We published this article in the spring of 1999. We knew that the Environmental and Animal Rights movements were just two of many change agents working towards a New World Order. We have updated the original information slightly.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~What, you may ask, is the Wildlands Project? It is a grandiose plan to transform at least half of the continental United States into an area free of modern industry and human habitation.
The father of this radical vision for a new green America is none other than Dave Foreman , principal founder of the eco-terrorist group EarthFirst!, and until 1997, a director of the Sierra Club . Carl Pope took the reign in 2002.
A vast network of powerful and influential environmental groups are taking great strides toward reaching the Wildlands' goals. They are working toward the resurrection of a pre-industrial North America — the continent once known to Native Americans as "Turtle Island." Foreman, in his own words, summarizes the Wildlands Project as a "bold attempt to grope our way back to 1492." What kind of progressive notion is that, you might ask.
Even so, these people consider themselves to be enlightened and always right, while they consider those with differing views to be ignorant and unenlightened. These eco-centrics have created their own vocabulary and terminology and this green "newspeak" has grown deep and extensive roots within our popular and political culture.
Buzzwords for a New Millennium
Biological diversity is a broad term which crops up in many environmental documents. It is used to define any kind of life form and its interrelation(s) to all the other life forms within any particular ecosystem a/k/a biome.
Bioregions, also known as biosphere reserves, are geo-political regions formed from land areas constituting similar ecosystems. The United Nations prefers the term "eco-regions," and the Department of the Interior refers to them as Ecosystem Management Areas.
Under such a plan, areas that are now defined by state boundaries in the U.S., would be reorganized to follow similar landscape features. For example, the mountainous regions of Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Kentucky and West Virginia would constitute the Southern Appalachian Bioregion.
According to the enviro¬gurus, all human activity is damaging to a biosphere. Following that reasoning, they believe that people must be heavily regulated or removed in order to protect the balance of biodiversity within eco-regions.
First, a core area is established where no human activity is allowed. Core areas are the central component of the Wildlands Reserve program. Core areas are large and are taken mostly from National Forest and Park lands and adjacent private lands. Around the core is a buffer zone, consisting primarily of private land. Buffer zones may contain some housing development and human activity. According to the "grand plan," however, no new development must be permitted. A transition area will surround the buffer zone. Human activity, such as tourism, or even some human settlement will be allowed. The transition area boundaries can be flexible. A corridor is an area of land that connects core areas with other core areas. Corridors generally follow rivers, streams and wildlife migration routes. Corridors consist of both public and private lands.
According to the Wildlands Project, no commercial development, housing or communities would be allowed within such a corridor. Imagine a national park that was 2,500 miles long, two counties wide and which passed through ten states from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico. This is the Mississippi River Corridor, as designated by Congress. Numerous and costly studies will be made in this region in order to develop a unified federal program to control this ten-state area. Are you beginning to see how this plan will work?
There are sixty-eight other designated Heritage Areas and Corridors across our country in nearly every state of the Union. (this was true in 1999 - there may be more at this time)
THE ROAD RIP: Road Removal and Implementation Project
A common characteristic of core wilderness areas and interconnecting corridors is the absence of roads. Road RIP is an NGO dedicated to removing existing roads and preventing the construction of new roads. Since this paper was first written, many "road removal" projects have been implemented.
The original Road RIP radicals prepared handbooks for local activists that describe step-by-step procedures for challenging road construction and "Six Steps to Close a Road." Sample letters, a comprehensive flow chart of the procedure and sample forms are provided to the organization's chapters. The author of the work, Keith Hammer, is credited with forcing the Forest Service to remove or commit to remove more than 1,000 miles of roads in the Flathead National Forest.
The group is not content to close only roads in the national forests. Their ambitions run much higher. According to their literature:
"The best road density goal for maintaining and restoring ecological and evolutionary processes is ZERO—NO ROADS AT ALL. And what we call a road includes everything from interstate highways to two-track logging roads, off-road vehicle trails, and snowmobile routes. They are all swaths of ecological destruction." And back to 1492 we go.
