Diane Alden *************************************************************** HI GUYS: IT IS A MUST THAT YOU READ THE ATTACHED ARTICLE. I KNOW IT IS LONG, BUT IT IS VERY IMPORTANT, AS IT WILL SHOW YOU THE PAST AND THE FUTURE IF THE PEOPLE DON'T GET INVOLVED. AS I HAVE SAID ALL ALONG I CAN WORK WITH OUR FEDERAL AGENCIES, BUT I DO NOT TRUST THEM. THEY ARE GREEN,GREEN,GREEN AND MORE GREEN. IF YOU LOOK AT THE HISTORY OF A GREAT DEAL OF OUR MONUMENTS, PARKS, WILDERNESS AND OTHER LOCKED UP LAND YOU WILL SEE THERE WAS A LOT OF FALSE FACTS AND PLAIN OLD LYING USED TO GET THESE LAND GRABS APPROVED. I AM NOT AGAINST A WILDERNESS, PARKS OR MONUMENTS, BUT WHY SHOULD FALSE SCIENCE AND LIES BE USED. ALSO WHY SHOULD RURAL AREAS AND THE PEOPLE THAT LIVE THERE SUFFER. THERE HAS TO BE A BALANCE. THEY HAVE TAKEN AWAY OUR LOGGING, MINING, WATER AND SOME OF OUR RECREATION BECAUSE OF SOME BIRDS, PLANTS, FISH, ANIMALS AND MANY OTHER THING THAT THEY CAN SAY ARE ENDANGERED. WAS ALL THESE LISTED BECAUSE OF GOOD SCIENCE?? I DON'T THINK SO. THEY JUST HAD NOT GOT CAUGHT USING FALSE REPORTS UNTIL NOW. THE FALSE LYNX REPORT HAS PROVEN THAT THE FISH & WILDLIFE AND LAND MANAGERS CAN NOT BE TRUSTED. WHAT DO YOU THINK SHOULD HAPPEN TO THE ESA. THERE IS NO QUESTION, A LOT OF THE ANIMALS AND PLANTS WERE LISTED BY FALSE RESEARCH. HOW DO WE STOP THIS, I DON'T KNOW. THE ONLY THING I CAN THINK OF IS ALWAYS VOTE, STAY INVOLVED, TELL THIS STORY TO ANYONE YOU CAN AND QUESTION WHAT THESE AGENCIES ARE DOING. LET ME KNOW YOUR THOUGHTS. HOWARD *************************************************************** The ESA needs to be totally redone, and all plants and animals now listed need to be reviewed by unbiased scientists. There is a few acre strip of land behind my restaurant that has been set aside because they found an endangered plant (just one) growing there. How easy would it have been for them to plant it there? Robert *************************************************************** A good detective story usually begins with a bang, a murder, a body, an interesting character or a dark and stormy night. But great mystery stories are as much about character and motivation as they are about intrigue and whodunit. Great detectives are observers; they don't pass up the details, dichotomies and small inconsistencies that lead to solving the mystery. They also see and incorporate patterns of behavior in solving that mystery. In the end, the ultimate answer is usually a complex of simplicity. But it is only simple once all the parts of the mystery and puzzle are put together and analyzed. Extraordinary mystery writers like P.D. James, Agatha Christie and Dick Francis incorporate their sense of the time, the place and the culture into solving the mystery itself. All of these elements are important in solving "The Case of the Missing Canadian Lynx." The Washington Times broke the story, Fox News Cable covered it, and recently Kim Strassel of the Wall Street Journal added her considerable journalistic skills in relating this most recent and obvious case of government abuse. The Times article reports: The admission that employees of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Forest Service and Washington state falsified data confirmed what many rural Westerners believe: Agencies are doctoring species and habitat studies to stop logging, ranching and mining on the federal government's vast land holdings. The lynx survey, which is being investigated by several federal agencies, would have been used to establish land-use rules in 16 states and 57 national forests. Strassel maintains: The lynx scandal underscores everything that's wrong with Fish and Wildlife and the Forest Service. It shows how the agencies succumbed to a Clinton-era culture that puts ideology ahead of science. It demonstrates the undue influence environmental groups hold over the departments. It also shows how vaguely written laws like the Endangered Species Act can be used to further political agendas, even in the complete absence of hard science. Furthermore, in 1998 the Forest Service contracted with a member of the Wildlife Conservation Society to do a lynx survey in Oregon and Washington. The contractor reported that lynx hair had been found in both states, which was surprising. No one thought lynx were in the areas listed. That information led to the determination that the lynx was threatened. Another survey in 1999 found that the employees of the Forest Service considered the results of the survey to be valid. But because a whistle-blower came forward, the hair in the 1999 and 2000 surveys was found to be from "bobcats or coyotes." California Republican and rural advocate Rep. Richard Pombo defines the case as [The] latest revelation, that officials from the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife planted false evidence of a Canadian Lynx on three occasions in our national forests, received a typical response from the agencies. Instead of terminating the employees, the individuals were given counseling and placed right back on the job to carry on with their environmental activism. Forest, Regional and interregional efforts are underway to improve lynx conservation through project design and implementation or forest plan amendments or revisions on 57 national forests. Most recommended conservation measures for lynx are non-controversial and require little change in current management. Some conservation recommendations overlap completely or to a great extent with existing management direction for other resources and do not substantially alter management of these resources. Two conservation