In part 1 of this two-part series, I promised I would give more details about Bill Clinton’s Forest Conference (Forest Summit) that took place in Portland, Oregon in 1993, and the events that decided the fate of western lands and forests. Al Gore also chaired the conference.
Al Gore: the Green Giant
You remember Al Gore? He’s the guy who said, in 1992, that we are on the verge of ecological collapse because we have tilted so far toward individual rights. His fellow eco-warrior, Donald Worster, an environmental historian, wrote that we need a revised Constitution, because a stable society in equilibrium with the processes of nature cannot allow much freedom or self-assertiveness to the individual. Gore promised the American people that the Clinton-Gore administration would “reinvent government.”
Gore pumped up public panic regarding imminent destruction of the earth in his book, Earth in the Balance. He attended the Rio Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. In June of that year, Bill Clinton signed the Convention on Biological Diversity treaty which had been presented at the Rio Earth Summit. According to Brian Sussman, in his book, Eco-Tyranny, Gore was cut loose to implement the United Nations’ Agenda 21 in the United States.
Origins of the Consensus-Building Model of Government
In 1993, when Clinton and Gore chaired the Forest Summit, they trotted out the Forest Ecosystem Management Assessment Team (FEMAT), which was tasked to find an ecosystems solution to the conflict between environmentalists and Wise Use advocates. Given Gore’s statements and Clinton’s actions, it is no surprise that the White House packed the FEMAT team with true believers in the sort of scientific conclusions favored by Clinton and Gore, that is, an ecosystems management approach. There were many scientists who did not come to the same desired conclusions, but they were cut out of the debate, despite their expertise.
One scientist who was invited to be part of Clinton and Gore’s team was Robert G. Lee, both a forester and a sociologist. Lee resigned from the FEMAT team for two reasons: he saw that science was being mishandled, and he warned about the havoc and suffering that the favored policies were about to inflict on rural Americans, but a deaf ear was turned to his warnings and pleas
After the destruction of the western rural economy, Lee was counseling rural people and helping them piece together their lives again. Their stories moved him to compassion. What he had forewarned at the Forest Summit had come to pass. As I said in Part 1 When Loggers were Right-Wing Extremists, he began to explore the dark side of the environmental movement. Remember that Lee is both a forester and a sociologist. His area of specialization is the sociology of natural resources.
Loggers as Scapegoats
Lee tried to share the destruction and despair wreaked on his clients with friends, colleagues and college students. Nobody cared about loggers and their families. They asked him why he cared about the plight of some loggers. Weren’t they environmental criminals destroying the earth? Didn’t they deserve what they got? After all, if we don’t save the earth, all of us will die. Loggers were in the way of that. They were impeding the natural processes and disturbing the balance of nature. We were doomed to destruction because of our environmental sins, and who cares about the fate of those who had to be sacrificed in order to atone for green guilt. Think of Greta Thunberg ad nauseum.
This might be the place to share that, after the Forest Summit, the Clinton-Gore administration created a plethora of crimes against nature that had never existed before. The concept of criminality had been extended. So, yes, the loggers had been stigmatized as environmental criminals. And Lee tells us that, as such, a principle known as moral exclusion had been applied to them and placed them beyond normal ideas of empathy and regard for other human beings in crisis. Loggers had to go so that we all could survive. You know, we have to break a few eggs to make an omelet—that kind of thinking.
The Green New Self
Lee tells us that a tactic had been applied during the war over the environment known as moral persuasion. He encountered the work of Charles Lindblom, a Yale economist and political scientist who compared various forms of social control in governments throughout the world. Lindblom discussed a system of social control known as moral persuasion, characterized by governmental or social elite “teachers” who assume the task of instructing the masses of people. The teachers are to write upon the blank slates of the masses the understandings of the “enlightened” ones. Lee writes, “’Education’ comes closer to describing what moral persuasion does, although indoctrination, instruction, propaganda, counseling, advice, exhortation, and thought control are all involved.”
The goal is to elicit volunteer conformity to the so-called enlightened views. The idea is to shame people’s improper attitudes, and elicit guilt in the self, so that people will embrace the correct attitudes and behaviors, and transform themselves into the “new man” desired by the teachers. The technique was also used in the Cultural Revolution in Red China.
Here, the idea is to get the masses to reject the old ecologically incorrect self and to embrace the green new self. You’ve heard of global green citizens?
Reinventing Government
Here is a timeline of events to refer to during the following discussion.
- In 1992, Gore attends the Rio Earth Summit.
