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Introduction: Some environmentalists are actually rational, well-educated, likable people with sound reasoning and good judgement, who just want to be good stewards of the Earth and keep wicked people from stripping and poisoning our environment. It is my privilege to be acquainted with a few such people. On the other hand, there are thousands of real fruitcakes around the world who exhibit exceptionally poor judgement in their effort to get attention, gain political power, and raise money. The most senseless anti-capitalist groups active in America today are run by environmentalists who apparently have been poorly educated on the subjects of history, applied physical sciences, statistics and the economics of supply and demand. California is one of the few places where radical environmentalists are thought to be credible, and as a result of their political power, California got into an energy crunch a few years ago, since it is all but impossible to build electric generating plants under California environmental law. I would even go so far as to say environmentalists oppose every practical source of energy. Throughout this page and others like it on this web site, you'll see a recurring theme: The bad news is wrong! Mass media, especially television news organizations, thrive on sensationalism. TV news in the 21st century isn't about journalism, it is about gathering an audience, and it has been proven long ago that good news doesn't bring good ratings. And most TV news anchors read the news better than they understand it.*. That's why there is a constant stream of crises being reported, and the more threatening the problems sound, the more likely you are to "tune in again tomorrow". Some among this horde of U.S. environmentalists (some are good; some are very radical) lack a sound background in history, and this shortcoming serves as a roadblock that keeps them from understanding the value of water resource development. Among these people, we include the "nuts" who parade virtually naked in the streets as they present the cause of good treatment of animals. Among these people (and particularly their leaders) are those who make speeches in public and say killing a few humans is a small price to pay for protecting flora and fauna. Some of them used to haunt airports and busy streets and throw dye and all manner of things on people who wore apparel made of genuine fur. Lies, propaganda, distortion and exaggeration: In order to advance their pie-in-the-sky idealism, environmentalists are not above stretching the truth here and there. One of the greatest environmentalist shams of all is the Global Warming crisis, for which there is a separate page here at akdart.com. You can also find a lot of disingenuousness in the application of the Endangered Species Act, about which there is yet another page. Related topics on other pages: Environmental False Alarms Lies about energy production EPA Chief: Climate Change Is Fact Because Bad Weather Leads the News. EPA administrator Gina McCarthy said there is no need to continue debating the science behind climate change. "I can remember a day when the weather report was in the middle of the domestic and international news and took about a minute and a half. It wasn't the news. When you go on the news today the first thing you'll hear about is the weather. So there is a dramatic difference in the way people perceive the ability of the climate to impact their lives because they're feeling it today," McCarthy said during an event sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. The Editor says... Sen. Sessions to EPA: Show Me Evidence for Obama's Global Warming Agitprop. Today [12/4/2012], Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) directed a letter to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson asking for clarification on President Obama's recent statement that "the temperature around the globe is increasing faster than was predicted even 10 years ago." That position has been used by the administration to push the possibility of vastly increased regulation of carbon emissions. Reselling Climate Change to Voters Without Saying So. Since the notion of manmade climate change has been debunked by a number of experts, the dialogue on the subject has undergone some dramatic changes. Rather than attempting to assert the truthfulness of manmade climate change, environmentalists and supporters of cap and trade have redirected the American people's attention to high gas prices and the effects of pollutants on children, in the hopes that voters will be swayed to inadvertently elect global warming warriors to office.The Truth, the Half Truth, and Little of the Truth. Climate science has become official truth, like Pravda, and the real truth has become an inconvenience, something getting in the way of environmentalist dreams and internationalist ambition. Straw Man Environmental Alarmism 101, California Style. How many times must it be proved that the world is not close to "exhausting its supply of petroleum" before environmentalists stop making the claim? And as Americans are realizing in greater and greater numbers, there is no objective support for the shrill claim that "greenhouse gas emissions... threaten the planet we call home." A Banner Day For Junk Science. After years of alarming claims about a "Great Garbage Patch" of plastic bottles and bags floating around the Pacific in a space twice the size of Texas, an Oregon State University professor of oceanography, Angelicque White, found the actual size of the supposed horror was "grossly exaggerated." Instead of taking up two Texases, the floating landfill's size was about 1% of that state's bulk. 