recommendations have been somewhat controversial. One is certain restrictions on pre-commercial thinning in lynx habitat for the purposes of providing snowshoe hare habitat (key prey of the lynx). The other is a recommendation to allow no net increase in groomed or designated over-the-snow routes and designated snow play areas in lynx habitat. Pombo recounts the case of Donald Fife. Fife was a professional scientist specializing in environmental mining and engineering geology, who learned from a former U.S. Forest Service official that plants listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) had been secretly placed on his property in an attempt to close about 30,000 acres of the highest mineral-valued land in Southern California. Exposing the Pattern We see a pattern developing. The facts in the case of the missing lynx include a documented previous instance of abuse of power by the Forest Service. In both cases the facts are indisputable. But the facts don't tell the entire story. At the moment, the most obvious and prime suspect in the abuse of federal power is the Clinton administration. That administration seemed to institutionalize the notion that the ends justify the means. The cultural and political atmosphere in that administration made things worse across the federal landscape. From the Department of Justice to the Department of the Interior, scandal erupted at every turn and bureaucrats and bureaucracies were politicized beyond the norm. In the case of the politicization and corruption of green bureaucracies in particular, Bill Clinton and his secretary of the interior, Bruce Babbitt, are the obvious suspects. But are they really the guilty parties? It is not unusual for conservatives and Republicans to blame the Clinton administration for the dishonesty and corruption that took place during his reign in office. That is also true in the recent case of the missing Canadian Lynx. Fingers are pointed in the direction of Clinton and Babbitt. I could spend days pointing fingers at Babbitt and Clinton. Their efforts, in addition to those of America's premier foundations the Pew Charitable Trust, Rockefeller, Alton Jones, Turner, McArthur and Ford and the United Nations, the international treaties America has signed, and the centrally planned economic agenda of multinational corporations and financial institutions all of the powers that be have had a negative impact on public environmental policy. The collusion and corruption have been a horror for rural America and for the rule of law not to mention the Constitution.. As an investigator, I could point a finger at the deaf and dumb American churches for making environmentalism a part of their social justice campaign. That campaign by and large does nothing for justice for the rural poor and certainly nothing for the environment, except to deify it. It is a selective justice that has nearly destroyed rural America. I could point to environmentalists, whose cause in recent years has been co-opted by quasi-religious extremists on one hand and corporate green interests on the other. What have suffered are science, the truth, the environment, common sense, and cooperation between rural types, government and the greens. Their cause has created a new class of poor and killed off many small communities communities, by the way, that offer a simpler, less materialistic and cleaner alternative to urban living. In addition, the American public has allowed itself to be flimflammed by corporate green groups with pleas for money as these monied interests use scare tactics and propaganda plus myth, which they serve up as truth. The public has been ill served by a media that take their environmental "stories" off press releases written by billion-dollar green organizations like the Sierra Club and National Wildlife Federation. That same press has adopted the mindset and language of the environmental true believers. That same press spins tales about a "fragile" ecosystem and "endangered" species. Those tales are often myths based on lies and half-truths, but they are related as the gospel by CBS, the Times, the Post, CNN and National Geographic. Yet seldom has the press bothered to question the lies, the manipulation, the half truths. Never do the media test what is claimed by the special interests. When something is truly an environmental concern, the various groups are too busy hunting down easy targets or creating the next nightmare environmental scenario. Green is big business, and the mystery is that very few members of our elite power structure have discovered how dangerous and manipulative and full of lies that green business really is. Think Enron and think how corporate structures and bureaucracies can hide the truth. An unquestioning attitude and a lack of priorities have been the downfall of correcting real environmental abuses. Nevertheless, what is at stake in the case of the missing Canadian Lynx is institutional credibility, not to mention lives, livelihoods and the environment of rural and urban areas. Institutional manipulation of the system has been the instrument in the destruction of trust and cooperation between those who work the land and those who would seek to drive people off the land. The result is that trust in government entities like the Forest Service, the BLM, and most certainly the Fish and Wildlife Service may be lost forever. For the time being, the Luddites in the environmental movement will have their way, but the environment and trust in the federal government to do a job will be the poorer for it. Discovering the Motive Dr. Alston