The "Re-Wilded" West

By: William Norman Grigg

January 29, 2001

Does … The Wildlands Project advocate the end of industrial civilization? Most assuredly. Everything civilized must go.... - John Davis, Editor, Wild Earth magazine

[The Wildlands Project] is a bold attempt to grope our way back to October, 1492, and find a different trail.... Local and regional reserve systems linked to others ultimately tie the North American continent into a single Biodiversity Preserve.... - Dave Foreman, Earth First! Activist, Wildlands Project co-architect

Our vision is simple: we live for the day when Grizzlies in Chihuahua have an unbroken connection to Grizzlies in Alaska; when Gray Wolf populations are continuous from New Mexico to Greenland.... Our vision is continental: from Panama and the Caribbean to Alaska and Greenland, from the Arctic to the continental shelves.... - The Wildlands Project Mission Statement

What do proponents of the Wildlands Project have in mind by the decree that "Everything civilized must go"? Writing in Science magazine, Charles C. Mann and Mark L. Plummer provide a partial answer. As the Wildlands scheme unfolds, "most roads would be closed; some would be ripped out of the landscape." Eventually, the Project will require "nothing less than a transformation of America [into] an archipelago of human-inhabited islands surrounded by natural islands." Environmental writer Alston Chase is even more blunt, warning that the Wildlands Project will require "the forced relocation of tens of millions of people … the removal of human habitation from up to half the country's land area."

With each designation or expansion of a national monument by executive decree, Bill Clinton advanced the Wildlands design. When the Clinton administration issued regulatory guidelines designating nearly 60 million acres of national forests as "roadless areas," it was another significant step toward the creation of a Wildlands archipelago. Indeed, nearly every outrage against property and prosperity that has resulted from successful environmental lobbying during the previous decade fits comfortably into the Wildlands framework. But it would be a grave error to believe that the Wildlands Project was a product of the Clinton administration.

With each designation or expansion of a national monument by executive decree, Bill Clinton advanced the Wildlands design. When the Clinton administration issued regulatory guidelines designating nearly 60 million acres of national forests as "roadless areas," it was another significant step toward the creation of a Wildlands archipelago. Indeed, nearly every outrage against property and prosperity that has resulted from successful environmental lobbying during the previous decade fits comfortably into the Wildlands framework. But it would be a grave error to believe that the Wildlands Project was a product of the Clinton administration.

Section 13.4.2.2.3 of the GBA, which deals with "conservation of biodiversity," specifies that "representative areas of all major ecosystems in a region need to be preserved, that blocks should be as large as possible, that buffer zones should be established around core areas, and that corridors should connect these areas. This basic design is central to the recently proposed Wildlands Project in the United States...."

When this passage was brought to the attention of key senators, the treaty was withdrawn from consideration, and it remains unratified. However, the Clinton administration - as was its wont - simply proceeded as if the treaty had won Senate approval.

Bruce Babbitt's Interior Department, through an administrative directive, created a National Biological Survey intended to carry out a nationwide species inventory. The purpose of that inventory, explained Interior Department science adviser Tom Lovejoy, was to "determine development for the whole country and regulate it...." The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and the Forest Service (USFS) embraced the Convention's key ideological assumption - "biocentrism," the notion that human beings are just another species enjoying no special place in nature (see page 23). The BLM's leadership echelon captured that vision when it issued a policy statement declaring that "all ecosystem management activities should consider human beings as a biological resource."

Another key element of the Wildlands scheme fell into place on January 19, 1996 when Bill Clinton issued Executive Order 12986, which granted to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) complete immunity from lawsuits. The IUCN is an advisory body to the United Nations, in which hundreds of state and federal agencies (including the EPA, BLM, and USFS) consult with representatives of 133 UN-approved non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to pursue the development of "eco-spiritual practice and principles." Composed entirely of bureaucrats and radical activists, and immune to civil lawsuits, the IUCN claims a mandate to "change human behavior."

