From: 21st Century, Fall 1992
Who pulls the strings of environmental groups? The establishment figures who fund and control it — from England’s Prince Phillip and the Netherlands’ Prince Bernhard, to U.S. corporate funders like Robert O. Anderson.
Far from a grass roots movement, environmentalism is a big business, funded and directed by the leading families of the U.S. and European establishments
This article is adapted from Chapter 10 of the Holes in the Ozone Scare: The Scientific Evidence That the Sky Isn’t Falling, published in June 1992 by 21st Century and now in its second printing.
Twenty-five years ago, those who believed that Mother Nature comes first and humankind second were part of an insignificant fringe, considered radical by most Americans. These environmentalists were visible mostly at the level of the antinuclear street demonstration, where marijuana smoke wafted around “Back To Nature” posters on display. Today, however, what used to be extremist “environmentalist” ideology has become mainstream, permeating American institutions at every level, from corporate boardrooms to the Federal Reserve, the Congress, the White House, the churches, homes and schools.
Official lore from the environmental movement’s publications asserts that the movement emerged from the grass roots. The truth, however, is that funding and policy lines comes from the most prestigious institutions of the Eastern Liberal Establishment, centered around the New York Council on Foreign Relations, and including the Trilateral commission, the Aspen Institute, and a host of private family foundations.
No U.N.This network of foundations created environmentalism, moving it from a radical fringe movement into a mass movement to support the institutionalization of anti-science, no-growth policies at all levels of government and public life. As prescribed in the Council on Foreign Relations 1980s Project book series, environmentalism has been used against America’s economy, against such targets as high-technology agriculture and the nuclear power industry. This movement is fundamentally a green pagan religion in its outlook. Unless defeated, it will destroy not only the economy, but also the Judeo-Christian culture of the United States, and has in fact come perilously close to accomplishing this objective already.
The vast wealth of the environmentalist groups may come as a shock to most readers who believe that these groups are made up of “public interest”, “nonprofit” organizations that are making great sacrifices to save the Earth from a looming doomsday caused by man’s activities. In fact, the environmental movement is one of the most powerful and lucrative businesses in the world today.
Funding from the Foundations
There are several thousand groups in the United States today involved in “saving the Earth”. Although all share a common philosophy, these groups are of four general types: those concerned, respectively with environmental problems, population control, animal rights, and land trusts. Most of these groups are very secretive about their finances, but there is enough evidence on the public record to determine what they are up to.
Table 1 lists the annual revenues of a sampling of 30 environmental groups. These few groups alone had revenues of more than $1.17 billion in 1990. This list, it must be emphasized, by no means includes all of these enviro businesses. It is estimated that there are more than 3,000 so-called nonprofit environmental groups in the United States today, and most of them take in more than a million dollars a year.
The Global Tomorrow Coalition, for example, is made up of 110 environmental and population-control groups, few of which have revenues less than $3 million per year and land holdings of more than 6 million acres worth billions of dollars, is just the best known of more than 900 land trusts now operating in the United States.
Table 2 lists the grants of 35 foundations to two heavily funded and powerful environmentalist groups — the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council — for the year 1988.
The data available from public sources show that the total revenues of the environmentalist movement are more than $8.5 billion per year. If the revenues of law firms involved in environmental litigation and of university environmental programs were added on, this figure would easily double to more than $16 billion a year. This point is emphasized in Table 3 which lists the top 15 environmental groups receiving grants for environmental lawsuits and protection and education programs.
To get an idea of how much money this is, the reader should consider that this income is larger than the Gross National Product (GNP) of 56 underdeveloped nations (Table 4). The 48 nations for which the latest GNP figures were available have a total population of more than 360 million human beings. Ethiopia, for example, with a population of 47.4 million human beings, many starving, has a GNP of only $5.7 billion per year. Somalia, with 5.9 million inhabitants, has a GNP that is lower than the revenues of those groups listed in Table 1. Not a single nation in Central America or the Caribbean has a GNP greater than the revenues of the U.S. environmental movement.
With these massive resources under its control, it is no surprise that the environmentalist movement has been able to set the national policy agenda. There is no trade association in the world with the financial resources and power to match the vast resources of the environmental lobby. In addition, it has the support of most of the news media. Opposing views and scientific refutations of environmental scares are most often simply blacked out.
Where do the environmental groups get their money? Dues from members represent an average of 50 percent of the income of most groups; most of the rest of the income comes from foundation grants, corporate contributions, and U.S. government funds. Almost every one of today’s land-trust, environmental, animal-rights, and population-control groups was created with grants from one of the elite foundations, like the Ford foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. These “seed grants” enable the radical groups to become established and start their own fundraising operations. These grants are also a seal-of-approval for the other foundations.
The foundations also provide funding for special projects. For example, the Worldwatch Institute received $825,000 in foundation grants in 1988. Almost all of that money was earmarked specifically for the launching of a magazine, World Watch, which has become influential among policy-makers, promoting the group’s antiscience and antipopulation views. The Worldwatch Institute’s brochures report that it was created by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to “alert policy makers and the general public to emerging global trends in the availability and management of resources — both human and natural”.
Foundation grants in the range of $20 to $50 million for the environmental cause are no longer a novelty. In July 1990, the Rockefeller Foundation announced a $50 million global environmental program. The specific purpose of the program is to create an elite group of individuals in each country whose role is to implement and enforce the international environmental treaties now being negotiated.
