Mark Vande Pol
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SUNNI: Yah, it is technical in places, although not as much as other books I've read. Maybe I've not gotten to the really heavy-duty material yet. You don't seem to use a lot of jargon, which tends to make a book harder to understand for non-experts. I have been enjoying your sense of humor, which sometimes reveals itself in the most unexpected places. It's a great touch! How did you come to write the book?
MARK: It started with the sense that there was something fundamentally wrong about environmental rules in our county, Santa Cruz, California. Environmental rules made no sense when it came to helping people restore their land. I had just completed building a house as an owner-builder. The permit process was an expensive joke that did little to assure better construction or lower impacts but they were great for bureaucrats, consultants (former bureaucrats), and selected suppliers cashing in on a local monopoly. The regulations hampered people who simply wanted to improve the condition of their forests. Meanwhile the county kept bringing in more weeds with their road maintenance equipment than from any other source.
So upon the prodding of some friends, I foolishly signed up for the local Agenda21 Biodiversity and Ecosystem Management Roundtable. I was operating under the mistaken belief that, because it was a "consensus process", I could get these people to face the mess they were making. Almost two years after the draft had been submitted, people who had never attended a single public meeting had totally changed the document, in secret. It was presented to me for my signature as if it was a done deal. There was some haggling that improved it somewhat, but I still refused to sign it. So they added my name to the list of contributors and fraudulently published it as a consensus! The county had agreed, in advance, to accept the product and write it into law, sight unseen.
I had studied the entire Federal Convention debate in college, under an iconic professor of government, Dr. William Allen, now at Michigan State. So I knew the frightening potential of a system of government like the Agenda21, under the aegis of the United Nations, in which elected representatives rubber-stamped the output of hidden committees loaded with pre-selected bureaucrats and activists.
Now, I hadn't become an engineer just because I liked inventing. I did well enough at it to create several novel processes and earn a couple of patents, but what I wanted to learn from engineering was to understand in an intimate way how wealth is created. I saw the lack of that knowledge in America's political leadership to be a serious problem about which I wanted to do something. So, about three years after the Agenda21 debacle, when I got to the end of a long and difficult, but intensely rewarding and interesting project, my wife -- a saint -- looked at me and said, "If you are ever going to do with your life what you always wanted to do, now is the time to do it." So, I quit the job, started to write, and ended up educating the kids at home -- a great decision.
Because I was focusing upon a problem, the book naturally started as a polemic, but in the first few drafts, I hadn't really created anything novel. Then I got some advice from Randal O'Toole after he had read a painful early draft. He said (I'm paraphrasing), "Yes, people do need to read it, but unless you offer a solution, nobody is going to read it." That's kind of like waving a red flag in front of an engineer (we're a compulsive lot when it comes to cracking problems). So, that's what you do. I'm proud to say that copies have been delivered to the White House by a former US Senator.
SUNNI: In its preface, you provide some background as to how you became an environmentalist, but almost none on how you became pro-freedom. Care to enlighten us on that some?
MARK: I had always been a risk taker, philosopher, and something of the rugged individualist. So my temperament was predisposed toward freedom, but that isn't enough to explain the transformation that occurred while writing the book. It was the wrenching experience of having confronted mountains of hard data that showed how "environmental protection" had been used to carefully manipulate the conversion of the local timber market to residential real estate for a period of over thirty years. It was political corruption on a massive scale.
Early in the process, families who had cared for their land for over a hundred years were being forced to log or sell in order to pay property taxes, while taking the political blame for doing it from the adjacent suburban users of those property taxes (not to mention cheap redwood lumber). Later, zoning laws took the next cut in land value mandating huge minimum subdivision acreage requirements, as much as 40 acres per parcel -- in other words, if you had 110 acres, the most you could make of it was two home sites. That kept the price of the total parcel up because of the reduced supply, which maintained tax revenue, but minimized the development potential to the landowner. It also forced more use of marginal sites with higher environmental hazards rather than higher densities in optimal locations with lower hazards. In the '80s and '90s, increasingly-dubious timber regulations -- some illegally titled as zoning law -- slowly made that purchase price even cheaper than it might have otherwise been because regulations had rendered the timber on the land of almost no value. They had also removed the only means to fund expensive land maintenance while neighbors in those new houses were demanding use of adjacent timberland for uncompensated entertainment purposes. Building codes, especially septic regulations, made using smaller parcels very difficult. The only thing left to do with big parcels was get out entirely and sell to a developer with the connections necessary to get permits. It should be no surprise who was behind those zoning laws and regulations. It was local developers and the construction industry cashing in on a closed game which paid more taxes than did timber.
