both
the United Nations’ Agenda 21 and Biodiversity Treaty. In classic socialist utopian idealism, Agenda 21 defines how every human
being must live in order to save mother earth.
The Wildlands Project represents a grandiose
design to transform at least half the land area
of the continental United States into an
immense “eco-park” cleansed of modern
industry and private property.
Wildlands Project coauthor Reed Noss
explains their intent: “The collective needs of
nonhuman species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans.”
Federal Programs-
While many key laws like the Endangered Species Act (ESA), Clean Water Act and
dozens of others that would facilitate implementation of the Wildlands agenda were
already in place, environmentalists needed to
identify areas that had no protection in order
to begin converting land to conform to their
agenda. The Clinton administration under took two major programs with no congressional oversight during the 1990s to identify
and begin targeting these areas. They were the
Gap Analysis Program (GAP) and the Road-less Area Rule.
The GAP process starts by analyzing existing protected government land, then overlays
geographical data of vegetation habitat, animal distribution and property ownership.
Land ownership is further divided into stewardship classes: (1) “fully protected” (such
as wilderness areas); (2) “mostly protected”
(national parks and many wildlife refuges);
(3) “partially protected” (national landmarks and multiple use areas like U.S. Forest
Service lands); and (4) “no known land
protection” (usually private land). Classes 1
and 2 are often combined.
Although GAP sounds innocent, even
noble, it is designed for the sole purpose of defining where gaps exist between already
protected areas and those that require protection. These gaps are huge in Midwestern and
Eastern states where very little government
land exists. Federal, state or local governments
already own over 40 percent of the land area
in the United States; however, most of this
federally owned land is in the West.
The only way to close these gaps is by taking private property through condemnation,
conservation easements or uncompensated
regulations. In most cases, access to this land
represents a rural family’s livelihood and GAP
represents a direct threat to their way of life.
The second federal program implemented at the end of the Clinton administration is
the U.S. Forest Service Roadless Area Conservation Rule (RA). RA established blanket,
nationwide prohibitions generally limiting
timber harvest, road construction and reconstruction within 58.5 million acres of inventoried roadless areas on national forests and
grasslands. The lives of thousands of people
depend on these historically available
resources for their living in forestry, livestock
production and mining for critically needed
minerals. This was one of the first major
efforts to convert already restricted government lands into Wildlands status, and accelerated the process of extinguishing the use of
private lands within these areas.
On July 14, 2003, the U.S. District Court
for the District of Wyoming issued a permanent injunction and set aside the roadless
rule. However, the U.S. Forest Service issued a
new rule on May 5, 2005, that allows the
roadless rule to be imposed with the permission of the governor of each state.
Already existing laws such as the ESA have
made it easier for environmentalists to push
their Wildlands agenda. By threatening
landowners with species listings or habitat
designations, they can force private property
owners into signing conservation easements,
or into giving away a large portion of their
property to the government or to a land trust
as mitigation in order to use just a small portion of their land.
Taking Liberty in Northwest-
The government owns 60 percent of Oregon
and 42 percent of Washington, so the immediate focus in the Pacific Northwest has been
to complete the conversion of these lands into
Wildlands and target the private lands within these areas. The ESA has so far been the
biggest tool for accomplishing this goal. The
designation of the spotted owl, (now the Sage Grouse), gave the environmentalists the surrogate they needed. The
spotted owl’s “habitat” occupies everything, west of the Cascade mountain range’s center line, which includes large tracts of private
property. The intention was never to save the
bird, but to make ghost towns out of entire
communities.
Even though their land essentially
became worthless, the State of Oregon did
nothing to help the farmers. Thousands of
Klamath residents lost their jobs, and businesses that supported farming faced financial
ruin. Later that summer, the National Academy of Sciences reviewed the data supporting the court decision and found “no clear evidence” that high lake levels benefited the fish
or “convincing scientific justification” for not
allowing the farmers to continue to use the water for irrigation. In fact, evidence showed
that the sucker-fish seemed to do better when
the farmers used the lake water for irrigation.
In reality, an arbitrary ESA decision based on
highly questionable science brought economic devastation to an entire region.
On the eastern side of the Cascade Mountain Range, the federal GAP analysis showed
that large tracts of land were already protected or nearly protected, but there were still
many ranchers, miners and foresters who
used these lands and held legitimate property
rights. A concerted effort was made through
the Clinton administration to begin the
transformation of this region through the
Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project in 1993.
The project attempted to develop cooperative management strategies between federal,
state and local governments to control land
use over the 64-million-acre Columbia Basin
Ecosystem east of the Cascade mountains
into Idaho, western Montana and northwest
Wyoming. Citizens strongly opposed it and in
2003, after a 10-year study, only federal agencies and NGOs continued the program.
Individuals living within populated areas
of the Northwest are also beginning to feel the
effects of the Wildlands agenda to move
urban growth into designated “human occupation zones.” For example, in 1979 planners drew an Urban Growth Boundary line
around Portland, Ore., to control urban
sprawl. Land values within the smart-growth
boundary skyrocketed. Land values outside
plummeted.
Smart growth causes severe economic
hardship. In 1990, two out of three families
could afford a home in the Portland area.
