The delegates who heard about the Wildlands Project during a 1998 Alaska Miners Conference may have naively thought the plot too outrageously unrealistic to pay heed to at the relevant time.

A reprint of Kathleen Benedetto’s paper in the July/August 1998 Mining Voice warned that the ranting of a handful of radical activists really was a must to be taken seriously.

The plan was being endorsed by environmental heavyweights and over 35 organizations, including the United Nations-approved Sierra Club and The Nature Conservancy.

They were lined up at the trough with their wonky ideas funded by wealthy, U.S.-based grant foundations such as Patagonia, Pew Charitable Trusts, The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Lynhurst Foundation, W Alton Jones Foundation and the Ted Turner Foundation.

Before the Internet Revolution, Turner Communications controlled the flow of the former mainstream media information that served to warp the minds of the masses.

The main tool behind the principles of the Wildlands Project, founded circa 1991, is the U.S. Endangered Species Act. It is not sufficient for Wildlanders to preserve what is remaining of roadless, undeveloped land. They want to re-create large swaths of wilderness by dismantling roads and dams, which, by the United Nations’ Agenda 21 standards, are not “sustainable”.

Through regulatory takings of privately-owned land, they want to reclaim plowed farmland, ranches, grazing leases and clear-cuts. Their plans cover reintroducing extinct species while disposing of some human population which Wildlanders view as a disgusting scourge to the planet.

If Wildlanders sound like a bunch of lunatics escaped from an insane asylum, then so is former U.S. Democrat vice-president Al Gore, who just about won the presidential bid in 2000. He and Wildlanders are cut from the same cloth.

His book Earth in the Balance indicates that Gore believes human civilization to be a dangerous species and the dominant threat to the global environment. His answer to solving the problem is to depopulate North America and eliminate vehicles and the internal combustion engine, none of which are “sustainable” under the UN’s Agenda 21 criteria.

One has to wonder why the 2000 presidential election was so close against his Republican opponent George W. Bush. Who in their right mind would vote for Gore?

While lots of sane people of an unfortunate “it-won’t-happen-here” mentality weren’t paying attention, plenty of green radicals infiltrated the system.

The Wildlanders, who are in their ludicrous scheme for the long haul, aim to set aside 50 percent-plus of North America as a network of wilderness in the name of preserving biodiversity and is definitely off-limits to despicable Homo sapiens.

A “regional reserve system” will eventually tie the North American continent into a single biodiversity reserve.

But the huge environmental appetite can never be satisfied. The Greens always want more, which speaks volumes as to why it is a waste of time for conciliatory industrial groups to try to placate or negotiate with them.

As a core area, Wildlanders propose to use existing national parks, wilderness and protected areas, and other federal, state, provincial and territorial lands, which, for the most part, are without roads.

The core areas would be protected by buffer zones which will be linked with other core areas and buffer zones through protected wildlife corridors.

Human activity will be restricted in the buffer zones. Recreation, mining, agriculture and logging would only be allowed on the outer margins, which will be adjacent to the “islands of human habitat”.

The so-called “islands” are actually concentration camps for the “human habitat” who will slave to mine, farm and log the government-owned resources. Nearby areas will be preserved as recreational playgrounds for the Wildlander elitists.

However, maybe there will be no harvesting of natural resources. John Davis once assured in Wild Earth Magazine that Wild Earthers and Wildlanders advocate eradication of industrial civilization. Davis, like Al Gore, said everything civilized must go.

The principal tool behind the Wildlands Project is the U.S. Endangered Species Act, which was the template for Canada’s proposed Species at Risk Act. Yet the Americans have hollered for the abusive Endangered Species Act to be repealed since its conception in 1973.

Initially, the green organizations petitioned for well over 100 species as threatened or endangered. Then they filed lawsuits to achieve a list of over 2,000 in total.

If these obnoxious activists don’t get what they want any other way, they have the option of whining to the United Nations. The UN’s bogus environmental Agenda 21–Agenda for the 21st Century born in 1992–exists for the sole purpose of attacking and weakening the capitalist nations which have always been in a perpetual state of denial over a Marxist-style global governance.

Canada’s Liberal finance minister Paul Martin told a news conference during the Montreal G-20 Summit in October 2000 that globalization is pointless if it is limited to a privileged few.

Therefore, to even the equality score, political elitist jackasses aid and abet the idea of dragging down wealthy, developed countries to the level of Third-World countries that wallow in abject poverty.

Northerners are quite aware of the inroads the Wildlanders and their cooperators and collaborators have enjoyed in shutting down the economy by severely restricting industrial activities as well as curtailing recreation (ski hills and golf courses are not “sustainable”). In other words, anything that needs a land base to exist or survive is taboo under the UN’s Agenda 21.

The Endangered Species Act is the obstructionist tool used to stop many projects and slows down all development in the United States. This act increases the costs of all affected projects because time is money. The longer the delays the more interest accrues on borrowed capital.

The act causes a net loss of private property by requiring former private lands to be “nationalized” as “set-aside lands” for endangered species. Nationalization takes private land off the tax rolls, which, in turn, diminishes tax revenues flowing into government coffers, which, in turn, weakens the rights and liberties of the citizenry.

It’s exactly what the Green radicals intend.

But what is not understood is that without privately-owned property as a tax base, these Marxists will run out of somebody else’s money to spend and, in turn, their boundless supply of money flow will dry up and the whole totalitarian system will collapse.

