Carroll suggests that the Right wing is working to challenge the recommendations of a UN white paper devoted to sustainable growth and hence social justice--and to identify policy and planning with sustainability as its goal as anti-American and as undermining our value for individual rights. I encourage you to imagine how the work you do as professionals can and must take on efforts such as these, to derail momentum toward a more sustainable world.Remember our conversation last semester about the disabling of a program that brought together HUD, the Department of Transportation and the Department of Energy to do collaborative planning? Here's another expression of the efforts to constrain sustainable planning.
This is new to me, but I think that it is worth disseminating this in toto...Here it is:
Inside the nefarious Agenda 21
Friday, February 17, 2012
jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.Have y'all heard about Agenda 21, the latest threat to our freedoms? It's a real thing and a growing movement, particularly in the West. Not in coastal California so much - we're west of the West - but in Colorado, Nevada, Utah, states like that. In some places, it's a big deal.
Agenda 21 is a 20-year-old white paper issued by the United Nations designed to encourage sustainable growth. Now it has become, in the eyes of some right-wing ideologues, a blueprint for taking American liberties away. Tom DeWeese, one of the guiding spirits behind End Agenda 21, or "Agenders," once wrote:
"Government will control how hot your shower may be, how much air conditioning or heat you may use. ... The policy of Agenda 21 comes in many names, such as Sustainable Development, Smart Growth, historic preservation ... and comprehensive planning."
And all the time I thought those were good things. Turns out they were a plot to make me take cold showers. Those bastards.
I learned about the phenomenon of Agenda 21 from a very good article by Jonathan Thompson in the current issue of the invaluable High Country News, from which much of this column is taken. Thompson traces the popularity of End Agenda 21 to a 17-minute Glenn Beck diatribe last year. Later that same year, Newt Gingrich vowed to cut funding for "any kind of activity for United Nations Agenda 21."
There had been glimmerings before. A Tea Party-backed gubernatorial candidate in 2010 in Colorado announced that Denver's bike-sharing program was part of the U.N. plot. That's the kind of looniness we're dealing with. I had thought at least that the United Nations had shaken off the world-domination thing long ago, based partly on its inability to dominate anything.
HCN even provided a handy list of words that act as dog whistles for the Agenders out there. They include: "Environment, Consensus, Affordable Housing, Protect, Social Justice, Watershed, Traffic Calming, Endangered Species, Invasive Species, Regional, Vision and Historic Preservation." All of these are indicators that secret U.N. agents are ready to make your town an international hellhole.
It's easy to make fun of these people now, but the consequences of their belief systems and their activism make them more dangerous than they seem. Thompson recounts the story of a long-range plan for La Plata County in Colorado (it's where Durango is located) and the county planning commission that shepherded it through.
It was two years in the making, took $750,000 to produce, and engendered a whopping 137 public meetings. And in the end, there was no report. Agenders have made it their mission to sabotage planning meetings, all to stop the United Nations breaking this country on the wheel of endangered species.
Or something.
This idea is that society acting for the common good is a threat to individual liberties. Even if a majority of people support the ideas. Even if the ideas are objectively good, like lowered air pollution. This is cussedness raised to a political art form and provided with its own bogeyman to strike fear into the hearts of the naive.
The United Nations is going to make you keep fringe-toed lizards in your back bedroom, dammit. Unless we stop them now, we'll be riding in hybrids and living in planned communities - because the United Nations wants it that way. As one La Plata activist said, "Someone who owns hundreds of acres in this county doesn't want someone living in the city who rides a solar-powered bicycle to tell them what to do."
We have met the enemy, and he is riding a bicycle...
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/02/17/DDHO1N828V.DTL
This article appeared on page E - 10 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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