And Strong, unfortunately, is closer to the mark than you. That’s because of all the dramatis personae in our story – more so than James Hansen, Rajendra Pachauri, Crispin Tickell, Bert Bolin and perhaps even Al Gore – Strong is the man most responsible for turning the green agenda into world-changing reality.
Maurice Strong was born in 1929 in Canada during the Great Depression, into a family with strong socialist leanings. His cousin Anna Louise was a Marxist and a member of the Comintern who spent two years in China with Mao and Chou En-Lai at the height of the Cultural Revolution. Her burial in China in 1970 was supervised personally by Chou En-lai. This family connection is partly why Strong enjoys such a close relationship with the current Chinese regime. It was to China that Strong scurried after being implicated in Saddam Hussein’s ‘oil for food’ scandal. He now advises the Chinese government on climate change and carbon trading.
Young Maurice left home at fourteen and quickly discovered he had two great gifts – the first for making money (variously as a fur trader, investment analyst, oil company VP, cattle rancher, landowner and, most recently, as a carbon trader, all of which have contributed to his enormous personal wealth) and the second for social networking (before the days of Facebook), especially within the orbit of the United Nations, where he first worked in 1947 in New York as a lowly assistant pass officer in the Identification Unit of the Security Section.
Strong’s main interest, however, was – and has been for many years – the idea of global governance by a self-appointed elite. He spotted early on that quite the best way to achieve this was by manipulating and exploiting international concern about the environment. As he once put it: ‘Our concept of ballot-box democracy may need to be modified to produce strong governments capable of making difficult decisions, particularly in terms of safeguarding the global environment.’
Though it was the Club of Rome that invented the weasel concept of ‘sustainability’, it was Maurice Strong who made it real. As early as 1972, he chaired the first UN Conference on the Human Environment, which in turn led to his appointment as first director of the new UNEP. In 1983, he was handpicked by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to serve as a key member on the ‘World Commission on Environment and Development’. The Brundtland Commission (as it became better known, after its chairwoman former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland) produced a report called Our Common Future. Its central theme will no doubt be familiar:
Sustainable global development requires that those who are more affluent adopt life-styles within the planet’s ecological means – in their use of energy, for example. Further, rapidly growing populations can increase the pressure on resources and slow any rise in living standards; thus sustainable development can only be pursued if population size and growth are in harmony with the changing productive potential of the ecosystem.
The idea that began a decade earlier as a twinkle in the eyes of Alexander King and Aurelio Peccei had finally been made flesh. Few were capable of spotting at this stage that this oh-so-nice-looking, bonnie, bouncing, gurgling babe had a birthmark on its scalp that read ‘666’. But they might have got an inkling from the next paragraph: ‘We do not pretend that the process is easy or straightforward. Painful choices have to be made.’
To find out how painful, the world would have to wait till Strong’s report at the May 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. This was Strong’s finest hour: the culmination of twenty years’ manoeuvring and positioning. Here, at last, he had gained sufficient clout to be able to persuade 179 nations to surrender their sovereignty by signing up to perhaps the most far-reaching and constrictive code of environmentally correct practice in the history of the world: a document known as Agenda 21.
Taken at face value, though, Agenda 21 is innocuous to the point of dullness – as you can tell from the first paragraph:
1.1 Humanity stands at a defining moment in history. We are confronted with a perpetuation of disparities between and within nations, a worsening of poverty, hunger, ill health and illiteracy, and the continuing deterioration of the ecosystems on which we depend for our well-being. However, integration of environment and development concerns and greater attention to them will lead to the fulfilment of basic needs, improved living standards for all, better protected and managed ecosystems and a safer, more prosperous future. No nation can achieve this on its own; but together we can – in a global partnership for sustainable development.
All sounds jolly agreeable. What kind of killjoy would you have to be not to want ‘improved living standards for all’, ‘better protected … ecosystems’ and a ‘more prosperous future’? But then you reach that phrase ‘global partnership for sustainable development’ and your antennae might just start to quiver. Would that be a polite way of saying ‘One World eco-Fascist government’?
It most surely would. Agenda 21 effectively puts an end to national sovereignty, abolishes private property, elevates Nature above man, and places a host of restrictions on what we’ve come to accept as our most basic freedoms – everything from how, when and where we travel to what we eat.
This is what Strong presumably meant in that chilling UN report about ‘unsustainable’ lifestyles. In the bright new future envisioned by Agenda 21, your behaviour will be determined by the diktats of an enlightened elite over which you have absolutely no democratic control. Strong knows some of you might not like it. But if a world government dictatorship is the price we all must pay for saving our planet, then that is what needs to happen. As he admits:
The concept of national sovereignty has been an immutable, indeed sacred, principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation. It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation states, however powerful. The global community must be assured of environmental security.
