Sustainable-development-the-evil-facing-america

On July 23, 2004, I addressed the fifth annual Freedom 21 Conference in Reno, Nevada. Freedom 21 was the first coalition of limited government/private property advocacy groups. Freedom 21 eventually sponsored 10 national conferences and educated and trained a cadre of leaders to fight Agenda 21. But in 2004, George Bush was in the White House two years after the devastation to individual liberty, free enterprise and private property that defined the Clinton Presidency. Yet, pre-TEA Party, so many Americans failed to understand the threat they faced. The movement was divided into fractured issues. Even the major Conservative organizations refused to mention Agenda 21 (some still do). To this gathering I delivered a call to arms. We had circled the wagons so tightly, we only had one left. I said we needed to charge! Stop being on the defensive. Go straight at the Sustainablists. Take it to the people. Amazingly, this was 7 years before the tactics I called for in 2004 began to take shape. The TEA Party brought our people together in a unified force. Battles over Sustainable Development broke out in Spokane, Washington. Then Richard Rothschild and his gallant fellow Commissioners in Carroll County fired the first real shot as they ended the county’s membership in ICLEI – the first to do so. Today, more than 150 communities have taken that same action. Several state legislatures are introducing legislation to stop the spread of Sustainable Development. And the perpetrators like ICLEI and the American Planning Association are “concerned.”

There’s two sides to this coin, and only one of them is objectionable.

The bad side is artificial shortages, government rationing and control, irrational controls on development and entrepreneurism, government takings of private property and wealth, increasingly omnipresent bureaucracy and brutalitarianism, and restrictions against the public over public property.

However, the good side is not objectionable to conservatives, and is utterly independent of the bad side. It includes profitable economy and lower prices, better technologies that give superior results for less cost, risk reduction from pollutants and contaminants, increased abundance; and if there are controls they are natural, not artificial controls.

The bad side of sustainable development makes itself known early, because what matters to its proponents is neither sustainment or development, but ulterior motives of government control and the impoverishment of the public.

Key concepts of the bad side are, first of all, the attempt to monopolize the use of the expression “sustainable development”, to which they want exclusive rights, as they only want it done their way.

Second, “raising public awareness” is a major red flag, because it amounts to seizing control of the debate. And for them, propaganda is far more important that any actual problem. The problem is generally ignored compared to the ulterior motives.

Third is that they always emphasize shortages and catastrophes. Seen most recently in the MMGW hysteria, and before then in the “population bomb” hysteria; which, not surprisingly, had almost the identical goals as the current hysteria.

The good side of sustainable development is rarely seen, because it can be carried out with minimal resources, and it solves whatever problems that might exist. It needs no great public support, advertisement or propaganda. It just gets done whatever is needed to be done.

By comparison, the bad side was getting the ball rolling for a major government seizure of power over “the desertification of the arable ocean on our coasts!” That is, because of pollution, most of the life had died out in the tidewater areas of our coasts.

However, even before their great propaganda campaign got underway, for a government program that would have cost billions of dollars and hired thousands of bureaucrats, about a dozen scuba divers ruined it all for them by fixing the problem.

These guys got some old bleach bottles, cut in half, with string and a brick to anchor them, then put giant sea kelp runners in them. Over the course of a few weekends, they dropped a bunch of these off the California coast.

Giant sea kelp grows very fast, and it did, and within a month or two their were huge kelp beds, shortly thereafter full of fish and other sea life, and after that, predators. They had created ecosystems filled with life, and probably spend a couple thousand for the compressed air in their scuba tanks and gasoline for their small boat.

And it totally fixed the problem. Zero need for government to intervene, taxes to be raised, bureaucrats to be hired, people prohibited from using the ocean, land to be seized, etc.

What these guys did was “sustainable development”. Just not the kind that the left wanted them to do. And because the problem was solved, the left immediately forgot about it and moved on to their next hysteria.

I don’t see it the way you do. First of all, Sustainable cities are very expensive and are designed to take money from the urban dwellers and give it to the high density dwellers. California has voted to have a high-speed rail from San Francisco to Los Angeles. The purpose of this rail line is to isolate the small cities in-between, kind of like Radiator Springs in the Disney film “Cars”.

Los Angeles has just elected Mayor Eric Garcetti who campaigned on sustainable cities. He wants 100% electric cars (think golf carts), and high density housing as the city has done to Hollywood.

L.A. has taken away street lanes and given them to bicycles and made rickshaws legal. The city is setting up kiosks that rent bicycles. The city of Ojai did that 20 years ago and every bike disappeared.

When they were talking about opening up a new football stadium, they were making plans not to include any parking. They are lessoning the parking requirements in new retail spaces and apartments.

I’ve researched this. Universities are teaching sustainable cities. When you go to the teacher’s writings you will see what their plans are. This has been done all around the world.

Where I live, the San Fernando Valley, they have encircled the valley on 3 sides and there are plans to fully enclose it with the fourth side along Van Nuys Blvd. with surface street bus lines. These bus lines are surface street high to create enough congestion that people will be forced into the transportation corridor lined high density apartments. These apartments will be built where zoning does not allow it, but builders will get permits for higher density if they promise to set aside one third of the apartments for subsidized housing. Now HUD has decided that city zoning laws are illegal and that high-density housing can go up anywhere.

The purpose of high-density housing is similar to when they forced bussed our children to degenerate schools. Parents moved out of the city. But there are not enough poor to fill these high-density projects so they are importing illiterate immigrants whose children will never amount to nothing but being service providers for the rich. We are no longer going to be a manufacturing country, that is best left to countries that refuse to care about the environment. California’s Cap and Trade system is a Value Added Tax that taxes the same product over and over again. A product produces taxed pollution, then the next assembly gets to tax it again, then the next assembly taxes it again, and so on and so on until the final assembly is taxed yet again, ending manufacturing in our state.

We have had prosecutions of people that were granted Section 8 housing from our city officials because our city officials are corrupt. Section 8 owners are paid the going rate for rentals, no discounts, and when a tenant does not pay, the owner still receives their money from our government.

The bus and train lines are not sustainable, they depend on the urban dweller to subsidize them.

That train line that is not high speed from SF to LA will be paid for by California’s Cap and Trade program, guaranteeing that Cap and Trade will be in our state forever. So says Governor Jerry Brown.

I could go on and on, but let me leave you with this. It was the sea urchins that ate the kelp at the root. SCUBA divers gained badges for smashing the little critters with hammers. Then the Asians came and parked huge ships off our shore and sent SCUBA divers out to harvest them because the Asians eat them. That is why our kelp came back.

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