Endangered Species Act: The Greatest Con Game of All by Allyn J. McDowell, MD

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ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT:
THE GREATEST CON GAME OF ALL

by Allyn McDowell, M.D. (copyrighted)

(NOTE): In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. This material may not be copied or quoted, placed on any web site or other open forum without the express consent of the copyright owner.)

PART ONE

Introduction:

Of all the con jobs American politicians have foisted upon their constituents, a grandiose one that seemingly surpasses all others has grandly succeeded; but the politicians don’t get the basic credit for that because they, too, were suckered into promoting it. I refer to the Endangered Species Act, henceforth E.S.A. If you think E.S.A. is primarily a harmless and noble effort to protect bald eagles, sea otters, or other cute, fuzzy and lovable little creatures, I wish to awaken you.

Details of the origin and the results of the Endangered Species Act will be presented a bit later. Meanwhile, suffice it to say that both the real agenda and the result of E.S.A. has been not so much that of "saving" little critters as that of transferring ownership or control of private property over to the government; and in that it has recorded enormous success. It will be shown that in 25 years E.S.A. has "saved" few if any creatures at all, but it has nevertheless grandly succeeded in placing under temporary or quasi-permanent government control some 25 million acres -- a land area equivalent to Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Connecticut combined.(1) "Wetlands" legislation, working hand in glove with E.S.A., ostensibly to "save wildlife," has enabled the government to seize control over the property of hundreds of thousands of American landowners -- amounting to an estimated additional 100 million acres, i.e. land equivalent to Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois combined.(2) That latter confiscation was facilitated by environmental laws decreeing that land that was bone dry for 350 days a year could nevertheless be designated as "Wetland" and thus needing to be "saved."

I have enjoyed a long life of camping, hunting and fishing, always remaining in awe of the miraculous, wondrous beauties of nature. Presently, I’m questioning the much ballyhooed disappearances of wildlife. Beaver and deer, never seen in the past in my native southwest Missouri countryside, both are now flourishing there. And although I now live at a city bus stop on a busy street in San Diego, America’s sixth largest city, our city lot here seems virtually overrun with wildlife. Raccoons and ‘possums frequently appear at the sliding glass doors of our back porch, the same as they did when we lived within a mile of the Hollywood Freeway in Los Angeles a few years ago. Egrets and Great Blue Herons frequently stalk our fish pond where dragon flies play. At night, rabbits often chomp away on our recent plantings and Skunks occasionally dig in our back yard; and during the days flocks of crows fly over and red-tailed hawks survey our yard, eyeing the rodents and lizards there. We are feeding finches, turtle doves, humming birds, fish and turtles daily. Although rats and mice and snails have high rankings on the Endangered Species List, we have to constantly battle against their invading our house and eating our garden. And, as is true in so many cities, by driving less than an hour in nearly any direction we come upon countryside occupied almost exclusively by wildlife. So, being already aware of the excesses resulting from the Endangered Species Act, I became curious when plans were announced here in San Diego County to set aside 172,000 acres -- equivalent to twice the combined area of five sizable cities in the county -- to be forever off limits to humans, as a necessity for "saving wildlife." I also noted that the plan involved wildlife "corridors," but more about that later.

"There is no question that the act is being applied in a manner far beyond what any of us envisioned ...," Sen. Mark Hatfield, one of the Endangered Species Act’s original supporters, correctly stated. Doubtless those supporters didn’t foresee that 77-yr.-old Grace Heck of New Jersey, attempting to build upon her land that she had bought for retirement was prohibited from building because there was some "endangered species of plant" located "within five miles of the site."(3) Nor did they foresee that immigrant farmer Taung Ming-Lin of Kern County, CA would have his tractor confiscated, and be threatened by Fish and Wildlife agents with a year in prison plus a $300,000 fine because of his federal crime of accidentally killing one or more rats while plowing his own land in order to raise vegetables for food."(4) Nor did they foresee that construction of a $141 million California hospital would be delayed, the site relocated, at a cost of $4 million, and fines threatened all because of a perceived possible disturbance of eight flies said to be "endangered".(5) The $4 million relocation costs alone amounted to an out-of-pocket expense of a cool half-million dollars per undisturbed fly.

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Birth of the Con:

Alston Chase’s book, "In a Dark Wood," presents an authoritative chronology (pp.79-94) of the development of the Endangered Species Act that was passed in 1973 and which provided for a tyranny that was vastly beyond anything in preceding similar legislative acts. In the 1960’s Congressman John Dingell and others had proposed legislation aimed at conserving some species that were endangered by hunting and commercial use. As is often the case, the actual wording of the eventual bill was turned over to staff members and, in this case, to radical environmentalists.

Chase identifies three among the most prominent architects in the actual wording of the bill as: Earl Baysinger, Lee Talbot, and Lew Regenstein. Their syrupy wording helped to obscure the tyrannical reaches underneath and when the final bill was presented, the legislators, who never comprehended the ramifications of its details, voted it in with minimal opposition. The Endangered Species Act was then signed into law in 1973 by President Nixon, a legacy infinitely more damaging to America than was the Watergate break in. One judge, who later grasped the details of the act, labeled it as the most comprehensive land use bill in the history of America. Lew Regenstein, a chief architect of the wording, of course had a clear grasp of the details and is thus quoted by Chase: "None of our enemies really read the act. It was motherhood and apple pie. They just felt good saving whooping cranes and spotted cats. They didn’t realize it applied to creepy-crawly things as well. Then, after the bill became law, they suddenly woke up, saying, ‘Wait a minute. What does this mean?’"

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Stretching the Con:

In typical fashion the legislators, who had failed to grasp or even read the scope of the details in the E.S.A. they had enacted, promptly turned its implementation over to staffs in the Department of the Interior where the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (hereafter FWS) was given authority to implement and enforce the Act.

FWS could then decide upon which and how many species to list as endangered, could decide what actions or what circumstances constituted "violations" of the E.S.A., and could recommend penalties to be dealt out to "violators." FWS became the constable, the prosecutor, the jury, and the judge, all rolled into one. Expansion of mission being an inborn trait for all bureaucrats, those at Dept. of Interior and at FWS quickly realized the more actions they could initiate, the bigger the necessary budget and the bigger their department, with increased power and potential promotions for all therein. With proper Public Relations gimmickry any self-serving actions could be translated as beneficent public service. Expansion of power became the order of the day, and such expansion was greatly aided by the existing vague and elastic traditions of Taxonomy, i.e. the classifications of animals and plants. Minor and temporary changes in pattern or color have often sufficed for the naming of a new variety or species (thus enhancing the name and reputation of the "discoverer") and even the difference between the appearance of male and female has on occasion promoted such errors. The writers of the E.S.A. had, for their own advantage, ignored Charles Darwin himself who had warned that due to adaptation of a species the resulting numerous subspecies and varieties were not to be mistaken as differing species themselves.

One of the most expansive and fraudulent details added into E.S.A. was a perversion of the term "species" so as to also be applied to subspecies, and even local populations. Under Section 3 of the E.S.A., Paragraph 16 states: "The term ‘species’ includes any subspecies of fish or wildlife or plants and any distinct population segment of any species ...." This afforded to bureaucrats enforcing the law some enormous self-serving opportunities to consider each one of the numerous subspecies and varieties of a single species as if it were also a species itself, and to also consider "a distinct population segment"(possibly two birds in a bush) as an "endangered species" even though the actual parent species might be in no danger whatever. The "local population" gambit afforded an FWS agent an opportunity to list a species as endangered or threatened if he decided the number of that species just to be insufficient in the particular locale of his observations.