PRIVATE PROPERTY
In order for the Wildlands Project to be successful, thousands upon thousands of acres of private property need to be incorporated into biosphere reserves. Landowners were once free to use their land as they saw fit, as long as their actions did not harm other people. That changed with a 1972 decision by the Supreme Court of Wisconsin. In Just v. Marinette County, the Court ruled that:
"An owner of land has no absolute and unlimited right to change the essential natural character of his land so as to use it for a purpose for which it was unsuited in its natural state. "
Simply put, the Wisconsin ruling set a legal precedence that a property owner could not "harm" the land itself. Fortunately, following cases favored landowners although the legal definition of "harm" was expanded and modified.
The Wildlands Project and other environmental organizations now campaign to "educate" the courts and public what they consider to be inappropriate land uses that "harms" others. The arguments which the eco-activists have dreamed up are convoluted and complex. They claim that when wetlands are filled, others are harmed by excessive run off and by the loss of the run off to the aquifer. When private property is clear cut others are harmed by the loss of biodiversity and so on, ad nauseum. They know the legal game and play it well. If they don't want you to have it (property), they will find a way to take (legally steal) it from you.
The Sweet Home decision is an excellent example of how the Supreme Court is expanding the definition of harm. It was based on the notion that landowners can harm the land itself, which in turn, would affect and harm people.
"Others" that are affected are often unidentified souls that may be indirectly impacted by the loss of some imagined benefit. This case has left the door wide open for government restrictions upon private property owners. A favorite scheme used to implement the Wildlands Project, is for the federal government to offer a variety of flexible conservation easements to property owners. The owner retains title to the property and continues to pay taxes on it even though specific uses of the property are relinquished to the easement holder. Further, they often receive a pittance for the rights they gave up and future generations are robbed of the property uses which were forfeited.
The Nature Conservancy and other land trusts have led the way in exploiting this technique of separating resource utilization from the bundle of rights which traditionally have been considered private property rights and other non-profits have learned those techniques.
From the Global to the National to the Local
It is no coincidence that an article about the Wildlands Project first appeared in the 1992 special issue of Wild Earth, * an EarthFirst! publication. After all, the United Nation's Convention on Biological Diversity also took place that very same year, and come to think about it, so did the release of Al Gore's book, Earth in the Balance.
Not surprisingly, one of Al Gore's first acts as Vice President was to establish an Ecosystem Management Policy. This directive was implemented via various resource management agencies within our federal government. (It should be noted that the Sierra Club published a map of the new America, broken down into 18 bioregions. )
In fact, the evolution of this land management concept can be traced through three books that were published jointly by the United National Environment Programme (UNEP); the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the World Wide Fund for Nature and the World Resources Institute (WRI). They are entitled World Conservation Strategy (1980) Caring for the Earth (1991); and Global Biodiversitv Strategy (1992) and laid the groundwork for the new earth movement we see today. As long ago as 1980, the Man and the Biosphere Program (MAB) of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) began implementing the global plan in its worldwide Network of Biosphere Reserves. There are a total of 328 UNESCO Biosphere Reserves/World Heritage Sites , some of which are which are located in the United States.
The IUCN International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources is an accredited scientific advisory body to the United Nations which has more than 880 state and federal governmental agencies and NGO members in 133 countries. A few of those members include the EPA, US Forest Service, US National Park Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, the Nature Conservancy and the Society for Conservation Biology. Though the advancement and progress of the U.S. Wildlands Project has been due to the efforts of NGOs, international organizations, and federal and state agencies, none of these entities claim any connection to the Wildlands Project!
The IUCN and the Society largely created the "science of conservation biology", on which the Wildlands Project is based. The SCB was created by Reed Noss (Wild Earth magazine)* and Michael Soule. Noss was the editor for the Journal of Conservation Biology in 1999. Noss admits that conservation biology is advocacy science, which means it readily accepts data that supports the desired conclusion, and ignores the data that does not. To paraphrase Al Gore, you might say it is a very convenient untruth!
Noss presented The Wildlands Project at the annual meeting of the SCB in 1993, and asked for a critique. He was told — by the very group of conservation biologists he founded — that the project made "wildly utopian assumptions about the future: that the values were not shared by other citizens: and that the benefits of corridors and roadless areas were insufficiently validated to form the basis of the approach." Nevertheless, the UN and the Department of Interior have accepted the concept whether it is scientifically valid (True) or not.
