THE WILDLANDS PROJECT - Wild-Eyed in the Wilderness

http://www.insightmag.com/news/2001/04/23/...ss-210931.shtml

THE WILDLANDS PROJECT - Wild-Eyed in the Wilderness

By John Elvin

Sure, life is wild in this country now, but you ain't seen nothin'
yet. With the support of major corporations, wealthy foundations,
environmentalist groups and friends in government, convicted
eco-terrorist Dave Foreman, a founder of the radical Earth First
"Monkey Wrench" gang of professed saboteurs, is mapping a new
"re-wilded" America that would be 50 percent "off-limits" to human
occupation. This huge portion of the re-wilded U.S. mainland would be
home to large carnivorous predators such as grizzly bears, jaguars,
panthers, pumas and packs of wolves.

Ridiculous? Most Americans would have said the same thing only a few
decades ago if told that every driver and passenger in a motor
vehicle would have to be harnessed in or that cigarettes would be
$3.50 a pack and harassed smokers would be huddled on sidewalks like
derelicts.

Foreman's self-proclaimed "baby," the Wildlands Project, is more than
a vision. It's more than a plan. It's an in-the-mill, happening thing.

The Wildlands Project (TWP) is "the most ambitious and far-reaching
attempt yet to reinvent the North American" continent according to
ecologically correct guidelines, says Matt Bennett of the Citizens
With Common Sense monitoring group. "Wildlands will be core reserves
of millions of acres connected by vast corridors following rivers and
other migratory paths from west to east, from Central America and
Mexico through the U.S. and Canada, using national forests and other
government lands."

Where government lands or trust lands owned by environmental groups
are unavailable, private property will be acquired by regulatory
decree or eminent domain. When you see a river, tract of land or
whole region designated as a U.S. Heritage site, U.N. Biosphere
Reserve, greenway, trail, path or some other special name conferred
by environmentalists and their legislative and bureaucratic allies,
"think Wildlands in the making," warns Bennett.

Designating these areas as environmentally unique provides a foot in
the door, "creating the impression that the area has some sort of
holiness, some sort of mystical significance and really should be
protected in a special way," says Carol LaGrasse, president of the
Property Rights Foundation of America. LaGrasse should know: She
lives in Stony Creek, N.Y., a rural hamlet in the heart of the
Adirondack Mountains ordained a U.N. Biosphere Reserve without so
much as local consultation. The spiritual aura that she sees implied
in these designations discourages normal human uses of the land such
as "modern home life, farming, forestry, mining, industry and
commerce," she tells Insight.

"Re-wilding" means that huge core areas in each region will be
returned to prehuman conditions, connected by large roadless and
unoccupied corridors maintained for migratory purposes. Extensive
buffer zones will separate the completely wild areas from enclaves
where humans may work and live. And that's just the beginning. The
wild cores would be expanded as the buffers become depopulated and
re-wilded.

Feeling a little claustrophobic? Well, you won't get any sympathy
from the Wildlanders. Telegraphing the united environmental front he
represents, project founder Foreman says: "All of us are warriors on
one side or another in this war; there are no sidelines, there are no
civilians."

Can this really be? You betcha! Activists involved in Wildlands
planning in Nevada, for instance, see all but Reno, Las Vegas, the
gold mines and the I-80 corridor as returned to nature. "I like the
idea of taking it all and making `people corridors,'" Marge Sill,
federal-lands coordinator for the Sierra Club, told High Country
News. "Move out the people and cars," says Foreman.

"No compromise" is another favored phrase, though Foreman and others
in his group have expressed the belief that their overall re-wilding
plans may not be fully realized for hundreds of years.

One reason to take the project seriously is the big money behind it.
Major foundations fund TWP and its affiliates. Ted Turner's
foundation has been a source of heavy funding, according to Ron
Arnold's book Undue Influence. Other major funding comes from large
donors, including the Pew Charitable Trusts and Patagonia outdoor
gear. Because Wildlands is the nerve center for so many connected,
cooperating regional groups, observers consider foundations providing
those groups with funds, such as the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation,
to be Wildlands supporters.

Turner is of special interest because, when it comes to property
rights, he has reason to be the country's most outspoken advocate.
The billionaire environmental crusader owns close to 2 million acres,
more than any other individual. Yet he not only funds TWP but appears
engaged personally in initiating it.