The IUCN plays a key role in organizing and mobilizing eco-radicals as "stakeholders" - officials who will participate in policy decisions that will advance the Wildlands campaign. Although such stakeholders supposedly represent the "will of the people," they are neither chosen by the communities they presume to govern, nor are they accountable to them. But this arrangement is perfectly acceptable to IUCN, given its self-appointed mission to tutor and rule over "ignorant humans."

According to an article in the IUCN journal Conservation Biology, "we assume that environmental wounds inflicted by ignorant humans … can be treated by wiser humans." If this means that "ignorant humans" come to harm, so be it: "Conservation biology is a crisis discipline. On a battlefield you are justified in firing on the enemy."

The "Y2Y" Menace

The IUCN's martial rhetoric aside, Wildlands activists have succeeded in seizing vast tracts of land without firing a shot. But their previous conquests would pale into relative insignificance should they succeed in their most ambitious undertaking yet - a binational landgrab that would span the U.S.-Canadian border.

Although Y2K came and went without causing lasting damage, the same may not be true of Y2Y - the "Yellowstone to Yukon" project, which seeks to create a transnational "bioregion" 2,000 miles long and 300 miles wide. The Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative describes its vision as one in which a "web of protected wildlife cores and connecting wildlife corridors has been defined and designated for the Yellowstone to Yukon region." All land-use and development decisions made in that region are to be "based first and foremost on ecological principles."

In order to achieve that vision, vast tracts of land within five states, as well as in two Canadian provinces and one territory, would have to be placed under strict environmental control. As the map on page 18 illustrates, implementation of the Y2Y plan would be particularly devastating to Idaho and Montana. Roughly two-thirds of Idaho and nearly half of Montana would be subsumed into the bioregion, which would eventually be administered by a UN-approved "bioregional council." Through such a council, the affected lands would be zoned for "sustainable use," with the UN acting as an absentee zoning board.

Ambitious though this landgrab may be, it would merely be a down-payment toward completion of the Wildlands Project. But this is to be expected, given that Harvey Locke, a founder of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, is also president of the Wildlands Project board.

It is by creating a matrix of "cores," "buffers," and "connecting corridors" that Wildlands activists seek to re-primitivize the North American landscape - and the "web of protected wildlife cores and connecting wildlife corridors" envisioned by Y2Y would be a quantum leap in that direction. "A wilderness recovery network is an interconnected system of strictly protected areas (core reserves), surrounded by lands used for human activities compatible with conservation that put biodiversity first (buffer zones), and linked together in some way that provides for functional connectivity … across the landscape," explains Reed Noss. In both core and buffer areas, Noss continues, "the collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans."

Every environmental preserve - whether it's a national monument, a UN World Heritage Site or Biosphere Reserve, or a wilderness area - is a potential core area under the emerging Wildlands scheme. Dave Foreman urges radical eco-activists to "identify existing protected areas" and seek to have them identified as core areas. The agitators would then demand the creation of "corridors" to connect the core areas across the landscape. At this point, Foreman points out, eco-radicals could "look for gaps between wild lands or public lands" for future acquisition "by public agencies or by private groups like the Nature Conservancy." Human activity would be strictly regulated not only in the core and buffer areas but in the corridors as well.

The strategy, according to Wildlands activist John Davis, is to keep "expanding wilderness until the matrix, not just the nexus, is wild" - or, in Foreman's words, until eco-radicals have been able to "tie the North American continent into a single Biodiversity Reserve...." Woe betide any private landowner whose property falls in one of the "gaps" mentioned by Foreman, or any farmer, rancher, miner, or logger whose livelihood collides with "the collective needs of non-human species" within a bioregion.

Mr. Clinton's departure from Washington will not end the Wildlands threat, in part because of our country's entanglement with the United Nations. In fact, for American landowners living within the envisioned Y2Y bioregion, a recent decision by the provincial government of British Columbia may prove to be just as significant as any of Mr. Clinton's landgrabs by executive order during the last two years of his administration.

A "Gift to the World"

Last November, after eight years of negotiations, the Canadian province of British Columbia enacted the "Mackenzie Decision," setting aside an additional five million acres as part of the Muskwa-Kechika preserve. That preserve is now a 16-million-acre wilderness area - essentially a core area the size of West Virginia.