'Great Garbage Patch' in the Pacific Ocean not so great claim scientists. Environmental scientists have been criticised for exaggerating the size of an "island" of plastic waste said to be swirling around in the Pacific Ocean after a study finds that it is 200 times smaller than claimed. "These folks seem to have sub-specialties in the "three-card monte" sub-species of science." Unequivocal Equivocation — an open letter to Dr. Kevin Trenberth. The first part of Dr. T's statement is true. There is general scientific agreement that the globe has been warming, in fits and starts of course, for the last three centuries or so. And since it has been thusly warming for centuries, the obvious null hypothesis would have to be that the half-degree of warming we experienced in the 20th century was a continuation of some long-term ongoing natural trend. But that's not what Dr. Trenberth is doing here. Keep your eye on the pea. He has smoothly segued from the IPCC saying "global warming is 'unequivocal'", which is true, and stitched that idea so cleverly onto another idea, 'and thus humans affect the climate', that you can't even see the seam. The pea is already under the other walnut shell. Al Gore Photoshops Hurricanes Into New Book's Cover. The cover of Nobel Laureate Al Gore's new book "Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis" was intentionally doctored to exaggerate the appearance of hurricanes in the northern hemisphere as well as reduce the amount of ice present in the Arctic. Maybe even more ominously, Florida was so diminished it's almost totally gone. We are not about to fry. The professional purveyors of panic in the Global Warming Industry continue to scare impressionable children and politicians with tall tales. Their most gruesome story is that earth is about to reach a tipping point, causing runaway warming, after which we all fry. There is no evidence to support such scare mongering. Top Ten Energy Myths: The list of top ten myths in the report are: Myth #1: Most of our energy comes from oil. Reality: Oil represents less than 40 percent of our energy use. ... Myth #4: Offshore oil production poses environmental risks. Reality: New technology has greatly reduced the risk of oil spills. Reducing oil reservoir pressure through extraction of petroleum will decrease the amount of oil pollution from natural seepage. Nobelist hopes "a lot of horrid things happen," to "get people concerned about climate change". Last night, FOX News host Sean Hannity looked at recent remarks made by Nobel Prize winning economist Tom Schelling. In a July 14 interview with The Atlantic Monthly, Schelling said about "global warming": "It's a tough sell. And you probably have to find ways to exaggerate the threat." "Green" Claims By Marketers Go Unchecked. Companies touting eco-friendly products or biodegradable packaging are supposed to abide by guidelines issued by the Federal Trade Commission in 1992. The FTC can take companies that ignore the so-called "Green Guides" to court and seek fines to reimburse consumers. However, the FTC has taken almost no enforcement action over the last decade, even as "green" marketing claims have exploded, says USA Today. Politics of Climate Science: Selective Research, Ignored Facts. [Water] covers much more of the surface than land, makes it unique from the other planets, and without it life as we know it would not exist. Search for water is a constant theme in space exploration. Despite all this what we actually need is more knowledge about water and its functions on Earth, especially with regard to weather and climate. All the emphasis is on temperature, but what happens to precipitation is far more important for plants and agriculture. Precipitation is mentioned in claims of increased droughts with global warming, but it's a scare tactic and illogical. Warmer temperatures mean more moisture in the air with more precipitation potential, not less. Making it up in global warming theory. Science Magazine has good news for global warming crowd: The Hockey Stick is back! It was shown to be a fraud before, but now — Shazam! It's back! Gee it's hot today. But... compared to what? That's the big question in the global warming game. Decision-based evidence making. The Obama administration yesterday [6/16/2009] released its blockbuster global-warming propaganda document, Global Climate Change Impacts on the United States. It's a doozy, filled with colour graphics, maps and dramatic pictures. The Myth of 5 Million Green Jobs. [Scroll down] The central finding of the study is that — treating the data optimistically — for every renewable-energy job that the government finances, "Spain's experience reveals with high confidence, by two different methods, that the U.S. should expect a loss of at least 2.2 jobs on average, or about 9 jobs lost for every 4 created." Despite expensive and extensive green-job policies, a surprisingly low number of jobs were created. And about two-thirds of those "green" jobs were just to set up the energy source, in construction, fabrication, installation, marketing and administration. Only 10 percent of the green jobs created were permanent jobs actually operating and maintaining the renewable sources of energy. Environmentalists Still Can't Get It Right. Now that another Earth Day has come and gone, let's look at some environmentalist predictions they would prefer we