This article was first published June 4, 2015 on The Daily Herb: A Country Woman’s Journal
I just love it when someone slips up and tells us country folk what’s really being planned for us.
Rural cleansing is the purposeful removal of rural citizens from the countryside and the relocation of rural populations into urban areas. Many public officials and media pundits scoff at the mere suggestion that rural cleansing is taking place, but the problem, you see, is that there are people who have inadvertently left tell-tale clues we can use to piece together things for ourselves.
One of the most startling clues I’ve run across lately comes from a July 1, 1998 newspaper article in The Montanian, which is published in Libby, a tiny rural town in Northwest Montana.
Did She Just Say That?
In the article, Libby County Commissioner, Rita Windom, informs us that she and other commissioners were approached by Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks (FWP) state land manager, Darlene Edge, with a proposal to cooperate in driving rural residents out of the Montana countryside into cities. When commissioners responded with horror, Windom says Edge replied
“Can’t you see we are doing you a favor by forcing people to move from rural areas into the urban areas. That way you can close roads…Why don’t you work with us and move these people out of the rural areas and into the urban areas so cities can shoulder more of the responsibilities and the county can save money?”
This exchange took place in a meeting regarding a document called The Wildlife Program Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), of which only 300 were published. According to Windom, there was very little public input because the few public meetings held were so poorly advertised.
But was this just an isolated, though shocking, incident? Did this public policy only affect Montana? I don’t think so. I’ll tell you why.
Sometime around 1997 I called a Boundary County, Idaho resident from Washington State regarding possible job openings in my field in Boundary County. Her answer was that the woods had been shut down and 300 families had left. She continued on to tell me she had seen a public land management agency document outlining a plan to empty North Idaho of people and turn the entire area into a wildlife corridor. Naturally, she was outraged.
About ten years later, another reliable eyewitness told me that the same document had arrived at his home first. The document was marked not for public view. He had purchased a house that had previously been occupied by a public land management agency employee who had moved. My source had opened the document and read it. He confirmed that it said what my other friend had previously described to me. In fact, he had lent her the document, which is how she happened to know what was in it.
I was never able to get my hands on that document, but when someone sent me a camera shot of the above article in The Montanian describing much the same policy being announced at much the same time as the eyewitness accounts, I wasted no time in getting a copy of the article.
Other evidence for believing that this article in The Montanian represents policies that affect Idaho, as well as Montana, is that, not too long ago, at a U.S. Fish and Wildlife public meeting about listing the wolverine on the Endangered species list, we were told that Idaho and Montana are now considered to be in the same management region by the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife. The land and wildlife management policies are pretty much the same now. This is why huge blocks of land, taking in N.W. Montana, Northern Idaho and N.E. Washington, are included in management plans for grizzly habitat, caribou habitat, wildlife corridors, etc.
Where Did Rural Cleansing Come From?
Commissioner Windom remarks, in the Montanian article, that the Draft EIS that had upset her and other commissioners was the product of five to six years’ labor by the FWP. That puts us back to around 1992, or a year later, when the Rio Earth Summit trotted out the document, Agenda 21: the Earth Summit Strategy to Save Our Planet, and other supporting documents, for our enjoyment.
Documents and resolutions introduced at the Rio Earth Summit had been in the works for years before being introduced to the world.
Policies leading to rural cleansing are found in the document, Agenda 21: the Earth Summit Strategy to Save Our Planet, but another important source is associated with one of the other documents introduced at Rio. That was the Convention on Biological Diversity. It has been shown that the Wildlands Project is the central mechanism by which the Convention on Biological Diversity is to be implemented. The Wildlands Project calls for humans to be removed from one-half of the American land mass, and to create uninhabited corridors for wildlife to move freely from Alaska to Yellowstone Park, or farther south. It was written by radical environmentalists working in United Nations nongovernmental organizations with the full knowledge and aid of U.S. federal agencies such as U.S. Forest Service, BLM, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, EPA and others.
It appears that the Wildlands Project is now being implemented, under another name, in Idaho and the West through the Western Governors Association’s Wildlife Corridors Initiative (WCI). To learn more about that, please see my blog, Infiltration of LittleTown U.S.A.: The Wildlands Project and Agenda 21 in Idaho. Particularly, pay attention to the section subtitled “Nudging Us into the Cities.”
If we are paying attention, we can catch public officials and media pundits additionally telling on themselves by their perpetual use of disinformation. One common bit of disinformation used to mislead the public is the repeated statement that Agenda 21 is an outdated and nonbinding document. You can always tell a trained operative when statements similar to this come out of their mouth. Here is an article displaying this strategy: How the U.N.’s Agenda 21 Affects Kootenai County, Idaho.
