Nature Conservancy deal shows threat of conservation fund

By Bonner Cohen, Ph. D.| January 1st, 2019 | 1 Comment

 

By flipping 300 acres of private land in Montana to the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the Nature Conservancy (TNC) has solidified its reputation as “the feds’ real estate agent.” In this case, Arlington, Va.-based TNC teamed up with the head of a high-flying California tech company to seal the deal.

The $1.025 million transaction also sheds light on the threat to traditional rural Western communities posed by one of Capitol Hill’s most insidious slush funds, the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF). Created in 1964, the LWCF was originally supposed to help states develop planning for recreation areas and related facilities. But over the decades the LWCF has morphed into a piggy-bank in which deep-pocketed environmental groups collaborate with wealthy, and often, out-of-state landowners flip land to the federal government......To Read More.....

New at Environmentalism is Fascism

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Dowie's Conservation Refugees

The author of Conservation Refugees, Mark Dowie, is the former publisher and editor of Mother Jones magazine. Six books and 200 articles have won him 18 awards. Researching this peer-reviewed M.I.T. Press-published text involved years of globe-trotting and the interviewing of many conservation and indigenous leaders. Dowie was privy to several leaked documents from major conservation organizations. Unusually, this book has no Acknowledgements section and does not mention Dowie’s patrons.

Highlights:

Between 1900 and 1950 about 600 wilderness parks were created worldwide. 400 were added in the 1950s. Today there are 110,000 such parks. 12% of Earth’s land is now conservationist controlled. This is an area larger than Africa. This is an area equal to half of humanity’s farmland.

There is nothing civil about Third World environmental activism. Truckloads of armed men arrive at frontier villages. They torch shacks, wreck wells, rustle livestock, and confiscate firearms. This has happened thousands of times.

The global tally of conservation refugees is somewhere between 5 and 20 million. Dowie estimates 10 million. One scholar estimates 14 million conservation refugees in Africa alone. The topic of conservation refugees has been assiduously neglected by academia. Conservation refugees are invisible because visibility raises the price of conservation.

After 1970, in a top-down process, elite enviro-organizations recruited and indoctrinated an auxiliary from the world’s most atavistic indigenous peoples. This puppet sub-movement is now fronting much environmentalist obstruction.

Conservationists are divided between those who advocate complete depopulation of hinterlands and those who want indigenous-environmentalist auxiliaries to govern these areas.

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