This proved to be a most successful flimflam. For example, 400,000 acres in southern California became dedicated to the California gnatcatcher which is not a species but merely a hardly distinguishable variety of innumerable thousands of other gnatcatchers ranging throughout most of the western states and on into Mexico. Likewise the Northern Spotted Owl is not a species, but at best only a subspecies of innumerable barred owls, whose range extends through British Columbia, our Pacific Northwest, California, and into Texas and even into Mexico as far as Mexico City. Nevertheless, environmental fanatics were able, with FWS support, to use that owl so as to close down dozens of sawmills, to destroy the jobs of tens of thousands of lumbermen, and to turn thriving northwest communities into ghost towns with unemployment rates of up to 35%. The land thus locked up calculated out to $96 million in lost timber revenues for each pair of spotted owls!(6) The "Old Growth" story about the owl was handily invented but exposed when the largest concentration of nesting Northern Spotted Owls was found in a private tree farm in eastern Washington where the oldest trees were 40 years old. The additional story that thousands of acres of undisturbed land were necessary around each owl nest was also exploded when a pair of owls were discovered nesting in the "K" of a "K-Mart" sign.

Further expansion of government authority under the act has been provided by using, in addition to the term "Endangered," such vague terms as "Threatened" and "Sensitive." And still another huge expansion of enforcement powers was afforded by expanding the definition of a "taking" of a member of an endangered species to also include any disturbance of the habitat of that species. Ironically, "habitat" for a distinct species cannot be exactly defined and in practice the declaration of "habitat" is left up to whatever an enforcing bureaucrat perceives or pronounces it to be. That has allowed people to be denied the use of their own private land, not because an endangered species was present thereon, but only because a Fish and Wildlife agent declared it to be suitable potential habitat for some endangered species, i.e. that some absent and unidentified member of an endangered species might possibly want to live there! Thus was an overwhelming network of regulations set into place which could serve the two hallmark policies of the environmental movement: (a) transferring control of property and affairs of the citizens over to the central government; and (b) potential curtailment of nearly any construction or endeavor of a capitalistic fashion aimed at human progress. Some members of the Dingell committee had originally expressed fears that an attempt to do too much toward saving species could serve toward "dismantling civilization," fears that could now be seen as on the road to becoming fulfilled.

Under Rules and Regulations that apply to E.S.A. and published in the Federal Register (Vol. 58, No. 183,) it is clearly stated that in determining the listing of an endangered species, no economic considerations will be allowed! Simply stated, any concerns of humans will be ignored. That travesty was upheld by a 1978 Supreme Court decision which did not rule upon any constitutionality involved, but instead merely ruled all this to be a provision of that law that Congress had so cavalierly enacted. It ruled that it was "..the plain intent of Congress to halt and reverse the trend toward species extinction, whatever the cost." Although the court ruling was limited to that interpretation without any ruling about the constitutionality involved, E.S.A. proponents could construe it to be a legal validation of the entire con game they had contrived and sold to the legislators and the public.

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The Emperor’s Extinction Clothing:

The con game about endangered species had succeeded marvelously, had built up such a national hysteria about an extinction crisis that few questions were being raised as to just which and how many species had become or actually were becoming extinct. Green spokesmen issued preposterous extinction numbers of 700 species per year, then on to 7,000, and by Harvard’s Edward O. Wilson, an estimated 27,000 per year! However, his estimate was an admitted extrapolation based in turn upon estimates of habitat loss and his lack of any verifiable figures was balanced by his remark that the great majority of extinctions are never observed. But other sources presented a vastly different picture.

Alston Chase in his book "In a Dark Wood" (p.363) stated that an exhaustive study by the highly respected International Union for the Conservation of Nature reported that " ... the number of recorded extinctions for both plants and animals is very small ... the current rate of extinction is about one per year." With a considerable knowledge of paleontology, Chase also stated (p111) that "no major North American grazing animal had disappeared in ten thousand years and only five bird species are known to have become extinct in North America and Europe since 1600." The latter figure was supported by Rothbard and Rucker, writing in the Wall Street Journal (11/18/96) that since the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock only four birds had become extinct: the Labrador duck, the great auk, the passenger pigeon, and the Carolina parakeet. They also related that even FWS monitoring reported that populations of most of the 254 bird species they had monitored in recent decades were rising, not falling.

Such realistic data presented a potential danger to the alleged species extinction crisis. What if people bothered to look and discovered no clothes on the Species Emperor?

Not to worry. "Preservation of Ecosystems," a handy saving stand-in was a ready back-up device. A chief selling point was that any ecosystem existed in a fragile equilibrium of delicate balance wherein even just the decline of any one component -- rat, dung beetle, whatever -- could eventually result in a devastating collapse of the whole thing, i.e. forest, etc. -- whatever allegedly composed the ecosystem. Ecosystems were so conveniently elastic of definition as to be actually indefinable, being once defined by Bruce Babbitt himself as "in the eye of the beholder." All Nature, environmentalists said, consisted of innumerable ecosystems, each in an equilibrium of delicate balance. But since environmentalists didn’t allow Man to be a part of any ecosystem, any role of his could and must be ignored -- as was specifically spelled out in the official E.S.A. ruling noted earlier.

However there were problems not only with any accurate definitions of ecosystems but also with that theory of a necessary fragile and undisturbed "delicate balance." Utter havoc had been wreaked upon countless ecosystems by the unlimited wildfires that overwhelmed Yellowstone National Park in 1988, and yet 10 years later virtually everything in the park had recovered and even improved. Environmentalists had pronounced the ecosystem destructions from the Exxon oil spill in Alaska to be irreparable and yet in less than five years all was virtually back to normal, except that fishing had actually improved. The earlier big oil spill at Santa Barbara, California was a similar story. Only two years afterward, a team of 40 scientists from the University of Southern California and from Johns Hopkins University spent a year assessing the damage to ocean life and found virtually none. The history of biologic evolution has never been one of equilibrium but rather of such ceaseless violent calamities, of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, asteroid collisions, floods, ice ages, fires, etc. as to defy the very idea of any end states of harmonious equilibrium. Actually, in the 1970’s and 1980’s, scientific opinion had begun a swing away from the idea of static ecosystems and toward a concept that disruptions were actually a necessity to ensure the continuous adaptation of both plant and animal species, thus being the greatest determinate of species composition.

However, it was during that same time frame that environmental preservationists had gained a general political dominance in all the government agencies involved. They eschewed any evolutionary perspective in favor of their concept of Nature being an intact balanced machine wherein every part plays an indispensable role with each part thus being of equal value. This notion conveniently fits in with the overall Green philosophy which, in the overall scheme of things, assigns no more importance to Man than to a cockroach if indeed Man is considered to even be a part of Nature. This philosophy will be further examined here later on.

The factual reality of insignificant numbers of species extinctions should have been timely and sobering news to report, but it got virtually no play in the news media. Fears always sell well and the media and the politicians had ridden the wave of the environmentalist’s contrived and popular extinction crisis which had become too politically correct for any late change in course.

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The Listing Procedure:

Upon attending a FWS hearing related to formally placing some "species" on the Endangered List, I discovered how elastic the listing procedure can be. With minimal publicity beforehand, the hearing was held at an out-of-the-way urban locale at a time still within the evening rush hour traffic. The FWS agent on the podium plus half a dozen biologists on the front row comprised nearly half of all present, and the whole meeting was tape recorded. It seemed apparent that due to their youthfulness the credentials of the biologists could not have exceeded a bachelor’s degree.

