Sunset on the West?
By William Norman Grigg
Published: 1996-02-05 06:00 Environment | Property Rights | Email this page | printer friendly version
During the recent budget impasse, a national park official told the New York Times that a
vacant and deserted Yellowstone national park should be "the poster child of the
shutdown." The Times invoked the closing of Yellowstone as it offered a front-page
scolding to Americans who were "inclined to see the deadlock over the federal budget as
only a paper problem in far-away Washington." But for many Western ranchers, miners,
loggers, and landowners - people who looked upon the federal shutdown as a reprieve
rather than a crisis - Yellowstone park had come to symbolize the determination of the
environmental bureaucracy to bring Western economic development to a halt.
In his syndicated column for January 3rd, environmental author (and Montana resident)
Alston Chase observed, "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 Nations Educational, Scientific, and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO) complied with the Administration's request.
Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt issued a statement on the same day, insisting that
UNESCO "recognized that these are domestic issues" and that "today's action does not
supersede any U.S. law." However, as the October 6, 1992 issue of Environment
magazine explained, the designation of World Heritage sites "constitutes a unique
precedent," as it "implies what might be called a voluntary limitation of sovereignty" and
a recognition that "other countries have, through the [World Heritage] convention, an
obligation - and therefore a right - toward these sites."
UNESCO's decision to declare Yellowstone National Park a World Heritage site is the
result of connivance - some dare call it conspiracy - between the UN subsidiary and
Babbitt's Interior Department. Last summer, Interior Secretary Babbitt wrote to the Paris
office of UNESCO and asked the organization to send a delegation to the U.S. for the
purpose of placing Yellowstone National Park on its list of "endangered" World Heritage
sites. The visit of these foreign officials was paid for with American tax dollars:
UNESCO's reply to Babbitt noted, "Due to lack of available funds at the World Heritage
Fund, the United States will assume the costs of the mission." Furthermore, George
Frampton, Babbitt's Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Parks, Wildlife, and Fisheries,
provided assurances that "the United States [will] assume full responsibility for assuring
the integrity of World Heritage values is not compromised by … actions taken either
internal or external to World Heritage Site boundaries."
One might wonder: With an abundance of federal regulatory mechanisms at its disposal -
including federal "wetlands" guidelines and the fearsome Endangered Species Act - why
would Babbitt's Interior Department enlist help from UNESCO? One answer was
provided in a New York Times house editorial applauding Babbitt's decision. The Times
complained: "Unfortunately, the lead federal agency in the E.I.S. [Environmental Impact
Statement] process [regarding the gold mine near Yellowstone] is not Secretary Bruce
Babbitt's Interior Department, but the Agriculture Department's Forest Service, which
controls most of the land near the mine." Why is this troublesome? According to the
Times, it is because the Forest Service "has an unfortunate history of favoring
commercial values over environmental values...."
In other words, the Forest Service is regarded by eco-extremists as insufficiently callous
regarding the economic impact of regulatory decisions. However, Interior Secretary
Babbitt has fewer compunctions about driving landowners and resource developers into
penury. In 1991, while acting as head of the League of Conservation Voters, an
environmental extremist lobby, Babbitt stated in a fund-raising letter: "We must identify
our enemies and drive them into oblivion." As Interior Secretary, Babbitt has diligently
sought to enhance the arsenal of the federal land-grabbers; the Yellowstone gold mine
issue offered an opportunity to enlist UNESCO in the assault.
The additional pressure provided by UNESCO, the Times opined, offers "a cleaner,
quicker way to end the controversy" than the tortuous process of filing state and federal
Environmental Impact Statements. The corporate officials in charge of the mine, known
as the New World Mine, could simply "cede the site to the Federal Government and win
large tax credits or ask for a Federal buyout equal to its investment costs." UNESCO's
involvement could help broker this "act of global environmental statesmanship." This
cozy little land grab would be financially lucrative for corporate interests and would
serve to hand over another plot to the already engorged federal land management
bureaucracy. However, it would do little to benefit the people of the region.
William Perry Pendley, an environmental attorney with the Mountain States Legal
Foundation, explained to THE NEW AMERICAN that the UNESCO listing "will give
Babbitt's Interior Department one more avenue to stop economic development in
Montana and, by way of precedent, throughout the West." Pendley points out that the
New World Mine could create 150 jobs at $35,000 per year, with a multiplier effect
which would generate about $15 million for the local economy. He noted that "the
average annual per-capita income in that region is about $17,000 a year. You bring in a
bunch of miners who make double that, and it's a real shot in the arm."
