Al Gore isn’t a candidate to be the next president of the United States. That office would mean a demotion for him. As emperor of an environmental empire that spreads across the globe, he wields more power than the commander-in-chief of the most powerful nation on Earth.
Using his campaign against global warming, he has sown the seeds of the No. 1 menace facing Americans. Yet mitigating global warming isn’t the real objective. Global warming fanaticism is a feint, a diversionary tactic that enables government planners to implement “sustainable development,” otherwise known under the fuzzy, politically correct term, “smart growth.”
The former vice president began tilling the soil in 1993, when President Bill Clinton, by executive order, created the President’s Council on Sustainable Development. The council enabled the Clinton administration to make an end run around the U.S. Senate, which in 1994 unanimously defeated the U.N. Biodiversity Treaty.
As it turned out years later, the Senate’s vote didn’t matter anyway. The president’s council succeeded in planting in America an invader more prolific than kudzu. Like kudzu, the smart growth movement basks in bright sunlight, yet it remains unchallenged by the media and overwhelms everything it touches. Now, a little over a decade later, vast expanses of private property across America lie permanently fallow under a carpet of government regulations.
But the spread of smart growth hasn’t gone unchallenged on the grass-roots level across America. It is hard to quash the human spirit. Hundreds of property rights associations in all the states are battling the crushing restrictions. The organizations represent millions of property owners — farmers, suburbanites, and most recently residents of cities who are awakening to the threat.
Unfortunately, their pleas for help have been drowned out by the roar of an avalanche of global warming propaganda. Well-funded organizations and businesses — such as the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, Bank of America, Wachovia, the Sierra Club, the Center for Climate Strategies, and hundreds of land trusts — form strategic alliances with governmental agencies and influence politicians through campaign donations and raw pressure. In turn, federal, state, and local governments provide billions of dollars in grants to foundations that bolster governments’ power and usurp citizens’ constitutional rights.
One valiant struggle by landowners to save their property and their rights in a South Carolina county epitomizes the scope and danger presented by the radical environmental movement. Kay and Bill McClanahan, and a handful of their neighbors, recognized the menace facing Lower Richland County and organized a powerful property rights association to confront the enemy. Lower Richland encompasses 330 square miles of the southeastern part of the county in which Columbia, the state capital, is situated.
The McClanahans and the African-American landowners in their half of the county, were able to push the environmental extremists and executive-styled elitists into retreat, for a while. For the African-Americans, property was sacred. It was bought with blood, sweat, and tears after the Civil War and the end of a century of slavery.
A series of tragedies, however, ended in Bill’s death and Kay’s near-demise. Without their leadership, paralysis overtook the other members of their grass-roots organization. Meanwhile, smart growth extended its roots throughout the county and into the very fabric of its citizens’ lives.
Today, Richland County, and countless others in the Carolinas and across the nation, are poised to leap headlong into socialism. Global warming might be today’s catch phrase, but in reality, it serves as a catalyst. The real payoff for environmentalists — control of all the land — hovers in the future.
In Richland County, 2020 is the date that the enviro-bureaucrats have set for the dawning of a Smart New World. In North Carolina, the date varies. Counties in the mountainous west, and some on the coast, have already wrapped property owners in a straightjacket of environmental regulations. Meanwhile, in the rest of the state, government-sanctioned theft of private property is well under way.
Richard Wagner is the editor of Carolina Journal.