forget. At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, "The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind." C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said, "The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed." Bogus Models Used To Justify Anti-CO2 Push. Here's a typical claim from the Environmental Defense Fund: "For about a dime a day (per person), we can solve climate change, invest in a clean energy future and save billions in imported oil." This sounds too good to be true, because it is. About four-fifths of the world's and America's energy comes from fossil fuels — oil, coal, natural gas — which are also the largest source of man-made carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. The goal is to eliminate fossil fuels or suppress their CO2. The Editor says... Water vapor, not carbon dioxide, is the primary greenhouse gas. This is an original compilation, Copyright © 2013 by Andrew K. Dart Poll Asks Preteens: Are You Worried Earth Won't Exist When (If) You Grow Up? I received a phone call just after noon on Sunday from a Princeton, New Jersey-based polling firm that asked to speak to "pre-teens" aged 6 to 11 for a poll about the environment. They encouraged me to listen in. My 11-year-old daughter answered five questions that grew increasingly dire. Environmental extremism must be put in its place in the climate debate. Most of our leaders know very well the World is in little danger from climate change, at least not any caused by human activity. But they also realize, as does any thinking person, that there are indeed serious pollution problems that we must continue to address. In an effort to appear "green", politicians are then pushed by party strategists to intentionally confuse the issue by referring to the benign gas carbon dioxide as "global warming pollution" (a favourite trick of Al Gore and [Senator Barbara] Boxer) and speaking of "clean air" and "climate control" as if they were interchangeable. This is amplified by many in the media who, out of ignorance, laziness or opportunism simply repeat the mistake until it becomes part of the landscape. 'Lost' Amazon tribe a hoax to raise awareness on logging. The man behind photos of warriors from an "undiscovered" Amazon tribe that were beamed around the world has admitted it was a hoax. Sound policy needs sound science. It would be easy — and wrong — to rely on a much-publicized study that connects U.S. corn ethanol production to greenhouse gas release via indirect land use change. ... No actual data exist that connect U.S. domestic ethanol production with, to cite a widely quoted example, the clearing of the Amazon rain forest. Instead, the paper's conclusions depend entirely on economic modeling and assumptions. Climate change heroes' sham case. One commonly repeated argument for doing something about climate change sounds compelling, but turns out to be almost fraudulent. It is based on comparing the cost of action with the cost of inaction, and almost every major politician in the world uses it. European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso, for example, used this argument when he presented the European Union's proposal to tackle climate change earlier this year. Green Hypocrisy at 30,000 Feet: They are the Green Bigots, leading environmentalists, those at the vanguard of the fight to change our lifestyles, restrict our foreign flights, who insist we do our 'bit' to cut greenhouse gas emissions while they rack up thousands of airmiles on business and pleasure trips." Dishonest Political Tampering with the Science on Global Warming. Two detailed investigations by Committees of the House confirm that the IPCC has deliberately, persistently and prodigiously exaggerated not only the effect of greenhouse gases on temperature but also the environmental consequences of warmer weather. Some say it's unethical to fly. Airplane emissions currently account for about 3 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide, according to Daniel Sperling, director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis. He says taking a train across the United States generates about 20 percent fewer emissions than an average cross-country flight. But doing the trip solo in a car would produce about 66 percent more carbon per passenger mile than an average flight. Dubious statistics alert: The writer compares the emissions of an airplane — presumably with a full load of passengers — to a passenger train, then to a car with one occupant on a cross-country trip. How many people drive all the way across the country by themselves? Keep in mind also that people would not travel by air if it were not an acceptable trade-off: spending money (and forfeiting their privacy and dignity) to save time, either on vacation or on business. Red-Tape Conservationists: Environmentalists seek to protect their de facto ban on logging by preserving the red tape that makes logging on federal land nearly impossible. Liberals use children as pawns. Debut of the pint-sized Climate Nazis. It's mid-summer and global warming alarmists are going right into the tree house to recruit your children to their never-ending, the-sky-is-falling cause. This time it's the well-paid bureaucrats at one of Britain's biggest utility corporations. Launched in the weekend papers, full colour ads by "Britain's brightest energy company," npower, urges vacationing school children to sign up as "climate cops". Environmental Disinformation 101. By every conceivable measure, the environment is getting better, not worse, with time but most college professors are reluctant to acknowledge the improvement, particularly on their own campuses. Green Myths: Enviro 