Part I traced the sustainable development movement to longstanding U.N. environmental and population initiatives with unmistakably Marxist goals. They talk about saving the environment, but most of the fine print refers to “equity,” “social justice,” “fair distribution” and other Marxist terms. “Global warming” is the latest scare tactic, but population control never left the scene. The U.N.’s answer: free condoms.
As I said before, these people are nuts.
The discredited work of Dr. Paul Ehrlich, population prophet of doom, and Obama’s lunatic Science Czar, John Holdren, are referred to in U.N. population studies, and Ehrlich was cited in Agenda 21’s Biodiversity Assessment Report under “Gender Perspectives.” That’s right; the feminists have a special perspective on global warming too.
So the pretext doesn’t matter. They will always find one, because in their minds the solution to everything, poverty, overpopulation, environmental degradation, or even who should win Dancing with the Stars, is Socialism. And the way they get there is by creating a crisis.
To promote their socialist nightmare, Marxists must use deceptive language and tactics. In “Sustainable Development” they have found a magic mantra. It has allowed them to insinuate all their socialist fantasies into our legal code, under our noses, with little or no fanfare, scant public debate and graveyard noises from our treacherously AWOL mass media, right down to the local level – with our permission. Agenda 21, a UN initiative that was never endorsed by the U.S. Senate, as all international agreements must be, has penetrated into the ordinances of county and city governments all over America.
They have accomplished this through a little-known (to us) vehicle called the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) – Local Governments for Sustainability.
Quoting ICLEI documents from this article (emphases added):
Our campaigns, programs, and projects promote Local Agenda 21 as a participatory, long-term, strategic planning process that addresses local sustainability while protecting global common goods. Linking local action to internationally agreed upon goals and targets such as Agenda 21, the Rio Conventions, the Habitat Agenda, the Millennium Development Goals and the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation is an essential component. [Sic]
Chapter 3, Section 1 states, “The eradication of poverty and hunger, greater equity in income distribution and human resource development remain major challenges everywhere. The struggle against poverty is the shared responsibility of all countries.”
As explained in the last article, this project has everywhere and always been about socialism. They don’t even hide it too well.
In his opening statements at the 1992 Earth Summit, billionaire U.N. bureaucrat and compulsive totalitarian Maurice Strong (also Al Gore’s partner in their carbon credit business), said:
Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work-place air-conditioning, and suburban housing – are not sustainable. A shift is necessary which will require a vast strengthening of the multilateral system, including the United Nations.
This is perhaps the most concise statement of Agenda 21’s real goals.
Strong echoes the sentiments of former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who said:
Do not do unto the environment of others what you do not want done to your own environment…My hope is that this (earth) charter will be a kind of Ten Commandments, a ‘Sermon on the Mount’, that provides a guide for human behavior toward the environment in the next century.
Ironically, while Republican and Democrat alike rush to embrace sustainable development at the local level, even quasi-socialist states like Great Britain are abandoning it. From the London Telegraph:
Hurrah! Our useless Coalition government has finally done something useful by axing one of its more pointless and hateful quangos, the Sustainable Development Commission.
Recall from the last article that Agenda 21 was imposed on this country when Bill Clinton, defying the U.S. Senate’s will, created our own version, the President’s Council on Sustainable Development, by executive order.
The Telegraph article pulls no punches:
“Sustainability” is not nearly as politically neutral as its cuddly, warm name sounds. A bit like “multiculturalism” or “diversity”, “sustainability” is one of those weasel concepts which has been foisted on our language and culture by the hard left, linguistically masquerading as something unimpeachably caring and reasonable while in fact advancing a policy agenda designed to increase state control, remove property rights and liberty, and brainwash the gullible into ceding more and more of their democratic rights to UN and EU bureaucrats.
Tom DeWeese of the American Policy Center, a leader in exposing the radical goals of “sustainable development,” has called Agenda 21 “the greatest threat ever perpetrated against the American ideal of liberty.”
