The aforementioned (dare we say it?)aliens were invited to poke around on their fact-finding mission at Yellowstone by Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Fish and Wildlife and Parks George Frampton Jr. Frampton, at the behest of the U.S. Park Service and a cavalcade of environmental groups including the Sierra Club, the National Audubon Society and the Wilderness Society, an organization Frampton once led, officially sought the intervention of UNESCO's World Heritage Committee to remedy what they called "extremely serious threats" by a proposed gold mine near the park.
The initial correspondence from the environmental groups to the World Heritage Centre in March 1995 requested that Yellowstone be put on the List of the World Heritage in Danger due to the mine that was planned on its perimeter. The World Heritage Centre followed up with a letter to Frampton in June requesting a detailed analysis of the site to determine whether it should be included for consideration as endangered at their July meeting in Paris. On June 27, Frampton responded on behalf of the Clinton administration in a lengthy letter in which he pleaded for intervention by the U.N. group and urged that international investigators immediately be sent to Yellowstone.
During their visit to the proposed site for New World Mine, north of Cooke City, Mont., the four visitors had the opportunity to interact with many of the more common local species including environmentalists, park-service representatives and mining-industry honchos. In fact, each member of the visiting U.N. team traveled in an overland vehicle (read jeep) with their own locally supplied good-guy environmentalist and evil mine representative. This allowed for a continuing dialogue to be maintained wherein each side could bark loudly at the other.
The visitors also took time out from their research to discuss the future of the park with many reporters who had gathered from around the globe. Adul Wichiencharoen of Thailand, who heads the World Heritage Committee, went so far as to tell a reporter from Montana's Billings Gazette that the park might be improved by the addition of several million additional acres of land. "Certainly the forest acres around Yellowstone belong to the same ecosystem," he said. "All of these lands must have protection so their integrity is not threatened."
The end result was that the visitors returned to the World Heritage Centre, presented their findings in Berlin that November and the world body voted to place Yellowstone on its list of endangered sites. The resulting international bad press effectively derailed the permit process and in late August the mine owners agreed to a land swap with the U.S. government, ridding them of their parcel for $65 million worth of property in a location yet to be determined.
Where was Yogi Bear when he was needed? It isn't certain. But the circus of events that took place in the mountains was enough to send House Resources Committee Chairman Don Young of Alaska to urge passage of the American Land Sovereignty Protection Act of 1996 faster than you could say Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
Young's proposal simply provided that Congress be allowed to assert its authority over what American landmarks make the World Heritage List. The World Heritage List is a product of the UNESCO Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and National Heritage, a treaty taking precedence at law over the U.S. Constitution. Since it was adopted in 1972 (the United States was its initiator and first signatory), the convention has been used to project the authority of a U.N. agency over an ever-growing list of officially designated cultural and natural sites. Commemorative photos are taken. Plaques are installed at qualifying locations. National sovereignty is eroded.
At present 496 cultural and natural sites throughout the world are included on the list. They cover a diverse compendium, including such buildings as Independence Hall, the Statue of Liberty and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and such areas of regional and national interest as the Florida Everglades and Mount Everest.
Instead, in the case of the World Heritage List, sites generally are recommended for this internationalization by the National Park Service. Twenty such sites are within the confines of the U.S. borders; two additional sites, Yellowstone and the Everglades, are on the list of endangered heritage sites. Hundreds of additional sites around the globe are pending inclusion on the list. If neither the first McDonald's nor Yankee Stadium has yet to be included, it could be an oversight.
Certainly the UNESCO folks are looking to improve their holdings. "An analysis of the World Heritage List has shown that the industrialized world, religious Christian movements, historical cities, historical periods and 'elitist' architecture are over-represented," according to World Heritage Centre documents. Well, so much for getting McDonald's on the list.
Now the World Heritage Centre is willing to admit that for the moment it is a dog that barks but has no bite. It can't yet force the United States to do anything about its national parks or turn over the Statue of Liberty. But these people are nothing if not ambitious. Although UNESCO admits that it has no enforcement teeth (which begs the question of why there should be such a list in the first place), the Clinton administration first strongly asserted its desire that Yellowstone be put on the endangered list and then opposed passage of Young's bill, which would have taken nomination of sites to the World Heritage List out from under the relatively opaque operations of the Interior Department and placed them in the hands of Congress.
"If Congress wishes to micromanage these international programs, it could assume that responsibility," claimed Rep. George Miller of California, the senior Democratic member of the House Resources Committee. "However, it is very ironic that this Congress is willing to spend its waning days fixing programs that are not broken...."
Critics slap their heads, roll their eyes and wonder if a treaty really has ceded American sovereignty over the Statue of Liberty and Independence Hall. They note with suspicion the administration's loathing of the proposed Young bill, going so far as to promise a presidential veto had it passed. They ask why we have Clinton protecting a list that supposedly doesn't matter--from a bill that supposedly doesn't matter.