Kathleen Teltsch reported in the New York times (July 24, 1990):
“As an initial step, the five-year program will assist hundreds of young scientists and policy makers in developing countries to create a worldwide network of trained environmental leaders, who will meet regularly at workshops, sharing information and discussing strategy.
“Through the international network, the foundation wants to encourage efforts to build environmental protection into governments’ long-range economic planning. Other major elements would promote the drafting of international treaties to deal with forest, land, and water preservation, and hazardous waste disposal”
The foundations are run by America’s top patrician families. These families channel billions of dollars into the organizations and causes they wish to support every year, and thereby exert enormous political clout. By deciding who and what gets funded, they determine the political issues up front in Washington, which are then voted on by Congress. It is all tax free, since the foundations are tax-exempt. The boards of directors of the large foundations are made up of some of the most powerful individuals in this country, and they always overlap with power brokers in government and industry.
One such individual was Thornton F. Bradshaw, who, until his recent death, was chairman and program director of the MacArthur foundation and a trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Conservation Foundation. At the same time, Bradshaw was chairman of the RCA Corporation and a director of NBC, the Atlantic Richfield corp., Champion International, and first Boston, Inc. Bradshaw was also a member of the Malthusian Club of Rome and director of the Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies, organizations that have played a critical role in spreading the “limits to growth” ideology of the environmental movement.
Another individual perhaps better known to readers is Henry A. Kissinger, former U.s. secretary of state and a trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. For years Kissinger was the director of the fund’s special Studies Project, which was in charge of special operations.
Corporate Contributions
Another huge source of contributions to the environmental movement is private corporations. Unlike tax-exempt foundations, however, corporations are not required by law to report what they do with their money, so it is difficult for an independent researcher to estimate the level of funding for the environmentalist movement from business and industry. There are watchdog groups, however, that have investigated these money flows and come up with startlingly large figures.
For example, the April 1991 newsletter of the Capital Research Center in Washington, D.C., which monitors trends in corporate giving, scathingly denounces those corporations it has discovered financing the environmentalists. The newsletter states that oil companies “are heavy financial supporters of the very advocacy groups which oppose activities essential to their ability to meet consumer needs”.
Further, it reports, “The Nature Conservancy’s 1990 report reflects contributions of over $1,000,000 from Amoco, over $135,000 from Arco, over 4100,000 from BP Exploration and BP Oil, more than $3,200,000 (in real estate) from Chevron, over $10,000 from Conoco and Phillips Petroleum and over $260,000 from Exxon”.
From the scant information publicly available (largely annual reports from the major environmental groups), one can conservatively estimate that corporations contribute more than $200 million a year to the environmentalist movement.
This should come as no surprise. Over the past 20 years, giant corporations have discovered that by using environmental regulations they can bankrupt their competition, the small- and medium-sized firms that are the most active and technologically innovative part of the U.S. economy.
Compliance with environmental regulations is also big business. According to official figures from the federal government’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), it costs the U.S. economy $131 billion today to comply with environmental regulations. That figure will have risen to more than $300 billion a year by the year 2000. The expenditures are a net drain on the economy, but while the nation is bankrupted, someone is profiting from the services and equipment sold. A look at classified advertisements in the papers today reveals that companies involved in environmental compliance are growing fast. Many of these corporations are contributing to the environmental movement.
Funds from the U.S. Government
There is a third area of funding for the environmental movement: the U.S. government itself. As reported in detail by Peter Metzger, former science editor of the Rocky Mountain News, there are now thousands of professional environmentalists ensconced in the U.S. government. These environmentalists channel hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and favors to environmentalists and environmental groups under all kinds of guises. In a 1991 newspaper series, columnist Warren Brookes exposed how the federal Bureau of Land Management [BLM] used the Nature Conservancy as a land broker, giving the antigrowth organization handsome profits.
The EPA doles out huge amounts of money to environmental groups to conduct “studies” of the impact of global warming and ozone depletion. President Bush has made the Global Climate Change program a priority, so while the Space Station, vaccinations for children, and other crucial projects have been virtually eliminated from the budget, $1.3 billion is available for studies of how man is fouling the Earth. Similarly, scientists who challenge global warming and ozone depletion as hoaxes do not receive a penny in funding, while those who scream doomsday receive tens of millions in research grants from the “climate change” program.
How much funding do the environmentalists receive from the federal government? Officially, the U.S. government gives away more than $3 billion a year in grants to support environmental groups and projects. The actual total, however, is impossible to estimate. A top-ranking official of the department of Energy who spent two years attempting to cut off tens of millions of dollars in “pork barrel” grants going to environmentalist groups, discovered that for each grant she was eliminating, environmentalist moles in the department added several new ones. The official resigned in disgust.
The environmentalist capture of Washington, which was consolidated during the Carter administration, produced radical changes in the Washington, D.C. establishment. This process of subversion was described by [Peter] Metzger in a speech given in 1980, titled “Government-funded Activism: Hiding Behind the Public Interest.”
“For the first time in history, a presidential administration is funding a political movement dedicated to destroying many of the institutions and principles of American society. Activist organizations, created, trained, and funded at taxpayers’ expense, and claiming to represent the public interest, are attacking our economic system and advocating its replacement by a new form of government. Not only is this being done by means already adjudicated as being unconstitutional, but it is being done without the consent of Congress, the knowledge of the public, or the attention of the press.