That figure dove to one out of three by
2000. The problem became so bad that in
2004 the citizens of Oregon overwhelmingly
passed Measure 37, requiring just compensation for landowners suffering from smart-
growth regulations and other land-control
restrictions.
Taking Liberty in Southeast-
Except for parts of Florida and the southern
Appalachians, the Southeast generally has
very little federal, state and local government
land that activists can use to lobby for creating Wildlands. So, to speed the process up
and help identify private land for Wildlands
protection, Region 4 of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the University of Florida’s Geo-Plan Center conducted a
GAP analysis called the Southeastern Ecological Framework Project in 1999-2000.
The project prioritized ecological areas in
the Southeast that need protection. Because
GAP gives such a high priority to ecosystems
over people, more than 60 percent of the Southeast—nearly all rural areas and private
land was identified as having a high protection priority.
Florida has already undertaken a number
of statewide initiatives to implement the
Wildlands Project under a variety of names,
of which the Greenways Planning Project and
Save Our Rivers Program are the largest.
During the 1990s these programs were
under the umbrella of the Preservation 2000 Act, changed by the Florida Legislature in
2000 to Florida Forever. The goal was to place
as much as 80 percent of Florida into Wildlands reserves and corridors, which they call
hubs and linkages.
By 2005, Florida had purchased another
800,000 acres throughout the state increasing
state ownership from 29 to 37 percent.
The state used conservation easements to
acquire development rights on an additional
315,000 acres at about one-third the cost of what the state would have had to pay to buy
the land outright. The landowners often sell
the easement for quick cash, figuring the land
will never have much future value. Or the
landowner sells the easement because regulations have made it increasingly difficult to
make a living on or to otherwise use the land.
Florida is cannibalizing its private land in
the name of protecting nature. It is not the
only state in the East that is doing so.
Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Rhode
Island and New York are also following closely in Florida’s footsteps. These states are also
identifying greenway hubs and linkages for
the Wildlands Project.
Taking Liberty-
Local communities will always need regulations that focus on true harm, nuisance and
public health. A healthy economy is required
to protect the environment. If the local, state
or U.S. economy declines because arbitrary
regulations limit or remove private property
from production, it is highly probable that
the very efforts to protect the environment
will eventually cause its decline.
The end result will not be the eco-utopia
the greens envision. It will be a land owned
by government and elite land trusts. In
truth, the Wildlands agenda is not about
whether America’s land and resources will
be used for human benefit; it is about who
will own them. Private property rights are
as important to the environment as they are
to people.
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| Watch the Video by Clicking Photo Above |
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Links:
https://agenda21truth.blogspot.com/2017/07/dr-michael-coffman-father-of-wildlands.html
http://nwri.org/the-wildlands-project/un-biodiversity-treaty-and-the-wildlands-project/
http://www.environmentandsociety.org/sites/default/files/key_docs/rcc_00097005_4_2.pdf
http://www.naro-us.org/Resources/NARO%20CA/NARO-CA,%20US%20Senate%20Minority%20Report,%20Billionaires%20Club%20(1).pdf
https://www.carnegiecouncil.org/publications/archive/morgenthau/99
https://worldpolicy.org/2010/06/07/this-land-is-your-land/
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/epr/03v09n2/0306glae.pdf
https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2014-04/documents/this-is-smart-growth.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_growth_boundary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Glaeser
https://www.nber.org/people/joseph_gyourko
https://docs.google.com/gview?url=http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/Agenda21.pdf&embedded=true
https://www.cbd.int/doc/legal/cbd-en.pdf
http://www.pennsylvaniacrier.com/filemgmt_data/files/The%20Wildlands%20Project%20Unleashes%20Its%20War%20On%20Mandkind.pdf
http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/pdfs/laws/esa.pdf
https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2017-08/documents/federal-water-pollution-control-act-508full.pdf
https://archive.epa.gov/esd/archive-nerl-esd1/web/pdf/natlgap-factsheet.pdf
https://www.fs.fed.us/emc/nepa/roadless/2001RoadlessRuleFR.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_easement
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_trust
https://agenda21truth.blogspot.com/2016/01/standing-army-mounts-against-peacefull.html
http://www.klamathbasincrisis.org/litigation/plfearthdayhumancosts042304.htm
http://articles.latimes.com/2002/feb/06/local/me-klamath06
http://articles.latimes.com/2002/feb/09/local/me-klamath9
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/urban-studies-and-planning/11-942-use-of-joint-fact-finding-in-science-intensive-policy-disputes-part-ii-spring-2004/lecture-notes/ponce.pdf
https://www.perc.org/wp-content/uploads/old/esa_costs.pdf
http://www.socminco.com/REWILDING.htm
https://www.intechopen.com/books/advances-in-landscape-architecture/greenways-as-a-sustainable-urban-planning-strategy
http://saveourrivers.org/
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/106/hr4846/text
http://www.fnai.org/PDF/FF_CNA_summary_report.pdf
http://www.landscope.org/florida/priorities/data/ecological_greenways_network/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Ecological_Greenways_Network
https://www.americanprairie.org/building-the-reserve
https://www.bitchute.com/video/vkHw6KqPV6H1/
https://www.bitchute.com/video/90y6hqoxf8Vb/
https://www.bitchute.com/video/h5D5LVZp33TS/