- June 1992 Clinton signs the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
- April 2 1993 Clinton and Gore hold the Forest Summit.
- 1993 Clinton sends the Convention on Biological Diversity treaty to Congress where it fails. Chase tells us that if the treaty ever passes the Senate, elected officials will lose all control over American lands: Once approved, it would “remove preservation policy from the control of elected officials altogether, delegating this power to United Nations bureaucrats, State Department officials, and advisory committees representing environmental groups (which the UN euphemistically called NGOs, or ‘non-governmental organizations).”
End Run around Congress
“Meanwhile,” Alston Chase adds, “the administration fine-tuned plans for implementing the Biodiversity treaty as the Senate began its consideration of the agreement.” Our Congress is still being pressured to pass this terrifying treaty.
- Clinton created Executive Order 12852. June 29, 1993, Bill Clinton established the President’s Sustainable Development Council, which mimicked the United Nations Council on Sustainable Development. Gore played an active role.
- The Sustainable Development Council presented a document titled A New Consensus for the Prosperity, Opportunity and a Healthy Environment for the Future. Sussman writes “Gore’s ‘A New Consensus’ states ‘the federal government should play a more active role in building consensus on difficult issues.” Gore also stated that there is no “legitimate debate” about global warming and that the Sustainable Development Council should create policies that are consistent with international agreements (Eco-Tyranny). Sussman remarks that science is not conducted on the basis of consensus and that ‘building consensus’ implies serious arm-twisting in this case.
An endnote in Robert G. Lee’s book, Broken Trust, Broken Land, shares the following: “During the post-FEMAT interviews with me, FEMAT scientists who designed Option 9 of the President’s report described how they had planned to break the political gridlock by circumventing pluralistic democratic politics and establishing local consensus groups to work in partnership with federal ecosystems managers.”
In fact, Lee comments that the real dark horse to come out of the Forest Summit was the FEMAT team, and it had been set up weeks in advance to include only those who favored the Clinton Administration’s version of ecosystems management. The real agenda was to shut down pluralistic and open debate.
Putting a Good Face on Things: Managing Dissent
The Forest Summit took place only as an orchestrated public relations event and included key local and regional leaders to give the public the feeling that they mattered, and that the President was a fair-minded guy. I might add that it gives the appearance of buy-in as well, and thereby enlists cooperation.
Lee further states that the FEMAT team “retreated behind closed doors, maintained complete secrecy, and excluded both unwelcome ideas and scientists with whom they disagreed,[they] came to see themselves as an authoritative and self-directed group, and developed a plan endorsed by the President.”
Lee goes on to comment, “The actions of officials in the Clinton Administration is consistent with the belief that ‘charismatic ecological scientists’ should be given the authority of philosopher-kings. The Administration has given these ‘scientists’ the authority to disregard democratic pluralism, including laws guaranteeing an open society.”
- The next step in Gore’s plan to reinvent government happened when Clinton conducted the “Gap Analysis.” This analysis was to conduct a GIS survey of all lands not held/controlled by the federal government and to target them for government acquisition. Also, every living thing was to be located and surveyed by computer technology. Clinton tried to make it so that the results of the survey were to be exempted from the Freedom of Information Act. Congress declined to go along.
Biocentrism: the New Declaration of the Rights of Nature
Chase says, “all along biocentrists had invoked the fate of the [spotted] owl, not because they were worried about the little bird itself, but because it was a tool for achieving broader antihumanist and primativist goals…Now by declaring the government responsible for all life, they could avoid science—and accountability—altogether.” As Chase puts it, the niceties of science had been left behind.
Sussman informs us that Gore presented his plan to reinvent government to the public as a way to streamline the government decision-making process, and to eliminate red tape.
America’s Vision and the Worldview of Philosopher-Kings
Robert G. Lee holds the belief that the environment and humankind can both be best protected by the restoration of the principles of our founding documents. He believes that individual liberty, not environmental security, must remain the central organizational principle of government policy, toward both people and the environment, and reminds us that “the institutional foundations of this nation are freedom of religion, freedom of association, private property, rule of law, and representative government.”
The United Nations’ Agenda 21/2030, Smart Growth, the Wildlife Corridors Initiative, the Wildlands Project, the Green New Deal and the Great Reset are all tools, devices and different names for world globalists’ desire to subvert American law as expressed in our founding documents and traditions in order to get Americans to abandon the rule of law as we know it. They want us to embrace the global green citizenship of the world, and to embrace the totalitarian government they plan for us. They are using our elected officials, our courts, our economy and our education system to do it. Consult John Fonte’s book, Sovereignty or Submission, for more information on how it is being accomplished.