It all began when President Carter hired individuals prominently identified with the protest or adversary culture… the appointment [by the Carter administration] of several hundred leading activists to key regulatory and policy-making positions in Washington resulted in their use of the federal regulatory bureaucracy in order to achieve their personal and ideological goals.
Already accomplished is the virtual paralysis of new federal coal leasing, conventional electric generating plant licensing in many areas, federal minerals land leasing and water development, industrial exporting without complex environmental hearings, and the halting of new nuclear power plant construction…
The consequences of those sub-cabinet appointees having then made their own appointments, and those having then made theirs, so that now, there are thousands of [environmentalist] representatives in government…”
According to Metzger, this new class,
“enshrined in the universities, the news media, and especially the federal bureaucracy, has become one of the most powerful of the special interests.”
Two Case Studies
Let us consider two case studies of how foundation-funded environmentalist organizations have virtually taken over national policy.
The Washington, D.C.-based Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) was created in 1969. The cover story is that it sprang from America’s grass roots, after a group of Long Island citizens began having coffee clatches to discuss the threat of toxic chemicals. The truth is that EDF was created by grants from the leading Eastern Establishment foundations and these foundations have continued to support it.
The Ford Foundation gave EDF its seed money in 1969. In 1988, EDF received $500,000 from the ford Foundation, $1,000,000 from the William Bingham Foundation, $75,000 from the Joyce Foundation, $150,000 from the Mott Foundation, and $25,000 from the Carnegie Foundation, among others. Today, EDF has seven offices nationwide, more than 150,000 members, and an annual operating budget of $17 million.
The EDF made its name in the fight to ban DDT, which it accomplished with the help of Natural Resources Defense Council litigation in 1972 — and with the cooperation of the EPA’s administrator, William Ruckelshaus. Ruckelshaus ignored the scientific evidence presented during seven months of EPA hearings on DDT, and he ignored the decision of the EPA’s hearing examiner not to ban DDT; instead, for what he admitted were political reasons, he banned this life-saving insecticide that was turning the tide on malaria. Thus “public perception” became established as more important than scientific evidence in environmental decisions.
In 1986, EDF helped to draft California’s first sweeping environmental regulations in the form of the ballot initiative known as Proposition 65, which restricted the use of dozens of chemicals in industry and agriculture and has cost the California economy billions.
EDF’s goals for the 1990s include: defending against the so-called greenhouse effect; saving sea turtles and porpoises by shutting down the fishing industry; banning CFCs worldwide by the year 2000; saving the world’s rain forests; passing legislation to prevent so-called acid rain; setting aside Antarctica as a permanent wildlife reserve; extending the chemical bans in California’s Proposition 65 to the entire nation; and recycling all household and industrial waste material.
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), one of several of the legal arms of the environmentalist movement, was founded in 1970 with a massive infusion of funds from the Ford Foundation. Together with the Legal Defense Fund of the Sierra Club and the National Audobon Society, the NRDC took to the courts, filing dozens of lawsuits to block dams, shut down nuclear power-plant construction, and derail highway development projects.
The NRDC and its cohorts also targeted federal regulators in the Environmental Protection Agency and other offices, forcing tightened controls on pollution and demanding the enforcement of statutory rules for clean air and rivers. The Clean Air Act of 1970 was a first fruit of these efforts.
Who funds these multi-million-dollar court battles? In 1988, the NRDC received grants of $75,000 from the Educational Foundation of America, $600,000 from the MacArthur Foundation, $165,000 from the W. Alton Jones Foundation, and $850,000 from the Beinecke Foundation.
A good chunk of this money ends up in the expense accounts and salaries of the Eastern Establishment bigwigs who run the environmentalist advocacy groups — or in the pockets of their lawyers. A 1990 cover story in Forbes magazine reports that the organizational network of consumer and environmentalist activist Ralph Nader is worth close to $10 million and receives ardent support in its anti-industry lawsuits from a circle of plaintiff attorneys with multi-million-dollar annual incomes (see Brimelow and Spencer 1990)
Nader himself lives very well off the publicity stirred up from court cases. “Oh, God, limousines and nothing but the best hotels”, Forbes quotes a former state Trial Lawyers Association official. “We got quite a bill when he [Nader] was in town”. Nader lives in a $1.5 million townhouse in Washington, D.C. (owned by his sister) and commands up to five-figure fees each for between 50 and 100 speaking appearances per year.
(Photo caption) The National Wildlife Federation’s Jay Hair, like other leaders of environmental empires, commands a six-figure salary — $200,000. However, his actual income is much higher because it includes earnings from his membership on the boards of corporations and other environmental groups. On average, environmental executives have salaries in the range of $150,000 to $200,000 a year, excluding benefits and income from other sources.
Other environmentalist organization leaders also maintain an expensive lifestyle. In August 1983, reporter Nancy Shute gave a colorful description of the environmentalists-turned-establishment who had taken over Washington. Under the headline “Bambi Goes to Washington”, Shute writes in National Review:
“On December 1, 1982, barely two years after Ronald Reagan’s election, hundreds of Washington lawyers and lobbyists munched pears and cheese and sipped Bloody Marys under the sparkling crystal chandeliers at the Organization of the American States (oas.org) headquarters, just two blocks from the White House. The conversation turned to politics, as do all Washington cocktail-party conversations.