"I like to think of this as Canada's gift to the rest of the world," boasted B.C. Premier Ujjal Dosanjh. "We're very proud of what this accomplishes. In effect, it creates the largest protected area in North America and establishes an important precedent." That precedent is twofold. First, with the new designation, British Columbia becomes the first jurisdiction in North America to meet the UN's goal of setting aside 12 percent of its land base as "protected" areas. Second, the Mackenzie Decision was achieved by consensus among "stakeholders" - with the "consensus" representing a huge victory for the landgrabbers. Although these negotiations have been described by supporters as an example of "local land-use planning," it is, in fact, the same process through which UN-approved "bioregional councils" would operate.

In an earlier report on Wildlands-related initiatives in the United States (see "Sold Down the River" in our January 5, 1998 issue), Dr. Michael S. Coffman, executive director of Sovereignty International, noted that the concept of stakeholders - like that of the Wildlands Project - is contained in the UN's Global Biodiversity Assessment. "Under the GBA plan, land-use decisions would be made through a new form of governance whereby local people form 'stakeholder groups' or 'partnerships,' who would make land-use rules by 'consensus,'" warns Dr. Coffman. "Of course, this arrangement would effectively dispense with property rights altogether."

Henry Lamb, director of the Environmental Conservation Organization (ECO), observes that Our Global Neighborhood, the report of the UN-aligned Commission on Global Governance, "calls for the creation of a 'Petitions Council' composed of five to seven representatives of accredited NGOs. They would help direct funding decisions, define administrative duties, and authorize enforcement actions. The world would be divided up into bioregions administered by bioregional councils under direct supervision of the UN and with enforcement authority through the petitions council."

A more suitable label for such "bioregional councils" would be "UN eco-soviets." The purpose of soviets in Communist Russia was to create local consensus on behalf of implementing policies enacted by the central committee. If such a "consensus" wasn't achieved voluntarily, it was imposed by force, usually involving the liquidation of those who resisted. Although the methods employed by the provincial eco-soviet in British Columbia were not as drastic as those used in Communist Russia, the process was quite similar in principle.

Mike Low, general manager of Abitibi Consolidated Inc., a forest products company in British Columbia, was among the industry representatives designated a stakeholder in the discussions that led to the Mackenzie Decision. "One of the fears we had was that if we couldn't reach consensus then the government would make the decisions for us, and none of the stakeholders wanted that," Low told the December 8, 2000 Christian Science Monitor. One incentive for forest products companies to participate as stakeholders, continued the report, was the prospect of being able to conduct approved logging operations "without encountering environmental activists every time they began felling trees." It is in this way that spikers, monkey-wrenchers, and other eco-terrorists help extort concessions from representatives of lawful industries.

After eight years, continued the Monitor, the "stakeholders" asked Premier Dosanjh "to approve the accord, rather than having the government render a top-down edict." Wayne Sawchuk, a stakeholder in the negotiations, insisted that the designation "proves that local land-use planning can work." Actually, the process referred to by Sawchuk illustrates how the charade of local control, carried out amid threats of terrorism and under the shadow of undisguised government coercion, can be used to carry out UN-mandated eco-socialist policies. And, as B.C. Premier Dosanjh pointed out, the process that created the Mackenzie Decision is intended to serve as a precedent throughout the Y2Y bioregion - and, indeed, across North America.

The Yellowstone Connection

The U.S. core area to be linked to the new 16,000,000-acre Muskwa-Kechika preserve in British Columbia is the "Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem," which includes not only the more than two million acres within the park but another 18 million acres in four states (Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah). Yellowstone Park was designated a "World Heritage Site in danger" by the United Nations Education, Social, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in December 1995. Environmental attorney William Perry Pendley noted that in making that designation, officials from UNESCO sought to review all policies dealing with mining, timber, wildlife, and tourism within the 20 million acres of affected land. This inspection was carried out in response to "petitions" made by a collection of eco-radical lobbies styling itself the "Greater Yellowstone Coalition."