'Facts' that Aren't. Polling 1,000 average Americans on assorted energy and environmental issues, we found a wide disconnect between what people "know" and what is actually true. ... More than four of every five poll respondents said that our cities are getting dirtier. In fact, pollution has been slashed since 1970, and our cities are far cleaner today. A majority believes our chief supplier of foreign oil is Saudi Arabia. In fact, it is our friendly neighbor to the north, Canada. All told the Persian Gulf supplies just 17 percent of the oil we import, and just 11 percent of all the oil we use. Science in the Media Sausage Grinder: Recent weeks have offered a rich harvest of new "health" threats with splashy headlines warning us about the supposed dangers from processed meats, hair dyes, and tanning parlors. While all of these stories are all a little odd, perhaps the oddest is the one about how meat increases the risk of stomach cancer. The Top 10 Junk Science Claims of 2005: It nearly took an act of Congress to get the researcher behind the notorious "hockey stick" graph, which purports to show a steep rise in global temperature in the 20th century following a millennium of stable temperatures, to release his publicly funded data and computer code. Among other dubious presumptions, the graph is derived from data that bases climate estimates for the entire 15th century on the tree ring measurements of a single tree. An exorbitant free lunch: The five-page IAGS "Set America Free" memo is an undocumented list of grandiose assertions based on bad science and worse economics. The bad science begins by treating electricity and ethanol as if they were sources of energy that could be produced without using any energy. To arrive at a figure like 500 mpg, just fill your tank with a mix of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline — but then count only that 15 percent against "miles per gallon." America's pristine myth: Next week my daughter will go back to elementary school, and I will be faced with a choice. At some point the curriculum will cover the environment, and she'll be taught that before Europeans settled the Americas the Indians lived so lightly on the land that for all practical purposes the hemisphere was a wilderness. The forests and plains, the teacher will explain, were crowded with bison, beaver, and deer; the rivers, with fish; flights of passenger pigeons darkened the skies. The continent's few inhabitants walked beneath an endless forest of tall trees that had never been disturbed. Does Manure Make a Farm a Superfund Site? Environmental activists are teaming up with state attorneys general and trial lawyers to bankrupt the nation's livestock farmers — in the name of saving the environment. If the situation wasn't so serious, it would be hilarious. A little warming, a lot of hysteria. Not so long ago, the media fad was all about the coming ice age. Newsweek reported in 1975 that the earth was cooling and the effects on food production would be catastrophic. Farmers in Northern Europe could expect the growing season to shrink by two weeks by the end of the century. That didn't happen. Environmental Education: School of Crock. A Roper poll in 2003 found that:
Earth Day is Cause for Celebration: Environmental Trends are Mostly Positive. The ninth annual Index of Leading Environmental Indicators, released today by the Pacific Research Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, shows that the environment continues to be America's single greatest policy success. Environmental quality has improved so much, in fact, that it is nearly impossible to paint a grim, gloom-and-doom picture anymore. Sick building syndrome is 'a misnomer'. Work-related stress rather than building conditions may be what's behind the constellation of symptoms known as "sick building syndrome", according to British researchers. In a study of more than 4000 UK government employees, researchers found that high job demands and perceptions of poor support were more closely related to sick-building symptoms than were the physical conditions of the workplace. Counterintuitive Energy Truths - Election-time reality check. There is no such thing as complete "depletion" of a resource under a system of profit-seeking capitalism with property rights. If the total amount of oil is finite and if there is no technological advance, ongoing depletion of the resource would result in a price that rises over time at a rate faster than the rate of interest, yielding powerful incentives to conserve for the future. Happy cows, desperate PETA. How desperate are things for PETA? Paul Walfield says they're angry about a California commercial that shows animated cows in a state of happiness and they're suing to stop the ads from running. Quorn & CSPI: The Other Fake Meat. Steven Milloy thrashes notorious Center for Science in the Public Interest for campaign against one brand of veggie-burger while touting a competitor's brand of veggie-burger. Anti-SUV Activists Versus the American Family: When you get behind the wheel of your SUV or minivan, do you automatically become a member of a hate group? According to the radicals now dominating the environmental movement, driving one of these vehicles proves you hate the planet. Flush Toilets Called "Environmental Disaster": Forget the convenience and sanitation of the flush toilet that industrialized nations have enjoyed for most of the past century. A growing number of environmentalists are now advocating the expanded use of compost or dry toilets worldwide to combat what they see as an international water crisis. Oh, great. How long until this is mandatory too? 