Report
from the Olympic Peninsula:
|
| I
first reported on our biosphere back in 1994, when I started the print
edition of the Citizen's News. (We
ran out of money for printing after 3 ½ years, and went online.) It came to my attention as a result of an oldtimer here, who
told me stories about the folks who had lost their land and homes over
the years due to inability to pay taxes, especially during the years of
the depression. He loaned
me the list of tax parcel names and former owners – and there were
thousands of acres in the Olympic Mountain area that used to be
privately owned, - now owned by the federal or state governments. And
then he told me about the mountain range being designated as a UN
biosphere. I was about to
have my eyes opened. |
 The Olympic Mountains from the Sequim-Dungeness area. - Photo by Sue Forde |
The United States part of the UN Biosphere Reserve program is run by a committee of ten federal agencies with no congressional direction or authorization. Over 68% of our National Parks, Preserves, and Monuments are designated as a United Nations World Heritage Site, a Biosphere Reserve, or both. “Biosphere reserves are areas of terrestrial and coastal ecosystems promoting solutions to reconcile the conservation of biodiversity with its sustainable use”, says the UN.
Biospheres,
I learned, consist of a “core” area, where no man is allowed to go
(except perhaps a few “elite” scientists/pseudo-scientists); a buffer area, and small
community areas where people are allowed to live (so-called “smart growth”
being perpetrated under the unpopular Growth Management Act). If you look at a map of the Olympic Peninsula, you’ll see
that there is only a strip of land remaining now, where people live –
and that private land is increasingly encumbered with restrictive
regulations of one sort or another.
I have spoken to several individuals who tell me they’ve seen a
Park Service map where a 20 year plan shows the park has eaten up most
of the remaining area, including Forks, Port Angeles, and most of
Clallam County. Not having
seen it myself, it will be interesting to see if this takes place.
A few years
ago, Penny Eckert, Ph.D. candidate from the University of Washington’s
College of Forestry was a featured speaker at one of our “watershed
council” [Dungeness River Management Team (DRMT)] meetings. Her dissertation,
funded by the State of Washington Department of Ecology, was on changes
in land use and ownership in the Dungeness Valley, 1981 through 1994.
Asked why she had chosen the Dungeness Valley for her study area, Penny
responded that proximity of the valley to a Biosphere Reserve was
largely the contributing factor.
Biosphere Reserves, Eckert told the audience, are
core areas and should have buffers. This reserve [the Olympic Mountains
and the surrounding area, where we live] doesn’t have those buffers,
she said. Therefore, information about land use in areas where these
buffers would otherwise be must be known for comparison with other
Biosphere Reserves, she stated.
Enter
the Governor’s “Sustainable Washington”.
We must become “sustainable,” says he.
In fact, the governor was presented an award reflecting that
Washington state is the 5th most sustainable state in the
union, but “we can never define precisely what ‘sustainable’
means. We have to discover – and invent- its meaning as time
passes,” he states. Terms
like “conflict resolution” are used to “forge a sense of
community.” Examples of a “sustainable” Washington is a state where
“single occupancy vehicles” will be gone, and people will be
“living in smaller communities," touts the governor’s website.
Nebulous, meaningless terms are used.
But words do have meanings. We can see the meaning of
“sustainability” by learning what the UN folks tell us what is NOT
sustainable.
Here’s
what Maurice
Strong, socialist, senior adviser to the Commission on Global
Governance and driving force behind the concept of “sustainability”,
said when introducing the term at the 1992 Rio Conference (Earth Summit
II): Industrialized
countries [Americans] have “developed and benefited from the
unsustainable patterns of production and consumption which have produced
our present dilemma. It is
clear that current lifestyles and consumption pattern of the affluent
middle class – involving high meat intake, consumption of large
amounts of frozen and convenience foods, use of fossil fuels,
appliances, home and work-place air-conditioning and suburban housing
– are not sustainable. A
shift is necessary toward lifestyles less geared to environmentally
damaging consumption patterns.” Strong
also explains in an essay that the concept of sovereignty has to yield
in favor of the “new imperatives of global environmental
cooperative.”
In
the vision statement for a sustainable future, linked to the
governor’s website, we’re told to “think globally and act
locally.” We are in the
process of becoming “global” citizens, rather than citizens of our
state and our own nation. It’s
a world government in the making.
The concept
of “sustainability” is, in fact, nothing less than socialism.
Our governor points to a wonderful speech made by the governor of
Oregon. Governor
Kitzhaber's (Oregon) Sept. speech
for the Sustainability Forum are called “inspiring words” by our
Governor Locke. Here are a
couple of items from that speech:
“Let us
remember that the word ‘politics’ derives from the Greek word
‘polis,’ meaning “city” – or in more modern terms,
“community.’ That is to
say, a group of individuals functioning together as a whole for the
mutual benefit.” (group think)… “Our political system – or
perhaps more accurately, our system of governance – grew out of the
recognition that there had to be some way to regulate the ways in which
people interact, precisely because their views, needs and interests
would not always coincide.
“And of
course this implies that individuals have an equally important duty:
they have to recognize that their own personal welfare is
inseparable from the welfare of the community as a whole, and they must
be willing to act accordingly, even if it means subordinating some of
their own personal desires for the larger good.”
He goes on
to talk about the “gap” in government – and the solution to
filling the “gap” he says, in the case of water issues (he referred
to Klamath and the conflicts there in this speech) is the “watershed
council.” For “livable
communities,” it’s the “Community Solutions Team.”
A local business person here has advised me there is a new group forming here to
develop “low impact” housing. The
goal is sustainability. The
group will, no doubt, be using the “consensus” process to achieve
their predetermined outcomes.
What he’s
actually talking about here are “soviets” – those groups used in
the Soviet Union to control the people.
One has only to read the communist manifesto to see how far down
that road we’ve gone.
We are faced with a “recession” in our area now, especially in the Forks area, where the spotted owl has virtually killed the economy. Residents have been given the choice of relocating or retraining – and the retraining consists primarily of three choices: massage therapist, law enforcement, or drug and alcohol counselor.
Bit
by bit, the property is being removed from private ownership and placed
into “public” ownership. The
public, however, in many cases, is closed off from access to the
“public” land by way of gates and designated “wilderness” areas.
The Port Angeles area is also in a state of recession
So
what does sustainability aka socialism, have to do with the Olympic
Mountains where I live? It
is clear to see, upon reviewing very few documents, that we are quickly
losing our sovereign nation that our founding fathers fought so hard to
get, and our young men and women through the years have fought and died
to keep. Whether it be through United Nations’ designations (with
the strings attached) or the United Nations idea of “sustainability”
– we are being directed into a one world government.
Most
people who live here don’t even think about the UN designations of our
mountains. “It’s so
nice,” they say, “that our mountains are so wonderful that they have
been noticed worldwide.” But
where there’s a designation, there’s also a certain power to control
what takes place. In recent
years, the Olympic Mountain goats were killed off, because they were
considered “non-native.” One
only has to look at the UN’s involvement in Yellowstone Park to see
the “nose under the tent”, so to speak.
The challenge is to wake Americans to the fact that we are losing
our sovereignty, piece by piece.
On the
Olympic Peninsula, however, there is a growing number of citizens who
are awakening to the facts about biospheres and sustainability, and who
are getting involved politically to try and turn the tide.
Do you see this happening in your area?
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