OK – you get the idea. Except some of you still aren’t convinced, because you’re thinking:
a) Agenda 21 sounds way too much like Area 51, the place where ‘They’ keep the bodies of the ‘Aliens’ they found after the ‘Roswell Incident’ in New Mexico, and must consequently be another of those conspiracies only nut jobs believe in. Or,
b) that if a document signed as long ago as 1992 really were that much of a problem, you’d definitely have heard of it by now. Or,
c) that no sovereign nation, no matter how many free caipirinhas its representatives downed at the Rio shindig, would have been mad enough to commit itself to such a stringent and binding international treaty … so I must therefore be exaggerating.
Well, I quite agree with you about a): Agenda 21 does indeed sound so villainous it couldn’t possibly be for real, but this is just an accidental by-product of bureaucratic literalism. Its name originated simply because it represented an ‘agenda’ for the twenty-first century. As for b) yes, I’m with you again. It is astonishing how little coverage has been granted to a document right up there in significance with the Declaration of Independence and Magna Carta (though with exactly the opposite effects).
And on c) what you must realise is that Agenda 21 is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The reason governments found it easy enough to sign is because it contains no legally binding obligations. But then, it doesn’t need to, for its apparently voluntary codes can be enforced – and are regularly scrupulously enforced – via a mechanism over which sovereign governments have little control anyway: the vast, labyrinthine, democratically unaccountable behemoth that is the United Nations.
One of the great mistakes many of us make with the dear old UN is to view it as an utter shambles of corruption, venality, muddled thinking, needless waste, political correctness and monumental incompetence. In our minds, it’s an institution so ineffectual that its blue-helmets could do nothing to stop all those hapless Bosnians being massacred under their noses at Srebrenica. It’s so wrong-headed that two of the member states on its Human Rights Commission are Libya and
Sudan.
While this analysis is entirely fair and justified, it often leads to the misleading conclusion that the UN is nothing more than a glorified and highly expensive talking shop designed mainly to give Third World kleptocracies, obscure island states, Islamo-fascistic dictatorships and banana republics a slightly smaller sense of grievance and inferiority.
But that’s just the bickering, self-defeating apparatus of the UN General Assembly. There’s another, much larger and more extended part of the UN that is considerably more effective and directed, and a lot more dangerous. It comprises bodies such as the Economic Commission of Europe (ECE) – a green activist wing of the UN that uses its $30m annual budget to campaign for ‘rational use of resources and sustainable development’; as well as the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the UNEP – which between them were responsible for setting up the IPCC.
We have to be careful here. The danger is that, exposed to all these initialled UN offshoots, your eyes will glaze over and you’ll drift into complacent indifference. But this, of course, is another of the UN’s secret weapons, just as it is one of the European Union’s. Either you’re committed to the project, fully cognisant of and sympathetic to its aims, or you’re so far removed from it that the whole damned thing might just as well not exist. In this way does the UN spread its tentacles, grabbing ever more power for itself and ever more control over your daily life – until by the time you become aware of what it’s doing, you’ve left it far too late to stop it.
To give you a rough idea of the UN’s spread, a 2004 UNEP study estimated that the UN system had over the years initiated 60,000 environment-related projects. Over a dozen UN agencies have their own environmental operations. Then there’s the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), a large umbrella group prioritising science and renewable energy, responsible for subgroups including the Committee for Sustainable Development (CSD). The CSD, in turn, meets annually to monitor the efficacy with which member states are implementing – yes – Agenda 21.
But really it doesn’t need to, for the apparently ‘voluntary’ codes are enforced in such a way as to pass unnoticed by those outside the system. Those within the system include politicians, European Union and UN technocrats, green activists and environmental NGOs. Those outside the system are people like you and me. We don’t know how Agenda 21 works because we are not meant to know.
This becomes clear in a 1998 UN discussion document, ‘The Future of Local Agenda 21 in the New Millennium’. Here, a man called Gary Lawrence (former director of the Center for Sustainable Communities at the University of Washington, chief planner in the city of Seattle, and an advisor to the President’s Council on Sustainable Development) outlines how best to outfox all those dangerous liberty-lovers who might seek to frustrate the noble work of the United Nations:
Participating in a UN-advocated planning process would very likely bring out many of the conspiracy-fixated groups and individuals in our society such as the National Rifle Association, citizen militias and some members of Congress. This segment of our society who fear ‘one-world government’ and a UN invasion of the United States through which our individual freedom would be stripped away would actively work to defeat any elected official who joined ‘the conspiracy’ by undertaking LA21. So, we call our process something else, such as comprehensive planning, growth management, or smart growth.
Note that Lawrence doesn’t even try to deny the anti-democratic nature of this ‘UN-advocated planning process’. His sole concern is how best to slip this One-World Government agenda under the radar of any pesky concerned citizens. And the best way, he suggests, is through lies, deception and a form of Orwellian Newspeak in which once-innocent words are subverted to promote the controlling agenda of the left.
