My RSS Feeds
The Buffalo Commons: A Marxist Assault on Propert Rights
In "Buffalo Chips to Microchips," Philip Burgess reviews a radical environmentalist effort. In 1987, a husband and wife Rutgers, Frank and Deborah Popper, gained the praise of environmentalists with a Marxist proposal for a Federal takeover of the Great Plains in order to restore that area to an earlier state: "The federal government's commanding task on the Plains for next century will be to recreate the 19th century, to reestablish what we would call the Buffalo Commons." This goal is now the central goal of the Great Plains Restoration Council.
In the Poppers' view, since the area was becoming depopulated already (a completely wrong assumption), the Federal government should step in and help move people out and put the land under Federal and environmentalist control. The Poppers wrote that "the only way to keep the Plains from turning into an utter wasteland...will be for the federal government to step in and buy the land -- in short, to deprivatize it."
"Deprivatization" is part of the radical environmentalist attack on private property. In fact, it's a key goal of all good Marxists, who abhor private property rights (for everyone but them, of course) and want to create a massively powerful centralized government that controls all property and people. Environmentalism and the nightmare of Marxism go hand in glove.
Don't think that the radical environmentalist care one iota about somebody's investment and livelihood associated with their land. Deprivatization is occurring all over the United States, typically with the stroke of a bureacrat's pen, as ranchers find that water rights have been taken away, or landowners find that they can no longer build on their land or use their land as they expected to because someone has suddenly declared their land to harbor wetlands (a moist spot can do it) or a protected species.
Dixie Lee Ray, former governor of Washington and a vocal critic of radical environmentalists, answers a couple of questions about property rights and environmentalism in a 1992 interview for Religion and Liberty (a publiation of the Acton Institute):
R&L: What is the role of property rights in the environmentalism debate?
Ray: There is a deliberate and quite outspoken attack on the whole idea of people owning private property. Mr. William Riley, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, has said publicly on a number of occasions that he does not believe that people should have the right to own private property. To use his words, "The ownership of private property is a quaint anachronism." He has called for a repeal of the fifth amendment as it affects the right of private property. There are two laws that have been passed by the Congress that are being used to take property away from people. One is the Endangered Species Act, and the other one happens to be the Clean Water Act. The Clean Water Act has a section, 404, which allows the Corps of Engineers to regulate the water that is navigable. By a series of very twisted definitions, the Corps has adopted the idea, which the Fish and Wildlife and EPA are also following, that any body of water, or any moist land, anything that they can call "wetland" constitutes navigable water.
R&L: So this causes problems where land can't be developed?
Ray: Not only just that, but actually, they can take property away from, let's say a farmer, who has a farm pond and uses that to irrigate his land. This has in fact happened, and there is an enormous, country-wide movement being started of property rights proponents to oppose this, but it is very difficult to stop the momentum that the radical environmentalists already have.
Dixie Lee Ray's concerns were well justified. Things have gotten much worse since that interview.