“But the women in pearls and men in dark suits who shouted to be heard over the seven piece dance band represented not Exxon or U.S. Steel or General Motors, but the nations’ environmental lobby, celebrating the tenth birthday of the Environmental Policy Center, an influential Washington lobbying group and research institute.
“In the 13 years since Earth Day, the environmental presence in the capital has grown from a ragtag band dedicated to saving trees and whales to a formidable Washington institution.
“Much of the environmental windfall has been spent on sleek new offices, on high-profile lobbyists like former senator Gaylord Nelson and Carter Administration Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus… on high-priced economists and lawyers, and on millions of direct-mail pleas for more cash…” [p.924]
These environmentalists are unabashed about their affluence. Their conferences have become notorious for their plush locales (Switzerland, Beverly Hills, Sundance and Aspen, for example).
The Campaign against CFCs
Both the EDF and NRDC played a leading role in the propaganda and legal campaign to ban CFCs.
In June 1974, Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina’s doomsday paper claiming CFCs would deplete the ozone layer was published in Nature. At that moment, however, the hottest topic in the news media was that chlorine emissions from the Space Shuttle would wipe out the ozone layer. It was not until September 1974, that articles on the CFCs threat started to appear.
In November 1974, the Natural Resources Defense Council joined the ozone debate, calling for an immediate ban on CFCs. In June 1975, the NRDC sued the Consumer Products Safety Commission for a ban on CFCs used in aerosol spray cans. The lawsuit was rejected by the commission in July 1975, on grounds that there was insufficient evidence that CFCs harm the atmosphere.
At that point, EPA administrator Russell E. Train intervened on behalf of the NRDC and proponents of the ozone depletion theory, calling for all nations to cooperate in establishing worldwide guidelines on CFCs to avoid environmental disaster. Today Russell E. Train is head of the World Wildlife Fund/Conservation Foundation, a trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and a top-ranking member of both the Trilateral Commission and the New York Council on Foreign Relations.
For the next two years, debate raged on the future of CFCs, with the NRDC, lavishly funded by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, playing a major role. While President Ford’s top science advisers said the evidence was still not strong enough for an immediate ban on CFCs, other members of the administration moved to implement such a ban. Once of them was Russell W. Peterson, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, who worked for a ban on the use of CFCs in aerosol cans as a first step toward the total banning of CFCs. Peterson made it clear that it did not matter that there was no scientific evidence against CFCs. According to Sharon Roan in Ozone Crisis, Peterson told the press:
“I believe firmly that we cannot afford to give chemicals the same constitutional rights that we enjoy under the law. Chemicals are not innocent until proven guilty” (p. 83).
Peterson today is the head of the National Audubon Society.
In October 1978, CFCs used as propellants in aerosol cans were banned in the United States.
The CFCs issue lay dormant for the next several years, until November 1984, when the NRDC started a new phase on the assault on CFCs with a suit against the EPA. The suit sought to force the EPA to place a cap on overall CFC production, as mandated under the EPA’s Phase Two proposals. The NRDC argued that under the Clean Air Act, the EPA was required to regulate CFCs if they were deemed harmful to the environment. The group claimed the EPA had acknowledged this in its 1980 proposed regulations, which had not been implemented during the first four years of the Reagan administration.
As the NRDC relaunched its campaign against CFCs, a major political change was taking place in Washington, D.C. The leading proponents of technology, the space program, and economic development in the Reagan administration had been ousted by a series of media-orchestrated scandals == Interior Secretary James Watt, NASA Administrator James Beggs, and EPA Chief Anne Burford. Burford was replaced by the multimillionaire corporate environmentalist, William Ruckelshaus, his second term as EPA administration.
There was still no credible scientific evidence against CFCs; supposedly this changed in May 1985 with the publication of Joseph Farman’s doomsday ozone-hole paper in Nature magazine. This article enabled the environmental lobby to start creating hysteria about CFCs once more, which set the wheels into motion that led to the signing of the Montreal Protocol in 1987.
In September 1986, the DuPont Company announced its support for the banning of CFCs. By summer 1987, the environmental onslaught against CFCs was in full gear under the leadership of the well-funded NRDC. It was at that moment that the World Resources Institute received a $25 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation. According to Sharon Roan’s book, Ozone Crisis (page 204):
“Economist Daniel J. Dudek of the Environmental Defense Fund provided a study on the cost of reducing ozone depletion… At the World Resources Institute and Worldwatch Institute, studies were completed to alert Americans to the effects of various ozone control policies. The Environmental Defense Fund, Friends of the Earth, and Sierra Club initiated public education campaigns and began pressuring industry to own up to its responsibility.”
In September 1987, the Montreal Protocol was signed, calling for a 50 percent ban on CFCs by the year 2000.
[CDR Note: In 1995 Arizona State Legislature passed a bill (HB 2236) — a one pager — which allowed the possession, use, manufacture, purchase, installation, transportation and sale of chloroflurocarbons (namely freon), while prohibiting any penalty, fine or retaliatory action against any person or political subdivision (local government) of the state who or which did any of the above. Governor Fife Symington signed the bill into law on April 15, 1995 and very shortly thereafter was out of office on alleged charges of misuse of campaign funds, or some silly nonsense.
