Who Really Owns Our (US National Parks) Biosphere's, the UN?

[Guest guest]

Who Really Owns Our Biosphere's and World Heritage Sites?

 

Michael S. Coffman, Ph.D.

 

http://www.libertymatters.org/bioreserve-who_owns.htm

 

The United Nations has sovereignty over the forty-seven UNESCO registered

Biospheres and twenty World Heritage Sites in the United States—right? Well, not

really, but sort of-----. Confused? Join the crowd. Our sovereignty is being

given away, but not necessarily in the way you might think.

 

Contrary to popular belief, the various documents concerning these programs

clearly state that the US maintains sovereignty within the designated areas.

Furthermore, there is no evidence that the United Nations has ever made an

direct management decision for any of these designated sites.

 

But that begs the real issue.

 

At issue is the fact that we have bound ourselves to international agreements

and a treaty that stipulates that the United States will manage these lands in

prescribed ways in order to achieve certain international goals and objectives.

In other words, we have agreed to limit our right of sovereignty over these

lands. In the case of the 1972 World Heritage Treaty the President and the U.S.

Senate had a Constitutional, albeit misguided right to do so as part of their

delegated powers. Congress, however, has never passed any law permitting the US

to enter into agreements that commits the US to an incredible list of provisions

and socialist goals contained within the UNESCO International Biosphere Program.

 

The problem is not in the noble goals of these programs, but in their mandates

which would subvert our Constitutional protections and republican form of

government if fully implemented. Not only have the feds been using these

treaties and agreements to limit access to, and use of, these lands to all

Americans, but they have also used these documents to limit the use of private

land outside the boundaries of these lands. The most recent example of this is

the invitation by the Clinton Administration to the World Heritage Committee to

list Yellowstone National Park as a World Heritage Site In Danger. Such action

totally circumvented the NEPA process and US law, and allowed President Clinton

to bully a mining company into abandoning a perfectly legal mine development

project that was occurring on mostly private land. The UN doesn't have to have

direct sovereignty if the feds " give " it to them.

 

Although the US Man and Biosphere Program has been rather benign to date, it is

touted in UNESCO documents as being " the first step in implementing the

Convention on Biological Diversity. " If fully implemented, it would be a

bureaucrat's dream come true. It is based on a communal-feudal concept of land

tenure where " stakeholders " (including non-residents and Nongovernmental

organizations, NGOs) get to participate in deciding how private as well as

public land is used. It is structured around the idea of private/public

" partnerships " where non-elected, unaccountable commissions, agencies or

councils " represent " the people's will and implement and enforce land use

regulations across jurisdictional boundaries.

 

If you think this is an open invitation to tyranny, you are right. One only has

to look at the Champlain-Adirondack Biosphere Reserve in Vermont and New York,

where a parallel concept has actually been implemented since 1972 within the

Adirondack State Park by New York State. Instead of the robust, thriving

communities promised in MAB literature, the Adirondack economy has been

devastated, the culture and much of the infrastructure frozen in time, and the

people repressed by a communal-feudal land tenure structure where a non-elected,

non-representative NGO controlled Adirondack Park Agency develops and enforces

arbitrary and capricious regulations across multiple counties.

 

If the Biodiversity Treaty is ever ratified, this will be the fate of all

Americans. Loss of sovereignty is loss of sovereignty no matter how it is

packaged. It hurts all Americans.

 

 

 

Dr. Coffman is Executive Director of Sovereignty International, Incorporated.