I had gone through the usual loop of thinking that better laws would fix the problem. But, when I saw how deeply even local government, supposedly the most transparent and accessible level of government, was so corrupt, so deviously manipulated, in ways that even the politicians immersed in the game did not understand, that is when I finally understood just how dangerous collective control of private property really is. As I learned more about the global scale of this resource manipulation racket, particularly as regards the UN Agenda21, it was shattering.
I wept, for my country and for my witless assent to the very same corrupt belief systems, the purpose for which I had since discovered. For the first time in thirty years, I prayed for an answer. The answers came, in bits and pieces. Theory gave way to example. After that, the hard part was getting at the questions by which to make the solutions realistic to implement. The process took nearly four years. As I said, my wife is a saint.
SUNNI: And you're amazingly persistent! I think a lot of people are casual environmentalists -- that is, they enjoy nature to some degree, but don't see themselves as part of today's environmentalism movement. It seems to me that you said somewhere in the book that today's environmentalists are pretty far removed from, say, the founders of the Sierra Club or Greenpeace. If my memory on that is accurate, how have they deviated from the early environmental movement, in your opinion?
MARK: That's not what I meant at all. What I was pointing out is that the environmental movement over the last fifty years has deviated from its John Muir/Teddy Roosevelt/CCC conservationist heritage and has become a self-aggrandizing religion of misanthropic avarice operating on the belief that anything humans do in nature must be harmful. Environmentalists, especially in resource agencies, are so afraid of doing any harm that they tie themselves in knots while obvious damage of mandated neglect continues to progress, too often on a scale so enormous as to make whatever efforts they finally take totally futile. Somehow, they spend an awful lot of money while they're at it.
SUNNI: Sorry, Mark, I phrased my question poorly, but I think you answered it okay anyway. I meant that the leaders of today's environmental organizations have strayed from that heritage, as you said. That probably leads people like me, who love nature and who love to see people working their land responsibly, not to even try to get involved -- I know I think it'd be a total waste of time, because of my perception that "hard core" environmentalists won't listen to someone like me who questions their dogma, let alone someone who espouses private, market-based solutions rather than more state interference. So it seems the "casual environmentalists", as I called them, are much quieter right now, but there are a lot of them out there. At least, I hope there are ...
MARK: You've touched on something important, the way often dishonestly portrayed positions within a technical debate alienates people from their accountability in a democratically controlled system. Because the uninvolved suspect the activists on either side are blowing smoke for reasons they cannot fathom, and know they don't know enough about environmental issues to be making decisions, they check out of the debate, usually with a bias toward one side or the other. That means they don't know what they have at stake in the way environmental activism affects their lives. If they knew the cost in transportation, energy, housing, etc, they'd be outraged, never mind the environmental damage that's been done. For example, just the money to change buried gasoline tanks in California from steel to plastic was enough to pay for full tuition for every kid enrolled in a state college or university. Oil companies wanted that change because it put mom and pop station owners out of business. Oil companies and their "environmental activist" stooges in the Natural Resources Defense Council advocated for MTBE to be mandated into the gasoline, even though the oil companies knew the stuff would leak through those new plastic tanks. Now the public is paying even more to clean that up too, whether in taxes or higher fuel costs. The problem isn't that oil companies are evil; it's that government has the power to specify their products and absolve the producers of responsibility for the consequences, just as Congress indemnified the producers of MTBE in advance of its introduction.