According to a report we’ve obtained, scientific studies have debunked the theory that CFC’s from freon were responsible for the hole in the ozone layer. The hole is caused from lack of sunlight at the polar areas during the long-night season. When the sun returns, the hole repairs itself. It is a repetitive process. The studies claim that CFCs from volcanoes and other natural phenomena are released into the atmosphere at a much higher rate than those [CFCs] released by freon.
It is most probable that since DuPont’s patent on freon was about to expire — at which time any company could manufacture freon — the timed release of the ozone-hole scare played a two-fold role; that is, forwarding the environmentalist movement and catering to the interests of the transnational DuPont company. We understand that the new coolant approved for use is also a DuPont patented product; was never tested for environmental safety; is much less efficient; uses more electricity to cool; is caustic to equipment, reducing the life of equipment; and cannot be used in present equipment so will ultimately cost homeowners and businesses billions to modify or change out equipment.]
The First Earth Day
First demonstrators who put spotted owls first, environmentalists define people as the enemy.
At the same time that the environmental organizations were becoming a well-funded big business, their propaganda output was used to create popular support for the environmentalist cause in the United States. A turning point in the transformation of the environmentalist fringe into a radicalized mass movement was Earth Day 1970.
On April 22, 1970, thousands of college students and curious onlookers turned out to participate in the widely publicized Earth Day festivities in dozens of major U.S. cities. Fold music, antinuclear slogans, “Love Your Mother Planet Earth” posters and college students were everywhere. On the surface it appeared to most observers that the nationwide rallies represented a grass roots movement to protest “the destruction of the environment”. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Earth Day publicity stunt was part of a highly coordinated effort to create a climate of sympathy for Malthusian zero growth, where none yet existed in the United States.
Earth Day was partly bankrolled by a $200,000 personal grant from Robert O. Anderson, at the time the president of Atlantic Richfield Oil Corporation, the president of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, and a personal protégé of University of Chicago zero-growth ideologue Robert Maynard Hutchins. Anderson and the Aspen Institute played a crucial role in the launching of a worldwide environmentalist movement, and Earth Day was a big step along the way.
Coincident with the Earth Day effort, The Progressive, a 70-year-old publication of the U.S. branch of the Fabian socialist movement of H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, and Julian and Aldous Huxley, devoted its entire issue to a special report on “The Crisis of Survival”. Among the environmentalist ideologues who contributed to this special issue were Ralph Nader and Paul Ehrlich. Denis Hayes, a Stanford University graduate who would later become the environmentalist-in-residence at the Worldwatch Institute, wrote the keynote article on Earth Day. He stated:
“April 22 is a tool — something that can be used to focus the attention of society on where we are heading. It’s a chance to start getting a handle on it all; a rejection of the silly idea that bigger is better, and faster is better, world without limits, amen.
“This has never been true. It presumes a mastery by Man over nature, and over Nature’s laws. Instead of seeking harmony, man has sought to subdue the whole world. The consequences of this are beginning to come home. And time is running out.”
In 1970, most Americans would have summarily rejected this pessimistic view. But, by the time the organizers of Earth Day 1970 were planning 20th anniversary celebrations of the event for 1990, the environmentalist hoax had been sold to the population of the United States. In the months before Earth Day 1990, every elementary and secondary school in the nation was provided with a special Earth Day preparation curriculum from the environmental Protection Agency. EPA spokesmen toured the nation. Television, magazines, and newspapers from the national to local level reported and editorialized on the event. State and town governments promoted it with public funds.
On Earth Day 1990, according to a spokesman for Friends of the Earth (a leading arm of the environmentalist lobby also financed by Robert O. Anderson), “one of the largest demonstrations ever” was held in Washington, D.C. and tens of thousands of people, representing “all types of environmental groups from all over the United States and internationally” were there. Smaller celebrations were held in literally thousands of state capitals, towns, and cities across the United States. A mass movement against science, technology, and economic growth had been consolidated in the United States.
Next Comes Genocide
In 1989, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak estimated that 500 million people in the Third World had starved to death in the decade of the 1980’s; current estimates by the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) are that 40,000 children under the age of five starve to death every day. Most of these deaths can be attributed directly or indirectly to debt service and “technological apartheid”, policies that prevent modern technologies — such as water treatment plants, nuclear energy, refrigeration, mechanized agriculture, pesticides, and fertilizers — from being used in Third World countries. These policies were considered colonialist in past decades; today, they are promoted by environmental groups in industrialized nations, under the guise of saving the Earth from pollution.
[CDR Note: See related article: Toxic Wastes ‘Recycled’ As Fertilizer Threaten U.S. Farms — Food Supply
Many environmentalists have no idea of the consequences of their belief system for the people of the Third World, but it is clear that those at the top of the environmentalist movement are witting in their advocacy of policies that ultimately kill people. We know this is the case because many of the environmentalist policy-makers say so publicly. It is not simply that the ban on CFCs will kill people and that the top environmentalists know that it will kill people.
