Sunset on the West?

Property Rights
Sunset on the West?
William Norman Grigg
Source: The New American
February 5, 1996

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 BiodiÐversity 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 mine in Montana.