• The State of the World’s Ecosystems

    This blogger asserts that just as global warming has created a whole warehouse of scandals, and politicized science to the point where reason has lost its moorings, conservation biology is equally as corrupt.  Over the past thirty years, our natural resources have been locked away from us by environmental NGO’s who have sold us a bill of goods about species and biodiversity loss, equally as bogus as the warming scam.  As a result, prices for all natural resources – particularly food and energy – are unnecessarily high, and penalize the least advantaged among us, preventing the very poor from climbing out of their poverty.

    Because of this pseudo-science, country people numbering in the tens of millions have been driven off their loved lands in every nation on earth.  Most poignant is the state of those indigenous peoples in the developing world who have had their land stolen from them and resources locked away, by the heirs to the greatest American fortunes, who run the foundations based on those fortunes.  Well connected, with unlimited funds, Ivy league educations, and an adherence to a false ideology, they’ve created a mapping system covering more than 1/3 of the planet, that is nothing more than a pack of lies.  Nonetheless these mapping systems, once created are donated to local governments and thereby form the basis of all land use planning.  The assertion of massive species loss is the so-called rationale behind the takings of hundreds of millions of acres in hundreds of countries, developed and not.

    Working country people in every locale say these maps cannot be ground-truthed, that more often than not, what the mapping says is there, is not there.  The mapping all too often is a politicized tissue of lies, created by pet scientists who are creating jobs for themselves first by establishing ecosystem collapse, then in finding ways to stop ecosystem collapse.

    In April of 2010, the U.N. Panel on Biodiversity announced that 1/3 of the species on the planet are going extinct.  With this document, which had no citations attached to it, these so called experts assert, among other absurdities, that 90% of the grasslands of North America are going extinct.  Even a schoolchild on a bus on the Canadian prairies or in the great intermountain States of the U.S. would find this laughable. One hundred and twenty-four countries contributed to this report.  The reports will certainly be found to be a clever mix of fact, fiction, utopian fantasy and blatant fabrication.

    Over the next year, this blog will attempt to gather data that ground-truths (fact checks) the assertions of the UN Biodiversity Panel, the Heinz Foundation’s 2008 The State of the Nations Ecosystems, an equally politicized report on species loss, and the grand-daddy of them all, The Nature Conservancy’s NatureServe.  I will publish the findings of conservation biologists on the ground all over the world, as I find them.  Conservation biologists who disagree with the prevailing zeitgeist, much like climate scientists who do not agree with the UN IPCC, are silent.  Many are afraid for their careers, since granting, especially from U.S. foundations, the U.N. and its satellites and most universities,  depends upon following party line.

  • My Gym

    It’s spring and some days I have to chain myself to my desk.  The broom is calling you see, and not a witches’ broom either – though witches’ brooms must have been made with the stuff I routinely slaughter.  It’s stiff and green and tough as steel wire and this month, the bright ghastly yellow flowers surround the house – 150 meters away, but nonetheless, it will go to seed in a month, and then all the earth – scraped bare by the construction crew –  will be colonized.

    So I got out with my loppers, rubber boots, and long sleeves and start work.  It is the best exercise ever.  Better than downhill skiing – ok not quite. Galloping a horse across a field – that’s more fun I admit, but I no longer risk death.  But most things – the gym, hiking, swimming – cutting broom trump broom.  Within fifteen minutes I’m breathing hard and sweating and here’s the thing – I don’t want to stop.  It’s too satisfying, it’s fun, it’s time travel back to when our ancestors cleared farmland – I used to think how miserable that must have been.  Now I know they were all high as kites the whole damn time.

    I’ve been clearing broom for 12 years now on and off.  It is the most aggressive invasive species out here and it flourishes wherever land has been disturbed and then allowed to go fallow – the best argument ever against our metastatic conservation urge.  All local shrubs and flowers are crowded out – the nootka rose, the camas lily, the chocolate orchid – gone.

    Here’s the thing: I arrived in the country, hollowed out from 20 years in big big cities, frail, exhausted, often bedridden with flu or a persistent cold. Broom gave me back my health.  Working outside cured me.  I can hike straight up a mountain now, or run five miles (with breaks) and I never get sick for more than a day.  Destroying that shrub on my 28, then after the (green) subdivision, 16.5 acres has given me another 40 years of brutal health.  Now, I must go because if I do four hours of phone interviews,  I can have two in my broom patch.

  • SINS OF COMMISSION director Richard Oshen

    Finally, a film about how the California Coastal Commission created the great fires of the last few years in California.

    “We are suffering a crisis of authority.  The California Coastal Commission has subordinated public safety creating a hazardous fuel preservation program, amending state fire code without the approval of the State fire Commission as is required by law.”  Ann Hoffman, President of Land Use Preservation Defense Fund, Governor’s Blue Ribbon Fire Commission.  7 January 2004

    People are fined $1000 a day for clearing 20 foot brush-free zones around their houses.

    This kind of coercion is happening in British Columbia, Washington State, Oregon, Montana, Idaho, anywhere the big environmental NGO’s like Sierra, Greenpeace, The Wilderness Society, NRDC, &etc. ad infinitum go to court to prevent any mitigation in any forest.  200 million acres of U.S. National Forest are at risk of catastrophic, once in an millennium fire.  The death of species, old growth forest, the pain suffered by those who live in and around the forest – all incalculable.

    Let’s start with indicting Peter Douglas, executive director of the California Coastal Commission for crimes against humanity.