One biologist, after scouting a limited locale in the nearby mountains felt that the population of a certain type of butterfly therein had drastically declined due to cattle grazing and she proposed that this butterfly be listed as "endangered." Two ranchers from there testified that those same butterflies instead had been markedly increasing in numbers and they seemed to especially like cow pies, upon which they spent considerable time.

Another biologist proposed a listing for the San Diego Fairy Shrimp, one of several varieties of these fly-sized crustaceans which, seemingly spontaneously, appear and thrive in mud puddles and can be found by the millions in California, Europe, Asia, Australia and Africa in irrigation ditches, ponds, truck ruts or any small depression where water stands temporarily after a rainfall. One California variety of "fairy shrimp" had been listed as a result of a one-paragraph petition submitted by a Davis, CA botanist in 1990, and here another young biologist was claiming a listing for a San Diego variety. All these varieties are merely distant cousins of the "sea monkeys" that used to be sold in the backs of comic books and could be mailed across the country (7). When I questioned this listing in an inquiry to the district FWS official, who would be acting as judge and jury, I eventually received 15 single-spaced pages of bureaucratese justifying the listing of this and at least two other varieties as due to the alarming decline of "vernal pools" (read "mud puddles") habitat for this "species" -- the same habitat in which mosquitoes, malarial and otherwise, love to breed. This alarm seemed to stem from a 1992 FWS report based upon a single 1978 paper by a graduate botany student and estimating that due to human activities some 90% of "vernal pools" in California had disappeared since "the Europeans arrived!"

Yes, indeed the establishment by the arriving Europeans of valuable productive farm lands, which had necessarily involved getting rid of malarial swamps and mud puddles, would be considered an atrocity by the Greens who sometimes acknowledge their favored fantasy of returning America to its "pre-Columbian" status.

However, according to the Wall Street Journal (8), the most rigorous study ever undertaken of the fairy shrimp’s habitat was done by a respected environmental consulting firm, Sugnet and Associates. It reported that the 1226 vernal pools they found containing fairy shrimp appeared to be only a fraction of California’s total which were estimated to cover roughly a million acres. Although FWS acknowledged receiving this report beforehand, this did not seem to be included in its "best available knowledge" when it decided to list three more varieties of fairy shrimp. Very little scientific knowledge can serve to create a listing claimed by a single petitioner who can also sue FWS for rejecting a listing claim. But once FWS enacts a listing a mountain of paperwork, money, and legal action will be required to reverse such a decision.

Thus, through a contrived crisis, through a wild stretching of the term "species," through equating imagined habitat with species, and through ruling out cost-effectiveness and human concerns, were Congress and the American public ensnared with a net so all-encompassing that the rights and needs and concerns of people were subordinated to the perceived or claimed needs of all lower life forms. Supporters had been lulled with PR claims about saving mountain lions, bald eagles, song birds, etc. However by 1995 the "species" listed as endangered totaled nearly a thousand, (9) with another two thousand reportedly in the pipeline for additional listings. And about two thirds of those listed consisted of weeds, fungi, rodents, snails and bugs, including a dung beetle, a cockroach and at least one fly. It was estimated that about 65% of "species" considered for additional listing would be composed of insects, arachnids, crustaceans, mussels, clams, and snails, with some 300 snails alone being considered for listing.(10) From now on an American could be denied his constitutional property rights merely by the self-serving pronouncement of a federal bureaucrat, and one could hardly build a chicken coop or turn over a shovelful of dirt anywhere in America without a risk of being prosecuted as a federal criminal. The order of the day was characterized by an acronym, BANANA: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.

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Con game propaganda:

But perhaps that was not the worst of it. The worst was that the American people had been conned into passively accepting the outrages of E.S.A. Through a steady drumbeat of concerted propaganda fueled by the sensation-seeking news media, the American public (other than the landowners directly affected) was conned into generally accepting two preposterous claims: (A) that the needs and welfare of human beings are subordinate to the claimed needs and welfare of all lower life forms, including various snails, rats, mice, weeds, fungi, cockroaches, and even flies; and (B) that an effort to buck evolution -- not just to conserve, but to attempt to preserve forever every one of the millions of species of plants and animals -- should now become such a supreme concern of Americans that virtually no human endeavor would be allowed that might conflict with that infantile and impossible dream.

It has long been widely agreed that 95% or more of all species ever existing on earth became extinct through normal evolutionary processes, and that they became extinct long before mankind appeared. After mankind appeared extinctions continued, in varying rates, (while new species emerged) and extinctions will now naturally continue on, in varying rates, due to the same evolutionary processes and despite government decrees to the contrary. So at best the logic seems somewhat strained in now suddenly claiming that human activity is the primary cause of species extinction. Even if that were true, one well might ask, "So What?." Isn’t is possible to consider that humans might have as much, perhaps even more, right to thrive than does the Arkansas Fatmucket, the Dudley Bluffs Bladder Pod, the Puerto Rican Cave Cockroach, the Delhi Sands Fly, or even Loco Weed? Couldn’t we possibly all get along okay without some of those? Is the world really now worse off because of the extinction of Dinosaurs?

Equally strange is the selling of the idea that humans are crowding wildlife out of a place to live. You can easily disprove that myth on your next airplane trip to anywhere. If, about ten minutes after takeoff, you just look down and keep looking down you will see that at least 95% of the land is either occupied only by wildlife or available for wildlife occupation. Only 3.1% of American land is occupied by cities (11) and over half of our human population lives near a coastline. Once away from the coastline areas, large cities tend to be hundreds of miles apart and there are countless thousands of square miles occupied by little other than wildlife. Even in crowded Japan over 90% of the land is unoccupied by humans, who prefer to crowd together in cities; and even in China the population per square mile is some 409. If everyone in the world were moved into the state of Texas, the population density would be about 20,000 per square mile, i.e. about the same as now in Paris or Toronto.(12)

Let us also not forget that over two-thirds of the earth’s surface is covered with water and thus unoccupied by humans. Also, in addition to the fact that even in the most heavily populated countries over 90% of the land area is unoccupied by humans, there are vast expanses in Greenland, Canada, Alaska, Siberia, the Sahara Desert, Antarctica, etc., having almost no human occupation at all. A question then naturally arises as to how humans who occupy an almost infinitesimal portion of the earth’s surface could possibly cause major changes in the overall condition of the earth, or in the overall process of biological evolution.

Nevertheless, for over two decades we have been bombarded with almost daily television programs selling the Quixotic idea of certain naturalists that we can and must reverse the process of evolution. This is sold in tandem with another strange concept that though the earth has survived just fine for some four billion years, its total destruction is now suddenly at hand. Moreover, it allegedly now needs to be "saved" by some elite group of naturalists who constantly clamor for more government control over property and whose own livelihoods are in turn being saved largely via grants from that same government.

Similar indoctrination has been installed and is running rampant in public schools where many students finish high school as functional illiterates, but have been well occupied since the third grade with concepts and plans of how to "save the planet." With California’s public schools ranking near the bottom in academic achievement, a state law is under consideration that would require all students from the 3rd grade and above to spend time identifying "endangered species," to develop plans to prevent extinctions and to enter their plans into local, regional and state contests.

