I guess mentioning Rosa Koire and the fact that she's gay makes me a homophobe, too. �Keep ridiculing man, i don't give a shit..but again, enough of the Right Wing shit... Democratsagainstunagenda21.com
Here's one of the first articles i encountered that made me want to research Agenda 21. �
eco�logic Special Report Sustainable Development: Transforming America
by Henry Lamb
Environmental Conservation Organization Hollow Rock, Tennessee
December 1, 2005
As the "sustainable development" movement continues to gain momentum, it is worthwhile to step back and take a long look at the big picture, painted with a broad brush to reveal what the United States might look like as the movement's vision is more fully implemented over the next 50 years or so. The picture painted here is based on official documents published by several government agencies and non-government organizations during the last decade. These documents were rarely reported in the news, and average working people have no idea what sustainable development really means, and even less knowledge of what is in store for the future. If the vision of sustainable development continues to unfold as it has in the last decade, life in the United States will be quite different in the future.
The Vision Half the land area of the entire country will be designated "wilderness areas," where only wildlife managers and researchers will be allowed. These areas will be interconnected by "corridors of wilderness" to allow migration of wildlife, without interference by human activity. Wolves will be as plentiful in Virginia and Pennsylvania as they are now in Idaho and Montana. Panthers and alligators will roam freely from the Everglades to the Okefenokee and beyond. Surrounding these wilderness areas and corridors, designated "buffer zones" will be managed for "conservation objectives." The primary objective is "restoration and rehabilitation." Rehabilitation involves the repair of damaged ecosystems, while restoration usually involves the reconstruction of natural or semi-natural ecosystems. As areas are restored and rehabilitated, they are added to the wilderness designation, and the buffer zone is extended outward. Buffer zones are surrounded by what is called "zones of cooperation." This is where people live - in "sustainable communities." Sustainable communities are defined by strict "urban growth boundaries." Land outside the growth boundaries will be managed by government agencies, which grant permits for activities deemed to be essential and sustainable. Open space, to provide a "viewshed" and sustainable recreation for community residents will abut the urban boundaries. Beyond the viewshed, sustainable agricultural activities will be permitted, to support the food requirements of nearby communities. Sustainable communities of the future will bear little resemblance to the towns and cities of the 20th century. Single-family homes will be rare. Housing will be provided by public/private partnerships, funded by government, and managed by non-government "Home Owners Associations." Housing units will be designed to provide most of the infrastructure and amenities required by the residents. Shops and office space will be an integral part of each unit, and housing will be allocated on a priority basis to people who work in the unit - with quotas to achieve ethnic and economic balance. Schools, daycare, and recreation facilities will be provided. Each unit will be designed for bicycle and foot traffic, to reduce, if not eliminate, the need for people to use automobiles. Transportation between sustainable communities, for people and for commodities, will be primarily by light rail systems, designed to bridge wilderness corridors where necessary. The highways that remain will be super transport corridors, such as the "Trans-Texas Corridor" now being designed, which will eventually reach from Mexico to Canada. These transport corridors will also be designed to bridge wilderness corridors, and to minimize the impact on the environment. Government, too, will be different in a sustainable America. Human activity is being reorganized around ecoregions, which do not respect county or state boundaries. Therefore, the governing apparatus will be designed to regulate the activities within the entire region, rather than having multiple governing jurisdictions with services duplicated in each political subdivision. It is far more efficient to have regional governing authorities with centrally administered services.
Sierra Club's proposal to reorganize North America into 21 Ecoregions. The Sierra Club, one of hundreds of non-government organizations actively working to bring about this transformation, has suggested that North America be divided into 21 ecoregions, that ignore existing national, state, and county boundaries. In 1992, they published a special issue of their magazine which featured a map, and extensive descriptions of how these ecoregions should be managed. (1) The function of government will also change. The legislative function, especially at the local and state level, will continue to diminish in importance, while the administrative function will grow. Already, in some parts of the country, counties are combining, and city and county governments are consolidating. Regional governing authorities are developing; taking precedence over the participating counties, which will eventually evaporate. State governments will undergo similar attrition; as regulations are developed on an ecoregions basis, there will be less need for separate state legislation. The administrative functions of state governments will also collapse into a super-regional administrative unit, to eliminate unnecessary duplication of investment and services.