President Bill Clinton eagerly signed the IUCN-sponsored Biodiversity Treaty in 1993, but the Senate refused to ratify it. In 1994, the Treaty narrowly escaped Senate endorsement. On January 16, 1996, President Clinton issued Executive Order 12986 in order to give the IUCN privileges and immunity from legal accountability. In other words, the Biodiversity Treaty was put into effect without ratification from the Senate.
And So it Began in Earnest
Not long after EO 12986 was signed, UN delegates surveyed the Yellowstone National Park and called for a buffer zone to surround it. Accordingly, the Park Service stopped maintaining certain roads and highways and bought up any available property. As more and more owners were denied use of their own private property, businesses were shut down and more property became available for sale. Numerous campgrounds were shut down in preparation for the biosphere reserve core area.
This is how the Crown Butte New World Gold Mine operations were shut down. They had the unfortunate luck to be located outside Yellowstone Park in a "buffer zone." Rather than facing nonstop litigation from the federal government, they agreed to leave $650 million of gold reserves in the ground for exchange of the right to mine other federal lands. They even received the privilege of paying $65 for this right $21 million of which would be used for environmental clean up projects!
Next, Clinton declared some non-polluting coal reserves in Utah a "National Monument" through yet another executive order. The Grande Escalante Monument fiasco cost the Utah Public School system $60 billion in lost education fees and will continue to drastically effect Utah's future economy.
If fully implemented, the Convention on Biological Diversity would have to displace millions of people through unacceptable regulation, and nationalization of private land. Production of agriculture, forest and mining would be seriously reduced. Millions of Americans would lose their jobs and the rest of us would pay double and triple for products. (and this did indeed come to pass)
Other United Nations "biodiversity" areas include the following National Park Biosphere Reserves:
Big Bend National Park, TX: 801,163 acres
Big Thicket National Preserve, TX: 85,750 acres
Congaree Swamp National Monument, SC: 22,200 acres
Death Valley National Monument, CA: 2,067,628 acres
Denali National Park and Preserve, AK: 6,500,000 acres
Everglades National Park and Fort Jefferson National Monument, FL 1,571,199 acres
Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, AK: 7,523,888 acres
Glacier National Park, MT: 1,013,572 acres
Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, AK: 3,283,168 acres
Great Smoky Mountains National Park, TN/NC: 520,269 acres
Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, HI: 229,177 acres
Isle Royale National Park, MI: 571,790 acres
Joshua Tree National Monument, CA: 559,954 acres
Kings Canyon National Park, CA: 461,901 acres
Mammoth Cave National Park, KY 52,708 acres
Noatak National Preserve, AK: 6,574,481 acres
Olympic National Park, WA 922,651 acres
Organ Pipe National Monument, AZ: 330,689 acres
Redwood National Park, CA: 110,232 acres
Rocky Mountain National Park : 265,727 acres
Sequoia National Park, CA 402,482 acres
Virgin Islands National Park, VI: 14,689 acres
Yellowstone National Park, WY: 2,219,791 acres
Some World Heritage Sites
Carlsbad Caverns National Park, NM: 46,766 acres
Grand Canyon National Park, AZ: 1,217,158 acres
Mesa Verde National Park, CO: 52,122 acres
Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve and Preserve, AK: 13,188,325 acres
Yosemite National Park, CA: 761,236 acres
Cue the band and let's sing "This Land is Their Land."
And On it Goes
The Northern Appalachian Restoration Project, one of many NGOs coordinated by The Wildlands Project, is working to convert eight million acres of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont into a Headwaters Wilderness Reserve System. The area encompasses the headwaters of several rivers including the Androscoggin, Kennebec, Penobscot, St. John-Allagash¬Aroostook, and Saco.
About one million acres of the area are already publicly owned; the remaining seven million acres are privately owned by timber companies. Acquisition cost for the privately owned lands is approximately $2 billion. The Headwaters project is the first step in establishing corridors and buffer zones that will eventually encompass southern New England, New York's Adirondacks, and reach up into eastern Canada. The time frame for completion of this project is 75 years.
Since 1993, the Minnesota Ecosystems Recovery Project has been developing the Minnesota Biosphere Recovery Strategy. The Boundary Waters-Quetico region of northern Minnesota and southern Ontario represents about 1.1 million acres. The total area involves fourteen counties, more than 2 million hectares, that are said to be "roadless, or lightly roaded" which qualify for wilderness designation under the 1964 Wilderness Act. The Minnesota project would be the largest "statewide" reserve in the lower 48 states.
