The National Federation of Republican Assembles, which calls itself the Republican Wing of the Republican Party, is happily reporting that the Republican National Committee has adopted a resolution opposing Agenda 21. For some reason, the RNC is keeping its unanimous approval of this resolution secret, but NFRA wants it presented to the world.

The right wing has thunked up in Agenda 21 a conspiracy that will deprive us of all our rights, starting with the most fundamental right: the right to use the land we own in any damn way we please to use it.

This conspiracy is usually written Agenda 21 (ICLEI). ICLEI is an acronym, 'International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives'. The preferred name now seems to include that dreaded s-word: ICLEI: Local Governments for Sustainability. It is composed of municipal governments, some of which have been working effectively on such issues as carbon dioxide emissions while national governments have dithered, lied, or betrayed their people.

In 1992 the United Nations convened the "Rio Summit," formally known as the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). There were hopes that the United States would fully participate, even leading the nations to agreements to reduce extinctions of all kinds of species, lower greenhouse gas emissions, reduce deforestation and desertification, reduce the draining of wetlands, and a variety of other environmental objectives. We should have known this would not appeal to President George H. W. Bush. Rio did result in the Framework Convention on Climate Change, which binds no nation to do any specific thing (the Kyoto Protocol was the doomed offshoot of the Framework Convention; it did try to set targets). Rio also produced the Convention on Biological Diversity, a rather toothless attempt to stop today's extinctions -- the most rapid extinction rate ever observed, except for the mass extinctions that may have been associated with asteroid impacts and/or volcanic activity. The U.S. has not ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity.

Agenda 21 set a goal that humans would make better use of the earth when establishing our settlements upon it. Perhaps the Generals' abomination called Brasilia would not be repeated -- no more human settlements in fragile environments. The plan to undertake population redistribution so as to live more in accord with the earth's resources could be read by those so inclined as a plan to reduce the rate of growth of the human population (the size of the human population has tripled in my lifetime). Perhaps that is the reason why the Vatican has also not ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity.

To many of us, Rio was a great disappointment. All that had actually happened was that an agenda had been set to have future meetings, which might also accomplish nothing. The more optimistic see bits of evidence of improvements, but then comes such startling news as that Canada has reversed its decline of CO₂ emissions, now rising the fastest of any G8 nation.

To the right wing of recent years, Agenda 21 (ICLEI) is the Devil's own work Famously, it has been conflated with others' calls for reductions in the size of the human population. The most famous of these was the Ehrlich's 1968 call for population reduction, repeated in 1990 in The Population Explosion. The latter book credits Paul Ehrlich's wife Anne, as she should have been credited in 1968. The Ehrlich's 1968 The Population Bomb described all the means by which populations had been reduced or could be reduced, including methods that almost anyone would find morally repugnant. Introducing sterilizing or contraceptive agents into the water and food supply got some attention when John Holdren was chosen as Science Advisor; John was a co-author with the Ehrlichs of Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions.

Much of the right wing's conspiracy thinking is guided by fears and lies about vaccines, chemtrails, fluoride in the water supply, chemicals in the food supply, HAARP and the earthquakes and severe weather that it causes, and other things thought to lead to reduction of the human population. I personally favor getting back to where it was about 1940 (2.3 billion), but there is nothing magic about that number. In fact, we had begun our gravest depredations of the earth well before the Industrial Revolution, when we were only about one billion people. Plato saw this coming in Critias. Malthus correctly warned that someday we would enter the Malthusian Gate, out of which we would emerge greatly diminished.

Some see the Georgia Guidestones as setting the real target: "MAINTAIN HUMANITY UNDER 500,000,000 IN PERPETUAL BALANCE WITH NATURE." A few people, loaded with extra nutz in the brainpan, claim that we are being farmed by alien beings, who after eating us will colonize the planet.

The interesting thing is, of course, that the RWNJ focused on the single most important key to sustaining human life on earth in anything remotely resembling decency and health: we do not have the right to use the land we own in any damn way we please to use it. Alberta does not have the right to destroy the boreal forest in an area the size of England in its quest for fossil fuel riches. BP does not have the right to drill dangerous wells beneath what was once one of the most complex ecosystems on the planet. Gas companies do not have the right to inject vast quantities of fluid of unknown composition deep into the earth. The U.S. does not have the right to dump both carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at the rate of thousands of tons per day. Russia does not have the right to spew tons of methane into the atmosphere every day from its leaky pipe system.

We have to learn to live peaceably upon the land.

Who denies us the right to do anything that we please? The Laws of Nature and of Nature's God deny that non-existent "right." Unless we change, what we do today will be cursed by those who follow us, who will look back upon us as foolish and wasteful exploiters of the wealth of this planet. That is, if any humans are still around to look back and curse us.

That drives the right wing wild.

I've sure you've all seen, but had to post it.