That phrase ‘smart growth’ is a good example. You hear ‘smart’ employed in its new meaning quite often by environmental propagandists and technocrats these days, as for example, in an interview on BBC Radio 4 in March 2011 with Steve Holliday, chief executive of Britain’s electricity connecting network, the National Grid. ‘The grid is going to be a very different system in 2020, 2030. We keep thinking that we want it to be there and provide power when we need it. It is going to be much smarter than that. We are going to change our own behaviour and consume it when it is available and available cheaply.’
Traditionally ‘smarter’ has tended to mean positive things like ‘more intelligent’, ‘better designed’, ‘sharper’ or ‘quicker’. But not in this context. ‘The time when consumers were free to use electricity whenever they wanted is coming to an end,’ Holliday is basically saying. ‘Now we must prepare ourselves for a new golden age of environmental righteousness, when power is rationed according to the whim of Big Brother.’
I hope you’re as dismayed as I am by the extraordinary contempt being shown here for the consumer. This guy is supposed to be an enabler: the corporate CEO whose job it is to make sure that customers get all the electricity they want whenever they want it. Yet now he seems to think his primary function is not to serve consumers but thwart their desires, to act as a cross between a behavioural policeman and the Soviet commissar in charge of rationing during the next (state-induced) famine. How on Earth did we get here?
Well, what you have to remember is that it’s now two decades since Agenda 21 was launched in Rio, three decades since the Bruntland commission advanced the concept of ‘sustainability’, and four decades since the Club of Rome invented it: more than enough time for those who believe in the Project to act, in true Gramsciite fashion, to infiltrate and take over the system.
Agenda 21 is enforced mainly at the local government level. Here is how it works:
1. Local environmental activists create a Local Agenda 21 (LA21) lobby group. Spouting the mantra ‘Think Global, Act Local’, they urge their town/city/district council to sign up to the ‘voluntary’ code of Agenda 21.
2. Often the council agrees, encouraged from within by the kind of ‘watermelons’ who tend to be drawn to careers in ‘public service’. Around the world, 1,200 districts have signed up – from Finland to Zimbabwe (whose starving, tyrannised people, you might think, have more immediate pressing concerns than, say, introducing a low-carbon, sustainable transport system or greater gender equality in the workplace).
The biggest take-up has been in the US, where over 600 districts have signed up. And not just the usual suspects, like Berkeley, California, but even places in traditionally conservative states such as Dallas, Texas.
3. The local government signatory is welcomed to the fold of ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, the UN-funded pressure group responsible for promoting Agenda 21. (It was founded as the ‘International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives’ but changed its mission and name in 2003.) ICLEI bestows accolades on the local government – such as its ‘Star Community Index’ rating – for its efforts in advancing the valuable cause of sustainability. In turn, the local government entity can then boast about its achievements in publicity handouts, showing voters how sensitive and caring it is. These ratings also make it far more likely that the local council will receive grants and/or other financial inducements from any number of UN-, EU- or federal and state government-sponsored initiatives.
4. In return for attaining this shiny new green status symbol, the local council feels honour-bound to promote the ‘sustainability’ agenda it has committed to (at least on its website). This can take myriad forms: converting public transportation from diesel to biofuels (thereby subsidising corn growers, making food more expensive, and increasing emissions to the environment); issuing fines for incorrect recycling; penalising drivers of 4x4 vehicles with higher parking permit charges; and greater restrictions on car use generally. In the US its effects are felt especially through town planning. Zoning regulations are changed to encourage ‘high-density’ housing in town centres and to prevent suburban development on farmland.
5. And there a
in’t nothing you can do about it.
It’s the last part that makes Agenda 21 so scary, of course: the utter lack of democratic accountability. It’s a little like returning home after a long holiday to your local church. You discover that it has been decorated with pentacles and that the vicar is now wearing a black cloak and preparing to sacrifice a goat where the altar used to be.
‘What’s going on?’ you ask, in horror. ‘Well, it’s what we all agreed on,’ says the vicar. ‘When did we agree to all this? No one asked me!’ ‘We put a message on the notice board. We held consultation meetings for anyone who was interested. Did you not get a call from young Damien, on our steering committee? The general feeling was that Christian worship was too old-fashioned, patriarchal and Western for our younger members, and that Satanism was a more vibrant, diverse and inclusive way forward for the community.’
‘But I want the old church back. I liked the old church!’
‘I’d love to help but I’m afraid it’s out of my hands. You see, as a signatory of Agenda 666 this church is now statutorily committed to our new code of practice…’
Welcome to the passive-aggressive world of global watermelons – socialism hiding behind the guise of environmentalism. If you disagree with the ‘consensus’ pushed through by the watermelons, tough. It serves you right for being such a freak.
And of course, this is why beneath their smiling, nurturing, consensual façade, the watermelons represent such a ruthless totalitarian outlook. All those zoning regulations, for example, and wildlife corridors – they may appear to be sensible gestures. But what about the interests of the farmers whose land they steal? What about all the property owners whose investment values fall and whose rights are undermined and/or stolen?
Watermelons: How Environmentalists Are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children's Future Page 18