Although it has been noted that politicians were cleverly hoodwinked into legislating the E.S.A., our "progressive" educational system must share some of the blame for the blind acceptance of E.S.A.’s, outrageous nostrums by today’s citizens. Too many of today’s "educated" Americans seem ignorant of Alexander Hamilton’s statement: "No powers of language at my command can express the abhorrence I feel at the idea of violating the property of individuals." Too many also seem ignorant concerning a vital statement of our second President, John Adams: "The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God ... (then) anarchy and tyranny commence. Property must be secured or liberty cannot exist.." Too many of both our citizens and our legislators seem to have become disconnected from a central truth that private property rights are the very cornerstone of American freedom, the defining difference between the freedom offered by the American experience and the slavery imposed via the Soviet Union experience. Too many seem to no longer recognize that the ownership of private property, clearly written into our Fifth Amendment (..."nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation...") is the fundamental civil right separating free men from serfs. A widespread lack of such recognition has resulted in a lack of outrage and revolt when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), as the enforcing arm of the E.S.A., has ridden roughshod over our constitutionally guaranteed and vital right to private property. That agency has done so not just occasionally but in wholesale fashion and with little opposition to such outrage except from the tyrannized first-hand victims.

Although millions of Americans (and their legislators) have warmly embraced the Endangered Species Act, most remain in the dark as to the fact that it has actually been an outright fraud. Most are also in the dark concerning the fanatics and the fanatic philosophy that shaped its origin, its development and its implementation. Part Two will begin to shed some factual light in an effort to dispel some of that mountain of darkness.

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PART TWO

E.S.A. as a Major Cog in the Green Political Machine:

For any realistic understanding of environmentalism it is necessary to recognize that it is a movement primarily aimed at practical politics. As such it perfectly exemplifies H. L. Mencken’s remark that "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." The Green political machine indeed has a history of supplying us with quite a string of imaginary hobgoblins -- a string continuing despite its demonstrated falsities. E.S.A. appears as the crown jewel, the most effective hobgoblin.

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Green Hobgoblins:

Early on, Rachel Carson’s fictional book "Silent Spring" served in 1962 to alarm the populace with her predictions of a dire future to be caused by the use of pesticides and inorganic fertilizers; but in practice such use has since enormously increased our agricultural output and our ability to feed America -- and numerous other nations -- without a single case of serious illness or death ever documented from pesticides properly used. In 1969 another scare story erupted, widely warning the public that pollution had resulted in Lake Erie becoming a "dead lake," a lie that was even repeated by President Clinton as late as in his 1996 "State of the Union" address. However, the 1969 scaremongers had conveniently overlooked annual government records kept of Great Lakes commercial fish catches since 1878. Those records showed no decrease at all, instead showing that catches from Lake Erie were exceeding the catches from all the other Great Lakes combined! (13) In 1970 yet another scare story came along about dangerous levels of mercury in fish due to "industrial pollution." This resulted in millions of cans of tuna fish being removed from supermarket shelves before it was discovered that mercury levels found not only in pre-industrial fish but also in prehistoric fossil fish were even higher and that no human illnesses could be traced to mercury in fish. (14)

By this time our sensation-seeking news media had become so enthralled with the increased ratings they had enjoyed from such sensational environmental scare stories that they saw fit to begin to ignore and dismiss any duller installments of factual follow-ups which would expose the original hoaxes. Fear always sells and they could get more mileage from Jane Fonda on the tube hysterically spouting her ignorant and emotional fears about radiation than from showing less charismatic internationally famous physicists whose views, based upon sound science, were of course completely to the contrary. The bogus scare stories took off in reckless abandon, continuing to the present with increasingly dire forecasts and with increasing support from a duped public.

A propaganda barrage had convinced the public that due to greedy capitalist timber companies our forests were disappearing and that it was virtually criminal to cut down a tree. This despite the fact that our forested land had been steadily increasing for decades, increasing from 464 million acres in 1920 to 728 million acres in the 1980s and that the major timber companies had for decades been growing more board feet of lumber than they harvested. And a major scare story about malignant lung disease resulting from exposure to asbestos resulted in billions of dollars being expended to root out any insulation containing asbestos from untold thousands of buildings whose occupants were more likely to be killed from lightning than from asbestos.

Thus by 1973 the media elite, both TV newspeople and journalists, were primed, ripe and ready to disseminate the bogus premises of environmentalists, especially including Endangered Species stories. They had learned that ratings were consistently buoyed by alarmist scare stories and that scientific backing was no longer required. They saw that no significant credentials were needed in order for someone to be presented to the public as "an Environmentalist Leader." Science could be ignored and nearly anyone wearing a headband, a beard, and camouflage clothing and who was prattling on about "ecosystems" and "food chains" could be championed on TV news as an "Environmentalist." The Science Editor of Time magazine, Charles Alexander made a confession (dittoed for the networks by Andrea Mitchell, then covering Congress for NBC) that concerning environmentalism "TIME" "had crossed the boundary from news reporting to advocacy."(15) But those same headbanded characters championed on TV were themselves mostly rank and file dupes -- foot soldiers rather than leaders -- in part duped about the same as the rest of the public by the socialist-bent fanatics who had founded and developed and were promoting the Endangered Species Act as an integral part of the whole Green socialist agenda.

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Socialist Core of the Green Political Machine:

At the first Earth Day, in the early seventies, the climactic moment was the mass singing of "The Internationale," virtually the national anthem for attending participants from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. At the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro a standing ovation was reserved for Fidel Castro who, according to the Jornal do Brazil, was " the most heavily applauded" of all the leaders.

The formal recommendations agreed upon at the Earth Summit in Rio were perfectly in accord with the theme of Socialists everywhere. The basic ideas were: take from the producers and give to the non-producers; turn the affairs and the property of citizens over to government bureaucrats; and when possible turn said affairs and property matters over to international government bureaucrats; and do all this in the sacrosanct name of environmentalism and while employing such soothing buzzwords as "sustainable development." The vice-president of that Earth Summit was Norway’s Prime Minister, Ms. Gro Harlem Bruntland, who happened to also be vice-president of the International Socialist Party. When, following her prepared remarks, she was questioned by a reporter, she freely acknowledged that the Earth Summit agenda was based upon the International Socialist Party’s platform. (16) The U.N. meeting in Kyoto in 1997 was basically more of the same, but at a higher level. The thrust there was to turn control of the entire economies of the best producing countries over to international government bureaucrats -- all in the name of avoiding the alleged but highly suspect theory of global warming. A written appeal from hundreds of respectable scientists (including 27 Nobel laureates) warning against the proposed actions at the Rio meeting had been ignored; and in 1997 at Kyoto, warnings again from hundreds of respectable scientists (who eventually numbered 15,000) that global warming was a flawed, unverified, and probably false theory, were again ignored.

During the past three decades hundreds of environmentalist organizations have developed and are funded mostly by donations and grants from corporations and foundations rather than from membership dues. In 1990 the top 12 environmental organizations alone were estimated to have a combined income of over half a billion dollars and Money magazine estimated a 1991 income for the environmental movement at 2.5 billions dollars. (17)

It is thus apparent that the "Greens" have an income not only greater than either major political party, but far greater than both combined, and their policies must be influenced, if not formulated, by the corporations and foundations that provide their main financial support. Ironically, various major corporations and foundations who owe their existence to capitalism have for decades been among the biggest supporters of various socialist movements.