The Greater North Cascades Ecosystem includes more than 10 million acres in Washington and British Columbia. The Northwest Ecosystem Alliance and the Sierra Biodiversity Institute are the coordinating NGOs for this area.
Data collection, analysis, and mapping are the first steps toward designing a reserve system within a bioregion. The U.S. Forest Service, The Nature Conservancy, Natural Heritage Programs, and state resource management agencies provide most of the information necessary for the design process. The IUCN International Union for Conservation of nature has declared the Klamath/Siskivou Region to be of Global Botanical Significance and is one of seven such areas in North America and 200 worldwide. An effort is being made to designate the area as a UN Biosphere Reserve, according to The Wildlands Project.
The NGO coordinating the work is the Klamath Forest Alliance and Reed Noss was selected to direct the work. The area covers approximately four million hectares, about one-third in Oregon and the balance in California. The project is funded by the W. Alton Jones Foundation , the Foundation for Deep Ecology, The Wildlands Project, the U.S.D.A. Forest Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
It would take a library to document the financial sources which support and underwrite the myriad of environmental groups now in existence in our country, so in closing, I will mention just a few: The Conservation Alliance is a group of companies that manufacture outdoor equipment, clothing, and supplies. CA makes donations to various environmental groups, some of which are working on the Wildlands Project.
EGA Environmental Grantmakers Association - An association of private and corporate foundations that make, oversee, and direct donations to environmental groups. (A list of EGA funders)
The Pew Charitable Trusts, a Philadelphia, PA based private foundation and The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a New York city based private foundation, also support the Wildlands Project.
The Turner Foundation is a private foundation begun by media mogul Ted Turner. The Turner Foundation is a generous supporter of the Project. Human-i-Tees is an environmental fundraising company; they sell tee shirts in schools and donate 20% of their gross profits to environmental groups.
The AR and Enviro movements use those five steps to control that Glenn Beck talks about. I have modified them slightly.
1. Form a Shadow Front using warm fuzzy benevolent causes as a "cover"
2. Channel your propaganda into a socialized mainstream media
3. Build anti-breeder, anti-animal use sentiment
4. Use endangered and threatened species to control private property or make land off limits
5. Provoke and demonize anyone who disagrees with your ideas
6. Use political activism, demonstrations, civil disobedience, disregard of people's property and push for more and more restrictive legislation
7. Take power and control
Further reading:
The following Green Organizations which have received direct funding and assistance from George Soros and his Open Society Institute (OSI). I have taken excerpts from the information listed on these pages. If you take some time to read the entire entries as well as to look at the entire list of non-profits on this website, you will be well on your way to understanding what has happened and what is happening to our country.
Defenders of Wildlife
DOW backs the Wildlands Project. This website describes it well, ..."an initiative that seeks the removal of all signs of human existence from fully one-fourth of the American land mass, with the aim of giving the land back to nature.
DOW condemns logging, ranching, mining, and even the use of recreational motorized vehicles. DOW Executive Vice President is Jamie Rappaport Clark (1997 - 2001 Director of the USFWS, appointed by Clinton). DOW opposes the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) proposed construction of security fences and round-the-clock high-intensity lighting on the Arizona-Mexico border, which would serve to curb illegal entry into the U.S. from Mexico and staunch crime in the border states. According to DOW, the erection of such barriers "would have ended any hope for further cross-border movement by jaguars, ocelots, and a host of other border species." Seriously!!???
DOW President, Roger Schlickeisen, served as a chief of staff to U.S. Democratic Senator Max Baucus (MT) . He currently sits on the Board of Directors of the League of Conservation Voters.
DOW is a member of the Save Our Environment Action Center (SOEAC) , a leftist coalition of the nation's most influential environmental organizations Fellow SOEAC members include, among others, Earthjustice, Environmental Defense, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, the League of Conservation Voters, the National Wildlife Federation, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Pew Environment Group, the National Audubon Society, the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, the World Wildlife Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists (Search this blog for the UCS).
DOW receives its principal funding from the Turner Foundation. Other notable benefactors are the Bauman Family Foundation, the Bullitt Foundation, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation (also contributes to HSUS), the David and Lucile Packard Foundation (another HSUS funder), the Streisand Foundation, and the Surdna Foundation.