Furthermore, argues Pendley, Yellowstone park was never threatened by the New World
Mine. "One of the misconceptions promoted by the mine's opponents is that it is right
next to the park, and that it would leave tailings [mining residue] nearby which would
defile the park," Pendley commented to THE NEW AMERICAN. "But it's separated
from Yellowstone by three mountain ridges. It's in an area which has been mined since
white men first went West, and people have been smelting ore there since about 1870."
But the chief preoccupation of the Clinton Administration is not protecting Yellowstone;
it is expanding the power of the eco-leviathan over Western lands. Last summer,
President Clinton - who is about as familiar with the Western United States as he is with
the concept of marital fidelity - took a sudden personal interest in the New World Mine.
During his weekly radio address for August 26, 1995 - which was delivered from the
Rockefeller residence in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, an heirloom of one of the original
"robber barons" - Mr. Clinton expressed concern about "activities on land that belongs to
the American people which are being used for profit in ways that could damage our
national parks. For example," he continued, his voice swelling with theatrical indignation,
"just two and a half miles from Yellowstone Park there's a proposal to build a big gold
mine." He proudly reported that he had "declared a two-year moratorium on any new
mining claims in the area near the northeast corner of Yellowstone Park." After all,
declared Mr. Clinton, "We have to do everything we can to protect parks like
Yellowstone. They're more priceless than gold."
Noranda Corporation, the Canadian entity which would operate the contested mine, was
in the process of completing an Environmental Impact Statement when Mr. Clinton
issued his decree banning the issuance of new mining permits near Yellowstone. The
proscription originally applied to 4,500 acres of federal land near Yellowstone; however,
by the time the presidential edict appeared in the Federal Register, the affected acreage
had more than quadrupled - to 19,000 acres.
According to Pendley, this is to be expected: "This issue is not about the mine itself. It's
about something called the 'Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem,' which includes not just the
two million acres of the park itself, but also the 18 million acres which surround it - 25
percent of which is privately owned. Furthermore, the UNESCO people are seeking to
review all policies involving mining, timber, wildlife, and tourism in that region - which
takes in about 75 percent of the economy."
"If the UN is given the power to set policy in Yellowstone and the region," Pendley
warns, "property rights will be in peril throughout the Western United States - and the
rest of the country." The UNESCO listing might prove a potent precedent for anyone who
owns property near any of the 17 other "World Heritage" sites in the continental United
States - each of which could suddenly be defined as the epicenter of an infinitely
expanding chain of "ecosystems."
The New World Mine controversy is one of the most recent escalations in what Pendley
calls the War on the West. In his important new book by that title, Pendley points out that
the West is uniquely susceptible to abuses of federal power because in many states the
federal government is the largest landowner: "The federal government owns more that 80
percent of Nevada; nearly two-thirds of Idaho and Utah; as much as half of Oregon,
Wyoming, Arizona, and California; more than a third of Colorado and New Mexico; and
more than a quarter of Washington and Montana."
For this reason, writes Pendley, "the enormous might of the federal government has
always meant that the life of the West was in the hands of strangers living thousands of
miles away. Like the weather that can sweep down upon Westerners and change their
lives in an instant, the federal government has always loomed as a distant threat." As the
federal government has become a servant of environmental extremists, the latent
possibility of federal tyranny has become a terrifying reality:
[T]he environmental extremists' vision of the West is of a land nearly devoid of people
and economic activity, a land devoted almost entirely to the preservation of scenery and
wildlife habitat. In their vision, everything from the 100th meridian to the Cascade Range
becomes a vast park through which they might drive, drinking their Perrier and munching
their organic chips, staying occasionally in the bed-and-breakfast operations into which
the homes of Westerners have been turned, with those Westerners who remain fluffing
duvets and pouring cappuccino.
The War on the West continues on several fronts, and the casualty count continues to
rise. In order to protect the alleged habitat of the supposedly endangered northern spotted
owl, millions of acres of timberland have been placed off-limits to loggers at a cost of
more than 100,000 jobs in the Pacific Northwest timber industry. A similar effort to
"protect" the Mexican spotted owl (MSO) in the Southwest has cost thousands of logging
jobs in Arizona and New Mexico.