Just two to three weeks ago, I submitted a comment on the above article. I commented that Agenda 21 is no outdated or irrelevant document, because in 2012, the United Nations held another summit called Rio+20, in which the members reaffirmed Agenda 21 as the working document for the 21st century. They also reaffirmed their commitment to the Convention on Biological Diversity. The webmaster declined to publish my comment.
To back up my comment, here is a quote found on Wikipedia’s entry for Agenda 21:
“Rio+20 (2012)
Main article: United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development
In 2012, at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development the attending members reaffirmed their commitment to Agenda 21 in their outcome document called “The Future We Want”. 180 leaders from nations participated.”
Bringing it Home
When the Wikipedia entry calls the Agenda 21 document a voluntary and nonbinding action plan, the writer fails to outline the process whereby former President Clinton issued an executive order and created the President’s Council on Sustainable Development (PCSD), which then formed policies and plans to implement Agenda 21 under soft law. Sustainable Development is the term used at United Nations and national levels to describe the goals of Agenda 21. The PCSD generated documents and guidelines, notably Sustainable America: A New Consensus for the Prosperity, Opportunity and a Healthy Environment for the Future, used by federal agencies, such as the Forest Service, EPA and others, to form policies.
These guidelines have become the overarching vision for our nation, not only for federal agencies, but also for city planners, corporate trade groups, and environmental groups, as this excerpt from Sustainable America shows.
Federal grants, monies, and other inducements, have drawn local and state governments into that implementation. I’m sure many of those public officials were ignorant of the consequences of accepting those grants at the time. Some are either still ignorant or too stubborn, or maybe even too complicit, to admit that they were duped. When soft law becomes the new normal, it can be upheld by case law. These practices are also now being codified in piecemeal legislation, comprehensive land use plans and zoning regulations.
There You Go Again
Now you will be told that county comprehensive land use plans, likewise, are nonbinding documents with no real clout. Oops—wrong again. For example, the U.S. Forest Service uses comprehensive land use plans when writing forest plans for your region. If your plan just happens to agree with their goals (and what are their goals? why, Sustainable Forestry, of course) the plan serves as cover for their management policies, because the Forest Service claims that they have coordinated with your county, as required by law, by having read and taken under consideration your comprehensive land use plan. See this video and hear F.S. employees state this over and over again, as they are being questioned regarding their latest forest plan for Idaho. 
I have also read that comprehensive land use plans can be used as a basis for zoning regulations and other county ordinances.
This is why various groups want to embed statements that are conducive to Sustainable Development in your county comprehensive land use plans.
Though the disinformation campaign strategy in Idaho is still one of denial and Alinsky-like mockery of Agenda 21 conspiracy theorists, as exemplified in this recent Spokesman-Review article, the strategy is now shifting elsewhere. Rosa Koire, speaking of California, describes how the charge of conspiracy theory is their giving way to the position that Agenda 21, and its related documents and policies, are real, but that these policies are the only feasible and just way of coping with global problems such as climate change, overpopulation, poverty and environmental degradation.
It’s the New normal, Just Accept it.
It’s no surprise, then, that FOX News just published an article entitled Foundations plan to pay news media to cover radical UN agenda. The article describes how a cadre of journalists is being trained to win the public over to U.N. Sustainable Development policies.
Comic Relief
That’s why I just chortle when I find articles like this one, from The Montanian, containing past candid (though Kafkaesque) quotes from officials who hadn’t yet sufficiently learned to dissemble. I hope you will read the entire article, as it has additional interesting comments about the changing use of conservation easements and the way Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks was circumventing the public and county commissioners to get its way. The article is reprinted by the gracious permission of The Montanian Newspaper.
And just so we can do a little mocking of our own, let me refer you to this funny, short short video called My Daughter’s New Agenda 21 Bedroom
But, then again, after having a good chuckle, let’s move past the mockery and get down to the debate–if we can get one. If journalists are going to try to convince us that Sustainable Development, as envisioned by members and advisory groups to the United Nations, is the best path for America, we need to be ready to engage in a logical and reasonable discussion. And that will be a serious conversation, indeed.
The Montanian. “FWP plans big changes in hunting and rural living.” Libby, Montana: July 1, 1998.
*Note: You can read The Montanian article, in its entirety, on my web site, The Daily Herb. Just scroll down to the bottom of my post and you will see the newspaper article. Due to the amount of print on page 1, we couldn’t get very large print copy off of microfiche, and the print on page 1 is small. I have included a transcription of page 1 at the very bottom of the post, so that it will be easy to read. Page 2 is sufficiently large for most people to read.
The post Telling On Themselves: Rural Cleansing in Idaho and Montana – Sara Hall appeared first on The Voice of Idaho.