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- The Loss of Our Republican Form of Government
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- ©January, 1998, Environmental Perspectives, Inc. (207)
945-9878
The American Heritage Rivers (AHRI)
and the Clean Water (CWI)
initiatives are a direct product of Agenda 21 and the
President's Council on Sustainable Development (PCSD).
Signed by the US during the Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro in 1992, Agenda 21 is
nothing less than a 40-chapter manifesto to reorganize the world to protect earth using
pure socialist principles. The goals and objectives of Agenda 21 were developed
into a US strategy by the PCSD and published in a report entitled Sustainable America
in 1996.
A Fundamental Shift in the Meaning of Government
Both Agenda 21
and Sustainable America represent a major fundamental change in the role of government in social
and land-use policy. Under the concept of sustainability, no longer is the primary purpose
of government to serve the people. Rather, the focus of Agenda 21 and Sustainable
America is to protect nature from people.
Both the PCSD and the Rivers initiative call for individuals, communities, and
institutions to work individually and collaboratively as non-elected "partners"
and "stakeholders" within a heritage framework based on "natural systems
such as a watersheds."
All land-use programs instituted by President Clinton during his administration follow
the strategy laid out by the PCSD and Agenda 21. An August,
1993, Internal Working Document of the EPA for Ecosystem Management asserts that
"Natural resource and environmental agencies ...should...develop a joint strategy to
help the United States fulfill its existing international obligations (e.g. Convention on
Biological Diversity, Agenda 21).... The executive branch should direct federal agencies
to evaluate national policies...in light of international policies and obligations, and to
amend national policies to achieve international objectives." In this context, the
EPA document also calls for making "ecosystem protection a primary goal of the
Agency, on a par with human health."
As called for in the EPA document, the AHRI and CWI amends current environmental law
to fit the goals and strategies of Agenda 21 and the biodiversity treaty.
Supporting documentation of the biodiversity treaty call for setting aside up to one-half
of America into totally protected wilderness reserves which would be interconnected by wilderness corridors up to 30 miles
wide--primarily along river corridors! This raises the ugly specter of whether the AHRI
and CWI's are but the first step in establishing federal land-use control in and along our
nations rivers in order to eventually implement the Biodiversity treaty without
ratification.
Magnitude
Executive Order 13061, which
authorizes the AHRI, mandates
that executive agencies "coordinate Federal plans, functions, programs, and resources
to preserve, protect and restore rivers and their associated resources
important to our history, culture, and natural heritage." Supporting documentation in
the Federal Register makes it clear that the federal focus is on preserving and restoring
the river, rather than the cultural heritage of the communities along the river. Fourteen
AHR were designated by President Clinton on July 30, 1998.
Likewise, the CWI (Federal
Register: 11/7/97 (Volume 62, Number 216) calls for setting aside "2 million
miles of buffer strips protecting waters from agricultural runoff by the year
2002." A 100 foot buffer strip along 2 million miles equals 76,000 square miles (48
million acres), a size equivalent to the entire state of Nebraska or South Dakota! To
illustrate the magnitude of this effort, there are 3.5 million miles of rivers and streams
in the entire U.S.
The CWI also makes it clear that entire watersheds are likely to be impacted by a
designation of just a portion of it as an AHR. Since watersheds can cross many state
lines, federal planning will take in enormous portions of the U.S. landscape. The
US Geological Service (USGS) has divided the contiguous U.S. into 18 watershed basins or
regions, including six within the Mississippi River basin alone. These eighteen basins are
further subdivided into 2100 individual watersheds (see map). One thousand of
these watersheds will be targeted by 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."
Since the plan for each watershed must fit within the federal plan for the
entire basin or region, if a portion of the lower Missouri River is designated as an
AHR,
or selected as one of the 1,000 watersheds in the CWI, it could theoretically impact over
13 million people living in the states of Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska,
North and South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana included in the Missouri River Basin! Even
worse, if the entire Mississippi River Basin is included, 41 percent of the entire United
States would be included as shown in the map above!
A Subversion of the U.S. Constitution
Promoted as a plan to "reinvent government", the AHRI and CWI's 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." It
can include anyone or anything from private citizens to businesses and NGOs
(Non-Governmental Organizations like the Sierra Club) to local and state government
agencies. They are self-appointed, not elected.
The Rivers initiative totally subverts the Constitutional guarantee of a republican
form of government where the real "river communities" are the incorporated
towns, villages, and counties within each state. The respective governments of each level
of community are accountable to the people they govern through the election process. Not
so these stakeholder councils or partnerships mandated by both the AHRI and CWI. A River
Community within the AHRI could theoretically be made up of nothing more than radical
environmental NGOs and 'save nature at any cost' state bureaucrats.
Elected local governments no longer decide what is best for their community. Instead,
they are relegated to a minority role in a team of "partners" or
"stakeholders" dominated by non-elected special interests who come to the table
with personal agendas that are not usually in the best interests of the community. Since
team decisions will be made by consensus using the Delphi process, problems will usually
be defined in a manner that leads to predetermined protectionist solutions.
If a community flexes too much independence and develops a plan that runs contrary to
the wishes of the federal bureaucracy, the AHRI has yet another tool to
discipline the recalcitrant government --an appointed "River Navigator." The
River Navigator is supposed to function as a single liaison for all federal resources to
work with a designated "River Community," thereby simplifying the delivery of
federal programs and monies. But there are no checks and balances to ensure that the
Navigator works for rather than against the communities. The Navigator
has awesome powers to thwart communities that don't toe the federal line, while rewarding
those that do.
The belief that these initiatives are not yet another federal land-use control
mechanism is an illusion. They are merely old socialist dogma with fresh paint.
-- Michael S. Coffman, Ph.D.
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