The effort to protect the MSO has made this winter an especially challenging one for
many of the poorest residents of northern New Mexico. As the Los Angeles Times
reported last December, "For the past 300 winters, the inhabitants of isolated mountain
villages in northern New Mexico have heated their homes and cooked their meals with
firewood collected from the surrounding forests. Wood was abundant and, until this year,
free for the taking. But now a lawsuit to protect the Mexican spotted owl, a bird that
residents say they've never seen, has prompted the U.S. Forest Service to put much of the
woods off limits."
On August 24, 1995, U.S. District Court Judge Carl Muecke - in defiance of a recently
enacted measure limiting the application of the Endangered Species Act - issued an
injunction which "temporarily" stopped all timber harvesting in the Southwest's 11
national forests. Judge Muecke ordered the Forest Service to huddle with representatives
of eco-extremist lobbies in order to create "a list of the activities or categories of
activities that may continue as they have 'no effect' on the Mexican spotted owl."
As a result of Judge Muecke's decision, the Forest Service imposed severe restrictions on
the practice of "free-roaming" firewood harvesting in the Carson National Forest.
Accordingly, while the "status conference" deliberated, families in Truchas, Cordova, and
other villages in northern New Mexico were left with firewood supplies which would be
exhausted by Christmas. In the face of public indignation, eco-extremists sought to
deflect responsibility to their quondam allies in the federal government.
Sam Hitt of the Forest Guardians, one of the plaintiffs in the MSO lawsuit, bleated that
the Forest Service had "manipulated" the situation to "scapegoat" environmental activists.
However, Roberto Mondragon, a longtime environmental activist from New Mexico,
admitted that "the environmentalists went ahead with their legal strategy without ever
asking for input from the people who would be most affected."
Those affected by Muecke's ruling also included thousands of families who depend on
timber harvesting for their livelihood. Reacting to the ruling, Arizona Governor Fife
Symington declared: "I don't think any of us ever imagined in the freest country in the
world that we could conjure up some circumstances where one individual would have the
power, with the stroke of a pen, to shut down national forests and destroy a way of life
and [at least] 4,000 jobs." Mark Killian, who serves as Speaker of the House for the
Arizona legislature, had this message for Muecke: "You're wiping out whole families.
You're wiping out whole communities. You're wiping out the culture and custom of a
group of people."
William Pendley observes that the environmentalist's jihad has also targeted "the most
enduring symbol of the American West - the cowboy - seeking to price and regulate the
rancher off federal grazing lands and out of business, destroying the economy of rural
areas." One of the first initiatives undertaken by Secretary Babbitt in pursuit of his vision
of a "New West" was to seek a 230 percent increase in grazing fees charged to ranchers
on federally administered lands. Although the proposed fee increase was thwarted by a
Senate filibuster, the effort to destroy the ranching industry continues.
After the fee increase was proposed, an Interior Department memo surfaced which
revealed that Babbitt wanted "to use price increases as a straw man to draw attention
from management issues." While ranchers fought the grazing fee increase, Babbitt and
company created "Range Reform '94," a cluster of proposed federal land use and
environmental regulations which Pendley describes as "A Thousand and One Ways to
Get Ranchers Off Federal Land." These regulations, particularly as applied to water
rights and right-of-way considerations for ranchers, are of particular concern to
"inholders" - ranchers and others who own property surrounded by federally administered
lands.
Nevada rancher Wayne Hage, who operates the 700,000-acre Pine Creek Ranch in Nye
County, has come to symbolize the plight of the contemporary Western rancher.
Although Hage's ranch is administered by the Forest Service, he owns the deed to it
outright. As the January 3rd Christian Science Monitor recalls, "In the late 1980s, the
Forest Service ordered [the Hages] to reduce the number of cows on a portion of their
Forest Service allotment, which Forest Service officials contend had been overgrazed.
When the Hages refused, armed federal agents hauled 104 head of cattle to an
auctioneer." The feds also revoked Hage's grazing permit and forbade him to cut down or
remove trees which had obstructed his right-of-way. When Hage cut down the trees in
question - which the feds themselves had previously identified as a nuisance - he was
charged with the destruction of government property.