For one thing, his huge holdings - located in the Northwest,
Southwest, Midwest and South - are described as "a swath," indicating
that he is building his empire in cooperation with the corridor
concept. Conservation easements already are in place on several of
his largest properties. While Turner dismisses concern that his lands
will be given to the government as parks to be re-wilded, he told
Progressive Farmer magazine that he can't guarantee what will happen
in a hundred years. For now, the plan is for the Turner lands to go
to foundations and trusts.

TWP's broader strategy calls for using existing parks and land trusts
and acquiring the rest through methods some critics consider
stealthy. Foreman explained the concept to Derrick Jensen, author of
Listening to the Land, published by Sierra Club Books. "If we
identify, say, a private ranch in Montana that's between two
wilderness reserves, and we feel that 50 years from now it will be
necessary as a corridor for wolves to go from one area to another, we
can say to the rancher, `We don't want you to give up your ranch now.
But let us put a conservation easement on it. Let's work out the tax
details so you can donate it in your will to this reserve system.'
When it's needed for a corridor, it will be there."

Conservation easements can take various forms, the key being that
they essentially prohibit any kind of development. In some instances,
such as Foreman's example, the land may be used agriculturally for
the lifetime of the farmer or rancher, then become a conservation
area. Other arrangements simply prohibit future human use other than
farming or ranching, eliminating development value but keeping the
property private until some advocacy group or government agency sees
it as vital to the cause. Usually, the owner at least has to agree to
develop wildlife habitat on the private land, setting the stage to
call for further "preservation." All such easement arrangements are
subject to legal challenges by interested parties trying to upset the
agreement one way or another, be they heirs or conservation
organizations.

Bennett tells Insight that conservation easements are a major part of
the Wildlands plan. As he sees the process, it's almost diabolical.
Government, acting on behalf of environmental zealots, puts economic
pressure on rural communities through restrictions on logging,
ranching, mining and farming. "As the economic opportunities decline
to the point that it is impossible to make a living, a conservation
easement or even donation of land for some kind of tax credit may
make sense to a landowner," he says.

LaGrasse agrees. Speaking of those who convey title to land trusts,
she says landowners often believe - or often are led to believe -
that land will remain in agricultural use and will not fall into
government hands. "But land trusts acquire land mainly with the
specific purpose of reselling it to the government rather than
holding the title themselves to keep the land as a private preserve,"
she maintains. "And they often make fabulous profits when the land is
rolled over to the government."

Transactions monitored by her group included markups of 22 percent to
155 percent in sales of trust lands to government, with profits of as
much as $5 million. Critics say acquisitions of easements or
properties in their entireties promise to become a more common
practice with passage last year of a modified version of the
Conservation and Reinvestment Act (CARA). It created a huge federal
slush fund for park purchases and maintenance. With bipartisan
support in Congress and the backing of major environmental groups, a
full-fledged, fully funded CARA stands a good chance of getting
through this year.

Foreman has his own spin on property rights, which he is trying to
abrogate, attacking "so-called conservatives today who prattle on
about property rights without any sense of responsibility. With
rights come responsibilities and accountability." His is an umbrella
organization for more than 30 regional environmental groups that have
adopted his terms, polemics and goals as their own.

Because its headquarters is in Tucson, Ariz., many who are aware of
the Wildlands effort mistakenly believe it is limited to the West.
Instead, there are active groups and plans from Maine to Florida.

Allied covert operations with similar agendas shy away from direct
identification and talk in more vague and general terms of wilderness
preservation, forest-land protections or stewardship programs. "There
is a significant amount of synergy among various environmental groups
and the Wildlands Project," according to monitor Bennett. "Different,
and often independent, groups work on their own projects and in an
indirect way make TWP more likely."

Bennett, whose group maintains a Website at www.wildlandsproject.org,
calls TWP a "rethinking of science, politics, land use,
industrialization and civilization. It requires a new philosophical
and spiritual foundation for Western civilization." Bennett calls it
nature worship "on a mission from God or Gaia," the term used by New
Age eco-spiritualists for the living Earth or pagan Universal Mother
of the ancients.

Not surprisingly, Bennett's Website is, in turn, under attack by TWP.
A note at its site, www.twp.org, accuses Bennett of using "scare
tactics in an attempt to create unwarranted public fear about TWP's
proposals" through display of "altered maps, quotes taken out of
context and false information." Foreman's group says it is "exploring
legal options as a remedy for the confusion and fear being spread" by
Citizens With Common Sense.

