The largest conservation easement in America became a
done deal on March
21 when Pingree Associates accepted a check from the New
England Forestry Foundation for $28 million. The easement involves
760,000 acres of company land in western and northern Maine. Pingree
Associates represent the descendents of the original Pingree family who
have managed the land in common- undivided ownership since the 1800s.
At first blush, the conservation easement seems to be a
win-win for both conservation and the landowners. Larger than the State of
Rhode Island, this environmentalist conservation easement preserves some
of the most spectacular natural resources in Maine, including the Allagash
Lakes and 16 miles along the St. John River in northern Maine. According
to the New England
Forestry Foundation, the easement protects over 2,000 miles of shore
frontage along major rivers and streams. More than 110 lakes and ponds
with 215 miles of shoreline will also be conserved. These forests contain
numerous active bald eagle nests, 24,800 acres of managed deeryards,
72,000 acres of wetland habitat, home to many species of waterfowl,
Maine's most productive peregrine falcon nesting area, and at least 67
rare and endangered plant sites.
More than one thousand individuals, along with forty-five
private, globalist linked foundations, both large and small,
contributed to the success of the project. Both the federal and state
governments contributed $5 million towards the effort. At the ceremony
completing the deal, Maine governor Angus King congratulated those who
made it happen. “Today we make history with a conservation easement of
unprecedented scale and magnitude,” King said. “The protection of over
three-quarters of a million acres shows that with the right partners
landscape-scale dreams can come true. Future generations owe a debt of
gratitude to the Pingree family and the New England Forestry Foundation
for the singular vision and determination that made this possible,” he
added.
The Pingree family a victim of a well
orchestrated plan by the globalists
Sound too good to be true? It is. While the Pingree
family has a right to do with their land the best way they see fit (within
common law), the deck was stacked against them from the start. Besides the
problems associated with large numbers of families having common and
undivided ownership of any property, the Pingree's were in some way set
up. They are the victims of a multimillion dollar campaign by the private
globalist foundations and environmental groups to find a way to control
the mostly private forest land of New England. The globalist-driven
foundations and environmental groups had already succeeded in shutting
down logging and other public use of much of the western forests. They
used the spotted owl and other techniques to lock up land within federal
ownership that controls over 50 percent of western states. They needed a
tool to do the same thing in the rest of the US, which is mostly privately
owned. They selected 26 million acres in the Northeast, including Maine,
New Hampshire, Vermont and New York, as their target area.
In 1992 the Environmental Grantmakers Association (EGA)
met to discuss how they were going to accomplish their goal of controlling
the natural resources of America and specifically how it was going to be
done in private land in the Northeast. The EGA is made up of 142 private
foundations, many of which have direct links into the globalist community.
Leading the effort were the various Rockefeller foundations and Donald
Ross who oversaw the EGA. The meeting was taped, and Discerning the Times
has a copy of these very confidential tapes, some of which are reproduced
in the editor's book Saviors
of the Earth? The Politics and Religion of the Environmental Movement.
In the book, the editor of Discerning the Time explains, "It is no
coincidence that the Rockefeller name keeps coming up.... The Rockefeller
family has played [a major role] in promoting and funding the agenda and
implementation of local and global environmental strategies."
During the EGA meeting Ross asked a very pointed
question; how are we, he asked, "who have no experience of ever
running a business, managing a business, or starting a business, gonna go
in and advise loggers who have no high school education and are making
$40,000 a year to convert to some other kind of economy in the middle of
the woods that is gonna produce $15,000 a year at best, and expect they're
gonna embrace it?" Picking up on this theme, another participant
recommended that environmental leaders should continue to take a hard-line
approach: "if it means shutting a plant down, or it means stopping a
pulp mill,... that's what has to happen.... There are local communities
that are going to go over the abyss in the short run.... It's gonna be
either a different kind of economy or its not gonna be there."