Pendley observes that Hage's "outspoken advocacy on behalf of Western ranchers and
their legal rights sometimes put him crosswise with high-ranking federal officials and
environmental extremists"; furthermore, the charge of "destruction of government
property" was filed against Hage just four months after the rancher had filed suit claiming
that the feds had made an unconstitutional "taking" of his property by revoking his
grazing permit and water rights. Even more significantly, the armed raid on Hage's ranch
had been timed to coincide with a congressional vote on grazing fees, and key members
of Congress - including then-Senator Mike Synar (D-OK) but none from Nevada - had
been briefed prior to the action.
All of this suggests that Hage's activism activated the federal government's "Waco gene,"
resulting in an armed raid intended to intimidate Hage and other ranchers into
submission. (The raid, it should be noted, took place during the Bush Administration.)
The criminal charges against Hage have been dismissed and his "takings" lawsuit
continues, although federal attorneys are seeking a summary judgment.
Predators are among the weapons being deployed against human populations in the
Western United States. In harmony with a worldview which denies that humans have a
special status in nature, efforts have been made to re-introduce grizzly bears and other
large predators into human-occupied areas. Last winter, in the teeth of vigorous
opposition from thousands of rural Westerners, Babbitt and his eco-comrades released
more than two dozen wolves into Yellowstone National Park and northern Idaho, and
plans are in development to re-introduce the grizzly bear in rural Idaho.
One environmental writer applauded the re-introduction of the wolf into Yellowstone in
these unabashedly misanthropic terms: "[This policy] will bring back another ingredient
that has been vanishing from the Western back country. The ingredient is fear. Wolves
are killers.... People will think twice before traipsing into the back country." Indeed,
humans who find themselves under assault by predators may have no right to protect
themselves, as Montana rancher John Shuler discovered.
After Shuler shot and killed a grizzly which had threatened first his sheep and then his
life, the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) accused him of an unauthorized "taking" and
fined him $7,000. When Shuler challenged the FWS ruling, a federal Administrative Law
Judge essentially ruled that when Shuler sought to protect his sheep he had "purposefully
place[d] himself in the zone of imminent danger of a bear attack" - and slapped him with
a $4,000 fine.
Alston Chase refers to the effort to re-introduce predators into the inhabited West as "a
preservationist version of the Bosnia mission, with the government attempting to
micromanage peace between stockmen and wolves under the guise of restoring 'natural
conditions.'" This leads to some bizarre and quixotic initiatives by the eco-bureaucracy.
For example, in June of last year federal officials took a litter of wolf pups into
"protective custody," fearing that they might fall to the depredations of eagles. However,
the slaughter of a hiker's dog by federally protected wolves last December was dismissed
as a "natural" occurrence, although, as Chase points out, "it wasn't clear how the killing
of a domestic pet by federally reared wolves was 'natural.'"
In some Western states, laws banning the hunting of mountain lions have resulted in an
unmanageable population of the large, hungry carnivores - and humans are suffering the
consequences. The January 8th issue of Newsweek described the recent mauling death of
56-year-old high school counselor Iris Kenna by a 140-pound mountain lion in Cuyamaca
Rancho State Park near San Diego. Kenna was merely the latest victim of a series of
attacks as cougars, their food supplies dwindling, encroach on human populations. Even
more alarming than the prospect of cougar attacks, however, is the anti-human ideology
which animates the predator's human advocates.
After California resident Barbara Schoener was attacked and killed by a cougar in April
1994, the animal was hunted down and killed by state officials. Donors raised $9,000 for
Schoener's two children - but eco-extremists raised more than $21,000 to care for the
murderous cougar's cub. Michael Manfredo, who has conducted opinion surveys for
Colorado State University, told Newsweek: "There's a value shift about how people view
wildlife, a high willingness to accept mountain lions on the urban fringe - even if they kill
people."
One exemplar of those new values is Wayne Pacelle, a vice president of the Humane
Society of the United States (HSUS), who urged Californians not to "over-react" to the
Schoener slaying:
The HSUS accepts that individual animals judged to be a threat to people should be
removed. But the injurious act of one animal should not provide a license to wreak
vengeance on other members of an animal population. We are encroaching on their
habitat, and we must respect that they should have a place to live as well.
Such sentiments are probably shared by the urban yuppie refugees who are migrating to
the West, whose occupations do not involve direct contact with the wilderness. For
ranchers and other landowners in the rural West, however, predators are a genuine threat
to both life and livelihood.