Don’t bother them with fiscal details. All they want is for the Endangered Species Act to continue to be enforced vigorously which is thievery as to the amount of financial compensation offered to the landowners for their forced property loss.

Small property owners are being devastated. Home owners are guilty even if they do not actually harm an endangered plant or animal.

The so-called endangered creature doesn’t even have to reside on the property. Yet the imaginary habitat is off-limits for touching. And harsh fines of $50,000 and one year in prison are imposed for each habitat disturbed.

Developers holding a large land base can pay for the extraordinary expensive Section 10 Permit. It requires the owners to donate two acres of “mitigation” property to the U.S. government for each acre the owner wants to develop.

Small home owners and farmers cannot pay the permit costs and cannot use their land either. Not only are they losing their means to a livelihood but are eating up their life savings.

Green radicals are thrilled to see property owners brought to their knees.

Editor Vivian Danielson added more flavor to the stew in the November 15, 1999 issue of the world-renowned, Toronto-based Northern Miner trade journal.

“Home owners have been prosecuted for bulldozing firebreaks around their homes during a California brush fire because they destroyed the habitat of an endangered mouse,” she wrote. “Farmers have not been allowed to farm because bureaucrats classified their irrigated land as wetlands. The files are a mile high with government high-handedness against property owners.”

To “encourage” property owners to sell, there are numerous recorded incidents of neighbours squealing on neighbours and bringing in agents from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, or any of the dozen agencies authorized to enforce the act.

Incidents reek of collusion between the government and green groups, such as The Nature Conservancy. They apply undue pressure to property owners until the owner is converted into a “willing” seller.

The owner is forced to sell for a paltry sum to an environmental group which re-sells the land for market value to the U.S. government which protects the land for some “special”, anti-development purpose.

Fed-up property owners have been forced into ridding their properties of species and habitats through what they coined as the Three-S System: Shoot, Shovel and Shut up. It seems that former Conservative Alberta Premier Ralph Klein had to recommend that landowners apply that technique in his province.

In 2001, bureau-rats were scurrying around somewhere in the bowels of Ottawa drawing up regulations for the proposed Species at Risk Act that would give the government and environmentalists unprecedented control over what happens on any private property in Canada.

It might be lakeside frontage, country residential, a farm, a trapline, a woodlot, or a subdivision home. The owner wouldn’t be able to dig up a weed from the front lawn, hence the extinction of dandelion wine. However, the bylaw officer would drop by with a ticket as a reminder to groom the property to city standards.

Rodents would be free to take up residence in your attic or basement. And you wouldn’t be able to legitimately shoot a rabid bat or coyote that was chasing your kids or livestock.

The legislation to protect endangered species was part of a global effort to maintain the biological diversity of the planet as laid out in the United Nations’ Agenda 21. In 1992, Canada signed the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, which should serve to curdle the blood of any property owner.

Signing the agreement committed Canada to writing legislation and/or regulatory provisions for the protection of threatened species and populations.

While humans and their habitats are the ones endangered, only the habitat of every other mammal, plant, bird and insect would be protected.

The first attempt to provide the federal legislative framework to protect endangered species was the Canada Endangered Species Protection Act (Bill C-65) that was introduced in Parliament in 1996.

It died on the order paper when Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien called an election in 1997.

Another version of the act was introduced to Parliament on April 11, 2000. Species at Risk (Bill C-33) died on the order paper when another election was called in October of that year.

It is just a matter of time before this abomination is resurrected and eventually passes into law to match its U.S. soul mate. Meanwhile, land-grabbing legislation is being brought into law province by province as privately-owned property rights come under attack in the form of such legislation as the Land Stewardship Act of Alberta.

The Canadian government, acting as a lapdog for the United Nations, sees all land as its land. And the feds plan to take the property by regulatory confiscation.

The only land owners who were “promised” any compensation in this charade were those who could prove they suffered loss due to “extraordinary impact” brought on by the act.

The compensation would not kick in until land owners experience a loss equivalent to 10 percent of their property’s value. Once that threshold is reached, only 50 percent of any additional losses would be covered.

The feds also could have used the Species at Risk Act to buy back or confiscate Indian settlement lands.

When arguing against the Endangered Species Act, the Center for Defense of Free Enterprise and the Centre for Prairie Agriculture, among other groups, mistakenly assumed they were dealing with rational people who would listen.

It proved a waste of time to suggest that unworkable, heavy-handed, punitive measures for saving endangered species be replaced with voluntary, non-regulatory, incentive-based measures as has been the practice and the plea used by various provinces in the past.

Before Canadian property “haves” become Canadian property “have nots”, the lobby centres really should stop tiptoeing around like mannerly ladies and gentlemen and simply go for the aorta.

They should demand that every politician titled with “minister of environment” hurl an axe into the heart of these draconian proposals which social engineers have designed specifically to force the “affluent” members of the human race off the land and down into the dirt to peck for a morsel of bread.

After all, it was politicians and bureaucrats who gave the green light to these unelected radical special-interest groups to hold control over other people’s lives without the ordinary citizens’ knowledge or consent.

They have an obligation to undo what they did.

*******
See related stories here on ChristopherDiArmani.com:

‘Land-Use Planning’ Means Driving People from the Land

Douglas Ranch: When Property Rights and your sense of entitlement clash, property rights win

Albertans: Alison Redford stole your property rights. NOW is the time to take them back.

A small glimmer of hope for Property Rights in America