© 1999
Discerning the Times Digest and NewsBytes
On March 3, 1994, Florida Governor Lawton Chiles issued
Executive Order 94-54 which created the Governor’s Commission for a
Sustainable South Florida. In 1996 the Florida Legislature caught the
fever establishing the Florida Sustainable Communities Demonstration
Project whose goal was to provide models for sustainable communities
throughout the state. Out of 28 applicants, Boca Raton, Martin County,
Hillsborough County/City of Tampa, Ocala and Orlando were chosen for the
Project demonstration.
Unfortunately, buried beneath the Project’s apparent
desirable goal of revitalization are the hidden costs—preservation of
the environment at the cost of personal freedoms and property rights. High
population density and suburban sprawl are two of the repeating themes
identified as unsustainable in Project literature. Residents who are in
search of the American dream are discovering that a three bedroom ranch on
a half acre lot away from urban centers and crime is "an
incredible waste of land," according to the Project’s
informational brochure entitled, Just What Do You Mean...
"Sustainable?"
Rural and some suburban areas are getting hit the
hardest. Since 1990 the State of Florida has spent $300 million annually
under the Preservation 2000 program to buy rural and suburban land. Over a
million acres have been purchased to enhance recreation opportunities and
dedicated to ecosystem restoration and protection in efforts to make
Florida sustainable.
Such efforts come at a high cost. Not only does
Preservation 2000 dramatically impact the east coast and mid-west’s
winter vegetable supply by taking tens of thousands of acres of
agricultural land out of production, but it also reduces the state’s
gross domestic product. Thousands of residents in these areas have had
their lives uprooted, homes destroyed and emotions traumatized when the
state condemned their land and homes. Many of these homes have been owned
by the same family for generations.
Sustainable development is a beast whose hunger is
never satiated. The more control that is imposed, and the more land that
is bought and set aside, the more that is demanded by those chasing the
sustainability rainbow. This fact was driven home recently when the
Florida legislature authorized the continued spending of $300 million
annually through the year 2010, to purchase even more land in the state’s
unending quest to become "sustainable." Called Florida Forever,
the pro-gram continues the Preservation 2000 program that ends this year.
Florida Forever has an even heavier emphasis on
restoration than did Preservation 2000. Like Agenda 21 and the Convention
on Biological Diversity, Sustainable Florida is designed to have high
density population centers separated by greenway corridors and ecosystem
recovery reserves. The South Florida Water Management District’s Save
our Rivers 1999 Land Acquisition & Management Plan calls for land
to be purchased "to protect the integrity of ecological systems."
"Buffer or transitional areas necessary to protect core lands from
adverse [human] impacts" will also be utilized, in part, to
"provide wildlife corridors."
Florida Forever has all the ingredients prescribed by
the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and the UN Global Biodiversity
Assessment (GBA), which are based upon what is known as the "The
Wildlands Project." The Wildlands Project was originally envisioned
by Dave Foreman, cofounder of Earth First! and now a board member of the
Sierra Club. Foreman’s plan calls for setting aside up to half of the
United States into wilderness reserves and corridors. (see February, 1999
issue DTT).
The Biodiversity Treaty was never ratified by the U.S.
because the plan was so outrageous. Nonetheless, most of its provisions
are finding their way into policy through the collaborative consensus
building process in programs such as Sustainable Florida.
When faced with opposition to the Project from those
who insisted that it was an extension of the UN’s Agenda 21, the
state denied all claims of any association. However, a cursory overview
reveals that every principle and recommendation for Sustainable Florida
can be linked back to Agenda 21. It is highly unlikely that this can be a
coincidence. While few of the local participants have even heard of, let
alone read Agenda 21, the Convention on Biological Diversity, or Sustainable
America, it is a near certainty that the
non-elected facilitators,
environmentalists and most government officials are quite familiar with
these documents.
Unlike Preservation 2000, which used current income for
funding the program, Florida Forever will use bonds to fund the program,
creating a $3 billion liability for the state by 2010. Additionally, the
state must pay in-lieu of taxes to local governments in-perpetuity for the
loss of property taxes, all payable when tax revenues are declining as
prime agricultural land is taken out of production.
When various Florida communities were being courted to
become sustainable, they were lured with examples of sustainability
success elsewhere in places such as Sweden whose 260 sustainable
communities were hailed as shining beacons of the virtues of sustainable
development. The people of Florida were never told, however, that in
Sweden citizens pay 70-80% of their income in taxes. Is this where
sustainable development will lead Florida and ultimately the nation?
V
ks