Chase, environmentalist, philosopher and former lecturer at Harvard, Oxford and Princeton, wrote a seminal work on the rising tyranny of ecology: "In a Dark Wood." Dr. Chase indicates that things began to go wrong in the Forest Service and other federal land agencies long before Bill Clinton or Bruce Babbitt came on the scene. Although the destruction of rural America accelerated under the Clinton regime, the institutional mindset and practices in the green bureaucracies changed long ago. Chase recounts that by 1979 a Louis Harris poll showed that Forest Service employees were already more "save/conserve oriented" than the general public. The Forest Service and other federal green agencies began to be divided into two classifications, the younger "baby boomer biocentrists" and the older forest rangers at the top. Furthermore, "the silviculture-educated foresters were bossing biologists who had spent more time in school but less time in the woods." However, as the older generation retired, the new guys moved up. With that move, Chase says, "politics outstripped science, agency and environmentalist values forged beyond what the researchers knew." These new green kids on the federal block accepted the theories of biocentrism. Indeed, the "ecologists" rejected science and the scientific method in many instances. Where the older scientists thought that nature is not stable or a constant but rather forever in a state of flux and chaos, the newer "ecologists" believed that stability was the norm and could be possible by creation or designation of their invention. Rather, the ecologist agenda was to conceive of some kind of restoration of a "pristine" environment. But no one knew exactly when such an environment existed, so they built a time frame that created a system before the white man came to America. They call it pre-Columbian times, and that is the direction in which the ecologists are trying to take federal land policies. However, pristine conditions and ecosystems were created by the theorists; seldom did science have anything to do with determining how things really were. There was no admission that the environment changes constantly, regardless of what man does or does not do. There was no admission that billions of species, eras and epochs had changed long before people were on the scene even in America. The American Indian was held up as the "perfect" interactor with the environment, when proof indicates that was just not so. But the true believers wanted white man's "footprint" on the land to be eradicated. That is not hyperbole, that is what is happening across the United States at this very moment. Today in the back country of the U.S. the Forest Service closes roads so that man cannot access the forest for even minimal use. They are digging 10-foot-deep pits so that even horses can't access those roads. They destroy old homesteads, and even the modern-day American Indian is finding that the Forest Service and the BLM do not respect their habitations and imprints on the land. Ask the Timbasha of Death Valley or the Dann sisters of Nevada, or the Hispanic loggers in New Mexico how little concern the government has for their history and their modern-day livelihood. Dr. Hegel and the Red Herring During the radical and extreme 1960s, it wasn't just music or culture that changed drastically. Clinging to the leftist causes of the "me" generation was the "me too" environmental movement. A favorite instrument of collectivists and socialists, including people like Herbert Marcuse and Antonio Gramsci, environmentalism was the socially acceptable wedge that would be used to bring down capitalism as well as our belief in individual rights and private property, which developed out of the Great Awakening and the Enlightment. What became important were not individuals but rather "the one," the "whole," the collective. In addition, at this time humanity was looked upon as a cancer that could do no good to the environment. Part of the intent of population control is to break man's legs so he can't leave a footprint. In the era of the '70s, according to Dr. Chase, at least half of the Forest Service and green bureaucrats and bureaucracies had allegiances to the cause of "biocentrism." That is as much a philosophical belief system as it is a pseudo-science. It has the language, but often lacks the data and the scientific method. The institutional culture is one of preservation rather than conservation. It is now more about aesthetics and promoting little if any human interaction with the environment. The ultimate goal is to return to a state "before the white man came." The new true green believers, in Chase's words, "confused philosophy with science and fact and value. ... [I]t embraced new values based on systems ecology, which from the beginning was less a preservation science than a program for social control. ... [I]t viewed the exercise of individual liberty as a threat." Part of the mystery in the long cultural and historical road to the case of the missing Canadian lynx is congressional response. Since the '60s Congress has responded badly to what was perceived as man abusing the environment. A flood of legislation resulted. Poorly thought out, just as with LBJ's War on Poverty, the laws did more damage than good. Just as the War on Poverty destroyed the black family, environmental laws have destroyed the rural poor. It was during the idealistic, albeit unscientific, '60s and '70s that cultural Marxism found its way into the system and plenty of really terrible ideas were carved into stone. They include the Wilderness Act of 