Manfredo's and Pacelle's comments offer an example of the "biocentric" worldview, in
which humans are seen as merely another species inhabiting a democratic "ecosystem."
And the War on the West is an ideological struggle between traditional American
concepts of property rights and the collectivist biocentric perspective.
Steven C. Rockefeller of Middlebury College, a theology professor and environmentalist,
explains: "In a biocentric approach, the rights of nature are defended first and foremost
on the grounds of the intrinsic value of animals, plants, rivers, mountains, and ecosystems
rather than simply on the basis of their utilitarian value or benefit to humans."
Rockefeller contends that humans must recognize that "other life forms have a right to
life, freedom from human oppression, and a habitat that offers them opportunity for well-
being."
Biocentrism is close kindred to the so-called "Gaia Hypothesis," which maintains that the
earth is a self-regulating organism of which humanity is an insignificant part. Norman
Myers, an ecologist who has been an adviser to the World Bank and the United Nations,
explains that from the Gaian perspective, "there is no longer any 'we' and 'they' … there is
only 'us' - all of us humans, together with all our fellow species and other members of the
Gaian community."
Predictably, some disciples of Gaia have little patience with those who do not subscribe
to their doctrine, and consider "unenlightened" humans to be an infestation to be
eradicated. Such sentiments were expressed by David Garber, a research biologist with
the National Park Service:
Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and
healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but
that isn't true. Somewhere along the line - at about a million years ago, maybe half that -
we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and
upon the Earth.... Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some
of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.
When the Clinton Administration was inaugurated in 1993, the federal bureaucracy was
staffed with numerous adherents of the "biocentric" worldview, beginning with Vice
President Al Gore. Other acolytes of the new faith include Environmental Protection
Agency Director Carol Browner, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, Assistant Interior
Secretary George Frampton, Fish and Wildlife Service Director Mollie Beattie, and
scores of middle-level bureaucrats. In his new book In a Dark Wood: The Fight Over
Forests and the Rising Tyranny of Ecology, Alston Chase describes these officials as
"apostles of the new order" and observes that they wasted little time inaugurating the new
faith: "The Administration, under the rubric of 'reinventing government,' … adopted
biocentrism as the guiding philosophy of all federal land management" immediately on
coming to power.
Biocentrism is more than an ideology; it is quite literally a religion, one which was
prefigured 30 years ago in an address by Berkeley historian Lynn White before the
American Association for the Advancement of Science. During that speech, which
environmental consultant Michael Coffman refers to as "the eco-shot heard 'round the
world," White identified the "victory of Christianity over paganism" as the source of our
environmental "crisis": "Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of
detachment to the feelings of natural objects.... Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt."
According to White, "More science and more technology are not going to get us out of
the present ecologic crisis until we find a new religion...."
Nearly identical sentiments were expressed by Interior Secretary Babbitt during his
November 21, 1995 address before the National Religious Partnership for the
Environment. Babbitt reflected on his childhood experiences with the Catholic Church
and his own "spiritual growth":
[T]he church implicitly sanctioned the prevailing view of the earth as something to be
used and disposed however we saw fit, without any higher obligation. In all the years that
I attended Sunday mass, hearing hundreds of homilies and sermons, there was never any
reference, any link, to our natural heritage or to the spiritual meaning of the land
surrounding us.
In pursuit of "spiritual meaning," Babbitt turned to "a very different religion" - the
pantheist traditions of the Hopi Indians, which he finds to be more consonant with "our
ancient religious values." According to Babbitt, "This [spiritual] lens lets us see not
human-drawn distinctions - as if creation could ever be compartmentalized into a million
discrete parts, each living in relative isolation from the others - but rather the interwoven
wholeness of creation." According to Babbitt, "when we can see past … manmade
divisions, the work of protecting God's creation grows both easier and clearer."
Like Vice President Gore, another eco-pagan who maintains that the preservation of the
environment must become the "central organizing principle" of human society, Babbitt
insists that "the work of preserving God's creation" will require the consolidation of
political power:
[The eco-crusade] unites all state, county, and federal workers under a common moral
goal. It erases artificial borders so we can see the full range of a natural habitat, whether
wetland, forest, stream, or desert expanse. And it makes us see all the creatures that are
collectively rooted to one habitat, and how, by keeping that habitat whole and intact, we
ensure the survival of the species.