The fact is that the top ozone depletion propagandists at the World Wildlife Fund, the Club of Rome, the Population Crisis Committee/Draper Fund, and other elite bodies want it to kill people. Depopulation is one of the reasons they devised the ozone hoax in the first place. By scaring the general population with stories of imminent catastrophe, these policy-makers intend to justify adoption of stringent measures that will curtail economic growth and population. The ozone hole is just one of several such scare stories.
On July 24, 1980, the U.S. State Department unveiled the Global 2000 Report to the President. It had been in preparation by the White House Council on environmental Quality and the State Department, employing scores of government personnel and hundreds of outside consultants since the early days of the Carter administration — an administration dominated by elite members of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission. The report was a long-inded proposal that “population control” — a euphemism for killing people — be made the cornerstone of the policies of all U.S. presidents from that time forward.
Pervading the report and several companion documents were lurid predictions: crises in water resources, severe energy shortages, shortfalls in strategically vital raw materials — all blamed on “population growth”.
The report argued that without countervailing action, by the year 2000 there will be 2 to 4 billion people too many. Therefore, the report said, it is required that government implicitly direct all policies domestic and foreign toward the elimination of 2 to 4 billion people by the year 2000.
The rationale for proposing a crime of such great magnitude is the simple — and totally wrong — Malthusian ideology that claims population growth inherently exhausts “natural resources” and there are, therefore, “limits to growth”, as the Club of Rome has insisted.
In the real world of human production of the means of human existence, there is no correlation between “natural resources” and human population potential, for the simple reason that resources are not really “natural”. The resources for human existence are defined by human science and technology, and the development of science and technology defines whole new arrays of “resources” for the societies that avail themselves of such progress. For example, oil was there “naturally”, but if did not exist as a resource for humankind until the technology — combustion engines, and so on — existed to make it a resource. Before that, it was a black mud that usually meant ruination of farm fields.
This means two things. First, there are no “limits to growth”. There are only limits within the confines of a given array of technology. So, unless scientific and technological progress were stopped dead, there could never be an absolute limit to “resources” for human life. There can never be such a thing as absolute “overpopulation” of the human species.
Second, were modern agricultural and industrial capabilities, even as they exist in industrialized nations today, diffused throughout the Third World, we would discover that not only do we have ample resources for year-2000 population levels, but we also have too few people to operate advanced agro-industrial facilities at optimum capacity. If we took account of in-sight technological advances, we would discover that underpopulation is the main problem we face.
The Global 2000 Report, however, assumed no diffusion of modern agro-industrial capabilities to the Third World. Instead, it assumed that the Third World would be denied even available forms of technology.
In addition, it assumed no progress beyond existing scientific and technological arsenals. The over population forecast follows neatly from these assumptions: The report assumes that science and technology have been forced to come to a stop, in order to assert that by the year 2000, there will be 2 to 4 billion more people than the world economy can sustain. The report neglects to point out that if science and technology were not to be forced into stagnation, the globe’s population would have much brighter prospects.
In other words, the Global 2000 Report is simply a statement of policy intent for genocide, not a scientific forecast at all. It reveals in a unique way the depopulation aims of those also behind the ozone-depletion hoax.
By the time Global 2000 was issued, whole sections of the U.S. government existed solely to implement its recommendation: depopulation. The role of Richard Elliott Benedick, who negotiated the Montreal Protocol for the United States, must be emphasized again. Benedick has spent most of his government career as head of the State Department Population Office, promoting policies to reduce the size of the world’s population.
Lest the skeptical reader think we exaggerate, listen to Thomas Ferguson, a Benedick colleague and head of the Latin American desk at Benedick’s Office of Population Affairs. Ferguson made these comments on State Department policy toward the civil war in El Salvado (as reported by Executive Intelligence Review, 1981, p. 43):
“Once population is out of control, it requires authoritarian government, even fascism, to reduce it. The professionals are not interested in lowering population for humanitarian reasons… In El Salvador, there is no place for these people — period. No place.
“Look at Vietnam. We studied the thing. That area was also overpopulated and a problem. We thought that the war would lower rates, and we were wrong. To really reduce population quickly, you have to pull all the males into the fighting and you have to kill significant numbers of fertile age females. You know, as long as you have a large number of fertile females, you will have a problem…
“In El Salvador, you are killing a small number of males and not enough females to do the job on the population. The quickest way to reduce population is through famine, like in Africa, or through disease., like the Black Death.
“What might happen in El Salvador is that the war might disrupt the distribution of food: The population could weaken itself, you could have disease and starvation. Then you can successfully create a tendency for population rates to decline rapidly… but otherwise, people breed like animals.”
Ferguson’s level of moral depravity is not unique among government policy-makers. Listen to William Paddock, an adviser to the State Department under both Henry Kissinger and Cyrus Vance. In spring 1981, Paddock told a Georgetown University seminar that 3.5 million of El Salvador’s 4 million people should be eliminated, and would be, provided that there was “continuous turmoil and civil strife, which is the only solution to the overpopulation problem.”
Paddock continued:
“The United States should support the current military dictatorship, because that is what is required… But we should also open up contacts with the opposition, because they will eventually come to power. As we do that, we should work with their opposition, because we will need to bring them to power. That is what our policy is, that is what it must be… an endless cycle.”