1964, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1967 and the Endangered Species Act of 1969. Eventually, these laws would lead to FLPMA, the Federal Land Planning Management Act of 1976. Out of FLPMA came the era of increasing hostility by the federal government to man's use and enjoyment of the environment. After FLPMA, federal land managers began to sweep through the Intermountain West in a quest to change practices and rescind promises made to rural workers, stakeholders, communities and families in a previous era. But there was no balance in this new shift in policy. Instead, statist values became the order of the day whether or not they made sense. These values were not better values they merely replaced the old ones. In so doing, there was no attempt at accommodation between old and new values, regardless of lip service paid to cooperation. It was the fatal combination of environmental groups gone left, with redesigning the language and taking the ephemeral language of "biocentrism" and ecology and creating a set of unscientific values, which did not leave any room for compromise. Because of that fact, lives were destroyed, and misunderstanding about man's place in the environment was never fully understood by either side in the debate. This influx of green theorists manifested in the late '70s. That was the real beginning of federal claims on water rights in the West and on huge chunks of states like Alaska. Democrat Jimmy Carter assigned hundreds of millions of acres to Wilderness status In Alaska. Bill Clinton was the next president to do the same. In Alaska, much of the state was left for an elite few to hunt or fish or bird-watch. Precious little was left for the people of Alaska to use for economic or personal reasons. The tax base suffered, and Alaska became a colony of D.C. That attitude continues today in places like Nevada, the Klamath Basin, and anywhere water or beautiful vistas exist. The debate over drilling in the ANWR is not about science or what is good for Caribou, but rather about a political and philosophical agenda gone awry. Another tactic by the new complex of federal agencies and corporate green groups was to abrogate private property and its value by a draconian implementation of the Endangered Species Act. What began as an idea with good intentions eventually led down the path to extremism, government control, and misuse and abuse of the environment and the rural poor. Increasingly strict controls on recreational uses are being implemented each year as more lands are denied to the public. There was no rational system developed. Priorities were skewed in favor of the wish list of environmentalists. Scattered and incompetent efforts at improving federal lands prevailed and became the rule. Federal agencies spent most of the time in court fighting off green demands and paying billions in court case judgments brought by green groups. That left less money to make improvements on the land in federal hands. On the other hand, more green 'scientists' were bringing their agenda with them as they moved up the ranks of the federal agencies and cooperated with activist environmental groups in numerous court cases. Solution to Saving Species Is No Mystery At this point in time, little has been "saved" by the government or green efforts and that includes species. The salvation of most species came about from the cooperation of rural people with private individuals and groups such as Ducks Unlimited and the Elk Foundation. It was the rural ag producer who maintained water resources and kept the lands that brought wildlife back. The greens, however, are not happy with that. Many believe that is not a "natural" condition, and they criticize the improvement the rurals have made. If that is not a Luddite attitude, nothing is. There was absolutely no concern for the impact of such attitudes on rural areas and their people as the destruction of rural America continued. What was created out of all this was a branch of government almost separate from the legislative, executive and judicial. That other branch is represented by the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other lesser subgroups. They receive funding from the government, but they increase their budgets from green activism. In a quid pro quo, the federal agencies and the greens have set up a marriage of convenience punctuated by court battles that really are not battles at all but rather a way for green institutions to line their own pockets and a further attempt to remove people from rural America. The casualties are the environment, the rural poor and the rule of law. The late President Dwight David Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex. He could not have foreseen the foundation-multinational corporation-green machine-federal bureaucracy complex that now controls much of what happens to the citizens, economy and health of the land mass of the United States. Part II next time: The Forest Service 1998 Code of Scientific Ethics and how it was broken. The Clinton administration's part in law breaking. The case of a woman akin to Karen Silkwood whose life may be in danger by what she knows. Check out www.aldenchronicles.com and write to me at alden@newsmax.com Diane Alden is a research analyst with a background in political science and economics. Her work has appeared in the Washington Times as well as NewsMax.com, Enterstageright, American Partisan and many other online publications. She also does radio commentaries for Steve Myers' show on Liberty Works Monday and Friday mornings, and can be heard regularly on Mike Fleming, WREC in Memphis. |