Nelson Mandela’s Farewell

Published The Globe and Mail, 13 October 2010

I spent the first three weeks of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison sitting in his back garden. “Smile, young lady!” he’d call and, eventually, he let me follow him around like a dazzled puppy as he loped through Soweto. “Are you in love with Zwelakhe?” he’d tease. Zwelakhe Sisulu was his press gatekeeper and I’d stare fixedly at him because I wanted an interview. Once in, though, things froze. I, the Life magazine reporter, was under strict orders to elicit his feelings. I’d recently not asked the Dalai Lama whether he missed sex, meaning that a reporter had to be sent all the way to Dharamsala, so I was on the spot.

“We …” he’d start. I’d frown. “Well, we …” he’d try. I’d look distressed. It was torture. In 1990, Mr. Mandela didn’t think of himself as an “I.” The most famous political prisoner in the world, the hero and hope of Africa, was a “we.”

Today, after working for 20 years with Bill Phillips, one of the most rigorous editors around, Mr. Mandela’s heart and mind are all the way open and, for the first time in Conversations with Myself (published this week), we see everything: heart, intellect, relationships, family, patriot, the whole of a man whose life is one of the most remarkable in history.

The seemingly inarticulate leader I met was, of course, anything but and, throughout his life, he jotted notes (“conditions to be borne in mind when starting a Rev(olution)”), kept a diary and wrote thousands of letters. Agile and funny, his comments range from the ingenuous “Gee whiz, the Pope is also an outstanding person!” to profound, almost Christian homilies to a deeply sophisticated political philosophy.

Mr. Mandela is 92, and the book is his farewell. It takes the reader from his childhood in the royal household of the Thembu tribe, through the classical schooling once given to the brightest in every former British colony, to city life, legal work, two marriages and increasing political involvement. He describes in some detail his choice to split with the African National Congress and become a leader of its armed wing, MK (translated as Spear of the Nation).

His prison letters are heart-wrenching. He was not permitted to bury his young son or his mother. When Winnie, his second wife, was jailed, their two young daughters were without parents. This pitched Mr. Mandela into despair: “I feel I have been soaked in gall, every part of me, my flesh, bloodstream, bone and soul, so bitter am I to be completely powerless to help you in the rough and fierce ordeals you are going through.”

Richard Stengel, Mr. Mandela’s collaborator on Long Walk to Freedom, and Ahmed Kathrada, one of Mr. Mandela’s fellow prisoners, tease out the horrors of that imprisonment. The South African struggle was heroic and vicious by turns (Ruth First, the mother of one of my friends and an anti-apartheid activist, a woman Mr. Mandela still mourns, was blown up by a letter bomb sent by South African police), and Conversations illuminates all its stark and terrible beauty.

But it’s in Mr. Mandela’s political thinking that his book truly soars. He insists over and over that “we” want a non-racial culture, where all are equal: “At a time when some people are feverishly encouraging the growth of fractional forces, raising the tribe into the final and highest form of social organization, setting one national group against the other, cosmopolitan dreams are not only desirable but a bounden duty; dreams that stress the special unity that hold the freedom forces together …”

Conversations demonstrates why Mr. Mandela’s hand on the tiller meant that his revolution didn’t result in a liberation bloodbath, or at least not much of one. He’s still a collectivist, although, he claims, no longer a communist. And he doesn’t outright condemn the violence in today’s South Africa, the habit of which MK, in part, formed. But he repeatedly preaches empathy for one’s enemies, and his collectivism is so moored to individual liberty that it’s collectivism even a conservative can love.

If the world can create such a man in such a furnace, freedom for everyone is, indeed, possible.

Elizabeth Nickson is a writer living in Victoria.

My Gym

It’s spring and some days I have to chain myself to my desk.  The broom is calling you see, and not a witches’ broom either – though witches’ brooms must have been made with the stuff I routinely slaughter.  It’s stiff and green and tough as steel wire and this month, the bright ghastly yellow flowers surround the house – 150 meters away, but nonetheless, it will go to seed in a month, and then all the earth – scraped bare by the construction crew –  will be colonized.

