Finally, it’s beginning to unravel: “… there is no substantial scientific foundation … for changing the operation of the Klamath Project to maintain higher water levels …”
The Interim Report of the National Research Council, a committee of the National Academy of Science, says there is no “scientific foundation” for the policy decision that shut off water to 1,400 Klamath Basin farm families.
The decision comes too late to avoid devastating consequences to families who had to watch their unplanted fields dry up and blow away; who had to sell livestock they could not feed; who had to give up the life they had worked to achieve.
The Klamath fiasco is but an example of the consequences of marching lock-step to the drum-beat of the so-called environmental saviors. For more than a decade, public policy has been designed to reorganize society around Al Gore’s first principle of protecting the environment – whether or not it needs protecting.
Understand that the public policy objective is to reorganize society, not to protect the environment. Environmental policies are simply the tool-of-choice to effect the reorganization. The Endangered Species Act, the wetland policy, Smart Growth, American Heritage Rivers, Monument, Wilderness, and Roadless designations are all tools used to drive people off the land, and reorganize them into “sustainable communities” where they can be forced to live the lifestyle that government has decided they should live.
The color of science – even to the point of deception – is sufficient justification to invoke environmental policies to force reorganization. The Klamath deception is just the latest in a rapidly increasing unraveling array of lies.
Federal officials in the previous administration deliberately planted lynx hairs in national forests to suggest the presence of an endangered species which could have resulted in the lock-up of thousands of additional acres. Federal officials tried to secure hairs from a grizzly bear rug, but were reported by the taxidermist. Bjorn Lomborg, a former Greenpeace member, wrote a book exposing the lies and deceptions used as a matter of course to invoke public policies designed to help reorganize society.
Why have Americans allowed themselves to be scammed by these deceptions? Look to the United Nations. Principle 15 of the declaration adopted in Rio de Janeiro at the 1992 U.N. Conference on Environment and Development says: “…lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing measures to prevent environmental degradation.”
This “lack of scientific certainty” has become the license for public policy measures that have made a mockery of property rights and rained down economic degradation on thousands of Americans – including the 1,400 farm families in the Klamath Basin.
Al Gore, who is again troubling the political waters, is the chief American proponent of this reorganization. But he is not the author of the idea – he is but a puppet dancing at the end of a set of strings being manipulated by the international community. Virtually every public policy shaping the reorganization of society originated in the international community. The Endangered Species Act, the particular law which authorized the water shut-off in Klamath Basin, says in its text, that the law is enacted to comply with “international obligations” and names several specific U.N. treaties. Our wetland policy flows from a U.N. Treaty signed in Ramsar, Iran in 1971. Our entire domestic environmental policy can be traced directly to international treaties and agreements.
The international community responsible for these policies has a fundamentally different concept of government from the system our founders devised. Our system is constructed on the belief that people are inherently free, and that government is empowered – and limited – by the consent of the governed.
The international community rejects this concept. The international community still labors under the concept that government – whether a king, a soviet, or the United Nations – is sovereign, and that people are granted (or denied) freedoms by government which places the collective good of society over the needs of the individual.
Throughout history, we have seen governments cheat, lie, steal and slaughter to enforce the “collective good” at the expense of the individual. The “lack of full scientific certainty” in the decision which denied water to Klamath farmers was a deception deemed necessary and appropriate to enforce a collective good – eliminating farmers and returning the Basin to its natural habitat – at the expense of the 1,400 farm families.
These deceptions are beginning to unravel – so, too, must the policies spawned by the deceptions be unraveled. More importantly, the initiatives from the international community must be recognized for what they are – deceptions – to justify policies to reorganize society into units where government can grant or deny the individual freedoms that government deems to be appropriate.
America is the only beacon of hope the world has to serve as an example of the power of free people in a free society. We have been asleep at the switch while the international community has systematically worked to extinguish the brightest flame of freedom. Exposure of the Klamath deception is another indication that, finally, we are awakening.
Class action scams
John Stossel