Lee writes that advocates for centralized control of our society believe that, in order to preserve our environment, there must be a revolutionary transformation of our citizens and institutions; reduction or elimination of private property, such as land, forests and water; public and private lands must be under the control of the state. There must be a curtailment of pluralistic, political debate, and religion must be broadened so as to focus our ultimate concern on protecting the ‘the community of nature.” That would often make our concern for the welfare of our fellow human beings a secondary priority.
Reinventing Rural America
So why do our elected officials, local, state and national, cooperate in implementing these agendas? In short, it’s because they believe the agendas to be correct. It’s not that they’re evil. However, they are as much under the influence of moral persuasion, propaganda and mass formation as anyone else.
Former President Clinton sent out special administrative teams to different Northwest forest units (known as Adaptive Management Areas (AMAs) to create partnerships between local citizens, government scientists and ecosystems managers. I think these “partnerships” are the stakeholder groups being touted in Idaho as the way to settle conflict over the environment.
Lee informs us” these reforms are guided by an idealistic vision of consensus groups that would be established to elicit the voluntary cooperation of local citizens in restoring damaged watersheds and helping implement ecosystems management. Partnerships between government, ecosystem managers and local people are proposed to take the place of the gridlock originating in debates between the timber industry and environmental interest groups. Contentious debate characteristic of an open, pluralistic political system is seen as a threat to stable ecosystem management.”
American Officials Get on Board the Green Train
Lee tells us that advocates for centralized control go into rural communities and act as “teachers” to imprint the correct attitudes, values and behaviors they desire concerning the environment. They use the tactics of moral persuasion to persuade leaders and citizens to embrace the green, new self. Many leaders embrace these teachers as “experts” imbued with authority. The leaders are then receptive to new programs and policies; the “teachers” are only too willing to oblige.
Because they see these teachers as having governmental and scientific authority, leaders are vulnerable, Lee tells us, to the same kind of blind obedience to authority that Milgram’s famous shock experiment demonstrated can result in people inflicting callous or inhumane acts on others, such as did the Nazis. When elected officials and participants in these groups have no independent moral authority, they often over rely on politically-motivated scientific authority, and they silence public debate and dissent.
Elected officials are often uncomfortable when debate and disbursement of information become public outside of their control. Sometimes these officials seem to be willing agents of groupthink enforcement and thought control.
Then, too, let’s not forget that several generations have been raised and educated under the indoctrination of moral persuasion and mass-hysteria regarding the care of the environment. Lee showed his college students a comic book for children entitled Stop the Chop! The heroes of the comic book are “Earth Rangers” who go to Oregon to stop Zack Axe from cutting old growth forests. When loggers in Oregon present them with written permission from the government to cut the trees, the Earth Rangers reply, “We represent something bigger than the government, Zack Axe.” “Yeah! Earth!”
Lee reports that less than one in ten of his students recognizes the police state activities of the Earth Rangers. The majority believes that laws may have to be ignored to save the earth. He says the vast majority are unable to comprehend the acceptability of tyranny that this comic would teach young children. Instead, his students are ill-prepared to “appreciate, protect, or defend a government based on law,” but, due to their fear of an apocalyptic collapse of the environment, they are thoroughly prepared to become functionaries in a government that places saving the environment above the law.
The mass-hysteria over planet earth that the last three to four generations have been subjected to, and the guilt and shame that have been heaped upon rural producers, have well-prepared elected officials to ignore and silence the voice of ordinary citizens, and to implement policies that ignore individual rights and the moral autonomy that are the basis of our founding documents and American traditions. Lee cautions us against falling for demagoguery because almost none of our elected officials are speaking up for us.
His book has many suggestions for how we might reclaim our institutions so that we may protect both our environment and fellow human beings. But he says that the most important thing of all is to first recover independent moral autonomy, because autonomous persons see themselves as independent moral agents who answer to themselves. As he puts it, “Autonomy implies that individuals develop the capacity to make independent moral and scientific judgments.”
This capacity is the absolute opposite of going along with consensus groups and engaging in groupthink. This means that citizens accept their responsibility for self-governance. One of Lee’s strategies is to start our own citizens’ Adaptive Management Teams. I would add that the best way to begin is by forming a reading and discussion group around some of the books cited in this article. Contact the editor of Boundary.News if you are interested.