So I got out with my loppers, rubber boots, and long sleeves and start work.  It is the best exercise ever.  Better than downhill skiing – ok not quite. Galloping a horse across a field – that’s more fun I admit, but I no longer risk death.  But most things – the gym, hiking, swimming – cutting broom trump broom.  Within fifteen minutes I’m breathing hard and sweating and here’s the thing – I don’t want to stop.  It’s too satisfying, it’s fun, it’s time travel back to when our ancestors cleared farmland – I used to think how miserable that must have been.  Now I know they were all high as kites the whole damn time.

I’ve been clearing broom for 12 years now on and off.  It is the most aggressive invasive species out here and it flourishes wherever land has been disturbed and then allowed to go fallow – the best argument ever against our metastatic conservation urge.  All local shrubs and flowers are crowded out – the nootka rose, the camas lily, the chocolate orchid – gone.

Here’s the thing: I arrived in the country, hollowed out from 20 years in big big cities, frail, exhausted, often bedridden with flu or a persistent cold. Broom gave me back my health.  Working outside cured me.  I can hike straight up a mountain now, or run five miles (with breaks) and I never get sick for more than a day.  Destroying that shrub on my 28, then after the (green) subdivision, 16.5 acres has given me another 40 years of brutal health.  Now, I must go because if I do four hours of phone interviews,  I can have two in my broom patch.

How Big Brother Came to the Gulf Islands

How Big Brother came to the Gulf Islands
The Islands Trust has turned the region into a museum exhibit for wrong-headed conservation
BY ELIZABETH NICKSON, SPECIAL TO THE SUN JULY 6, 2010
Last Sunday, suitably enough July 4th, the 13 communities of the Gulf Islands threw Salt Spring Coffee into Ganges Harbour and kicked off a rebellion.
With the Islands Trust’s refusal of the coffee company’s development application, the iron-fisted conservation government now finds itself in more trouble with its citizens than ever contemplated in those dewy days 35 years ago when the trust was struck to preserve and protect the Gulf Islands.
Former Vancouver mayor Senator Larry Campbell spoke, and 40 tractors, backhoes, septic and dump trucks drove to the protest site, some of the big-machine operators were nude.
To many on the Gulf Islands, the trust has become Big Brother, impenetrable, managed by a small closed elite, and destructive not only to once vivid, diverse and open communities, but arguably to the land itself.
The Gulf Islands have long been known as an argument surrounded by water. The end of the hippie trail, the repository of the anarchic, ridiculous and strange, to the casual observer people move here, shed their adult selves and decide to express their inner artist. All of which might lead that observer to divine that the islands are essentially ungovernable.
In point of fact, there is no government. Dozens of volunteer committees struggle with parks, water, library, recycling, recreation, fire, and every other issue that might come up before a municipal government. Area CRD directors parcel out money and try to keep up. And while the trust describes itself as a “unique form of local government,” its mandate is solely to manage land use. Mismanage might be a more precise word.
Property prices are among the highest in the country, despite 90 per cent of the land lying fallow and neglected. Tinder builds up in those abandoned forests, and invasive species predate once fertile fields. Hundreds of Gulf Islanders live in forest shacks, boats, trailers and tents, while the trust endlessly studies plans for affordable housing.
Applications for business expansion can take a decade to process through the trust and requirements are so stringent that applicants shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars only to be turned down, as the coffee company was, based on a “feeling.”
As business owners wait, jobs melt away, and young people, shorn of opportunity, leave. On many of the islands, there are so few students that schools are starting to close. And the islands are aging rapidly; on Hornby, the median age is 60.
The trust is the great-grandaddy of a new kind of government, which has over-laid strict environmental management on a new kind of jurisdiction — the conservation community. Struck in 1974, the trust has been imitated all over the world: The California Coastal Commission and the Cape Cod Commission, for example, are modelled, in part, upon the trust.
Essentially undemocratic, each island, whether 10,000 or 450 strong, has only two trustees, with any tie vote broken by an off-island trustee who comes in for the monthly meetings. Trust council can, with a single vote, obviate any decision approved by local trustees.
On Galiano, 100 forest-lot owners have been waiting since 1991 for permission to build just one house on plots that range from eight hectares to 43 hectares. Nowhere else in Canada must a property owner pay residential taxes on a property he cannot live on, and nowhere else in B.C. is a forest-lot owner not permitted a residence. On Denman, trustees turned down a 405-hectare park, bigger than Stanley Park, offered in return for a total of 100 houses on the 486 remaining hectares. Denman’s density is one resident for every 10 hectares, hardly “overdeveloped.” Dozens of similar decisions have worn away trust credibility and respect.
All over the world conservation communities are failing. An imposed web of ecosystem management regulation practically ensures a poor and aging population.
New York State’s 2.4-million-hectare Adirondack National Park, for example: 59 per cent of the park is private but subject to the earliest form of environmental regulation. The 30-year results were just tabulated: the population is aging, a school closes every 18 months, private business has fled, there is no Internet or cellphone coverage, young people have left, property tax revenues crashed, welfare and social service requirements have spiked and only massive government subsidy keeps the park going. Much of it is now closed off with little money left for maintenance.
Not one resident of the Gulf Islands wants over-development. We cherish our small intimate rural communities and treasure the little corner of the natural world we have been given to tend. Many of us build green houses, covenant our lands, and build salmon enhancement.
But without sensible reform, another 10 years of trust mis-management will turn the islands into museum exhibits for authoritarian and wrong-headed conservation.
Elizabeth Nickson is a writer who lives on Saltspring Island. Her next book is Soft Place to Fall.

