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Trojan Horse: The Wildlands Project Inspired by Deep Ecology, A Scheme Is Hatched That Would Change America Legally, Structurally, And Materially Beyond All Recognition By Perry Hicks Part VII in a Series "... The collective
needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires
of humans."- "Does all the foregoing mean that Wild Earth and The Wildlands Project advocate the end of industrialized civilization? Most assuredly. Everything civilized must go."-Dave Foreman, President Wildlands Project My daughter-in-law was born and raised on the Indian continent. She is immensely proud of India, and most everything Indian, but she loves America. After September 11th, she copied me on an email she had sent to her international friends living all over the world; she defended America and rebuked the notion that America had “asked for it”; she reminded them that many nations of the world owed their freedom to America; if American armies came they did so to liberate, not to conquer; that she had come to know Americans like few Indians ever would and that she found “these people generous to a fault”. It was a beautiful piece and on the first anniversary of September 11th, I read it aloud on my radio show. Call me naive, but I have never really understood why America, and particularly, capitalism, is despised in so many places in the world. Sure, I realize there could be a good deal of jealousy. Sure, I am aware that there could be vestiges of colonial animosity. That is not what confuses me. It is the rejection of empirical evidence that blows me away. If someone were to say they were working to lift people up from poverty, I would find it perplexing to find them fighting prosperity. If someone were to say they are concerned for the environment, I would find it equally baffling to hear them attack capitalist democracies. In both cases, it is the capitalist democracies that have given the common citizen the best quality of life, the most personal liberty, and done the most to preserve the environment. Wildlands Project "We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects ... We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of tens of millions of acres of presently settled land."-David Foreman, Founder of Earth First! President of Wildlands Project The Wildlands Project is a radical, well financed, and formally recognized organization dedicated with religious fervor to return the entire continent of North America to its pre-Columbian state. To this objective they eschew capitalism, look to confiscating vast tracts of private land, and drastically reduce the human population. The salient points of The Wildlands Project are: · Preserving biodiversity by creating “reserve networks” that would take a full 50% of the land mass of North America. · Reserve networks are subdivided into three land use classes: 1. Core areas taken initially from national forests and park land 2. Buffer areas taken from private land adjacent to the cores and corridors. 3. Corridors to link cores taken from public and private land. · Core areas are to be as large as possible, as measured in tens of millions of acres. Human activity within the core areas is forbidden. · Buffer areas permit only limited human activity so long as that activity “is managed with native biodiversity as a preeminent concern.” · Corridors would follow rivers and other wildlife migration routes. Obviously, a practical implementation of such a plan could not go forward within the legal structure of the U.S. Constitution. I say “practical” in that it would be theoretically possible, so long as this was the will of the people, and condemned land owners were compensated for the loss of their property. However, it is unlikely that a majority of voters would subscribe to this plan, once they saw the full ramifications of it. Still, The Wildlands Project claims that the organization exists within the confines of the law and the project must ultimately be “debated and ultimately decided” by the public. The project leaders recognize that full implementation could take over one hundred years. The Wildlands Project is based upon a philosophy detailed in the last article called Deep Ecology. The “morals” and “ethics” set forth by this philosophy has been the inspiration for a number of radical “green” movements. The major Deep Ecology points on which the Wildlands Project rests are: · Humans have no greater intrinsic worth than animals, insects, and plants. · It is immoral for humans to consume resources above what is considered “vital”. · Human population must be reduced (through humane means, of course). · Western civilization must be remade ideologically, economically, and technically. Implementation in Progress As mad as this plan sounds, it is amazing how far along it is in implementation and the extent to which it has been financed. It is even more surprising how many tenants of the plan are accepted by the main stream media. For example, one of the Wildlands Project’s “dream” objectives is to see large carnivores reintroduced back into the wild and at full implementation, be able to “range from New Mexico to Alaska”. The Federal Government placed gray wolves on the endangered species list in 1973, developed a relocation plan, further refined it over ten years, and began a reestablishing the wolves in select areas in the 1995. At this date, wolves have been reintroduced from New Mexico to Washington State. There have even been some studies into reintroducing wolves as far east as the Adirondack area of New York. Experimental red wolf reintroductions have been made in both North Carolina. Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire are viewed as possible sites for future repatriation. And of course, once endangered species are reintroduced to an area, both land use and human activity become federally regulated. Then there are the United Nations Heritage Sites. These are natural or cultural locations throughout the world that have been deemed of such “universal value” that the entire globe has an interest in their preservation. Yellowstone Park was designated by the U.N. as the first “endangered” Heritage site in 1995 because of a proposed gold mine outside the park. The U.N. was invited in by the then Assistance Secretary of the Interior, George Frampton. Accordingly, UNESCO representatives called for a buffer zone of 150 miles in diameter around the entire park! Yellowstone had not only been designated a World Heritage Site in 1978, it was also identified as the center of a U.N. Biospheres Reserve during the 1980s. The Biospheres Reserve Treaty was never ratified by the U.S. Senate. None the less, in 1990, the Federal Government, in concert with a number of environmental groups, attempted to use the U.N. Biospheres designation as an authority to implement the Wildlands Project by declaring an 18 million acre buffer zone around the park. The mechanism for this was the Greater Yellowstone Vision Document. A massive cry of protest erupted from the states of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. Eventually, the Federal Government backed away from this attempt. The Precautionary Principle “All propaganda must be so popular and on such an intellectual level, that even the most stupid of those toward whom it is directed will understand it….. Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched kind of life as paradise.”-Adolph Hitler Indeed, it is surprising just how much of Deep Ecology and the Wildlands Project are worming their way into the very fabric of straight news presentations. Take, for example, the Precautionary Principle. Because nothing can ever be 100% certain, the Precautionary Principle states that extreme environmental measures are justified even when in the absence of empirical evidence! In other words, because the environmentalists have established zero tolerance for any loss of non-human life, then any pro-environmental action is justified, no matter how extreme. Hence, newspaper and magazine articles, radio and television presentations more often than not favor environmental positions without question. If the claim is made that the earth is loosing 150 species a day, it doesn’t matter if the claimant has no proof. It just could, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, be true. Therefore, we must take extreme action immediately! The claimant will escape empirical challenge by stating that their figures are estimates. The global warming claims are based upon computer predictions and the media report the “findings” with all the solemnity as if the predictions were, in fact, fact. Worse, actual hard data will be ignored, simply because “we can’t afford to be wrong”. We are quite literally, back to the transcendentalist’s “blatancy” of the facts. Of course, environmentalists are all to happy to paint themselves with the same morally justified brush stroke as did the conservationists: Environmentalists are selfless; they do their work based on the “highest standards” of “scientific evidence”; they only want to “protect” helpless wildlife and clean up our polluted environment. Americans are not just be asked, but literally demanded, to give up their Constitutional freedoms, their prosperity, and their health and well being on what Arthur Paul Patterson termed “the subtle intuition of the beyond”. In other words, they demand that we live by what should be recognized as a nature-worship religion. Because the elite environmentalists, by virtue of their feelings, know better than the rest of us; throw out evidence to the contrary; devalue human life; disregard liberty. Quite literally, they would be happy to see the world populated by no more than 10,000 hunter-gatherers. Better yet, no humans at all, for by their faith, man is not part of nature and his existence can only harm it. Could it be possible that America would ever allow its power and prosperity to be eroded away, however gradually, the implementation of something like the Wildlands Project? How could such a plan differ in objective from the goal of America’s enemies to bring her low? In the next installment, we explore the military and political ramifications of an American economically and militarily crippled by radical environmentalism.
Part III - Just What Temperature Should The Planet Be? Environmentalists Seek So Much Authority Over Our Everyday Lives, Fears Are Rising That The Real Agenda Is All About Power And Control - By Perry Hicks Part V - Starting On The Road To Kyoto - The Radical Left Takes Up Global Warming As A Club To Beat Down The Industrialized Nations - By Perry Hicks Perry Hicks is a former Mississippi Coast resident and was a correspondent for the old Gulfport Star Journal. He has appeared on Fox News Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor.” Perry has also hosted his own radio talk show on the auto industry with a mix of politics, and is a former Ford Motor Company technical trainer. He currently works as an Associate Professor of Automotive Technology at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College in Richmond, VA. Contact the Author: royalenfieldcrusader@hotmail.com |