One major player in the environmentalist movement was The Wilderness Society, founded as long ago as 1935. It was formed by financially secure Eastern urbanites, a chief architect being Robert Marshall who was a member of the Socialist Party of Norman Thomas. Another founding member was Benton MacKaye, a member of the Socialist Party of America. From its beginning The Wilderness Society concentrated upon promoting the expansion of federal control and/or ownership of both public and private lands. It claimed its founders to be the specialists on "public land issues," referring thereby to lands totaling some 700 million acres -- about one-third of America’s total land surface. George T. Frampton ("our only rational options are to reject privatization") served as president of The Wilderness Society from 1986 until 1993 when, under the Clinton administration, he was awarded the position of Assistant Secretary of Fish and Wildlife and Parks, thus becoming the right hand man of the Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt, who himself had earlier stated that Americans should "get over" the concept of "individualistic ownership of property." And for icing on the cake, Jack Ward, a champion of the spotted owl hoax, became the new head of the U.S. Forest Service.

Thus the ostensible concern about saving plant and animal species has perfectly served the one central mission woven throughout the fabric of the various other environmental agendas, i.e. the transferring of the ownership or the control of property out of the hands of citizens and into the hands of the federal bureaucracy. This has all been in line with socialist Michael Harrington’s book, "Socialism," wherein it is explained that the easiest way of getting rid of private property is to transfer the control over to government, so that transfer of the actual ownership title is not always necessary.

To see that the Greens have indeed had a "Johnny one-note" Socialist role, one need only look at their proposed remedy for each of their continuing series of scare stories; it is always the same bottom line, i.e. giving the federal bureaucracy more and more control over the lives and the property of the citizens. But the overall Socialist aim of transferring ownership or control of property over to the federal government seems to have achieved greater success through the avenue of the Endangered Species Act, together with allied "Wetlands" legislation than through any other avenue. As noted earlier, millions of acres equal to the combined areas of several states have thus been brought into the corral of the federal bureaucracy. State legislatures have also jumped upon the bandwagon to legislate additional endangered species laws and lists of their own. And the decades of Green propaganda saturating our news media and our educational system has so conditioned the public that such a massive takeover has resulted in little opposition.

However, to illustrate the Socialist character of the Greens is not to impugn the character or the motives of either the leaders or their converts. Certainly the leaders are acting forthrightly in regard to the socialistic and pantheistic and even anti-human philosophy they have adopted. They have successfully paraded under such noble banners as Clean Air, Clean Water, and kindness to Bambi -- and those not buying into their messages risk being labeled as villains who want to have Dirty Air and Dirty Water and to see Bambi die. By joining in with their parade, however, anyone can instead dodge such villainous labels and at the same time easily gain a popular noble status of one who is out to save the world -- one who can righteously condemn those who do not join in. And virtually no effort or sacrifice is required to thus become such a noble convert to this simplistic secular religion. Millions of adherents have thus been gained, including not only TV news anchor people, but especially politicians. Anything -- no matter how infantile, no matter how stupid -- that has an Environmental label attached is now automatically sacrosanct and all elected or candidate politicians feel absolutely bound to pay public obeisance, to constantly reiterate how concerned they are about "protecting the environment." Such have been the rewards of some three decades of incessant and expensive Green propaganda.

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Fanaticism Of E.S.A. Origins Blossoms Forth:

In 1978 Dave Foreman held a Washington D.C. office as chief lobbyist for the Wilderness Society. Later he left and, with a group of other malcontents, formed Earth First!, a radical and violent environmental organization which attracted large numbers of hippie types. Their early activities were such as sabotaging bulldozers, driving spikes into trees (to cause chain saws to explode into logger’s faces), disrupting powerlines, etc.(18) Earlier, Congress had passed the Wilderness Act of 1964 through which 11 million acres of America were declared to be "wilderness" wherein no structures, no roads, no campgrounds, and no vehicles were allowed, not even wheelchairs. Such land, thus was available only to those physically and financially able to traverse it on foot. Through political pressures this had later been increased to 90 million acres. But that was still nowhere near enough for the radical environmentalists. Dave Foreman proposed a "Wilderness Preserve System" which would push Americans off of some 700 million acres (about one-third of all American land), drain all reservoirs of the Snake, Colorado and Missouri rivers, and establish a 3 million acre condor sanctuary near Santa Barbara, California. (19) And with Dave Foreman sitting on its Board of Directors, the Sierra Club has recently issued an unbelievable formal recommendation for draining the Colorado River’s Lake Powell, the second largest fresh water reservoir in America. Always included among Earth Firster’s agenda was a central theme that " ...humans have no divine right to subdue the Earth, that we are merely one of several million forms of life on this planet..." -- a theme used to justify various forms land-grabbing and criminal sabotage.

Later, Foreman’s proposed "Wilderness Preserve System assumed differing names. After ten years of adjusting and refinement, Dave Foreman presented at Tempe, Arizona his North American Wilderness Recovery Project -- otherwise known as the "Wildlands Project." Consistently, the idea was that half of all the land in the United States be reserved as habitat for wildlife and strictly denied to humans as off-limits, with humans being allowed upon only the strictly regulated remainder. This was summarized by Timothy Walters as a project which "... detailed the restoration of entire landscapes. A system of connected wilderness reserves would crisscross the continent, displacing human inhabitants, closing roads, dismantling ... whole communities. The reserves would be decided by the omnipotence of plants and animals, with absolute disregard for economies, the human environment, spectacular scenery or recreational opportunities ... all existing national parks, wildlife refuges and other sanctuaries would be abandoned in deference to the larger reserves ..." (20) Other versions have specified that in each state, 50% of the land should be denied to humans in order to form connecting "wildlife corridors."

Foreman presented his delusional proposal in 1993 and later that same year our Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt submitted to Congress his proposal for a National Biological Survey, appearing to be a dangerously similar prologue for enactment of Foreman’s fanatic Wildlands proposal. No doubt this was warmly welcomed by Babbitt’s right hand man, George Frampton, former president of the Wilderness Society. Babbitt’s National Biological Survey provided for the mapping of the United States to produce a map, as the president of the National Wildlife Federation said, "showing... major types of vegetation ... across the United States and the types and numbers of animals, birds, fish and ... insects that live or migrate within the ecosystems ." Assistant Secretary of the Interior, Thomas Lovejoy was quoted as saying that would: "...map the whole nation for all biology and determine development for the whole country and regulate it all because that is our obligation as set forth in the Endangered Species Act."

Fortunately, two congressmen attached amendments for protecting private property rights, whereupon Babbitt withdrew his bill. But meanwhile, Congress had already appropriated $321 million dollars for the National Biological Survey and Babbitt had already staffed it and appointed its first deputy director. (21) So his plan could possibly proceed even without authorization. Actually the "wildlife corridor" approach is now virtually a fait accompli in San Diego County, the fourth largest county in the United States. For some five years bureaucrats in an assortment of government agencies have worked toward creating a "Multiple Species Conservation Plan" (hereafter MSCP) in which such "corridors" would connect a total of 172,000 acres, equal to twice the combined areas of five cities in the county, to be set aside and off limits to humans; This was ostensibly to "save" some 85 endangered, threatened or rare, and mostly unnamed, species of plants and animals including species that hardly one person in a thousand would know whether they had ever seen one or not seen one. After the County Supervisors had approved the project, one Supervisor admitted when questioned that she didn’t know even the general makeup of the species list. She just wanted to "save all those species" but was unfamiliar with things to be saved, such as "vernal pools" (commonly known as "mud puddles"), the lance-leafed dudleya plant, the Pacific pocket mouse, the California gnatcatcher (of course) and especially "coastal sage scrub." The latter, which looks a lot like ordinary sagebrush elsewhere just happens to most often be on expensive coastal property worth $2 million per acre.(22) and it seems that nothing elsewhere will do for the gnatcatcher.