The Great Journalism Swindle

What nobody ever tells you is that journalism is not a profession you can learn. You either have the knack or you do not. Of course you can go to school, and there are several good ones, where former journalists teach principle and technique. Classes busily analyse who was successful and why. You learn the structure of newspapers, magazines, and television stations, and how they are staffed. You learn copy editing, editing editing, and how to write a lead. But the profession is so competitive that there is no way learning the ropes guarantees you a career.
Without the knack, you’re toast in a year. The knack is largely a product of a voracious mind unafraid of complexity and eager to tweak the powerful. This is why new media are like a river full of leaping fish at spawning season. Old carcasses in the shallows twitch in their death throes, their meaty carcasses already turning grey. New media break one story after another, all pink and new and leading the charge. Consider Andrew Breibart in the U.S., easily the journo-success story of the new millennium. Breitbart, at 40 with a stable of unknowns he pays next to nothing, breaks almost every story worth talking about.
Old media began to die the minute they became assets rather than businesses. Advertisers demand a lack of hotness. Lack of hotness puts off customers. Boards of directors? Even worse. No controversy, too much to lose, no lawsuits, we own the media; we don’t want to be in the media. Be meek, bland, just the facts we are comfortable with, ma’am. The bloated multinational is a sleek shark sliding in the shadows. Secrecy is all.
Thereby, cutting the customers out of the equation, who began to snore, then drop their subscriptions, and find another source. Who needs more worshipping of the status quo and the endless celebration of ghastly Hollywood cadavers?
Which brings me to Torontonian Donna Laframboise. Recently, she did something that the Globe and Mail or the Toronto Star should have done three years ago, which was ground-truth the 2007 IPCC Report, upon which senior governments all over the world have made multi-billion dollar decisions, which affect the lives of everyone on earth.
Readers of Laframboise’s blog, noconsensus.org, volunteered for the task. Forty citizen-auditors from 12 countries examined the 18,000 citations, all of which were guaranteed by the head of the U.N.’s climate unit to be peer reviewed. For accuracy, each of the 44 chapters was reviewed by three separate committees of three.
Let’s give the floor to Donna: “The focus was extremely tight. The entire exercise was a truth-in-advertising evaluation: Is it true – as the IPCC chairman and the media have repeatedly claimed – that the report is based solely on peer-reviewed journal articles?
“It was incredibly straightforward for lay people to read through the references, sort the scientific journals from the other kinds of sources, and then count everything up.”
What were the results? Almost one-third of the supposedly peer-reviewed citations were no such thing. They were “grey” literature, which is to say newspaper pieces, magazine articles published by the World Wildlife Fund, Audubon, Greenpeace, etc., all of whom publish advocacy magazines for their membership, all filled with wild accusations of ecosystem melt-down. Working papers, position papers, and opinion pieces all made it into the report.
So let’s be exact. What were Donna’s results?
“As the citizen audit results I released…reveal, the 18,531 references cited by the IPCC are so far from being 99 per cent peer-reviewed it’s laughable. A full 30 per cent of them (5,587) were not published in peer-reviewed academic journals.
“Moreover, in 21 out of 44 chapters (48 per cent) the level of peer-reviewed references was so low the chapter received an ‘F’ on our report card.
“Let’s restate this: the rate of non-peer-reviewed source material cited by the IPCC is thirty times larger than what the British government suggested would be acceptable a mere 12 weeks ago.”
Why didn’t the CBC do this work? There are hundreds of contract workers at the corporation who sit around filing their nails and arranging their vacation time. Where was the National Post? Where were the Star, the Globe, Macleans and the Citizen? Doing the lazy.
In mid-May, the U.N. released their report on biodiversity, claiming that one-third of the planet’s species are going extinct, including 90 per cent of the grasslands of North America, an assertion so stupid that anyone driving across the northern prairies or through the intermountain West would be able to disprove. Nonetheless, Time Magazine threw the story onto its cover that very week. This, despite the fact that the annually published Index of Leading Environmental Indicators puts species loss around 2.7 per cent, then points to recoveries of many. Even the alarmists at the Heinz Foundation put species loss nowhere near 1/3. So here we go again, lies dressed up as truth, which trigger regulation that damages the financial health of hundreds of thousands of families.
Note: Laframboise is a former Post, Star, and Globe journalist who left the profession seven years ago out of disgust. We can see why her despair is so well founded. For some real journalism, try NoConsensus.