Or, as W4 referred us to,

I wonder if Orly had a hand in creating this meme? Someone sent her an article on a Republican resolution in OK(I think) which she splashed with a headline that it was an RNC resolution. She also has FMs in the California Republican Assembly

I tend to share Carlin's opinion. While I suppose I consider myself an environmentalist and do think species should be preserved at least where we are actively destroying them, I think environmentalism is doomed as long as it is perceived as some altruistic wishy-washy bullshit done by well-meaning but ultimately stupid hippies.

Even if humans enacted our own worst case scenario, which I think likely, involving first exhausting our fossil fuels without developing alternate energy sources, wrecking our climate so that we can't grow enough food and there is a global famine and an energy crisis, then nuking ourselves off the face of the earth in a squabble over the few remaining resources, that would be no big deal. Even the half-life of plutonium isn't that long in geological time.

The resulting environment might be fatal for us, but to whatever survived, it would be ideal.

I have sometimes thought the "purpose" of humans, if there is one, is to serve as a bad example for whatever comes after us.

A current example of RWNJ paranoia about "Agenda 21 (ICLEI):"

News With Views January 21, 2012 AGENDA 21: THE END OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION PART 1 by Kathleen Marquardt



* Maurice Strong and Al Gore are the villains in this conspiracy theory.

Benjamin Fulford -- the fellow with such extraordinary ties to the ancient Chinese and Japanese dragon societies that control all the world's wealth, and with some prior responsibilities for Forbes -- has identified the New System's (New World Order's) agenda:

Fulford's weekly newsletter contains a list of goals for the New System that sound very Agenda 21 to me

This is not how I read Agenda 21, which is rather prosaic. However, two of the goals listed by Fulford caught my eye:

I'm not sure that I know how to do that (5), and I am concerned about who will teach readin', writin', and 'rithmetic if K-12 schools are teaching life skills (4).

You don't need no steenkin' 3Rs if you're in partnership with nature.

What happened to the other 20 agendas?

We'll never know. The Illuminati have produced one for each century (probably more than 20 of them) in addition to the first public one, Agenda 21.

Lest you doubt that Agenda 21 is a Illuminati plot, I can provide plenty of Orlylaw evidence in which I authenticated something on the screen that said Agenda 21 was Illuminati. I think Shurf Mack spoke to this as well.

Agendas -30 through -5 or so were almost entirely devoted to control of the Tigris, Euphrates, Nile (Upper and Lower), and Yangtze river flood plains.

Agenda -137 included a sternly worded protocol about the trash left in the Bering Strait by migrating Siberians.

What Agenda did they start with?

We're gonna have to ask Sterny.

It's turtles all the way down.

Agenda 14/Americas edition was one of those that went badly wrong. The instructions were very clear: set up a Border Patrol and an Immigration and Naturalization Service, or your lands will be filled with illegal aliens.

Principle 12 of the Earth Charter -- a product of the Agenda 21 UN program so vilified by the right wing -- holds:


The Guardian April 21, 2012 'They're killing us': world's most endangered tribe cries for help

Undercover video

There was a resolution introduced in the Georgia General Assembly this past session to "recognize the destructive and insidious nature of the United Nations Agenda 21, endorse rejection of its radical policies and of any grant monies attached to it, and recommend exposing to the public and public policymakers the dangerous intent of the plan." Senate version was SR730. There was a house verson, too. Both died in committee.

I think a similar resolution was introduced in Tennessee.

GA Gen Assembly SR 730

Met my parents for dinner this weekend (had a lovely time) and they told us about a community meeting that was held up in northern Upper Michigan (where they live) to share information and get feedback about a proposed "Geo Park" for some part of the region -- the region in question being Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula, an area of stunning natural beauty.

My parents hadn't been able to attend the meeting, but they heard afterwards that a group of Tea Party members rather incivilly took the meeting over, shouting down everyone else, preventing calm questions from being asked and answered, and agitating about "something called Agenda 21?" My dad seemed baffled. Listeme and I nodded knowingly.

Now, I have no idea whether Geo Park status is the right idea for the proposal at hand -- though I feel that anything that would tend to protect and nurture areas like that is good thing, not least for tourism and the economy (the economy up there is in the toilet) -- but WTF? Agenda 21?

And now *I'm* almost paranoid enough to wonder if they were organized by -- or at least encouraged by -- the local timber interests

Arizona - leading the way.



And the sponsor of the bill? Sen. Judy Burges, R-Sun City West, who sponsored last year's birther bill.

Anti-Agenda 21 bill

Add a title before the URL followed by a comma; no spaces.

Thusly.

Reich-wingers have good reason to fear the Earth Charter. It contains those dangerous words "justice," "universal," "dignity," and "responsibility." It ends with a ringing hope that attacks all that the Reich-wing stands for:

I do recommend reading the Earth Charter. It is revolutionary and idealistic, but its premise is simply true:




For more from that era, visit the Hoffman Family Archives at the University of Connecticut.

-- Sterngard Friegen

Lord Monckton speaks to the recent Rio conference, proclaiming that "the environment is no longer cool." He provides a spy's report from the ICLEI pre-conference meeting, conveying a wealth of lies.