When another participant, obviously feeling guilty by
devastating peoples lives, asked if there might be a way of compensating
unemployed and displaced citizens in the destroyed communities, Bill
Devall of the IRA-HITI Foundation for Deep Ecology suggested, "I
think it's quite possible. It means taxing, taking back the enormous
profits that these corporations have reaped.... And that means in some
cases confiscating their assets." (Italics added for emphasis)
This incredible arrogance and hatred for their fellow
man was underpinned with a 10 year plan for the Northeast that was
explained by Chuck Clusen, a political strategist working for Laurence
Rockefeller's American Conservation Association. Clusen then defined the
goals of the plan. "In many ways this is a much more complex
situation [than we have ever tackled before] because of the private
ownership in total of eighty percent of these 26 million acres... There's
no way we are going to buy it all. We all know of the great interest in
the Forest Legacy Easement Program as well as traditional acquisition, but
these will only be part of the solution. There is a lot of thought and
work being done on how to take a forest industry that is dying, and make
it viable. How to make a working forest ecologically sound and sustainable
that is becoming less and less economic."
The claims of a dying forest industry devastating the
forest would have been news to the industry and state had they heard
Clusen and others speak at the meeting. The forest industry was relatively
healthy. Although that was about to change, the very thin profit margins
they worked with were not new--the companies had always operated with lean
pockets. The state had just gone through a distressing 10 years of a
cyclic attack of spruce budworm that had decimated the spruce and fir
inventory of the state. Only an aggressive plan by the forest products
industry of clearcutting the spruce-fir stands as they were first attacked
by the insect kept the damage from being far, far worse than it was
projected to be.
The EGA provided massive funding to the mainline and
smaller environmental groups like the Sierra Club, Wilderness Society,
Maine Audubon, the Maine Natural Resources Council and others to develop
on-the-ground-ideas. More importantly, these activist groups were the
shock troops to constantly agitate for more regulation and economically
prohibitive forestry practices they claimed would stop the horrendous
"clearcutting" of Maine's spruce-budworm ravaged forests. Never
mind the clearcutting is what saved the forest from even more budworm
damage. Clusen revealed that the "environmental community has come
together in a very large coalition called the Northern Forest Alliance
[comprising] 28 organizations.... I have been working with them the last
year and a half to not only develop the political strategies, but also to
facilitate their development of a campaign plan." In other words, the
well funded white knights had arrived to "save" the northern
forest.
Over the following 10 years a cacophony of proposals to
"fix" the horrific logging practices supposedly being practiced
in northern Maine were introduced. A host of public referendums were held
to impose draconian regulations on logging practices. While these failed,
the constant barrage of complaints by these environmental organizations,
mostly paid for by the EGA, caused Maine's opportunistic governor and
state legislature to pass some of the strictest, most economically
punitive harvesting laws in the nation--against all common sense and
prudence.
Naturally, the forest products industry took a nosedive.
Many of Maine's forest companies were bought and sold in a desperate
attempt to stay afloat. Many went under. Staff was laid off and corners
cut to cover the much increased operating costs caused by unneeded
environmental regulation forced on them by "enlightened"
environmental elitists who had a lot of money to spend in their misguided
efforts to make the forest "sustainable". The Pingree family,
many of whom idealistically supported the environmentalists efforts, saw
their annual dividends in the land progressively shrink. Seemingly out of
the blue, the environmentalists began promoting conservation easements as
a win-win solution.
Conservation easements
Conservation easements are promoted as a mechanism for
landowners to be paid to protect their land. In the case of the Pingree's
easement, they sold their development rights to the New England Forestry
Foundation in perpetuity for $28 million or a meager $37 an acre. While
they are free to do so, they in essence created a split estate in which
there are two owners deciding what can be done on the land. While they can
continue to log the forest they are prohibited from ever developing the
land, lakes or rivers for any other purpose other than forestry and open
space. In other words, for $28 million they denied all future generations
any options of what to do with the land.
