All across America, various environmental organizations have been engaged in schemes to deter development such as housing, new energy plants, or the horror of a manufacturing facility that might actually employ people. In some states, the attack has been on farms and ranches, finding ways to punish their owners for improving their land in any fashion such as digging a drainage ditch.

Property rights were deemed so essential, so important to the economic future of America that the Founding Fathers wrote an Amendment to the Constitution to protect those rights, ensuring that private property could not be taken for public use “without just compensation.”

As far as environmentalists are concerned, private property rights are an impediment to the “protection” of what they always describe as “pristine” forests, deserts, or some horrid wilderness such as the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve. ANWR is unfit for human habitation, but it does have countless thousands of caribou and several billion barrels of untapped oil beneath a “pristine” surface.

In a small State like New Jersey, land and its proper use has been a major concern from its earliest years. The State got its moniker, “the Garden State”, from the many farms in its southern half, although there are some in the north. One can drive up Route 78 through the northern portion and see horse farms and even cattle being raised.

Beyond its urban centers, there are large, verdant areas in which one can find small, picturesque suburbs and one of those areas is known as the Highlands. It is a 1,400- square-mile region, some 860,000 acres, extending from the northern border with New York and including land in Sussex, Warren, Passaic, Morris, and Hunterdon Counties.

The Highlands Water Protection and Planning Act was enacted in 2004 and signed into law by former Governor James McGreevey whose lamentable and mercifully abbreviated term in office was cut short when, in the wake of a scandal concerning a young man whom he had put on the state payroll, he announced he was a homosexual and resigned.

Put into motion in 2006, the State’s largest daily newspaper, The Star-Ledger, editorialized that “Development controls are so sweeping that perhaps less than 20 percent of land in the region is left available for construction, even in the half of the region lawmakers had targeted for future growth. That small amount of buildable acreage could be cut further when additional rules, such as new regulations for septic systems, are completed.”

The area in question is a watershed and the environmental claim was that any further construction or use of it posed a threat to water quality and that the area, home to abundant wildlife, needed to be subject to all manner of regulation and restrictions to protect it against the humans who had been living there since before the Revolution.

There never was a need for the Highlands Act. Existing environmental laws were and are sufficient, but the objective was to render the huge tract of land beyond any development, to reduce the value of its homes and other structures, and generally put it off limits. This kind of green gangsterism is part of the reason why, along with high taxation, and senseless spending, more people leave New Jersey than move here.

In 2007, northern New Jersey farmers and landowners affected by the Highlands Act made plans to contest it in court to protect their loss of equity and private property rights. Consider if you owned a home in this vast region and wanted to sell it. Who would buy it knowing that you could not add a porch, a swimming pool, or even some swings for kids to play on? If you were a farmer almost any normal act of tillage or harvest could be ruled a danger to the environment.

As a Star-Ledger columnist, Paul Mulshine, pointed out in July 2007, “The purpose of the plan was not to redistribute development, but to stop it entirely. And the way the law was written is positively Machiavellian. The Highlands law amounts to an ingenious effort by the state to grab as much land as possible without leaving the state open to a court challenge under the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment.”
I was reminded of this appalling piece of environmental chicanery when a story appeared in The Star-Ledger in late January. “A report by Gov. Chris Christie’s transition team calls the Highlands Council ‘a disaster on multiple levels’ and recommends cutting the water-protection agency’s powers over local zoning or eliminating it.”

It has taken six years of suffering by the many landowners of the affected area and frustration among the many local officials in towns affected by this hideous land grab to finally reach a point where something might begin to be done to repeal the act and return the legislatively stolen property rights.

All around America, similar actions have been occurring, spurred on by various environmental groups, and all intended to drive out farmers and ranchers, to kill any development of any kind, and to abrogate the Constitutional protection of private property in every way possible.
It is part of a vast matrix of efforts to destroy the nation’s economic growth and it is too often successful. Given their antipathy to all human activity, if the Greens had their way, they would put up signs everywhere that would say, “Keep Out!”

Alan Caruba writes a daily blog at FactsNotFantasy and a weekly commentary at the website of The National Anxiety Center.