HERE is a list of the more than 600 U.S. cities, towns and counties currently participating in ICLEI’s Local Governments for Sustainability.
ICLEI has succeeded in implementing the sustainability agenda through something called the Delphi Technique. All activists need to understand the Delphi Technique. Originally created by the Rand Corporation as a consensus building methodology for scientists, Delphi has morphed into a subversive tactic for imposing malevolent leftist agendas on an unsuspecting public who would never agree if they understood.
A key feature of the Delphi Technique is to identify the “good guys,” i.e. those who go along with the predetermined agenda, and isolate the “bad guys,” thereby removing any obstructionists. It is a sophisticated application of Alinksy’s Rule #13: pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it.
In order to motivate the “good guys,” ICLEI has created a rating system for counties based on how well they implement Agenda 21. King County, Washington has become the proud test bed for this new system. Listen to this bloviating county executive:
“We are honored to be selected and look forward to piloting this innovative efficiency program,” said King County Executive Dow Constantine. “The Pacific Northwest and King County have a lot to gain by protecting the climate, and I am happy we are going to be using all available tools to measure how we make a difference.”
Note that local governments receiving a poor rating can now be identified as “bad.” For the young “enlightened” couple seeking a place to settle, such a place obviously won’t do. The city/county is also much less likely to receive “sustainability” funds available from federal and state government, so while they are on the hook to adopt Agenda 21 initiatives, they will have to fund it themselves. The rating system thus creates strong financial incentives for local governments to compete to be the “best” and serious consequences for those who do not.
And the above-referenced article about King County, perhaps inadvertently, has exposed the radical nature of this organization:
The STAR Community Index ™ (STAR) is a groundbreaking software tool being developed by ICLEI- Local Governments for Sustainability USA, in partnership with the US Green Building Council (USGBC), the National League of Cities, and the Center for American Progress. (Emphasis added.)
You may recognize the Soros funded Center for American Progress. It is run by John Podesta, Clinton administration Chief of Staff and Obama Transition Team director. Podesta is also on the board of the Apollo Alliance, formerly run by Green Jobs Czar, self-described communist, Van Jones.
CAP has been described by Weather Underground Obama supporter Mark Rudd as Obama’s “government in waiting.” Members include Open Society Institute President and SDS founder Aryeh Neier, self-described communist, Van Jones and a laundry list of other radical leftists. The National League of Cities isn’t much better.
Here is another example of the Delphi Technique in application and a revealing illustration of where they are attempting to go with it. The Baltimore County government’s Office of Planning devotes an entire section to developing the concept of a “Green Transportation Hierarchy,” kind of an upside-down takeoff on Abraham Maslow[1]‘s “Hierarchy of Needs.”
They identify those transportation modes that contribute to “global warming” ranked from least (pedestrians) to most (our cars).
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out who are the “bad guys” here. It is interesting to note that taxis are preferred over high occupancy vehicles. Do taxis carry more people? Usually not, but taxis are not privately owned, like carpool vehicles using the HOV lanes usually are. The thrust clearly favors public transportation and the ultimate goal is walking and biking, the common modes of transport in communist China.
Yes, they want our cars too.
This is made explicit in the push for “20 minute neighborhoods.” Portland, Oregon is taking the lead in this initiative. Here is there justification (emphases mine):
Desires for sustainable living: increased energy conservation, support for local businesses, active and healthier lifestyles and improving community connections and equity has led to an interest in fostering the development or redevelopment of walkable communities, or 20-minute neighborhoods, in Portland.
Before the 1920s, when autos were rare and few people had access to a car on a regular basis, most people lived in 20-minute neighborhoods by necessity. As cars became more available, proposals to preserve 20-minute neighborhoods entered planning literature. In 1929, the “Neighborhood Unit” by Clarence Perry described successful neighborhoods as those that offer accessibility to the spectrum of day-to-day human needs. He proposed defining these neighborhoods in terms of a one-quarter mile walk.