Perhaps the most sinister part of the easement is the
language used in the restrictions
on conducting forestry activities on the land. For instance, they are
restricted to using management "practices that provide for a
sustained yield of timber products while recognizing that ecological,
aesthetic, wildlife, and other non-timber values are important components
of the forest." Even if the New England Forestry Foundation would
never do so now, it is a common practice for such organizations to be
taken over by zealots with an agenda, who will then take the family to
court because their harvesting practices are in some way not
"sustainable" or are harming the "ecological, aesthetic,
wildlife, and other non-timber values." Eventually, harvesting will
become so expensive as to be prohibitive, and to avoid having to pay
property taxes on worthless land, the future Pingree heirs will simply
have to deed the property over to the state or federal government.
Not surprisingly, the very same
foundations that funded the attack on the Northeast, contributed to
the New England Forestry Foundation to purchase the conservation easement
at a fraction of the land's true value. Near the top of the list was the
Rockefeller Brothers Fund, who contributed in excess of $500,000.
The plan from hell--create vast
tracts of wilderness to save Mother Earth
The long-term goal of the globalists and new age
environmentalists is to create a mystic wilderness where mother nature can
heal her perfect ecosystems. That means getting rid of the current owners
and then forcing the state and federal owners to stop all management and
use of the forest--just as they have done in the western states. This is,
of course, what the UN Convention on Biological Diversity is designed to
do. Northern Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and New York will become a vast
wilderness reserve. As incredible as it sounds, these environmentalists
actually demanded such a goal in the mid-1990s in what they called the
Wild Areas Campaign. Although that effort failed, through programs like
conservation easements the Northeast eventually will have about 50 percent
of its land base in wilderness reserves, just as dictated by the as yet
unratified United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity.
The globalist plan to lock up America is working
beautifully. It is so diabolical that it is difficult for most American's
to believe that their fellow human beings could be so evil. While many are
not evil, they nonetheless support this evil agenda. In 1990, Michael
Kellet, who was then New England director of the Wilderness Society, told
a Growth Management audience at Tufts University: "What we're really
talking about here is sustainability, sustaining planetary life support
systems and part of that is maintaining undisturbed ecosystems. I think
it's likely this [26 million acres] will all end up, most of this will end
up being public land, not by taking away, but that will probably be really
the only alternative."
Adding to Kellet's new age comments, Sandra Lewis of the
Tufts University Environmental Studies Program proclaimed, We're going to
have to think big because we've got some very big global things happening,
some effects that people feel may change the way we live very, very
dramatically.... I don't think it unreasonable to think about 26 million
acres as a possible reserve and furthermore, I think it may be an absolute
necessity to think in those terms for survival and for preservation of
biodiversity." Kellet and Lewis were basing their ideas on protecting
ecosystems on pantheistically-based, unproven theology that nature knows
best. Mother Earth is far more important than human beings.
Brock Evans, vice president of the National Audubon
Society said at the Tufts meeting: "I don't agree that we can't get
it all [the 26 million acres] back... I don't agree that it shouldn't all
be in the public domain. In fact I think it all should be in the public
domain... You might say I'm a twenty-five year veteran of the forest wars
in the northwest. It's the same kind of situation as here. We should get
all of it." He then said the Northern Forest effort "will be an
even bigger campaign in the next few years than the Ancient Forest
Campaign we're just going through right now in the Pacific
Northwest." Evans then set the tone for the next ten years: "Be
unreasonable. You can do it. Yesterday's heresy is today's common wisdom.
It happens over and over again... So I would say let's take it back, let's
take it all back." These eco-terrorists have indeed created a new
common wisdom and the Pingree family has bought it hook line and sinker.
Their easement is just one step in achieving their final goal--taking it
all back from people for nature.
We are witnessing the reemergence of pagan beliefs that
once dominated the world. Paul said in Romans 1:21-23, 25; "For
although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks
to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were
darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and
exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like
mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.... They exchanged the truth
of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the
Creator—who is forever praised. Amen." TOP
