Liberty Matters News Service
October 31, 2002
Sierra
Club Oils Up The Propaganda Machine
Television
and radio ads are rolling in eight states “to educate voters about the
differences in the environmental records of various candidates,” in an
effort to elect candidates who will carry the water for radical
environmental causes. The
Sierra Club is clogging the airways in a desperate attempt to persuade
voters to go for the “green.” In
Colorado, Sierra Club is throwing its support to Democrat Tom Strickland
over incumbent Senator Wayne Allard.
The ads infer that Senator Allard has willingly put Colorado
children in danger by voting to delay tougher clean air standards, and
worse, “voting to allow mining companies to threaten drinking water
with their waste,” while their choice, Tom Strickland, as U.S.
Attorney, pursued charges against Summitville Mining Co. “for
contaminating Colorado waterways.”
The Club offers similar support to Democrats in Georgia,
Missouri, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Oregon, Iowa and Minnesota.
Time is running out for tax-exempt organizations to publicly
promote candidates before elections since a provision in the recently
passed “Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act,” prohibits
“electioneering communications” 60 days before a general election or
30 days before a primary election.
The provision does not go into effect until November 6, 2002, the
day after the general election, and the Sierra Club and others are
taking advantage of the situation.
No doubt, their lawyers are, even now, busily researching
loopholes to circumvent the law in time for the 2004 presidential
election.
Sierra
Club Propaganda
Michigan
Land Grab
The
Michigan Department of Natural Resources and the state chapter of The
Nature Conservancy expect to buy a “forest conservation easement” to
prohibit development of 390,000 acres of Upper Peninsula property.
The planned acquisition runs across ten UP counties and includes
two-and-a-half miles of Lake Superior shoreline and 130 inland lakes.
Local environmental spokesmen say the land must be managed by the
state because, “If it all goes private, it’s gone,” said Ray
Fenner, executive director of Superior Wilderness Action Network.
The Department of Natural Resources already controls 4.5 million
acres in Michigan, including 142 miles of Great Lakes shoreline and 3.9
million acres of forest. The
Michigan Department of Agriculture has spent $24 million to prohibit
development on 13,000 acres of farmland. Twenty percent of all Michigan
property is already controlled by federal, state and local government.
Michigan has supplied ample money for government land purchase
since 1984, when the Natural Resources Trust Fund was established with
revenues from state mineral leases.
Since that time, the cap on Trust Fund expenditures has grown
from $200 million to $500 million.
Although the state would not own the land in question outright,
the “easement” would preclude any development, rending it useless to
private interests.
The
DNR’s Latest Land Grab
Nature
Abhors a Vacuum
How
does restrictive U.S. timber harvest policies destroy more forestland
than ever? The U. S.
government’s virtual shutdown of domestic lumber production has not
lessened the demand for forest products and that has resulted in more
timber imports from Third World countries that have few environmental
restrictions. Timber
harvest in the United States has fallen by nearly a half billion cubic
feet in the last ten years while imports have grown by about a billion
cubic feet. California now
depends on foreign countries for 80 per cent of its forest product
needs, in stark contrast to its self-sufficiency 20 years ago.
According to U. C. Berkeley forestry professor William J. Libby,
“for every acre of forestland not harvested for timber here, 2 acres
must be harvested in tropical forests of the Third World.” In Indonesia, for example, timber is harvested from an
area the size of Connecticut every year to supply U.S. demand. Environmentalists have helped create the problem of
deforestation in poor countries by their insistence, aided by political
acquiescence, that U.S. forests must be untouched by commercial
chainsaws. Today, there is
more forestland in the U.S. than there was in 1900, yet
environmentalists continue to oppose meaningful forest management to
thin dangerously overgrown stands, a practice that would benefit U.S.
consumers and reduce the growing problem of deforestation overseas.
The situation will not improve, however, until the problems of
environmental ideology and political power are reconciled.
Environmental
Paradox
The
Oregon Supreme Court, last week, ruled against Measure 7, approved by
Oregon voters in November 2000, which required governments to pay
property owners when excessive regulation denied them full use of their
land and investment. The
Court struck down the measure because it contained two changes to the
Oregon Constitution that should have been considered separately.
Chief Justice Wallace Carson wrote; “Because Measure 7 was not
adopted in compliance with the requirements…we hold that it is void in
its entirety.” The issue
of “takings” was not addressed.
Opponents of the measure claimed Measure & would have been
the “end of land-use planning as we know it.”
Oregon passed its first land-use planning law in 1973 and now
every city in Oregon has an “urban-growth boundary aimed at protecting
farms, forest and coastlines from becoming tomorrow’s subdivisions.”
Supporters of Measure 7, plan to continue the fight in the
upcoming legislative session. “When
regulations steal a landowner’s ability to use private property, the
government should pay for what it took,” said Ben Waggoner, a lawyer
with the Pacific Legal Foundation.
High
Court Throws Out Measure