According to Babbitt, "our collective moral imperative" has been translated "into one
landmark law: the 1973 Endangered Species Act." The Endangered Species Act (ESA) is
recognized by environmental extremists as "the pitbull of environmental laws" - and eco-
socialists have displayed canine tenacity in their use of the ESA to attack property rights
and economic development. Although it was originally enacted as a measure to protect
species in danger of extinction, Pendley observes, "The purpose of the Endangered
Species Act has become stopping all activities of which environmental extremists
disapproved."
Western property owners have come to dread the possibility that an "endangered" variety
of flora or fauna - be it fish, fowl, fly, or flower - will be located on or near their property.
Wherever such a privileged creature is found, it instantly acquires pre-emptive claim
upon the land it occupies as "habitat" - and the only practical limit to the extent of such
habitat is the inventiveness of environmentalists and bureaucrats. Human use of "habitat"
for economic development is severely curtailed or proscribed altogether. Although the
Endangered Species Act has wrought plenty of havoc on property rights and economic
development since it was signed into law by President Richard Nixon, it was not until the
Clinton Administration's biocentric politburo came to power that the measure's full
implications became known.
In August 1993, the EPA announced a "fundamental reorientation" of its mission which
embraced the biocentric gospel. Vice President Gore's National Performance Review
observed: "Historically EPA has primarily focused on the protection of human health
with less consideration of the impacts on ecosystem issues." Henceforth, however, "EPA
must make ecosystem protection a primary goal of the Agency" - in short, it would no
longer protect public health, but instead protect nature from people. The Bureau of Land
Management was even more forthright about its new ethic, declaring that "all ecosystem
management activities should consider human beings as a biological resource."
Additionally, the Clinton Administration has undertaken an effort to harmonize federal
environmental and land-use policies with the imperatives issued by the United Nations
during the 1992 "Earth Summit" in Rio de Janeiro. Toward this end the Administration
created the "President's Council on Sustainable Development," which wedded five
Cabinet members with the leaders of the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense
Council, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Nature Conservancy. This cabal was
charged with the mandate to "develop policy recommendations for a national strategy for
sustainable development that can be implemented by the public and private sectors." The
keystone of the national strategy for "sustainable development" was to be the UN's
International Convention on Biodiversity (the "Biodiversity Treaty"), which was signed
by Bill Clinton in June 1993.
The Biodiversity Treaty was a masterpiece of "soft law" - vague and seemingly
innocuous environmental admonitions. However, as treaty opponent Senator Jesse Helms
(R-NC) pointed out, the document is a "preamble falsely described as a treaty," with
binding "protocols" which were to be written by unaccountable environmental
organizations after the treaty was ratified by the Senate. Furthermore, as Alston Chase
reports:
The treaty set off a tidal wave of planning designed to analyze and control every square
inch of American real estate.... [The treaty] triggered a plan to create a new agency that
would map and computerize biodiversity data throughout the country.... [T]his new body
would compile a national biological inventory to catalogue all life forms and identify
sensitive areas.... As Congressman Gerry Studds put it, the survey would have an
"awesome mission - catalog everything that walks, crawls, swims, or flies around this
country." It would, as Secretary Babbitt's science adviser Tom Lovejoy reportedly
concurred, "map the whole nation for all biology and determine development for the
whole country and regulate it all because that is our obligation under the Endangered
Species Act." [Emphasis added.]
Not only did the Clintonites intend to create a central planning regime for all economic
development via the Biodiжersity Treaty and its offspring the National Biological Survey
(NBS), but it sought to make the Survey immune to the Freedom of Information Act.
Congress attempted to attach amendments to the NBS enabling legislation denying its
secrecy provision and requiring surveyors to obtain permission from landowners before
conducting inventories on private property. However, Babbitt was not satisfied with an
NBS which could operate as anything other than a biocentric KGB; accordingly, he
withdrew the legislation - and created a similar agency by secretarial executive order.
Because of opposition catalyzed by Senator Helms, the Senate also refused to ratify the
Convention when it was submitted on September 30, 1994. However, the Clinton
Administration has never allowed Congress to impede its ambitions. Henry Lamb,
founder of the Environmental Conservation Organization (ECO), explained to THE NEW
AMERICAN that "the Clinton Administration is moving forward on implementation of
the Biodiversity Treaty as if it had actually been ratified." Furthermore, Lamb reports,
"Although the National Biological Survey has been officially discontinued, it has been
scattered throughout the federal land-use bureaucracy, and the underlying initiative is
proceeding through various eco-system management programs."