Earthjustice was founded as the "Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund" in 1971 and which was fully independent from the Sierra Club. Earthjustice seeks to place severe restrictions on how U.S. land and waterways may be used. Earthjustice has provided free legal representation to more than 600 client organizations, including the American Friends Service Committee; Defenders of Wildlife; Earth Island Institute; Environmental Defense Fund; the Natural Resources Defense Council; Friends of the Earth; Greenpeace; the National Wildlife Federation; Public Citizen; the Union of Concerned Scientists; the U.S. Public Interest Research Group; Waterkeeper Alliance; the Wilderness Society; and the Sierra Club.
Nearly 85 percent of Earthjustice's income is derived from individual contributions and grant money. The remaining portion comes from investments and court-awarded attorney's fees. The organization's chief supporter is Pew Charitable Trusts. Other major funders of Earthjustice include the Turner Foundation; the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; the Beldon Fund; the Compton Foundation; the Educational Foundation of America; the Scherman Foundation; the Bullitt Foundation; the Columbia Foundation; the Nathan Cummings Foundation; and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) was responsible for the 1989 Alar hoax. Apple growers lost some $250 million as a result of the campaign, with many smaller growers being forced out of business. NRDC fared much better. According to an internal memo written by David Fenton and later published in the Wall Street Journal: "We designed [the anti-Alar campaign] so that revenue would flow back to the Natural Resources Defense Council from the public, and we sold a book about pesticides through a 900 number and the Donahue Show. And to date there has been $700,000 in net revenue from it."
NRDC was founded in 1970 on a $400,000 seed grant from the Ford Foundation. The organization's President is Frances Beinecke, a co-founder of the New York League of Conservation Voters, a Board member of the World Resources Institute * and a former Board Chair of the Wilderness Society. * David John Jhirad of HSUS is the VP of the World Resources Institute and was the former Deputy Secretary of Energy.
The NRDC established a separate lobbying arm, the 501(c)(4) NRDC Action Fund. They file lawsuits to impede the construction of everything from highways and hydroelectric dams to nuclear power plants. NRDC receives financial backing from Pew Charitable Trusts, the Tides Foundation, the Bauman Family Foundation, the Beldon Fund, the Blue Moon Fund, the Bullitt Foundation, the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, the Columbia Foundation, the Compton Foundation, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the Educational Foundation of America, the Energy Foundation, the Vira I. Heinz Endowment, the Heinz Family Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, the J.M. Kaplan Fund, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the New York Times Company Foundation, George Soros's Open Society Institute, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Prospect Hill Foundation, the Public Welfare Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Scherman Foundation, the Surdna Foundation, the Turner Foundation and many others.
The Sierra Club elected eco-terrorist Paul Watson (radical AR activist) to its board of directors in 2003 Watson stated that "There's nothing wrong with being a terrorist, as long as you win," during a 2002 animal rights convention. In recent decades, the organization has lobbied vigorously for an ever-wider net of federal regulation aimed primarily at the entire notion of technological progress.
This shift toward a more aggressive agenda may be properly credited to David Brower. When he took over as the Sierra Club's first Executive Director, the organization was a collection of 2,000 nature enthusiasts, hikers and trailside conservationists. The Sierra Club became a foe of development, portraying any new construction initiative as a greed-driven effort to exploit natural resources. The organization eventually parted company with Brower, who went on to found the Wilderness Society.
Taking literally David Brower's 1992 comment that "All technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent," the Sierra Club has in the past pressed for "a moratorium on the planting of all genetically engineered crops and genetically engineered organisms.” The Sierra Club in 1998 filed a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency, demanding the suspension of genetically modified crops. The suit was unsuccessful.
Among its financial supporters are the Bauman Family Foundation; the Beldon Fund; the Compton Foundation; the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation; the Ford Foundation; the Scherman Foundation; the Bullitt Foundation, the Energy Foundation, the Foundation for Deep Ecology, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, the Blue Moon Fund; the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation; the J.M. Kaplan Fund, Pew Charitable Trusts, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Turner Foundation, and many others.
The Sierra Club has endorsed a document called the Earth Charter, which blames capitalism for many of the world's environmental, social, and economic problems.
See for more HSUS Funders
See for foundations that donate to AR and enviro organizations.
Environmental Working Group
