Property rights in America had a near-death experience last year, though most property owners remain blissfully oblivious to the fact. The date of our hairbreadth escape was September 30, 1994, when, thanks to the determined efforts of a relatively few patriots, the Biodiversity Treaty (formally known as the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity) failed to win Senate approval. Expertly packaged and promoted as a desperately needed measure to protect the earth’s “endangered species” and ensure “sustainable development” of its dwindling resources, the dangerous treaty enjoyed a “moral authority” that few solons wished to challenge.
As in so many other cases, at the start of this fight North Carolina’s Senator Jesse Helms stood virtually alone in opposition to (as he put it) “this preamble falsely described as a treaty.” He forced into the open the troubling fact that the Senate was being pressured to ratify an unfinished document, to, in effect, sign a blank check. incredibly, the treaty’s “protocols” (i.e. mandates) were to be drafted after ratification (at the November 1994 Conference of Parties in Paris) by representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as the World Resources Council, the World Wildlife Fund, and other certified eco-fanatics.
American Archipelago
These socialist greenies are fully aware that under the prevailing (and patently false) interpretation of the Constitution’s “treaty supremacy” clause, treaties, conventions, and international agreements are likely to be upheld by American courts as superior to state and federal laws — even superior to the Constitution itself.
“If the Senate precipitously ratifies this preamble falsely described as a treaty,” warned Helms, “it will have given away one of its major constitutional authorities and will have betrayed the trust of the American people.”
A fax, phone, and letter campaign led by the Alliance for America and other property rights organizations came to Helms’ assistance, exposing the collectivist agenda hidden beneath the green wrapping. The National Cattleman’s Association and the American Farm Bureau convinced Senator Bob Dole to round up additional Republican opposition.
The big break, however, came when the American Sheep Industry obtained a copy of Section 10 of the UN’s Global Biodiversity Assessment (GBA), which was to provide the basis for the as-yet-unwritten protocols. That blew the treaty’s benign cover. Dr. Michael Coffman, writing in the Land Rights Letter, reported on the totalitarian features revealed in that secret document:
… the basis for protecting biodiversity and ecosystems was to be centered on what is known as the Wildlands Project. This Draconian plan calls for setting aside vast areas (about 50 percent) of America into reserve wilderness areas, interconnecting corridors, and human buffer zones where human use would be eliminated or severely restricted. According to the September 25, 1993 edition of Science magazine, such a system of reserves and corridors would create “an archipelago of human-inhabited islands surrounded by natural areas.”
If that sounds disturbingly similar to another archipelago — the hideous Soviet prison and slave labor system so powerfully described in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago — don’t be surprised. The totalitarian will to rule, to control absolutely, is one of the most important shared traits of the Reds and the Greens. If that sounds unduly harsh, you are undoubtedly unfamiliar with Agenda 21, the main agreement of the 1992 UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Signed by all participating nations — including the U.S. — Agenda 21 is an enormous, eco-fascist blueprint for regulating, to minuscule detail, every human activity on planet earth. It provides the overarching framework for the new global green regime into which all other eco-schemes will fit as we enter the 21st century.
“Every Person on Earth”
What is immediately striking on a first reading of this highly revered text is the open exuberance and audacity with which it proposes global micromanagement of all human activity and of nature itself. Agenda 21 proposes “an array of actions which are intended to be implemented by every person on Earth” and calls for “specific changes in the activities of all people.” (Emphasis added.)
In language becoming of Robespierre, Chairman Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, and other monsters of past memory, Daniel Sitarz, editor of the UN-approved abridged version of Agenda 21, makes this chilling boast in that text:
Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced — a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level.
But wait, there’s more:
There are specific actions which are intended to be undertaken by multinational corporations and entrepreneurs, by financial institutions and individual investors, by high-tech companies and indigenous people, by workers and labor unions, by farmers and consumers, by students and schools, by governments and legislators, by scientists, by women, by children — in short, by every person on Earth. [Emphasis added.]
In Agenda 21, the planetary grand viziers have literally left no stone unturned. They have devised detailed management plans for the earth’s mountains, forests, plains, deserts, jungles, tundras, wetlands, farmlands, ranchlands, urban areas, lakes, rivers, streams, oceans, coastal waters, seabeds, the atmosphere, and the space surrounding our planet.
Open-Ended Agenda
According to Nicholas A. Robinson, professor of law at Pace University and editor of the unabridged Agenda 21 (Oceana Publications, 1994), “this heavily negotiated ‘soft’ law instrument” is unquestionably “the essential guide for the future interpretation of law and policy in all spheres of life.” Unlike normal “hard law” treaties among sovereign nations, “soft law” agreements adopted through international organizations such as the UN commit the signatory nations to adopt laws and policies conforming the behavior of their governments and citizens to constantly developing international “norms.” And Agenda 21, Robinson says proudly, is “the most extensive soft law document ever produced by the family of nations.”
How does this affect you and me in practical terms? “International Environmental Law links individuals and their local governments into a worldwide network,” explains Robinson. “This system is not often perceived locally, because each country’s own legislation and institutions are assigned the job of applying the shared environmental rules.” You see, many of the local, state, and federal laws and regulations that are costing you dearly and tying you in knots are actually the result of these “shared” rules — UN “soft law” — adopted and promulgated by the “consensus” of global environmental elitists claiming to represent all humanity and nature too.
According to the UN’s own “experts,” the economic costs of implementing Agenda 21 in the developing countries alone will be “over $540 billion” — much of which is to be financed by the developed countries (that’s us). Multiply that by several times to compensate for typical government underestimation of true costs and you’re probably closer to the real expenses involved — just for implementation in the developing countries. Multiply that several more times to account for the costs for implementation in the developed countries too and you’ll probably be getting close to the actual financial pain we’ll be feeling if the globocrats have their way.
Hidden Teeth
Following the Rio Earth Summit, New York Times writer William K. Stevens observed that the “soft law” documents signed there “have hidden teeth that will develop in the right circumstances.” Hidden teeth like those we are beginning to feel now from the 1987 UN Montreal Protocol on Ozone Depletion. in 1992, with then-Senator Al Gore leading the charge and citing bogus “science” to conjure up a dreadful spectre of “an immediate, acute emergency threat” to the entire planet, the Senate was stampeded into voting 96-0 to add vampire fangs to that “soft law.” The fangs involved outlawing the production of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) after 1995 — this year. If not repealed, that one mad act, according to a study by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, will cost Americans between $44 and $100 billion over the coming decade. Hundreds of millions of refrigeration and air conditioning units will have to be replaced or expensively reconditioned. All this in spite of the fact that there is absolutely no scientific evidence to support the hysterical claims that our atmospheric ozone is in danger or that man-made CFCs have any effect on it whatsoever.
Unfortunately, there are other examples of “soft law” poised to clobber us with hard realities. A major one is the Global Climate Change Treaty, another creature of the Earth Summit. Again, using fraudulent “science” and terrifying scenarios of environmental apocalypse caused by man-made “greenhouse gases,” the eco-zealots succeeded in shackling us with more constantly tightening treaty law. The Conference of the Parties to the Convention convened in March in Berlin to rachet the regulatory controls even tighter.
This in spite of the fact that many former global warming doomsayers like Time magazine appear to be dropping that frightmare to resurrect the global freezing scare of the 1970s. In a January 31, 1994 alarm, Time asked, “Whatever happened to global warming?” The magazine suggested that “it may be more to the point to start worrying about the next ice age instead.” Indeed, this new crisis “may have already started.”
Global freezing or frying — it really doesn’t matter, as long as you suspend all rational thought and welcome the tyrannical “solutions” of the global green regime.