Although cost estimates for this MSCP have ranged upward of half a billion dollars, the massive amounts of publicity releases used to sell this project claim that little if any private property will be used because some 70% of the land is already publicly owned. Nevertheless it is admitted that in addition to money squeezed from developers, there will still be a need for purchasing some 27,000 privately owned acres at an estimated cost of up to $180 million. (23) But critics have pointed out that the usual measures of obtaining such private property consist of designating it to be within such a proposed project and to then continue with regulating it until the value approaches zero before the purchase. Naturally Bruce Babbitt came onto the scene to publicly provide the most lavish praise for the project.

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Fanaticism Ripens in the Implementation of E.S.A.:

As noted earlier, agents of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) ended up with pretty much carte blanche authority to interpret, implement and prosecute as they saw fit, under this law. Accordingly, examples of fanatic, tyrannical abuses abound. One call to a Farm Bureau office resulted in a response of some 24 lbs. of papers detailing such abuses. In addition to those referred to here in Part One, only a few more will be given space here.

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The Failure Record of the Endangered Species Act:

With the draconian authority of the FWS extended to allow the infliction of such preposterous outrages as these, surely, one assumes, some vast successes must have resulted toward the ostensible purpose of "saving" all manner of species. Logically -- assuming the authors of these laws had written them with even a speck of good faith-- at the very least, numerous species of plants and animals would have been "saved." Yet, the record shows only an abysmal failure of saving species. In fact few, if any at all, have been saved from extinction.

As reported by Conda in the Wall Street Journal of 1/23/95, the General Accounting Office found that after more than 20 years of E.S.A. rule, more than 80% of E.S.A.’s listed species had continued to decline; of 1,354 species listed, only 19 had been de-listed with seven of those de-listed only because of extinction. A 1994 report by Brian Seasholes (28) indicates that no species at all could be shown to have recovered due to E.S.A. It showed that of seven species claimed to have been recovered, three were birds of Palau island in the South Pacific. The birds had fled during extensive destruction on the island during World War II, and had simply returned after the island vegetation regrew. The claimed recovery of the gray whale, while true, had nothing to with E.S.A.; due to a 1946 international moratorium against hunting the gray whales, their population had been increasing for decades before the passage of E.S.A. and its protection was neither needed nor relevant. Likewise the listed American alligator was far from endangered and was increasing in most of its range before E.S.A. passage and continued to increase until further hunting was instituted as a necessary control. A Utah plant, the Rydberg milk-vetch reported such a dramatic increase, a hundred-fold in 11 years, that the "recovery" could only have been due to an inadequate search originally.

Undaunted, Bruce Babbitt reported in May 1998 that E.S.A. "had worked" and that he was ready to de-list 29 species due to "recovery." One week later, however, he was in central Colorado proposing to add to the E.S.A. list a 3-inch meadow-jumping mouse said to live in some stream banks there. Species savers seem to have quite an obsession concerning snails, bugs, and rodents.

In Part Three, the fanaticism of E.S.A. implementation will be shown to have originated and developed within a basic Green philosophy that not only excludes humans but which is actually anti-human -- indeed regarding Man as "a cancer upon the earth."

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Notes for Part Two

13."The Disaster Lobby," Grayson and Shepard, p78

14. Ibid p93-95

15. Wall Street Journal, October 5, 1989

16. "Environmental Overkill," Ray and Guzzo, p5

17. "Trashing the Economy," Arnold and Gottlieb, p592

18. "In a Dark Wood," Alston Chase, p185-187

19. Ibid

20. "Surviving The Second Civil War," Timothy Robert Walters, p140

21. Ibid, p138

22. San Diego Union/Tribune, 6/11/1995, pA22

23. Ibid, 3/18/1997, pB4

24. "When A Law Goes Haywire," Reader’s Digest, September, 1993

25. Ibid

26. San Diego Union/Tribune, 5/7/94

27 Bernard Goldberg, CBS evening news, 12/11/95

28. San Diego Union/Tribune, B. Seasholes, 7/5/94

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PART THREE

The Hatching Out of Environmentalism:

As described by Alston Chase, up until the 1960s an unnamed environmentalism consisted primarily of two groups: Conservationists, who were campaigning for forest preserves and game sanctuaries; and Preservationists, who were pushing for national parks and wilderness. For the prior 270 years, John Locke’s philosophy that people are good and that nature is benign had remained well established.

But in the 1960s youths in and out of college began rejecting the beliefs that had been basic in America for 200 years. They came to believe that everything "establishment" was wrong, too wrong to be righted through mildly changed government policies, that more radical remedies were required. A common core belief evolved that the primary cause of everything being wrong was that society was ignoring or flaunting the laws of nature. "Ecology" emerged as a sacred buzzword with the notion that nature consisted of numerous balanced "ecosystems" and that all was good only so long as the ecosystems kept all their parts and remained in balance. However scientists had for decades been discarding that idea of all nature being in a delicate balance. By 1990 even the New York Times was reporting the tide of scientific change away from that notion of ecosystems in balance, noting that nature is in a continuing state of change and turmoil. Disturbance and fluctuation, rather than constancy and balance is the rule. Indeed, if ecosystems were to remain in balance, Biologic Evolution which requires disruptions would be impossible. (29)

Another concept, not only false but degrading, accompanied the ecosystem notion. As Chase wrote: "combining the ecosystem idea with the nature worship they had inherited from the preservationists, the more radical activists conceived of a unique ideology called Biocentrism. If everything is dependent on everything else, they reasoned, then all living things are of equal worth, and the health of the whole -- the ecosystem -- takes precedence over the needs and interests of individuals." (30) The obvious corollary -- that a human’s life is of no more importance than a cockroach’s life -- was not denied but not so frequently enunciated. (And Biocentrism became a key topic for the Earth Summit in 1992 at Rio de Janeiro.)

These notions were ready-made for the revolting hippies of the 1960s. By proclaiming themselves as noble apostles of "Ecology" they could assume a mantle of respectability not afforded them through their other pursuits of drugs, communal living, barnyard style sex habits, filthy speech, etc. And it was all so easy, too. They could become self-anointed protectors and patron saints of all the lovable little forest creatures, and easily adopt suitable jargon about "ecosystems" and "food chains." Army surplus camouflage clothing, suitable style for "ecologists," was the cheapest and thus fit in well with the frequent hippie status of unemployment. So they climbed aboard the ecology bandwagon in droves. The news media, having witnessed the colleges and churches caving in to the degenerate hippies assault, went along and gave additional support.

One basic article of faith among these budding environmentalists was that anything "natural" was good, and anything not natural was highly suspect. All foods and medicines had to contain only "natural" substances. Although tobacco, alcohol, and cancer were all natural, making a case for their goodness was conveniently avoided. But marijuana, was of course both natural and good. Another article of faith was that "chemicals" were terribly bad and should be excluded not only from foods and medicines but from the environment generally. An unstated problem here was that nobody could name anything in the world that was not composed of chemicals, inorganic and/or organic.

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Biocentrist’s Anti-human Philosophy:

Upon pondering the Endangered Species Act one might logically ask: why is it that in all their dire warnings the proponents have never spelled out the mechanisms by which great harm would befall us if further extinctions do occur? Such a question belies a certain naivete regarding basics of the Green philosophy because that "us" refers to people and Greens are not all that much interested in protecting people. As will be cited here a bit later, some of the basic movers and shakers behind the Green agendas want instead to get rid of large numbers of people and still others want to get rid of all of "us", regarding the human race as the cancer of the earth -- a cancer that must be destroyed. Yes, the beginnings of the environmental movement were much less radical. They were just about Nature, and who could be against Nature? But, as it’s said, from a little acorn a mighty oak -- perhaps even a hangman’s tree -- can grow.