The Reality This vision is quite attractive to many Americans, especially those born since 1970, who have been educated in the public school system. To these people, nothing is more important than saving the planet from the certain catastrophe that lies ahead, if people are allowed to continue their greedy abuse of natural resources. The public school system, and the media, have been quite successful is shaping new attitudes and values to support this vision of how the world should be. This vision did not suddenly spring from the mind of a Hollywood screenwriter. It has been evolving for most of the last century. Since the early 1960s, it has been gaining momentum. The rise of the environmental movement became the magnet which attracted several disparate elements of social change, now coalesced into a massive global movement, euphemistically described as sustainable development. The first Wilderness Act was adopted in 1964, which set aside nine million acres of wilderness so "our posterity could see what our forefathers had to conquer," as one Senator put it. Now, after 40 years, 106.5 million acres are officially designated as wilderness. (2) At least eight bills have been introduced in the 109th Congress to add more wilderness to the system. (3) And every year, Congress is asked to designate more and more land as wilderness. Most of this land is already a part of a global system of ecoregions, recognized internationally as "Biosphere Reserves." In the United States, there are 47 Biosphere Reserves, so designated by the United Nations Education, Science, and Cultural Organization, (4) which are a part of a global network of 482 Biosphere Reserves. This global network is the basis for implementing the U.N.'s Convention on Biological Diversity, (5) a treaty which the U.S. Senate chose not to ratify. (6) The 1140-page instruction book for implementing this treaty, Global Biodiversity Assessment, provides graphic details about how society should be organized, and how land and resources should be managed, in order to make the world sustainable. This treaty was formulated by U.N. agencies and non-government organizations between 1981 and 1992, when it was formally adopted by the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro. Consider this instruction from the Global Biodiversity Assessment:
"...representative areas of all major ecosystems in a region need to be reserved, that blocks should be as large as possible, that buffer zones should be established around core areas, and that corridors should connect these areas. This basic design is central to the recently proposed Wildlands Project in the United States." (7)
Now consider "this basic design" as described in the Wildlands Project:
"...that at least half of the land area of the 48 conterminous states should be encompassed in core reserves and inner corridor zones (essentially extensions of core reserves) within the next few decades.... Nonetheless, half of a region in wilderness is a reasonable guess of what it will take to restore viable populations of large carnivores and natural disturbance regimes, assuming that most of the other 50 percent is managed intelligently as buffer zones. Eventually, a wilderness network would dominate a region...with human habitations being the islands. The native ecosystem and the collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans." (
Even though this treaty was not ratified by the United States, it is being effectively implemented by the agencies of government through the "Ecosystem Management Policy." The U.S. Forest service is actively working to identify and secure wilderness corridors to connect existing core wilderness areas. (9) Both state and federal governments have enacted legislation in recent years to provide for systematic acquisition of "open space," land suitable for restoration and rehabilitation, to expand wilderness areas, and to provide "viewsheds" beyond urban boundaries. In the last days of the Clinton Administration, the Forest Service adopted the "Roadless Area Conservation Rule," which identified 58.5 million acres from which access and logging roads were to be removed. In the West, the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management are driving ranchers off the land by reducing grazing allotments to numbers that make profitable operations impossible. Inholders, people who have recreational cabins on federal land, are discovering that their permits are not being renewed. The Fish and Wildlife Service is forcing people off their land through designations of "wetlands," and "critical habitat" which render the land unusable for profit-making activities. Much to the chagrin of the proponents of sustainable development, some of these policies have been slowed, but not reversed, by the Bush administration. Nevertheless, agencies of government, supported by an army of non-government organizations, continue to transform the landscape into the vision described in the Wildlands Project, and in the Global Biodiversity Assessment.