The New Suicide

I come from generations of ferocious volunteers – my father, who worked a full day running a textile business, would come home, eat, and gallop off to a committee meeting two or three times a week, a pattern which persisted for 40 years. In sharp contrast, I don’t like to leave the house except for shopping and parties, and these days I try to wriggle out of even those activities.
This, of course, is very wrong and I am going to change. Robert Putnam, the Harvard sociologist who published that 90s classic on civic life, Bowling Alone, reports that even one community meeting a month can increase an individual’s happiness by 50 percent. 50 percent! Two hours in a meeting hall drinking bad coffee can make you twice as happy, imagine that. We thought it was art, or opera, or literary appreciation, yet it turns out to be attending a re-zoning meeting. Wonders simply never do cease.
I live on Salt Spring Island where there are more clubs than people. Volunteerism proliferates like the broom and deer that predate our gardens. Nearly everyone, across all the classes, can be busy every night doing one thing or another from the arts council to Rotary to knitting club to folk club. And that is a good thing; it makes the island – for those innocents who can afford it – warm, connected, gentle. Salt Spring, according to the last census, is one of the richest, most educated jurisdictions in Canada. Plus it’s the warmest part of Canada, and not only that, it is one of the top 10 visual arts towns in North America. House prices are nutty-high; nature is resplendent. They say in the States that as California goes, so goes the US. I’m going to venture that as progressive, wealthy, green, smart Salt Spring goes, so goes Canada. And that knife cuts deep. You don’t want to be us. We are committing a slow suicide.
We have abandoned our local government to the environmental left – this is, after all, where Elizabeth May has chosen to make her stand as head of the Green Party. I guess her thinking is that if she can’t get into Parliament from here, she won’t make it anywhere. For your sake, I hope she loses. Because on the evidence, what the Greens have in mind for us is nothing short of tyranny; a broke, exhausted, aging, and rapidly shrinking tyranny.
We watch our young people leave because they cannot afford property – despite 40,000 acres on Salt Spring alone lying fallow and neglected. And on the smaller islands in our jurisdiction, older citizens are forced to leave because there are no young people to provide the services they need. We have trouble housing our teachers or RCMP members because they can’t afford to live here, despite again, all those empty acres.
Our population is crashing, 4,000 have left out of 29,000 in only two years; remember, this in the warmest part of Canada, a short hop from three gleaming supra-modern cities. Nearly everyone still remaining has grey hair. Tourists day trip; there is a smattering of hotels and B&Bs, but families can’t come because we don’t allow vacation rentals. The principal marina, which brings in $30 million a year, has been viciously persecuted by our local government – the notorious Islands Trust – for more than 10 years. Last year, our keystone green business, the rightly famous Salt Spring Coffee Company, which produces over 40 jobs for young people, was put through a two-year rezoning process. After spending over one hundred thousand dollars complying to harsh green regulations, it was finally turned down based on a “bad feeling” by a trustee who not too long ago popped up here out of Montana.
I go to dinner parties where grown men and women, successful, having family, and connected are fit to be tied by the slow train wreck we are witnessing. But our political skills have atrophied and the other side is masterful, working the levers of power that they invented while we shopped. By assigning our civic life to experts – and green experts at that – who are all, every one of them, people who have no experience whatsoever of the private sector, we have risked the future.
It is now a truism to say the post-war generations went to sleep, politically speaking, and in Canada, from Trudeau on, we were happy to assign all our responsibilities to government and party on. Highly educated and informed consumers we all are, our snouts dug deep into the marrow of life, sucking up the vacations, the lovely fabrics of our clothing and upholstery, the make-up and I-Whatever.
The U.S. Department of Labor’s time-use surveys show that, compared with 2005, Americans spent less time shopping and more time taking part in “organizational, civic, and religious activities.”
Maybe we can take back our politics before we die children in the grip of tyrants.