 

WesternFront America

Early in American history, one was pretty much free to do as one saw fit on one’s property so long as it was moral especially if one lived in a rural area where one’s actions were not likely to encroach upon the sensibilities of one’s neighbors. However, now it seems the landholdings of the United States in general and private property in specific are for everyone else to decide what to do with except the one to which it is titled.

As of September 1, 2009, the Virginia Department of Game and Fisheries has announced that it is illegal to artificially feed the deer through the first Saturday in January. This regulation is part of a program to keep the number of deer in check.

In other words, it is hoped that a number of them will starve to death during the winter months. If pristine, untouched nature is to be the standard by which our actions and decisions are to be judged, then shouldn’t we speak plainly as to the policy’s goals and intentions?

While the government has every right to set policy as to what it wants done on public lands and in state parks, private property holders should be able to do in regards to this issue on their own lots and in their own yards what they themselves believe best. Not everyone is going to feed the deer to begin with.

It should be noted that this bureaucratic mandate will go beyond regulating one single activity. According to a story posted at Harrisonburg Daily News Record titled “Deer Feeding Now Illegal”, those with deer eating the seed spilled from birdfeeders will be ordered to temporarily take their feeders down.

Seems unwanted deer aren’t the only extraneous animals authorities hope will die off and I am not talking about the birds. Obama’s healthcare plan hopes that the aged demographic will simply throw in the towel with little resistance so that resources might be directed towards preferred groups such as illegal aliens.

Seems other public policy proposals may be furthering this agenda in a roundabout way. For you see, feeding the birds is often the highlight of the day of an elderly person who might not have anything else to look forward to in terms of entertainment now that television has pretty much been taken away from them unless they have a PH.D in electronics now that one has to have a digital converter box.

And speaking of illegal aliens and the like, it baffles the mind how environmentalists (who are usually some variety of liberal) that view human beings as being no better than animals and often of lower regard when it comes to the unborn as you can hack apart all the fetus you want so long as you don’t smash open a bald eagle’s egg or even touch a discarded feather for all that matter, fail to grasp a number of lessons that transcend the species barrier.

In an interview regarding the rational behind the prohibition, a wildlife official pointed out that once the deer get use to finding food in a certain place, they can become disgruntled and testy if nutritional allotments are discontinued. In other words, these ungulates loose their sense of self-sufficiency and develop an entitlement mentality.

Does any of this somehow seem familiar? During the speakership of Newt Gingrich, the Republican Congress thought they would get a handle on spending not really by cutting back certain programs such as school lunches but rather by slowing the rate of increase.

From the response to the policy at the time, one would have thought conservatives were smashing babies’ heads against concrete buildings, something a number of Obama’s closest advisors might not have all that much problem with. Likewise, one of the reasons elected officials are reluctant to do away with or eliminate many assorted handouts are the massive riots that would erupt across the country if the chronically dependent were suddenly expected to provide for themselves. Thus, one of the greatest bribes or ransom schemes in human history is basically continued for now to forestall what will one day result in history’s greatest bloodshed.

The issue of deer also provides an excellent study into other aspects of the immigration debate as well. The article says, “An overabundance of deer can lead…to increased human-deer conflicts, including vehicle collisions and disease transmission such as tuberculosis and other deer ailments.”

Illegal aliens and immigrants of dubious loyalties cannot be dealt with in the same manner as deer as one has a soul made in the image of God. However, the results are quite similar when the ratio of native born to foreign born becomes imbalanced in a similar manner.

Increased conflicts do result. Just ask Americans that have had their homes violated on the West coast.

I recall reading of incidents in California where Black families have come home only to find that illegals have moved in and staked a claim to a dwelling while the legitimate residents were out for the day. It is not uncommon for Arizonans to be awakened in the middle of the night to the sound of migrants rummaging through their refrigerators.

Secondly, though few want to talk about it since, in the eyes of the hypertolerant, being accused of racism is a fate worse than one’s lungs filling with blood and festering puss, deer aren’t the only ones spreading tuberculosis these days. Thanks primarily to deviants with compromised immune systems and diseased foreigners bringing in any number of previously conquered or even unknown diseases, America now faces an assortment of drug resistant pestilences.

Environmentalists are fond of pointing out that ecosystems are delicate things to balance. What they fail to realize is that one of the greatest threats to such harmony is government control.

© Dr. Frederick Meekins

 

WesternFront America