Yellowstone Park offers a very useful case study of the UN-driven landgrab. Yellowstone is one of 20 UN World Heritage Sites dotting the U.S. landscape. To these have been added 47 UN Biosphere Reserves. Together, the Heritage Sites and Biosphere Reserves - each of which is a prime candidate to serve as a Wildlands Project core area - account for more than 50 million acres. The World Heritage Convention was ratified by the Senate in 1973; the Man and the Biosphere Program (MAB), through which the Biosphere Reserves were created, was implemented by the State Department through "memoranda of understanding" without the involvement of Congress. The designation of these sites was achieved through secretive collusion between unaccountable NGO stakeholders and eco-bureaucrats, usually without any input by the affected local citizenry.

In fact, such secrecy is mandated by the UN. Paragraph 14 of the 1994 Operational Guidelines for the World Heritage Convention dictates that governments bound by the convention "should refrain from giving undue publicity to the fact that a property has been nominated for inscription pending the final decision...." With reference to Biosphere Reserves, the UN also claims the power to circumvent public accountability altogether. UNESCO's 1995 Seville Agreement for Biosphere Reserves dictates that in the process of identifying and designating such sites, "national or local NGOs could be appropriate substitutes" for elected officials. It was through such covert machinations that the network of Heritage Sites and Biosphere Reserves was created.

Furthermore, where Heritage Sites are concerned, UN designation recognizes a state of "shared sovereignty" over a given parcel of territory within our country. As the October 6, 1992 issue of Environment magazine explained, the designation of World Heritage Sites "constitutes a unique precedent," as it "implies what might be called a voluntary limitation of sovereignty" and a recognition that "other countries have, through the [World Heritage] convention, an obligation - and therefore a right - toward these sites."

It was on this basis that the Clinton administration invited UNESCO to intervene to declare Yellowstone a World Heritage Site in danger. Yellowstone Park superintendent Mike Finley also deferred to the supposed sovereignty of the UN over the park by maintaining that the World Heritage treaty, despite the lack of federal implementing legislation, has "the force and statutory authority of federal law."

The UN panel used its "authority" to promote the use of Yellowstone as a Wildlands core area. Describing the 1995 visit by the UNESCO delegation to the Yellowstone area, the Billings Gazette reported that the officials "said the United States may be overlooking the commitment it made, by signing a treaty, to maintain an uncompromised buffer zone around the national park. The President of the World Heritage Committee said he is inclined to suggest that the international panel urge the United States to expand Yellowstone Park to encompass millions of [acres of] national forest that surround it."

With the Park as a core area and a buffer zone that absorbs territory in four states, the next phase of the program will be to begin work on the corridor between the "Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem" and its partner core area 1,500 miles to the north - the newly created Muskwa-Kechika preserve. In such fashion does the Wildlands cancer metastasize across the landscape.

To Control the Land

The Wildlands Project radicals enjoy several tactical advantages over their would-be victims - the most obvious being that the eco-radicals are well-organized, well-funded, supported by federal and UN environmental bureaucrats, and are following a detailed game plan. The very grandiosity of their designs also offers them another advantage: The notion of "re-wilding" North America and abolishing industrial civilization is simply incomprehensible to rational people.

It must be remembered, however, that the objective of the UN-created Wildlands Project is not to restore the land, but rather to control it. The UN plainly stated this socialist premise in the report of its 1976 Conference on Human Settlements in Vancouver: "Land, because of its unique nature and the crucial role it plays in human settlements, cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market." But property rights are the literal, material foundation of all liberties; a government that controls the land will control the people thereupon. Through the Wildlands Project and subsidiary efforts such as Y2Y, the Power Elite that controls the UN is, quite literally, seizing control of the land upon which Americans live.

Although the UN's environmental agreements are usually portrayed "as pitiful gutless creatures with no bite," observed New York Times writer William K. Stevens, "they have hidden teeth that will develop in the right circumstances." Throughout the Western states, UN-aligned eco-radicals are busy sowing dragon's teeth, and a bitter harvest will result - unless Americans who cherish their liberties organize to extricate our nation from the UN and its designs.