Some who testified in favor of the bill argue strongly that congressional oversight is a constitutional necessity. "If these international programs are seen as harmless because they are merely symbolic, Congress is entitled to think competing concerns also deserve 'symbolic' recognition," testified Jeremy A. Rabkin, an expert in constitutional law from Cornell University. "[The bill] seems to me a modest but useful statement that global enthusiasms should not be allowed to run roughshod over our traditional constitutional principles."
But if the American Land Sovereignty Protection Act of 1996 didn't stand a chance this time around, and the bill, while it received a majority of votes, did not recieve the two-thirds vote necessary for it to pass under the rules of suspension, it still is not a fight that's finished. Young has vowed to keep the pressure on when the 105th Congress convenes.
"While I'm pleased that a strong majority of the House supported this legislation, I'm amazed that a single member of Congress would oppose having congressional oversight of international land designations within the borders of the United States," Young says. Clinton administration claims of U.N. authority over Yellowstone and the Statue of Liberty are meanwhile continuing to give conservatives a bad case of dyspepsia.
To: Noumenon
The environmental Nazis love us also:
"...The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can't let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the U.S. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are. And it is important to the rest of the world to make sure that they don't suffer economically by virtue of our stopping them." - Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund
"Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs." - John Davis, editor of Earth First Journal
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." - H.L. Mencken
"Cannibalism is a radical but realistic solution to the problem of overpopulation." - Lyall Watson, The Financial Times - July 15, 1995
"Protecting the environment is a ruse. The goal is the political and economic subjugation of most men by the few, under the guise of preserving nature." - J.H. Robbins
"Global sustainability requires: the deliberate quest of poverty....reduced resource consumption...and set levels of mortality control." - Professor Maurice King
"The environmentalist's dream is an Egalitarian society based on rejection of economic growth, a smaller population, eating lower on the food chain, consuming a lot less, and sharing a much lower level of resources much more equally." - Aaron Wildavsky
"A global climate treaty must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the greenhouse effect." - Richard Benedict, State Dept./Conservation Foundation
"Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun." - Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University
"The secret to David McTaggart's(early officer in Greenpeace) success is the secret to Greenpeace's success: It doesn't matter what is true...it only matters what people believe is true...You are what the media define you to be. Greenpeace became a myth, and a myth-generating machine." - Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace.
"Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover the source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it." - Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute
"We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing--in terms of economic policy and environmental policy." - Timothy Wirth, former U.S. Senator(D-Colorado)
"We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects....We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of tens of millions of acres of presently settled land." - David Foreman, Earth First
"The collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans." - Dr. Reed F. Noss, The Wildlands Project
"As radical environmentalists, we can see AIDS not as a problem, but as a necessary solution." - Miss Ann Thropy(pseudonym), Earth First Journal
"The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing....This is to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run." - Economist editorial
"I suspect that the politicians and businessmen who are jumping on the environmental bandwagon don't have the slightest idea of what they are getting into. They are talking about emission control devices on automobiles, while we are talking about bans on automobiles." - Dennis Hayes, Eart Day Agenda
"The invention of the concept of sustainable human development and that of so-called human security, as opposed to territorial security of nation-states, and its promotion by the UN is in clear contradiction to all that we, the Group of 77, and the UN Charter itself consider inalienable, namely national sovereignty and security." - Pranab Mukherjee, India's Minister Of Commerce- Earth Times, Oct.15,1994
"It's(the prospect of cheap fusion energy) the worst thing that could happen to the planet." - Jeremy Rifkin
"If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels." - Prince Phillip, World Wildlife Fund
"Christianity is our foe. If animal rights is to succeed, we must destroy the Judeo-Christian Religious tradition." - Peter Singer, the father of Animal Rights
"In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 per day." - Dr. Jacques Cousteau
"I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems." - John Davis, editor of Earth First Journal
"We reject the idea of private property." - Peter Berle, President of National Audubon Society
"People are the cause of all the problems, we have too many of them; we need to get rid of some of them, and this(ban of DDT) is as good a way as any." - Charles Wurster, Environmental Defense Fund
"This is a political game. It has nothing to do with science. It has nothing to do with health and safety." - Sherry Neddick, Greenpeace
7 Posted on 12/27/1999 19:28:38 PST by Uncle Bill
Okay, so maybe there were only a handful of individuals involved, and maybe they didn't actually arrive in the dead of night protected by whirring black helicopters and hell-bent on clandestine maneuvers. But the fact that four members of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's, or UNESCO's, World Heritage Committee traveled from halfway around the globe to the Idaho-Montana-Wyoming border area in summer 1995 to investigate a "dangerous" situation unfolding at Yellowstone National Park has some people still scratching their heads in disbelief.