'Air shower' set to cut water use by 30 percent. Scientists have developed a simple "air shower" device which, when fitted into existing showerheads, fills the water droplets with a tiny bubble of air. The result is the shower feels just as wet and just as strong as before, but now uses much less water. Our Improving Environment: There is no water shortage and very likely never will be except where distribution systems are inadequate. Water is used, not consumed. Therefore there is just as much water in the world today as there ever was. The New York Times Encyclopedic Almanac 1970 states that there are about 327 million cubic miles of water on the earth. ...1% or 3.3 million cubic miles is fresh surface and ground water which amounts to about one billion gallons of fresh water per person in the world today. This is many million times more water than we are using each day. And yet there are people who insist that inevitably we will run out of water. Green is for Money: Wealthy nature groups become more like the corporate world they seek to reform. The Bird-Flu Scam: You can't make any real money without a boogeyman, and the new "Bird Flu" hoax is the latest scam used to generate profits for pharmaceutical company insiders. Mommy, There's A Monster Under My Bed! (A Review of "Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths") Along with their colleagues, and in only eleven chapters, they manage to address the major claims of environmental theology: Global Warming, population control, "sustainable" development, Genetically-modified foods, "synthetic" chemicals, energy production and the widely cited "precautionary principle." Green Movement Turns To God To Advance Cause: It may or may not be a marriage made in heaven, but environmentalists are enlisting the help of religious groups to persuade Americans to consume and pollute less through "self-restraint." "Sustainable" Development's Unsustainable Contradictions: For environmentalists, the campaign for "sustainable development" is not motivated by a legitimate desire for development. Instead, it is an attempt to put a respectable face on their anti-development, anti-industry, anti-technology philosophy. Caught in the crosshairs: No one should be surprised by the fact that employees of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the U.S. Forest Service planted fake evidence of Canada lynx in the Gifford Pinchot and Wenatchee national forests. What is surprising is that they were caught. GAO: Lynx fur hoax was no secret. The General Accounting Office reported yesterday [3/6/2002] that government scientists knew they should not have submitted falsely labeled samples into a national lynx survey and that some supervisors were aware but took no action. Group Cries Foul Over Alleged Liberal Agenda Textbooks: "By omitting important facts and by distorting others, these textbooks do not prepare students to think critically about important environmental issues," said Chris Patterson, Director of Education Research for the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Among the issues most disputed are acid rain, pollution, species and rain forests, Human population growth, and climate change. In one instance, Patterson said each textbook gave different numbers for the remaining size of South America's rain forest. "Glencoe says that 75 million acres of rain forest has been destroyed, Holt says 32, Prentice Hall says 15," Patterson said. "None of them cite where they got the information, but in fact, according to a NASA study, 7.5 million has been destroyed." Stossel blasts enviro-critics: The government's own figures largely support Stossel's claims that the environment is improving, not getting worse. In fact, the most recent data suggest that the overall environmental condition of the United States is better now than it was in 1970, in terms of air, water and soil quality. However, some claim the hour-long documentary was misleading, and that Stossel asked leading questions of school children about what they were being taught in school about the environment. According to Stossel, an environmental activist group, after getting wind of the show which is critical of fear-based teaching about the environment in public schools, contacted the parents of schoolchildren interviewed by Stossel and persuaded their parents to complain to ABC. The Stossel Problem: According to some leading journalists and consumer activists, ABC's news division suffers from a major problem: John Stossel. He used to be such a good consumer reporter, years ago, worthy of his numerous Emmies. But now he thinks that markets protect consumers better than governments do, and he's skeptical of all sorts of beliefs that we all just know are right. Air Pollution Study Called "Editorial," Not Science: A Carnegie Mellon University study, appearing in the latest issue of the journal Science, claims "more people are being killed by air pollution than from traffic crashes." However, critics of the study say it has no credibility and one claims the authors of the study pulled their conclusions "out of a hat." The Greens are hurting the poor in Third World. Skeptical environmentalist, Dr Bjorn Lomborg believes ecological groups are misleading us with their doomsday predictions. Shady Environmentalism: Environmentalists come in many shades of green, but a lot of them are just plain shady, ignoring science and common sense and jumping on the green bandwagon for partisan political purposes. Virtual climate alert: The April 5 edition of Nature contains this