Resilient Communities and our Supervisors

September 5, 2013

OPINION By TOM DAWSON

On June 21, 2013, the Central Coast Resilient Communities Symposium was held in Santa Barbara. Local officials, key government staff and selected business and non-profit executives in the Ventura, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Opispo counties were invited. It was sponsored by the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, commonly known as ICLEI.

Several months ago, some citizens attending a San Luis Opispo Council of Governments (SLOCOG) meeting asked about our political connection to ICLEI and were assured that, although SLOCOG had purchased and used their software in 2008, they no longer had a membership with ICLEI.

Yet, just two months ago, two of our county supervisors and Mayor Jan Marx signed an agreement at the symposium in Santa Barbara.

Their actions didn’t seem merely ceremonial but a significant statement of their goals for SLO County… for all of us! So I decided to research ICLEI and found that it was launched in 1990 at the World Congress of Local Governments for A Sustainable Future and was instrumental in the development of United Nations Agenda 21 Sustainable Development. (Research it yourself and you will see that these two organizations use the same language.) ICLEI even drafted Chapter 28 of the Sustainable Development workbook.

So what’s so bad about ICLEI? A closer look at their goals and objectives will answer that. ICLEI communicates with local special interests to translate international policy into local and regional legislation. It’s objectives presuppose the notion that legislation is the only method of improving the conditions or problems of the world. This notion denigrates the intelligence and ingenuity of local individuals (like you and me) and our ability to address problems of our own lives and property. We are marginalized and placed under increasing oversight of government planners.

So I am legitimately concerned that, on one hand, we’re fed a denial of any influence of or involvement with ICLEI, and on the other hand, two supervisors and our mayor signed an agreement to promote its goals and objectives in our county.

As I consider a global organization like ICLEI intrusively analyzing our local problems and deciding the best solutions for us, I wonder, “How will their policies change the unique character of our rural communitites?”

We moved to SLO county because we wanted to own property and have space to raise our family, plant gardens and orchards, raise animals and work on personal projects. ICLEI’s main objectives include moving people off the rural, open land areas and into higher density housing in towns and villages, concentrated around transportation hubs with trains and buses. Private property and cars will go away or be heavily restricted, as well as other aspects of our lives listed by Maurice Strong, author of Sustainable Development: “Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work air conditioning, and suburban housing are not sustainable.”

Although Sustainable Development is promoted as a war on pollution, it is increasingly clear that the “environmental crises” are simply the means to promote a political agenda — the restructuring of the governmental systems in all nations so the people of the world will be subjects of a global collective. Many of ICLEI’s proposed implementation strategies require the surrender of our unalienable rights.

Speaking of rights, Harvey Ruvin, Vice Chair of ICLEI, has stated, “Individual rights will have to take a back seat to the collective” in the implementation of Sustainable Development, whose premise is that individual human wants, needs and desires are to be conformed to the views and dictates of the community (Communitarianism).

This is in agreement with Gro Brundtland, another founder of Sustainable Development who states,”The World Socialist Party is part of the Global Socialist Movement that believes capitalism cannot meet the needs of the majority of the people in the world, however ‘progressive’ it might become. To meet these needs, capitialism must be replaced by socialism.”

As we continue to allow Sustainable Development, Smart Growth and other ICLEI doctrine to become our county’s doctrine, these stated principles become inextricably woven into our local government, thereby supplanting our American Constitutional free enterprise system. By the way, the United Nations votes against the United States 70% – 90% of the time! The UN and ICLEI are no friends of America.