Lucky for Bennett and his group that Foreman has mellowed since his
arrest on charges of plotting to sabotage several nuclear facilities
in the West by downing power lines serving the plants. He pleaded
guilty to federal conspiracy charges and received a suspended
sentence. Involved since 1971 in radical efforts to reduce population
and restructure the approach of Western civilization to technology,
ideology and economics, Foreman was for many years the chief
Washington lobbyist for the Wilderness Society.

After six years with Earth First, he says, he became disenchanted
with its "hippie, countercultural" image. The real nature of the
split seems to have been between left-wing activists who include
"social justice" in their ecological agenda and those such as Foreman
who just want to "re-wild" the planet. Not only is the Foreman
contingent little concerned about humanity's woes, but its attitude
is the less humans the better. Foreman says he sees "eating,
manufacturing, traveling, warring and breeding" by humans as causes
of "the greatest crisis in 4 billion years of life on Earth."

Today, Foreman calls those who practice the eco-terror tactics he
once espoused "idiots." He says he's "never been a liberal or a
leftist, which makes a lot of my friends in the conservation movement
unhappy." He describes himself as a registered Republican and
"redneck," a great-great-grandson of New Mexico homesteaders. His
opposition to immigration - an outgrowth of his desire to limit
population growth - also is a cause of friction with those on the
left.

But this man is a member of the board of directors of the Sierra
Club, the most influential left-wing environmental group in the
country. It was Foreman who led it to endorse replacing the 50 states
with 21 "bio-regions." But the actual "how-to" for that particular
scheme is presented as the work of TWP cofounder Reed Noss, a
conservation biologist.

The plan is complex, requiring a hefty 50-page document to present,
but it stems from belief that the current "parks" system to protect
nature for scenic and recreational purposes doesn't work. Because the
parks are "islands" remote from each other and are used by humans,
many types of wildlife are doomed to extinction, Noss explains. What
is needed is "connectivity." To have the connectivity vital to
migrating species, particularly large carnivores, many other types of
land "from the highest to the lowest elevations, the driest to the
wettest sites, and across all types of soils, substrates and
topoclimates" will have to be linked to the parks.

The way to do this is through creation of bio-regions or eco-regions
for planning purposes. The regions also have psychological value in
selling the idea to locals because they "often inspire feelings of
belonging and protectiveness in their more enlightened human
inhabitants." Each of the regions would have large reserve areas
restored to a primitive state, providing "connectivity" to other
regions for the benefit of migrating wildlife.

The fact that many of these regions now lack huge swaths of primitive
land suitable for wildlife migration gets to re-wilding - the core
mission of the project. Noss advises activists to get busy now
mapping local areas, with cornfields and parking lots of less
interest than "roaded landscapes that are relatively undeveloped and
restorable, especially when adjacent to or near roadless areas." It's
that kind of thinking that makes rural-property holders more than a
little nervous.

Having identified where corridors will exist in their areas,
activists following Noss' plan identify obstacles ahead. These
include private property to be acquired, "land and mineral-rights
acquisitions, road closures, road modifications, cancellations of
grazing leases and timber sales, tree planting, dam removals, stream
dechannelization and other restoration projects."

One question that comes to mind is how these grizzlies, panthers and
wolves will know to stay within their reserves and corridors. But
that's really no big problem, TWP statements assure us: "People can
coexist with wolves, bears and other wildlife, just as they have for
thousands of years in many parts of the world, including North
America. In most cases, humans can easily learn to safely coexist
with wildlife by making minimal lifestyle changes."
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For additional information, check out these web sites:

http://www.wildlandsproject.org - an informative site by Matt Bennett
revealing the dark side of the Wildlands Project.

http://www.twp.org/ - the site of the Wildlands Project.

For the past 12 years, state and federal land managers have dismissed
The Wildlands Project as a myth while writing key elements of The
Wildlands Project into management plans.

Today, you will find key elements of TWP in legislation, legal
decisions, and administrative actions at al levels of government in
the form of conservation easements, multiple species habitat
conservation plans, critical habitat designation and proposed
wilderness areas.

It is more than loss of access to a recreation route. It is
restrictions that limit fire prevention measures around your home.
It is restrictions that levy increased costs on businesses. It is
lawsuits filed to stop timber salvage operations.