Readers are encouraged to seek out and read the documentation for themselves in official government documents. For example, National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests, a recently declassified memo written by National Security Advisers Brent Scowcroft and Henry Kissinger in 1974, states specifically that population growth in the developing sector is a national security threat to the United States, and must be curtailed as a matter of America’s foreign policy. Under the rubric of this document, the United States has worked internationally to cut the growth and overall size of the darker-skinned peoples of the Third World — an explicitly racist policy.*
Notes______________________________
This policy against the Third World and “less advantaged populations” is being implemented on a scale never seen before but, in fact, it is nothing new. Historian Anton Chaitkin documented recently that the policy-makers gathered around George Bush, the family of the President, and the Anglo-American financial establishment behind the Bush administration, are the same group of people who put the racist Adolf Hitler into power and copied his eugenics policies in practice in the United States. The continue to promulgate the policy of Hitlerite “eugenics” or race purification under the new label of population control and in the name of “saving the environment”.
Bush’s work for population control goes back to the 1960s, when he was the first congressman to introduce national population-control legislation. Bush was also a conspicuous activist for population reduction when he was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 1971 to 1972. In 1972, prodded by Bush and others, the U. S. Agency for International Development (AID) began funding the Serilization League of America to sterilize nonwhites.
In his introduction to the 1973 book The World Population Crisis: The U.S. Response, by Phyllis Piotrow, Bush wrote that “one of the major challenges of the 1970s… will be to curb the world’s fertility”.
In 1988, U.S. AID made a new contract with the Sterilization League, committing the U.S. government to spend $80 million over five years. This contract is not listed in the public U.S. AID budgetary literature, yet the group says that 87 percent of its foreign operations are funded by the U.S. government.
The sterilization program is based on deception.
The U. S. AID tells Congress and the public, that since the Reagan and Bush administrations have been opposed to abortions, tax money that would have funded abortions in foreign countries has been diverted to “family planning activities”. They fail to explain that in addition to buying 7 billion condoms, the program funds surgical sterilization of growing numbers of the Third World Population.
References________________________
Peter Brimelow and Leslie Spencer, 1990. “Ralph Nader, Inc.”, Forbes (9–17) pp 117–122 (cover story)
Anton chaitkin and Webster Tarpley, 1992. George Bush; The Unauthorized Biography. In Press.
Council on Environmental Quality, 1980. “The Global 2000 Report to the President: Entering the Twenty-first Century”, Washington D.C.
Executive Intelligence Review, 1981. The Conspiracy Behind the Trilateral Commission, New York.
Joseph Farman et al. 1985. “Large losses of total ozone in Antartica reveal seasonal CLOx/NOx Interaction”, Nature, Vol. 315 (Jan 24), pp 207–210.
Peter Metzger, 1980. “Government-Funded Activism: Hiding behind the Public Interest”. Present at the 47th Annual Conference of the Southwestern Electric Exchange in Boca Raton, Florida (March 26).
Mario J. Molina and F.S. Rowland, 1974. “Stratospheric sink for chlorfluromethanes: chlorine atomic-atalysed {sic} destruction of ozone”, Nature, Vol. 249 (June 28), pp 810–812.
Kathleen Murphy, 1979. “The 1980s Project: Blueprint for ‘Controlled Disintegration’ “, Fusion (October), pp. 36–47.
National Security Study Memorandum 20, 1974, Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests, Washington, D.C.
William Paddock, 1981. “The Demographic and National Security Inplications of the Salvado Revolution”. Washington, D.C.; Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies Seminar (Feb. 27).
Sharon Road. 1989. Ozone Crisis: The 15-Year Evolution of a Sudden Global Emergency. New York; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Lydia Schulman, 1981. “Global 2000: Will the Zero-Growthers capture the White House?” Fusion Magazine (May), pp. 18–19.
“The State Department’s Office of Population Affairs: Depopulating by ‘War and Famine’ “, 1981. Fusion magazine (June), pp. 20–23.
Nancy Shute, 1983. “The Greening of James Watt”, National Review (Aug 5), pp 924–928
Kathleen Teltsch, 1990. “Rockefeller Foundation Starts Ecology Effort”, The New York Times, July 24.
Table 1
Environmental Groups
(U.S. dollars, 1990, 1991)
______________________
Organization Revenues
_____
African Wildlife Foundation $ 4,676,000
American Humane Association 3,000,000
Center for Marine Conservation 3,600,000
Clean Water Action 9,000,000
Conservation International 8,288,216
The Cousteau Society 14,576,328
Defenders of Wildlife 6,454,240
Earth Island Institute 1,300,000
Environmental Defense Fund 16,900,000
Greenpeace International 100,000,000
Humane society 19,237,791
Inform 1,500,000
International Fund for Animal Welfare 4,916,491
National Arbor Day Foundation 14,700,000
National Audobon Society 37,000,000
National Parks Conservation Assoc. 8,717,104
National Wildlife Federation 77,180,104
Natural Resources Defense Council 16,926,305
Nature Conservancy 254,251,717
North Shore animal League 26,125,383
Planned Parenthood 383,000,000
Population Crisis Committee 4,000,000
Rails-to-Trails Conservancy 1,544,293
Sierra club 40,659,100
Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund 8,783,902
Student Conservation Association, inc. 3,800,000
Trust for Public Land 23,516,506
Wilderness Society 17,903,091
Wildlife Conservation International 4,500,000
WWF/Conservation Foundation 60,000,000
Zero Population Growth 1,600,000
Total $1,177,656,571
_____
Sources: Buzzwork, September/October 1991- Chronicle of Philanthropy March, 13, 1992
TABLE 2
WHO OWNS THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT?