Despite well-recognized interest in keeping 20-minute neighborhoods in the late 1920s, and beyond, during the second-half of the 20th century, the trend across the United States was toward providing auto-oriented residential and commercial environments.
Yep, autos, the villain. So here’s the pitch:
However, increased interest in improving sustainability—responding to challenges posed by climate change by reducing car trips and decreasing energy use in general, the need for affordable housing and to reduce housing-related costs, the need to stay physically fit and live healthily and wants to support local businesses–has renewed interest in walkable environments or 20-minute neighborhoods.
Walkable communities are defined specifically, too:
Some studies have shown that a 20-minute walk equates to approximately 1 mile walking at a fast pace; however, the average person could walk between to a mile under safe, conducive walking conditions, (e.g. sidewalks and short blocks).
To emphasize the importance of short distances for walking, we used an analysis area with dimensions of 500 by 500 feet and used the frequency of intersections and the presence of sidewalks as factors in walkability.
They want to herd us into neighborhoods a little larger than a football field! And population density is specified as well: a minimum density of 12-18 households per acre.
The country is awash in this crap. The Maryland State government is virtually bursting with “Sustainability” initiatives like Governor O’Malley’s Smart, Green and Growing. The state Department of Natural Resources hosts a Sustainability Network page, where you can link to organizations promoting sustainability in every county in the state.
The Maryland state government created a new “Sustainable Growth Commission” in 2010. The year before, it passed the “Smart and Sustainable Growth Act of 2009,” which requires county planning officials to take a special course. You can see the study guide here. The guide is a road map to the “sustainable” future, which will force us all into cities, crowd us close to public transportation, bike paths and into “walkable neighborhoods”:
“…encouraging shorter drive times, locating housing closer to work, minimizing shopping trips, and giving our kids real options to walk and ride bikes to school, parks and playgrounds…” while reducing our “carbon footprint.”
But the drive to push us into cities would not be complete without an equally aggressive effort to chase us out of the country.
Earth First! is a radical environmental group branded by the FBI as domestic terrorists, a fact they are proud of. Believe it or not, Dave Foreman, Earth First’s co-founder who pioneered in the use of tree spikes (left), has been an intimate partner in development of the “sustainability” agenda.
His “Wildlands Project,” now called the Wildlands Network, was adopted by the U.N. Biodiversity Treaty. Here is what he has to say:
We must make this place an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects… We must reclaim the roads and plowed lands, 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.
This is getting old: these people are nuts!
The goal is to make 50 percent of the land in every state inaccessible by man (except, of course, the “good guys”.) According to Tom DeWeese, much has been accomplished already:
Today, there are at least 31 Wildlands projects underway, locking away more than 40 percent of the nation’s land. The Alaska Wildlands Project seeks to lock away and control almost the entire state. In Washington State, Oregon, Idaho, Montana parts of North and South Dakota, parts of California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Wyoming, Texas, Utah, and more, there are at least 22 Wildlands Projects underway. For example, one project called Yukon to Yellowstone (Y2Y) – creates a 2000 mile no-man’s land corridor from the Arctic to Yellowstone.
An excellent video by Dr. Michael Coffman explains it all. The six minutes are worth your time.
If I haven’t convinced you, Dr. Coffman’s video should. The metastasized cancer of Agenda 21 must be ripped out root and branch from our body politic. Local governments and state legislatures must be confronted and forced to repeal the myriad laws, ordinances, zoning codes and regulations that advance this globalist agenda. It simply must be tackled now.
This is a perfect issue for local Tea Party groups and must become a focal point of our efforts to reclaim our country.
The Wildlands map is particularly stunning, showing exactly how they plan to herd the entire U.S. population into tiny urban centers and put most of the country completely off limits. (Except for the good guys, of course)
Question: Can we fit?
Next: Agenda 21 Part III: Globalist Totalitarian Agenda Demands the Extinction of Man – Except for the “Good Guys”
First Posted at RightSideNews.com
[1] According to this article, Maslow was a member of the communist Frankfurt School.