Lamb's observations are confirmed by Jim Streeter, policy director for the National
Wilderness Institute. "The Biological Survey is still an active battleground," Streeter
informed THE NEW AMERICAN. "When Babbitt couldn't get the legislation he wanted
out of Congress, he did by executive order what he wanted to do in the first place. He
also got Congress to appropriate about $170 million to fund the Survey within the Interior
Department budget back in 1994." To conceal the work of the Survey, according to
Streeter, Babbitt and his lieutenants have gone through "a series of comic-opera
exercises, first changing its name several times and then making it a subdivision of the
U.S. Geological Survey."
The arrival of a Republican congressional majority in January 1995 placed a few
impediments in the path of the Clintonista eco-juggernaut. However, while
Administration policy wonks wrestle over recondite budget details with their counterparts
in Congress, the work of remolding America to meet the demands of the biocentric
worldview continues.
In November 1991, the "Wildlands Project" was co-created by environmental journalist
Reed F. Noss and Dave Foreman, the erstwhile fŸhrer of Earth First! As described by
Charles C. Mann and Mark L. Plummer in Science magazine, the Wildlands scheme
"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." Designed to help realize the vision of a "wild and healthy planet," the
Wildlands Project, according to Mann and Plummer, calls for the re-primitivization of at
least half of the United States:
[T]he Wildlands approach calls for 23.4 percent of the land to be returned to wilderness,
and another 26.2 percent to be severely restricted in terms of human use. Most roads
would be closed; some would be ripped out of the landscape... [It would mean] nothing
less than a transformation of America from a place where 47 percent of the land is
wilderness to an archipelago of human-inhabited islands surrounded by natural areas.
Chase points out that the Wildlands Project would involve "the forced relocation of tens
of millions of people.... the removal of human habitation from up to half the country's
land area." This scheme to create an American Kampuchea in the name of "biodiversity"
was endorsed as recently as 1994 by the World Resources Institute, which is a major
constituent of the President's Council on Sustainable Development and among the non-
governmental organizations which are creating guidelines for implementing the yet-
unratified Biodiversity Treaty.
ECO's Henry Lamb notes that the Wildlands concept is essentially a brainchild of the
United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) and the foundation-funded
environmental lobbyist community which interfaces with both the federal and UN
environmental bureaucracies. The UNEP scheme is to organize the earth into
"bioregions" - which would supposedly be intact ecosystems, and which would (in
Lamb's words) serve as "the basic biological and geological unit around which society is
to be reorganized." The bioregions would be presided over by "bioregional councils,"
which would be "public-private partnerships" between government officials and
foundation-funded non-governmental organizations, perhaps modeled after the
President's Council on Sustainable Development.
Writes Lamb, "It is difficult to envision society organized as it is proposed in the UNEP
documents. The vision is a regression from the progress society has made, to a lifestyle
that society struggled for thousands of years to escape." It is the drive to realize the
Wildlands concept which underlies the "battles over endangered species, grazing fees,
wetlands policy, heritage corridors, natural landmarks, logging, outdoor billboards,
chlorine, pesticides, wastewater," and other environmental controversies. The Wildlands
vision may take decades to realize, observes Lamb, but "the process has just begun. The
'War for the West' has almost nothing to do with spotted owls or salmon; it is a planned
method to force humans off land that is to become core wilderness areas."
Some might protest that Lamb's projections exaggerate the ambitions of the eco-
leviathan. But ten years ago it would have been thought fanciful to suggest that the
federal government would prosecute a rancher for shooting a grizzly bear in self-defense,
or enlist the UN's help in shutting down a gold
Green Jihad Is Wiping out a Way of Life in the Pacific
Northwest
Like the Caananites of old, the environmental lobby worships "sacred groves" -
specifically, the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. Eco-literature abounds in
references to the pristine Northwest as a verdant paradise adorned with an unbroken
blanket of old-growth forests. The effort to "re-create" that lost arcadia is a religious
crusade for environmentalists - and the infidel to be vanquished is the Northwestern
logger. In order to impose their religious preferences on the timber-dependent economies
of the region, the green lobby has waged surrogate warfare through the Endangered
Species Act, using the northern spotted owl as a proxy. William Perry Pendley of
Mountain States Legal Foundation offers a concise summary of the process:
Beginning in 1987 and continuing to this day, the environmental movement has waged an
aggressive war of attrition against the timber harvesting industry in Washington, Oregon,
and northern California. Environmental groups from these states and elsewhere have
sought to end forestry on federal lands through lawsuits filed before federal courts....