FOUNDATION GRANTS TO EDF AND NRDC
(U.S. dollars, 1988)
________________________________
Foundation EDF NRDC
_____
Beinecke foundation, Inc. 850,000
Carnegie Corporation of New York 25,000
Clark Foundation 150,000
Columbia Foundation 30,000
Cox Charitable Trust 38,000
Diamond Foundation 50,000
Dodge Foundation, Geraldine 75,000 10,000
Educational Foundation of America 30,000 75,000
Ford Foundation 500,000
Gerbode Foundation 50,000 40,000
Gund Foundation 85,000 40,000
Harder Foundation 200,000
Joyce Foundation 75,000 30,000
MacArthur Foundation 600,000
Mertz-Gilmore Foundation 75,000 80,000
Milbank Memorial Fund 50,000
Morgan guaranty charitable Trust 5,000 6,000
Mott Foundation, Charles Stewart 150,000 40,000
New Hope Foundation, Inc. 45,000
New York Community Trust 35,000
Noble foundation, Inc. 20,000 35,000
Northwest Area foundation 100,000
Packard Foundation 50,000 37,000
Prospect Hill Foundation 45,000
Public Welfare Foundation 150,000
Robert Sterling Clark Foundation 50,000 40,000
Rockefeller Brothers Fund 75,000
San Francisco Foundation 50,000
Scherman Foundation 40,000 50,000
Schumann foundation 50,000
Steele-Reese Foundation 100,000
Victoria Foundation 35,000 35,000
Virginia Environmental Endowment 25,000
W. Alton Jones Foundation 100,000 165,000
Wallace Genetic Foundation 80,000 65,000
William Bingham Foundation 1,000,000 150,000
Total* 2,885,000 3,236,000
_____
*The total includes some smaller foundation grants not listed here.
Source: The Foundation Grants Index — 1989, 1990
TABLE 3
TOP 15 RECIPIENTS IN ENVIRONMENTAL LAW, PROTECTION, AND EDUCATION
————————————————————————————————————–
Recipient Foundation Grant in $
World Resources Institute MacArthur Foundation 15,000,000
World Resources Institute MacArthur Foundation 10,000,000
Nature Conservancy R.K. Mellon Foundation 4,050,000
Nature Conservancy Champlin Foundations 2,000,000
Oregon Coast Aquarium Fred Meyer Charitable Trust 1,500,000 International Irrigation Mgmt Inst. Ford Foundation 1,500,000
Open Space Institute R.K. Mellon Foundation 1,400,000
Internat’l Irrigation Mgmt. Inst. Rockefeller Foundation 1,200,000
Chicago Zoological society MacArthur Foundation 1,000,000
Native American Rights Foundation Ford foundation 1,000,000
Wilderness Society R.K. Mellon Foundation 800,000
World Resources Institute A.W. Mellon Foundation 800,000
University of Arkansas W.K. Kellogg Foundation 764,060
National Park Service Pillsbury Co. Foundation 750,000
National Audobon society A.W. Mellon Foundation 750,000
_______
SOURCE: Environmental Grant Association Directory, 1989
TABLE 4
Underdeveloped Nations Whose Gross National Product (GNP) Is Less Than
The Annual Revenues of U.S. ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS (1990)
———————————————————————————————–
Country GNP (billions $ Population
Bhutan 0.25 1.4
Laos 0.70 3.9
Lesotho 0.71 1.7
Chad 0.86 5.4
Mauritania 0.91 1.9
Somalia 1.00 5.9
Yemen 1.03 2.4
Central African Republic 1.10 2.9
Botswana 1.21 1.2
Burundi 1.22 5.1
Togo 1.26 3.4
Malawi 1.36 8.0
Mozambique 1.49 14.9
Benin 1.72 4.4
Burkina Faso 1.70 8.5
Mali 1.84 8.0
Congo 1.91 2.1
Madagascar 1.96 10.9
Maurilius 1.96 1.1
Rwanda 2.14 6.7
Niger 2.19 7.3
Zambia 2.20 7.6
Guinea 2.32 5.4
Haiti 2.39 6.3
Jamaica 2.57 2.4
Papua New Guinea 3.00 3.7
Nepal 3.24 18.0
Gabon 3.27 1.1
Bolivia 3.03 6.9
Tanzania 3.95 24.7
Trinidad and Tobago 4.02 1.2
Honduras 4.13 4.8
Uganda 4.54 16.2
Senegal 4.55 7.0
Costa Rica 4.56 2.7
El Salvador 4.70 5.0
Paraguay 4.72 4.0
Panama 4.88 2.3
Dominican Republic 4.97 6.9
Ghana 5.60 14.0
Ethiopia 5.69 47.4
Jordan 5.85 3.9
Sri Lanka 6.97 16.6
Oman 7.00 1.4
Uruguay 7.66 3.1
Guatemala 7.83 8.7
Kenya 8.29 22.4
Ivory Coast 8.62 11.2
en
Figures were not available for Afghanistan, Kampuchea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Angola, Lebanon, Nicaragua and Vietnam. Source: World Development Report 1990: Poverty, The World Bank (New York, London, Oxford University Press, 1990