1. The anti-human attitudes of the biocentrist Greens are neither rare nor much concealed. As noted earlier, the Earth Firsters had adopted a central theme that "humans have no divine right to subdue the Earth, that we are merely one of several million forms of life on this planet," or as Ingrid Newkirk, founder of PETA stated, "a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy."

2. As quoted in Fortune magazine (Sep, 23, 1991, p215), an article in the "Wild Earth" magazine stated: "If you’ll give the idea a chance, you might agree that the extinction of Homo sapiens would mean survival for millions if not billions of Earth-dwelling species."

3. And in a 1990 issue of "Audubon" magazine, Richard Conniff wrote: "Among environmentalists sharing two or three beers the notion is quite common that if only some calamity could wipe out the entire human race, other species might once again have a chance"(31)

4. Judi Bari of Earth First! (founder member Dave Foreman being seated on the Sierra Club’s Board of Directors) wrote: "I believe the Earth is going to rise up and throw us off ... to collapse. I’m sure life will survive that, but I don’t think that humans will. I don’t know if we deserve to." (32)

5. Environmentalist Victor B. Scheffer, who worked for 30 yrs with FWS and wrote four books including "The Shaping of Environmentalism in America" in 1991, wrote: "I use the word Nature for the world without humans, a concept which ...like the square root of minus one ... is unreal but useful." (33)

6. And even the respected grand fatherly environmentalist so many TV viewers came to love and admire, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, stated: " ... This is a terrible thing to say. In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it’s just as bad not to say it." (34)

7. Also, Prince Phillip of Great Britain, as leader of the World Wildlife Fund, has stated: " If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels."

8. At the State of the World Forum, sponsored by Michael Gorbachev (San Francisco,’96), Dr. Sam Keen announced: "We must speak far more clearly about sexuality, contraception, about abortion, about values that control the population, because the ecological crisis in short, is the population crisis. Cut the population by 90% and there aren’t enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage."

9. The Council of the Club of Rome was equally explicit in its publication of "The First Global Revolution:" "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine, and the like, would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention ... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself."

10. Geoff Fieger, the Democrat party’s 1998 nominee for governor of Michigan, stated a somewhat more blunt message consonant with many "Deep Ecologists:" "We’re just the (expletive) bubonic plague with legs, man ... We’re just a pestilence with appendages." (35)

Gregory Benford, professor of physics at University of California, Irvine, speculated upon the plausibility of "Deep Ecologists" designing a Designer Plague in order to eliminate at least most of the human race. The vehicle would most likely be a virus, using a modified form of perhaps the influenza virus or smallpox virus. He pointed out that nearly all of the necessary science for the creation of a successful Designer Plague is known and it would require only a few small scientific advances which could be accomplished by perhaps a few dozen researchers. Many "Deep Ecologists" also flourish within the citadels of our universities. Sufficient motivation might easily come from the rationalizations of their Deep Ecology credo: "all life is equally sacred; all species must be saved (influenza and smallpox viruses are species); but humanity is a cancer of the earth." Many Deep Ecologists have expressed a desire for such a plague (36). Dr. Benford notes, in passing, that Adolf Hitler (whose Hitler Youth group began as a nature-worshiping organization) favored animal rights, and was a vegetarian.

Ironically, the same American public which has long considered genocide of a particular citizenry or race to be the most horrible crime of all, has become innocently duped (via slogans about clean air and clean water) so as to lend wide support to the Green Biocentrists whose spokesmen often acknowledge their desires for elimination of humans altogether. It takes only a passive acceptance of the basic Biocentrist philosophy that all life is equal so that humans have no more rights than any other species, in order to placidly accept Hitler’s holocaust. Putting six million Jewish people to death in gas chambers can then logically be looked upon as no worse than tenting some houses in order to gas millions of members of a termite species to death!

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The Burgeoning Green Religion:

From time to time in the past, religious fanatics would stand on rooftops, quoting biblical verses and shouting to passers-by about salvation needed before the impending end of the world; and the passers-by generally reacted with no more than exchanged winks, knowing nods and smiles. Today’s religious fanatics are not on the rooftops, but on TV news and in the national magazines and newspapers and in high government offices. They are selling a pagan nature-worshiping Green religion, and the scriptures they quote are from the writings of such feverish minds as those of Paul Ehrlich, Al Gore, and Ted Kaczynksy. And thanks to endless pseudoscientific and other propaganda, these zealots are now being widely believed and taken seriously. The impending end of the world in their preaching is due to "environmental damage." Fortunately salvation is available. Their predicted apocalypse can be avoided, but barely so, and only by turning over more and more of your property and your affairs to government greenies here and in the United Nations.

A concerted effort by the Greens to infiltrate and enlist American churches into their ranks should be recognized as a malignant fraud -- a Trojan horse The Gaia-based Green religion postulating that all life is equal, that humans are no more important than other species, runs contrary to Islam and it also runs exactly contrary to the basic teachings of Judaism, and Christianity, the moral foundations from which all values and human progress of Western civilization have evolved. . Actually the dichotomy is succinctly expressed in Genesis, chapter 1. After saying that God created all the other living things "according to its kind," it is then stated (verses27-28) that: "God created man in his own image" ... and told him to: "...have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." Nothing whatever is said there to the effect that spotted owls or gnatcatchers might have dominion over man. Rather, dominion, defined in Webster’s as a sovereign or supreme authority, is clearly bestowed upon man, and not upon any creatures of the E.S.A. A second Webster’s definition of that dominion biblically bestowed only upon man notes the "power to direct, control, use, and dispose of." In Psalm 8, referring to man, it is also said: "You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands."

Citing a non-existent constitutional "separation of church and state" found nowhere in the Constitution, any references to the Ten Commandments or the Lord’s Prayer are forbidden and any other traces of religious worship have been pretty well eliminated from our public school systems. All, that is, except the one actual religion not labeling itself as such. The Green religion with its pagan nature-worship is welcomed and actively taught in our schools, using all manner of studies and classroom activities about "saving species" and "saving the planet." Bible-thumping preachers are forbidden in our schools but Earth-thumping zealots are welcomed and enshrined. And "greening" truly is a pagan religion whose faith is based upon a fanatic worship of the earth goddess, Gaia to the exclusion of Judeo/Christian beliefs.

Thousands of years ago, primitive peoples had pagan religions generally based upon three main notions: (a) Animism -- the belief that everything, animate or not, is imbued with a soul; (b) Polytheism -- the belief that many gods exist, each having charge of and ruling over some one aspect of nature or life; and (c) Pantheism -- all things, animate and inanimate are godlike manifestations. Gaia worship coincides with all of that and is at the very heart of today’s environmental policy. The Endangered Species Act, The United Nation’s Biodiversity Treaty and the President’s Council on Sustainable Development all appear as offsprings of the Gaia hypothesis of saving "Mother Earth." Just ask Al Gore, whose book "Earth in the Balance" coincides in large part with the writings of both the Gaia people and the Unabomber.

The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City serves as a major headquarters for the pagan Gaia religion of the Greens. The Gaia theory was advanced 20 yrs. ago by an avowed agnostic, James Lovelock, who has spent years writing about it in collaboration with Lynn Margulis who in 1986 said "the religious overtones make me sick," but later said "Gaia is less harmful than standard religion. It can be very environmentally aware. At least it is not human centered." A dean of the Cathedral is the Rev. James P. Morton, also president of its Temple of Understanding. One Director of the Temple of Understanding is Rev. Thomas Berry who has said: "We should place less emphasis upon Christ as a person and redeemer. We should put the Bible away for 20 years while we radically rethink our religious ideas."