Obtaining injunction after injunction, they must have succeeded beyond their wildest
imaginings. They have virtually shut down logging on federal lands in the Pacific
Northwest.
The consummation of the green jihad against the Northwestern timber industry was the
Clinton Forest Plan, which Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt proudly refers to as "a
holistic agreement forged with state and local officials and the private sector. Across
three state borders, it keeps critical habitat intact, provides buffer zones along salmon
streams and coastal areas, and elsewhere provides a sustainable timber harvest for
generations to come."
In fact, the Clinton Forest Plan was created by a committee called the Forest Ecosystem
Management Team (FEMAT), which sequestered itself in the U.S. Bank tower in
Portland, Oregon in early 1993 under strict instructions to create an "ecosystems
approach" which would "revolutionize land management in the Pacific Northwest." The
ecosystem approach, as Alston Chase notes, treats old-growth forests as "a biologically
distinct category that never changes." But such a forest has never existed anywhere,
anytime: "old-growth" - or "late successional" - forests do not endure; they are forests in
decline and are susceptible to fires. This was demonstrated by Oregon State University
graduate student Bob Zybach, who conducted a systematic review of Bureau of Land
Management maps from 1850, 1890, 1920, and 1940, as well as personal accounts from
explorers and other records. Rather than the "sea of old-growth forests" described in eco-
mythology, the documentary evidence showed the Northwest to be a collection of "green
islands." This analysis was confirmed by a recent study by Forest Service biologist Jan
Henderson, who documented that old-growth forests are not being decimated - their
acreage has actually increased during the 20th century.
But the eco-jihad and its allies in the Clinton Administration are indifferent to facts and
quite prepared to sacrifice the livelihood of thousands of logging families in pursuit of a
mythical sylvan utopia. One member of FEMAT, natural resource biologist Robert G.
Lee of the University of Washington, resigned in disgust to protest the prostituted science
used to justify the group's pre-ordained conclusions. Clinton Administration attorney
Robert S. Whitman has admitted in court that the Administration deliberately packed
FEMAT with advocates of the "ecosystems approach" because otherwise Mr. Clinton
would not have been able to "control the policy parameters of the advisory committee....
[He] would have to hear from people who disagree with an ecosystem approach to forest
management."
As an anodyne to families who depend on the Northwestern timber industry, President
Clinton and Vice President Al Gore convened a high-profile "timber summit" in Portland
on April 2, 1993. For nine hours, Clinton, Gore, and sundry Cabinet members held court
as environmentalists, business leaders, and timber workers expressed their views and
concerns. The summit was described as an attempt to create an arrangement which would
fulfill Mr. Clinton's promise that there would be "no net job loss" for the timber industry.
However, the meeting was merely a diversionary charade.
C. Larry Mason, a timber activist who participated in the timber summit, recalls that
"Clinton shook my hand, looked me in the eye, and said, 'Larry, we won't forget about
your people.' What I didn't know was that the forest plan was already being written
before I spoke with President Clinton." While Mr. Clinton was putting on his best facade
of moist-eyed empathy for the consumption of Northwestern timber families, FEMAT
was in session nearby, putting the finishing touches on a program which would determine
the fate of those to whom they derisively referred as "timber junkies."
Writes William Pendley: "The Clinton plan handed down on July 1, 1993, was a
devastating blow to the men and women of the timber-producing communities of the
Pacific Northwest." Enormous tracts from Oregon, Washington, and northern California
were set aside as "habitat" for the spotted owl, and 16 million acres were to be returned to
"presettlement conditions." The timber harvest goals on affected lands were reduced by
75 percent. As for the promise of "no net job loss," Dr. John H. Beuter, the head of a
team which examined the potential impact of a proposed "spotted owl solution" less
drastic than the final FEMAT plan, projected a loss of 102,757 jobs and $3.8 billion in
revenue.