Phil Brennan
Wednesday, March 21, 2001

I'm going to quote liberally from Tom's column, because he says what needs to be said and says it loud and clear: Unless we reverse the policies that are bankrupting large segments of the nation's industries that provide jobs, food, and natural resources such as lumber, coal and oil, the United States is going to sink to the level of a Third World country.

As I have said before, the American people are going to have to deal with the Marxist cabal that has been successful in imposing a whole slew of insane restrictions on American productivity. We are going to have to gear up for a fight to the finish with these people, and if we want to win we're going to have to go about it with the same courage and determination our fellow Americans displayed on the beaches of Normandy and the sands of Iwo Jima.

There can be no turning back if we want to regain and preserve the magnificent heritage our ancestors bestowed on us. And we can no longer wait – the time is now.

Just what am I talking about? I'll let Tom DeWeese answer that.

"To sustain the highest standard of living the world has ever known, America must have its farms, ranches, mines, and productive forests. The vital commodities these elements of the economy produce are the targets of environmental radicals and the web of federal regulations they've been instrumental in creating," Tom writes.

But there has been a sustained and covert assault on the exploitation of these resources by a Marxist elite masquerading as dedicated lovers of the environment. Unwilling to display their hand openly, they have employed a gradual approach, clamping the shackles of repression on America a chain link at a time.

Says DeWeese: "Banning these industries outright would meet too much resistance. Instead, powerful government regulations, guidelines and punitive taxes are being used to slowly diminish and then drive them out of businesses. Fully a third of all federal regulations and laws are devoted to the 'environment.'

"As an industry disappears from a region, the land it formerly occupied is removed from any further production. It then joins millions of other newly created non-productive acres under control of the National Park Service or the U.S. Forest Service. After that, no human use is permitted."

In a mournful dirge DeWeese intones the casualty list of America's battle with the environmentalist regulators:

* A mere fraction of America's timber resources formerly harvested from federal lands is now permitted. "The number of forest acres shrink every year, despite the fact that America is home to 70% of the forests that existed when the Pilgrims arrived. As this is written, fully 247 million acres (33.5%) are reserved from harvest by law or represent slow-growing woodlands unsuitable for timber production."

Shockingly, there are bans in effect that forbid even the removal of dead trees and those downed by storms.

"Between 1992 and 2000, the years of the Clinton-Gore administration, more than 300 timber mills were closed in the northwestern states alone, at a cost of an estimated 130,000 jobs.

"Entire communities that depended on timber revenue have been destroyed. Since 1990, timber harvest on federal land has declined from 12 billion board feet a year to barely 2.5 billion board feet in 2000. This nation is actually importing timber!"

As a direct result of the war on the timber industry, home building costs in the U.S. have jumped by as much as $10,000, depriving low-income families of the dream of home ownership and condemning many of them to lives in crowded slums.

* The idiotic restrictions have also skyrocketed the price of harvesting lumber: "It now costs more to harvest fewer available trees. In upstate New York, in just one year, the cost of raw hardwood jumped 60 percent."

Far from being a program to protect the environment, this ban on harvesting timber from public forests is nothing less than "a planned attack on an essential American industry," De Wesse writes.

"While sawmills stand empty and jobs disappear, the dead trees attract insects and disease, affecting the remaining healthy trees, and endangering the forest more severely as the result of government-mandated forest management practices."

Thanks to the restrictions that have produced millions of acres of unhealthy forests, millions now burn every year, destroying trees that could have been used for productive purposes. "As this is written, the Department of the Interior is recruiting and training thousands to fight the fires they know are coming. These are fires that could be avoided with proper forest management."

* Uncle Sam now controls huge areas of the United States. "The total acreage of public land in Washington [alone] is 42,606,080. Of this, 2,599,250 acres are controlled by the U.S. Forest Service, 25,492 acres are in the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) Natural Area Preserves and 46,892 acres are in DNR Natural Reserve Conservation Areas.

"Citizen access to these federal areas is severely restricted or prohibited. Now, under a green-driven 1990 program called the Washington Wildlife and Recreation Program (WWRP) the state government is in an all-out drive to buy or take more and more land.

* Uncle Sam's thirst for water is never satisfied. "On the Great Plains the battles for water rights and grazing rights (the bedrock of the ranching industry) is little understood but potentially devastating to America's ability to feed itself."

Water and grazing rights, DeWeese explains, "are supposed to be guaranteed to those ranchers who operate on public lands. Those agreements go back over one hundred years to the days when the western territories became states.

"Under those agreements, negotiated in good faith with state and federal authorities, they were not to be subject to question. Water and grazing rights are considered by ranchers to be just as sacred as any homeowner's deed of private property."

Yet the Department of the Interior has been attempting to hike grazing and water fees so high that ranching and farming in these areas would be simply impossible. "If the battle is lost it will mark the end of America's cattle and sheep industry, and the destruction of family farms. The land where those ranches and farms now stand will become unproductive, barren wilderness controlled by the federal government."

De Weese wonders if, in their absence, we can continue to feed ourselves, "let alone the rest of the world? Meanwhile, in tandem with this federal assault on cattle ranching, animal rights activists like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) advocate the elimination of meat consumption. This is no coincidence.

"If the United States had been invaded by a foreign enemy who had seized our lands, we would be at war today, but in Clinton's first term more than 141 million acres were taken by the federal government. In 1999 Clinton removed more than 2.3 million acres from access to mineral exploration. While this once-productive land was turned into wilderness, many roads, bridges and even some dams were closed or eliminated. Tax bases were destroyed, turning whole communities into virtual ghost towns.

"Piece by piece each of these moves by the federal government, aided by the environmentalists, dismantles American infrastructure. The plan, created by radical environmentalists is called The Wildlands Project. It is being implemented by the U.S. government. If successful, it will return 50 percent of the nation to wilderness. It will forcibly remove Americans living in every State of the Union requiring them to give up their homes and move into government-approved human habitat areas."

All of these nightmarish things are happening while Americans sit back and allow their God-given heritage to be stolen from them. There's little time left before America's infrastructure collapses under the weight of these insane restrictions on our natural rights.

Concludes DeWeese: "Now we must lay siege to our elected representatives in Congress and the new administration to end it. America is being dismantled and all that is necessary for this to continue is our silence, our compliance, our willingness to let someone else fight this battle."

Amen
Faugh a Ballagh

Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor and publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee. He can be reached at pvb@pvbr.com.

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