© 1999
Discerning the Times Digest and NewsBytes
As the United Nations restructures
itself to become a world government, it is being
formed around the principles of sustainable
development as defined by Agenda 21. Signed by
the U.S. during the Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro in
1992, Agenda 21 is a 40-chapter manifesto to
reorganize the world using socialist and pantheistic
principles to protect Earth .
Agenda 21 represents a major
fundamental change in the role of government in social
and land-use policy. Under its concept of
sustainability, the primary purpose of government will
no longer be to serve the people. Rather, the focus of
Agenda 21 is to protect nature from people.
Governance will be by consensus among
"stakeholders and partnerships." The concept
of elected representation that holds the government
accountable to the citizens will be eliminated.
One offspring of the United Nations
Agenda 21 in the U.S. is the 1996 report from
the President’s Council on Sustainable Development (PCSD)
entitled Sustainable America. Among the
programs spawned by the Sustainable America include
the American Heritage Rivers (AHRI), and the Clean
Water (CWI) initiatives. Neither program was voted on
by the U.S. Congress. Instead, they are being
implemented through executive order.
The CWI’s 1998 Clean Water Action
Plan calls for obliterating 5,000 miles of roads each
year on federal land, and setting aside a whopping
"two million miles of conservation buffers on
agricultural lands." The potential impact of this
program is enormous. The Department of Agriculture’s
Stream Corridor Plan calls for these conservation
corridors to equal the 100 year flood plain for a
river in width, which could be many miles wide for
some rivers. Even a 100 foot buffer strip along two
million miles totals to 76,000 square miles (48
million acres), an area equivalent to the entire state
of Nebraska!
Supposedly done to protect water
quality, the road obliteration and river corridor
plans create defacto wilderness reserves and corridors
very similar to the requirements of the Convention on
Biological Diversity. The treaty came within an hour
of being ratified in 1994 when Sovereignty
International, an educational and UN watchdog
organization, provided irrefutable evidence to the
U.S. Senate that the treaty would have required up to
one-half of America be put into wilderness reserves
and corridors!
Similarly, the AHRI also makes it
clear that "entire watersheds" are likely to
be impacted by a designation of just a portion of them
as an AHR. Technically, the entire Mississippi River
watershed, covering 40 percent of America, is now
under the AHR program!
In a giant step to impose federal
land use controls, 1000 watersheds are targeted
in the CWI as "critical rural watersheds"
for special assistance to "comply with applicable
standards" that are consistent with goals for
"watershed and basin level planning."
Promoted as a plan to "reinvent
government," both the AHRI and CWI are touted as
"ground up," "community based"
efforts under the control of local people. In fact,
each step is under the "top down" control of
the feds. By definition, a "River Community"
under the AHRI is "self-defined by the members of
the community." In the CWI, it is called a
"Watershed Council." River Communities and
Watershed Councils can include anyone, especially NGOs
(Non Governmental Organizations). They are
self-appointed, not elected.
These non-elected entities are
empowered to prioritize federal programs, and
therefore funding. In doing so, non-elected people
within the AHRI and CWI have the power to withhold
monies from communities that don’t toe the federal
line, while rewarding those that do.
Protecting Mother Earth from use by
humans in this way is not God ordained stewardship.
Rather, it is regulation based on the desire to "exchange
the truth of God for a lie, and worship and served
created things rather than the Creator."
Romans 1:25 V ks