shocker, "Animal species viability linked to climate." So why is there a flurry of press activity on this research finding? Because the researchers weren't content to link toad population dynamics to changing climate, they felt compelled to make the leap to human-induced climate change. Book: Science, Nonscience, and Nonsense: Approaching Environmental Literacy, by Michael Zimmerman, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, 220 pp. Despite its promising title, this book is not about separating science from nonsense. Rather, its author is content to simply repeat the many myths, legends, and frightening (but unfounded) predictions of the most radical and anti-market environmentalists. Back to the top of the page (All the material about eco-terrorism has moved to its own page, here.) Property rights issues related to environmentalism: The Endangered Species Act Debate: Under the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, private property may not be taken for any public purpose without the payment of "just compensation." Unfortunately, most environmentalists and private property owners disagree on whether the ESA is being used to take privately owned property or simply to protect a preexisting public interest in the natural flora and fauna. Endangered Species Act endangers rights of landowners: By stripping landowners of control over their land, the act has discouraged species protection. [Some people believe] if you find a listed species, you should kill it, bury it and never say anything. Less dramatically, owners of forest land cut down trees to avoid attracting the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker, which nests in old-growth trees; and adjust logging practices to discourage the habitat favored by the northern spotted owl. Eco-Fascism: Fifty years ago, who would have supposed it credible that a snail, an owl, or a tree on one's own land would become excuses for the ecological fascism that has already spread its tentacles not only into American society, but throughout the entire world? The micro-management of land usage we have witnessed in the past thirty years now aspires to "macro-management" of the entire continent. Science and the Environment: There is a deliberate and quite outspoken attack on the whole idea of people owning private property. Mr. William Riley, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, has said publicly on a number of occasions that he does not believe that people should have the right to own private property. Smart Growth: More Congestion, Air Pollution & Less Home Ownership: In his testimony, Mr. Cox reviewed the national and international evidence demonstrating that the higher densities "smart growth" requires are associated with greater traffic congestion, more air pollution, higher consumer expenditures and lower levels of home ownership. A Straitjacket on Growth: New urbanist and so-called "smart growth" policies promise to slow economic growth where implemented and could limit job creation and business expansion. Quotes on Climate Change: Rather than global warming, some environmentalists were predicting an ice age as recently as 1970. Today there are environmental activists calling for the abolition of private property as an answer to global warming. Protecting wetlands, destroying freedom: A year ago, the U.S. Supreme Court struck a blow for property rights. State governments should not be allowed to undo this small victory. The Green Movement's Road to Nowhere: Foundations are supposed to help the poor, not create them. That's why Donna Thornton doesn't understand why the Pew Charitable Trusts is trying to put her out of business. Government Helping Gaia Movement Take Land Away From Humans: While the nation's attention is riveted on the war on terrorism, business corruption, church scandals, and the kidnaping of children, another war to subjugate American citizens goes unnoticed except by those in the cross-hairs. This war is being waged inside our borders. The apostles of Gaia, with the help of principle-less elected officials and Quisling Clerks, are advancing their agenda, the depopulation of large areas of the country, a.k.a. The Wildlands Project. It's time for new owners: America was built on the principle of free enterprise, which begins with private ownership - of land and resources. Nearly half of America is now owned by the government - federal, state, and local. How can free enterprise exist if government owns the land and resources? Transforming America: Whether it's wildfires in the West, or floods in Florida, the consequences of ill-conceived land-use policy is wreaking havoc in the lives of too many citizens. Until the late 1900s, land-use policies were based on principles that included free enterprise, multiple use of public lands, and private-property rights. These principles have given way, first to what has been loosely called "conservation" principles and, more recently, to what's called "sustainable development." Environmental perestroika: Under socialism, nobody had a personal stake in preserving the forests and lakes of the old Soviet bloc. According to the widely read Ecocide in the USSR, "No other great industrial civilization so systematically and so long poisoned its air, land, water and people." With no defined property rights, but plenty of commissars rushing around looking for resources to turn into lousy shoes, the great outdoors in the various workers' paradises rapidly degenerated into open cesspools. Back to the Environmental Issues Page Back to the Home page 
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