Blueprint for Sustainable Development Other agencies of government are working with equal diligence, to create the "islands of human habitation," otherwise called sustainable communities. The blueprint for these communities was also adopted at the 1992 U.N. Conference in Rio de Janeiro. Its title is "Agenda 21." This 300-page document contains 40 chapters loaded with recommendations to govern virtually every facet of human existence. Agenda 21 is not a treaty. It is a "soft law" policy document which was signed by President George H.W. Bush, and which does not require Senate ratification. One of the recommendations contained in the document is that each nation establish a national council to implement the rest of the recommendations. On June 29, 1993, President Bill Clinton issued Executive Order Number 12852 which created the President's Council on Sustainable Development. (10) Its 25 members included most Cabinet Secretaries, representatives from The Nature Conservancy, the Sierra Club and other non-government organizations, and a few representatives from industry. The PCSD set out to implement the recommendations of Agenda 21 administratively, where possible, and to secure new legislation when necessary. One of the publications of the Council is "Sustainable Communities, Report of the Sustainable Communities Task Force." (11) This document, in very generalized language, makes sustainable communities sound like the perfect solution to all the world's ills. Another document, however, describes in much more precise detail exactly what sustainable communities will be. This document was prepared by the Department of Housing and Urban Development as a report to the U.N. Conference on Human Settlements in Istanbul, June, 1996. This report says that current lifestyles in the United States will "...demolish much of nature's diversity and stability, unless a re-balance can be attained - an urban-rural industrial re-balance with ecology, as a fundamental paradigm of authentic, meaningful national/global human security." (12) This highly detailed 25-page report goes on to describe the sustainable community of the future:
"...Community Sustainability Infrastructures [designed for] efficiency and livability that encourages: in-fill over sprawl: compactness, higher density low-rise residential: transit-oriented (TODs) and pedestrian-oriented development (PODs): bicycle circulation networks; work-to-home proximity; mixed-use-development: co-housing, housing over shops, downtown residential; inter-modal transportation malls and facilities ...where trolleys, rapid transit, trains and biking, walking and hiking are encouraged by infrastructures."
"For this hopeful future we may envision an entirely fresh set of infrastructures that use fully automated, very light, elevated rail systems for daytime metro region travel and nighttime goods movement, such as have been conceptualized and being positioned for production at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis; we will see all settlements linked up by extensive bike, recreation and agro-forestry "E-ways" (environment-ways) such as in Madison, Wisconsin; we will find healthy, productive soils where there is [now] decline and erosion, through the widespread use of remineralization from igneous and volcanic rock sources (much of it the surplus quarry fines, or "rockdust", from concrete and asphalt-type road construction or from reservoir silts); we will be growing foods, dietary supplements and herbs that make over our unsustainable reliance upon foods and medicines that have adverse soil, environmental, or health side-effects. Less and less land will go for animal husbandry, and more for grains, tubers and legumes." (13)
Sustainable communities cannot emerge as the natural outgrowth of free people making individual choices in a free market economy. Nor can they be mandated in the United States, as they might be in nations that live under dictatorial rule. Therefore, the PCSD developed a strategy to entice or coerce local communities to begin the transition to sustainability. The EPA provided challenge grants, and visioning grants to communities that would undertake the process toward sustainability. Grants were also made available to selected non-government organizations to launch a visioning process in local communities. This process relies on a trained facilitator who uses a practiced, "consensus building" model to lead selected community participants in the development of "community vision." This vision inevitably sets forth a set of goals - each of which can be found in the recommendations of Agenda 21 - that become the basis for the development of a comprehensive community plan. (14) According to the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), 6,400 local communities in 113 countries have become involved in the sustainable communities Local Agenda 21 process since 1995. (15) ICLEI is one of several international non-government organizations whose mission is to promote sustainable development and sustainable communities at the local level. Dozens of similar national NGOs are at work all across the United States. A cursory search on the term "sustainable communities" through Google or Yahoo will return a staggering number of responses. The federal government deepened its involvement in the transformation of America by providing millions of dollars in grants to the American Planning Association to develop model legislation which embodies the principles of sustainable development. The publication, Growing Smart Legislative Guidebook: Model Statutes for Planning and the Management of Change, provides model legislation to be adopted by states. Typically, this legislation, when adopted, requires the creation of a statewide comprehensive land use plan that defines the administrative mechanisms for regional government agencies, and provides planning models for counties to use in creating county-wide land use plans. Municipalities within the county are required to produce a plan that conforms with, and is integrated into the county and state plans. (16) Using the coercive power of the federal budget, which the PCSD describes as using "financial incentives and disincentives," the federal government had little trouble getting states to rush to adopt some form of the model legislation. The state of Wisconsin, for examples, says this about its comprehensive planning act:
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