The Cathedral is also the home of the Gaia Institute. According to "eco-logic," Nov/Dec., 1995, pp26-27, "the Gaia hypothesis, developed by James Lovelock, claims that the planet earth is a living organism, that human beings, like cockroaches and rattlesnakes, are nothing more than cells which collectively constitute the organism. Lovelock, Berry and the promoters of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment believe that the earth is the operative force which produced all life forms and as such, it is the earth that should be worshiped, not the external creator God of the Bible."

The National Religious Partnership for the Environment is no small force to be reckoned with. The Partnership consists of a formal agreement among the U.S. Catholic Conference, The National Council of Churches of Christ, The Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, and the Evangelical Environmental Network. It marshaled a promotional grubstake of more than $5 million from such foundations as the Pew Charitable Trusts, The Turner Foundation, W. Alton Jones Foundation, The New World Foundation, etc., and gathered a co-signed letter of support from eleven Green Advocacy Groups including the National Audubon Society, The Sierra Club, The Environmental Defense Fund, and The World Resources Institute.

Partnership literature says its program "seeks to broaden exponentially the base of mainstream commitment, integrate issues of social justice and environment, and urge behavioral change in the lives of congregations." Toward that end it has prepared and distributed "education and action kits" to 53,000 congregations including every Catholic parish and every Jewish synagogue in the nation. The kits contain Sunday School and sermon resource material designed to mesh with the doctrine of the particular denomination being targeted (37). The material contains indoctrination regarding trade and industrial policy, "environmental justice," pollution, global warming, corporate responsibility, etc., and is generally right down the line with the Global Environmental Agenda being advanced by the United Nations. The Partnership, the Temple of Understanding, and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, are inextricably intertwined, sharing the same people as Directors and even sharing the same address; and Al Gore, naturally, has lent close support to them.

Gore and Undersecretary of State, Tim Wirth, hosted a 1990 Congressional breakfast with Partnership promoters. In June, 1994, 40 Partnership officials met with 25 senior White House officials (including Al Gore, Bruce Babbitt, Carol Browner and Tim Worth) to "begin an ongoing process of dialogue and appropriate collaboration." Also in 1994 Al Gore delivered a sermon at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in which he proclaimed: .. "God is not separate from the earth..."(37), a central tenet of the Gaia religion. Writer in Residence at the cathedral, William Logan described that service as appearing to be an "epic petting zoo." A camel and an elephant walked the aisles of the Cathedral, and worshipers marched to the altar with "a bowl of compost and worms."

Far East mysticism seems to guide the Gaia belief which includes not only humans and other animals as mere "cells of the organism," but also includes rocks as such "cells." The same Gaia believers who reject Judeo/Christian beliefs might be said, in a word, to be worshiping dirt. Yet they and their pagan religion are making serious connections with and inroads into both Synagogues and Christian churches across America to the obvious detriment of our Judeo/Christian religion and have received active support in this from Al Gore and other Greenies high in our government. .

Another ploy used by Green groups for promotion of their agenda within America’s churches is to push literature and Sunday School lessons seeking respect for the Endangered Species Act by equating it with the old testament story of Noah and his Ark. That’s really rich. If Noah had lived in the time of an Endangered Species Act, he would surely have been prosecuted as a federal criminal. Poor old Noah only took care of humans, animals, and cattle and birds and "every creeping thing that creepeth on the earth" and he undoubtedly failed to provide enough "suitable habitat" on his Ark to save every last listed subspecies of every bacterium, fungus, weed, etc. in the world -- er,

excuse me -- on the planet.

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Conclusions:

So effective and subtle has been the Green propaganda that almost every American, if asked today whether he/she were an environmentalist, would answer "yes." This is merely a reflection of the Green’s cultivated false public image of being primarily concerned about such unopposable goals as clean air, clean water and reduced litter. It also comes from a reversed carrot and stick approach in Green propaganda.

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Carrot and Stick:

Instead of carrot and stick, a stick and carrot approach has worked well. The Stick has been the proclaimed apocalypse already bearing down upon us wherein we all are on our way to succumbing not only to Alar on our apples and mercury in our fish, but also to toxic pesticides, inorganic fertilizers, lack of sufficient species habitat, poisoned air and water, global warming and other fictions. The alternative Carrot offered has been a puerile utopian vision. If we all support whatever Greens advocate, no matter how tyrannical it might be, we shall all come to live among pristine green forests and green meadows with little forest creatures gamboling about in our lovely bucolic setting.

Lost in all that mush are the details of how the Greens propose to bring about their utopia. Conveniently omitted is much mention of abolishing private property rights, of down-grading humans to the point of extinction, of turning America into a wilderness where any humans still allowed will be riding only on bicycles and raising their vegetarian food by plowing the ground with a stick. Yet these are all announced goals shared by some basic leaders with great influence in Green organizations and are also in accord with some personages who have risen to high places in our government. Both automobiles and tractor engines are suspect in the vision of Vice-President, Al Gore, who has written that the greatest danger to our existence is "the internal combustion engine" -- presumably a greater danger than war with nuclear bombs.

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A Fitting Reminder Symbol:

One further example should serve as a reminder of the basic fanaticism from the Green movement bred into the Endangered Species Act. Mr. Brandt Child of Three Lakes, Utah owned some property there, long used by his neighbors for recreation and seemingly ideally suited for a campground and golf course which he planned to build thereon.

However as recounted in Policy Review (38), "...the project was brought to a halt when the FWS declared Mr. Child’s pond to be a prime habitat for the Kanab ambersnail. The area was fenced off, people were no longer allowed on the pond’s banks, and Mr. Child was forbidden to work in the area. He dutifully contacted the FWS to report that a flock of domestic geese had taken up residence at his pond. If the geese ate any snails, the owner of the geese could face a $50,000 fine for each snail.

"The Fish and Wildlife Service asked the Utah Department of Wildlife and Resources to send someone to shoot the geese, remove their stomachs and bring the contents to Salt Lake City so they could determine how many snails had been eaten. But when a State wildlife agent and a highway patrolman arrived and saw newsmen and photographers, they opted not to shoot the geese, claiming they did not have jurisdiction. Later the Fish and Wildlife Service induced vomiting in the animals, which was analyzed but contained no snails. Today the geese are living happily elsewhere and the snail population is soaring in the pond -- but Mr. Child has never been compensated for his estimated $2.5 million loss."

It is reasonably certain that the geese vomitus was Green in color, and thus an appropriate visual reminder of E.S.A. zealotry. The reader should try mentally picturing government agents poking around in puddles of Green goose vomit, hoping to find evidence which could enable them to levy one or many $50,000 fines upon some innocent non-resident goose owner. That mental image could serve well as a reminder of the E.S.A. primrose path (equally Green no doubt) down which we have been led by the Environmental zealots.

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Notes for Part Three:

29. "In a Dark Wood," Alston Chase, p185-187

30. Ibid, pp 3-7

31. Trashing the Economy," Arnold and Gottlieb, p53

32. Ibid, p 71

33. Ibid, p 60

34. Ibid, p 321

35. George D. Will column, San Diego Union-Tribune, 8/30-98

36. Reason, Jan. 1994, pp 37-41

37. eco-logic, Nov./Dec., pp 26-27

38. Policy Review, Winter 1994, "Salamander the Great" p 56

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