Mark Vande Pol

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SUNNI: Wow, Mark. No wonder we casual environmentalists feel in over our heads. So, how did we get left behind, do you think? Was it a dilution of the ideas as the movement became popular? Or were there some problems with the original environmental movement when it sprang up in the 60s?

MARK: Environmental regulatory perfidy was working in the halls of excessive power long before any public awakening in the 1960s. As you probably read in the book, the Congressional Record on the ratification of an environmental treaty, The Convention on Nature Protection and Wildlife Preservation in the Western Hemisphere [PDF file] received no recorded vote, no record of a quorum, and a cover letter from Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, that lied outright about the virtually unlimited (and unconstitutional) regulatory powers it emplaced in both the Congress and administrative government. That was in 1941.

While campus leadership developed in the 60s, the popular movement really got going in the '70s. It was set up by very wealthy people with an interest in using government to control access to resources for fun and profit. They set up charitable foundations posing as environmental charities. Those supply grants to universities to generate useful science, more grants to activist groups posing as the public, and more grants to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) full of lawyers with which to bring suit against agencies with every reason to lose those suits because they get a non-discretionary budget to "comply with the order" as a part of the usual consent decree. It is akin to a vertically integrated, tax-exempt resource racketeering system operating on much the same economic principles that date from the days of the European mercantilists.

Remember that when Lenin first took over Russia, one of his first moves was land use control in the name of scientific environmental protection. The policy was articulated in two documents, On Land and On Forests, with goals, means, and justifications very similar to the current Wildlands Project here in the USA. With those tools, Lenin successfully implemented land use policies that starved 22 million recalcitrant Kulaks. So I guess it's no surprise to see environmentalism first crop up in America among the Stalinists within the Roosevelt Department of State, and then surface at the universities in the '60s as a tentacle of cultural Marxism.

SUNNI: Wow. I knew a little about the land control in the Soviet Union, but very little. So, at the risk of going conspiracy theory in some readers' eyes, do you think it's a coincidence that there are parallels here?

MARK: It is a legitimate question how much of what the environmental movement does is for purely ideological reasons as opposed to manipulation. My take is that it's both, with much of the latter arising out of normal human opportunism. Still, to assume that people in power don't conspire would be plainly silly; it is after all, a time-tested way to stay on top at relatively low risk -- until the system collapses. I'm not one who believes in one grand conspiracy, but rather more of a feeding frenzy among those with means who believe that it's the only way to survive in business while they fan their egos at cocktail parties. Still, that it was set up the way it was, when one considers who was driving it, and then you see the games being played now which are CLEARLY profit driven, you can't help but think that there were some very smart people planning ahead. Orwell warned us explicitly of such a conspiracy between the left and the capitalist class in his first book, Homage to Catalonia, written in 1933. Wait just a second while I pull up that quote ...

SUNNI: An environmentalist-engineer who knows his history -- you're proving more than I bargained for, Mark! Do you think there's any way to reach out to environmentalists of today, to convince them that consumption doesn't necessarily equal devastation, or to get them to even listen to free-market alternatives such as yours? Or will it take a serious free-market environmental counter-movement to get them to pay attention?

MARK: I think it's a three-step process. First, at every opportunity, point out the scale and depth of habitat degradation at the hands of environmental agencies complaining of a chronic lack of funds. No industry has ever had the power to make environmental mistakes on the scale of which government is uniquely capable. No industry would ever load a job with such extravagant overhead. It may become increasingly difficult to get that story out to the general public when public lands are closed off to all human entry as is proposed in the Wildlands Project (whose "connecting corridors" are virtually guaranteed to be conduits for pestilence on an unprecedented scale).

Second: If we can get that story across, show them how they're being played for chumps by the very big businesses they said were the problem in the first place.

Then, draw them to a solution: show them the potential for an honest buck as a small business in a free enterprise alternative system.

SUNNI: I suppose we shouldn't go farther without me asking you about your reactions to the recent Kelo decision by the Supreme Court. What's your take on that?

MARK: Most people think Kelo is about the Fifth Amendment, but the original interpretation of the Bill of Rights didn't apply to the state and local governments at all, except to defer all powers not enumerated in the Constitution to the states or the people. Thus the state power to take property by eminent domain goes as far back as the early 19th century barge canals in the East and Midwest and really got cooking with the railroads. Abraham Lincoln made his name as a lawyer rigging precisely such deals. The results were that Eastern investors got rich in the name of "the public good" while rural landowners and small land speculators got "just compensation" -- if, and only if, their respective states held to that principle; often it was a lot worse than that. Thus the only thing different about Kelo as far as the original understanding of the Fifth Amendment is concerned, is that it involves people's houses.

SUNNI: Your observation of Easterners getting rich under early eminent domain takings is somewhat relevant today still, don't you think, Mark? It seems to me that many people who live in the West -- the real West, not trendy towns like Aspen or Jackson Hole -- see the environmental movement as increasingly a move by people who don't live here, and agencies with offices in D.C., to control their lands, when they've never even set foot on them, and can't possibly know the land with the intimacy a resident owner has.

MARK: Absolutely it's relevant, particularly as regards Eastern control of the Senate and the use of treaty law to effect environmental regulatory powers. Many of the same Eastern families driving the land grab policy in the West today were doing it a hundred fifty years ago with easy access to federal lands. Sadly, the gentrification of the West we are seeing now has a bunch of those same urbanites buying up ranch land with no idea how or inclination to manage it properly.

Back to Kelo for a moment. The legal problem essential to Kelo is the Supreme Court's Orwellian selective incorporation doctrine as regards the Fourteenth Amendment. It is "selective" in that "equal protection" of specific "privileges and immunities" listed in the Bill of Rights applies only to those cases as determined by the whim of the Supreme Court by how they read the tea leaves in the first ten amendments. As the resulting federal powers have broadened, people have become so used to expecting an intrusive Supreme Court to protect individual rights that they expected Fourteenth Amendment privileges and immunities to include Fifth Amendment protection of individuals from local government takings. In fact, it never has done so before, preferring to leave matters of property rights to the states. Thus, this Court's majority opinion interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment as regards the Fifth is consistent with the selective incorporation doctrine over the last eighty years. The same has been true of the Second Amendment, which should scare the hell out of any gun rights advocate.

My opinion on this conundrum is that the powers Fourteenth Amendment granted to the Federal government (to protect individual rights via the courts) have their perverse consequences: People rightly don't pay as much attention to their state and local representatives when they know that every law is subject to the very slow, expensive, remote, and seemingly indomitable powers exerted by Federal courts. The mere existence of the judicial option inhibits self-government: Everybody's hands are tied, nobody can make a decision, and your vote doesn't matter much anyway because some judge can toss out the law. In that regard, the selective incorporation doctrine of the 14th Amendment is an evil. It may have imposed corrective measures for structural racism in the States, but one can't say race relations are all that much better because of them, while the Feds have gained powers they rightly shouldn't have. The people should have paid more attention to their own State laws. Now, with Kelo, some people surely will as we have already seen in several states. So, in that respect, Kelo is not all bad news.

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