UN Taking over US Parks

This past year the United Nations (UN), at the request of the Clinton administration, called for the establishment of buffer zones around several national parks in the United States (U.S.). Since that time several dozen parks, forests and other reserves have been included in the plan. The plan uses the 1972 World Heritage Treaty (WH) and the Man and the Biosphere Program (MAB) to justify the need for the buffers around U.S. parks.

While the WH Treaty was ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1972, ostensibly to protect the "cultural and natural heritage" of sites and areas, the MAB program was created the same year through memoranda of understandings by federal agencies, not Congress. The MAB attempts "to achieve a sustainable balance between the conservation of biological diversity and economic development."

Although the two programs have different goals, both are administered by UNESCO and call for core reserve areas surrounded by buffer zones. Together, the two programs occupy over 53 million acres of U.S. soil that are now managed to achieve international goals and objectives. By abiding by these agreements, the U.S. has ceded its sovereign right to manage these parks and forests to the UN.

These UN programs are being used by federal agencies to permanently close interior roads and campgrounds, supposedly to protect the "natural" functioning of ecosystems within the parks. Since these ecosystems cross over onto private property, the UN is calling for strict land-use controls on private land in buffer zones outside the parks in order to protect the ecosystems within the parks.

The need for these buffer zones is based on the science of "conservation biology," which comes from the pantheistic theology that nature-knows-best. By slight of hand, this pantheistically based science was created out of thin air in the 1970s and 1980s by the International Union of Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

It just happens that the National Park Service (NPS), as well as other federal agencies, mainline environmental groups and UN organizations like UNESCO, are members of the IUCN. The IUCN also conveniently provides the scientific oversight for the WH and MAB programs, which in turn, is used by the NPS to justify the need for buffer zones.

In short, the NPS, in collaboration with environmental groups and UN agencies not only helped create the pseudoscience it uses through the IUCN, it works through the IUCN to set the regulatory policy for the UN programs it administers. It provides the perfect closed circle, totally eliminating any accountability to the people affected by these policies.

In the process, our national parks are slowly being converted from areas of outstanding natural beauty and wonder for the enjoyment of all American citizens, to areas of wilderness for the benefit of nature and the exclusion of people.

Few people are even aware that these programs exist. Secrecy is paramount. The 1994 Operating Guidelines for the WH treaty states; "To avoid possible embarrassment to those concerned, States Parties should refrain from giving undue publicity to the fact that a property has been nominated for inscription...."

There is a silver lining in this bleak picture, however. A firestorm of protest around the country erupted in 1995 when Sovereignty International provided citizens with the actual UN and U.S. documents detailing their real intent. Two quietly nominated biosphere reserves have been completely routed by angry, well informed citizens using these U.S. and UN documents pertaining to these programs.

Although the federal government assures the press that the MAB program is harmless, UNESCO’s Statutory Framework for the MAB program declares the MAB program is designed to contribute "to the objectives of the Convention on Biological Diversity and other pertinent conventions and instruments."

The Convention on Biological Diversity was kept from ratification when the outrageous nature of the treaty was exposed by board members of Sovereignty International moments before the ratification was scheduled on September 30, 1994. (See February & June, 1999 DTT)

One of the MAB nominations that failed was the Ozark Man and the Biosphere Reserve (OMAB). Nominated by state and federal resource agencies in 1988, announcements of public hearings for the OMAB were deliberately buried in small rural newspapers, hence few citizens attended them.

When local citizens finally found out about the nomination, organizations such as Take Back Arkansas, and Missouri’s Citizens for Private Property Rights led the opposition to the Ozark Man and the Biosphere designation—and succeeded! The defeat was so stunning that a study by the Department of Rural Sociology at the University of Missouri was commissioned by the U.S. State Department and the U.S. MAB Program.

Entitled "The Ozark Highlands Man and the Biosphere Reserve: A Study of a Failed Nomination Effort," the study lays the blame right at the feet of the conspiratorial nature of the nomination. The report blisters the steering committee for trying to keep the nomination "out of public view until after the designation." The study also reveals and documents a deliberate effort by the steering committee to manipulate a feasibility study to produce evidence of public support of the project when there was none.

Undeterred by the will of the people, the Clinton administration continues to work closely with the UN to implement its secretive, pantheistic agenda of global governance through a host of additional programs—all designed to strip private property rights from landowners and revert much of the American landscape back to its natural wilderness condition. Only through prayer, factual documentation and direct action by citizens can this agenda be exposed, then stopped. V mc