Where Are All The Corpses

On a more positive note, while I have been in the trenches, the inestimable Dr. Timothy Hulsey has been auditing the U.N.’s Biodiversity Sky is Falling 33% of the World’s Species Are Going Extinct Report, Summer 2010.   To date he has found that only 29% of the citations used are peer-reviewed.  Less than one-third.  And we know just how reliable those are.  Conservation biologists who quarrel with the sky-is-falling, the earth- beneath-our-feet-is-collapsing agenda do not get grants.  Nor are they published.  They are not granted tenure.  They are shut out of the profession.

The rest of the citations are put together by the various and many organizations with an interest in promoting universal fear of collapsing ecosystems.

Like everyone I need to know:  Where are all the corpses?

I seem to be in another pitched battle with the Islands Trust, an inevitability, I suppose. I like a good fight I guess, but I’d prefer not. However, the human rights record of green governments are pitiful and impossible to ignore. The Trust launches suit after suit against the residents of the islands, and all too often for silly things, resulting from flagrant over-regulation. In every jurisdiction where strict ecosystem management has been effected, local residents suffer. And the less privileged you are, the less access you have, the more you will be punished. Some months it seems, the most vulnerable are those culled: young men who work with their hands, who are trying to raise a family, older retirees who have mis-read their rule books, those needing an extra $5000 a year for dental bills, school fees, a family holiday. It is despicable and worth the fight.
In other rural areas, in working country, the situation is more serious. Poverty rates among working and middle class families shoot up when Greens move in – from 4% to 22.9% in counties in northern California. They are paid well, typically 30% more than for an equivalent private sector job. And they are predatory. The more flaws they can find in the wild, the more rules they can impose, the more secure their jobs. And for the rest of us who do not have a dog in the fight – it means higher prices for everything, a sky-high misery index for our less fortunate fellows, and secret misery for those who fight them. A creeping tyranny which does not see its deadening hand.

Xtra Stimulating Lunch Date

Three hour talk yesterday with Rob Scagel, a brilliant forestry scientist in B.C.  Apparently we have 15 million hectares of dead and dying timber lands in our province  - a full one billion cubic meters –  the cutting and replanting of which would pay for itself if we sold the wood for biomass (green) energy.  India wants it.  Are we taking that opportunity?  No, the trees are rotting where they stand, turning into tinder, kindling waiting only for the match.  And the beetles that killed the trees lie two inches thick on wilderness lakes, ready to advance on what’s left of the forest.

Why no mitigation?  Why no action?  The dead hand of conservation.  No politician who wants to keep his job will touch B.C. forest policy – the political fallout would end his career.  Who would turn out people on the streets?  Representatives from America’s greatest foundations – who spent, in the last 10 years over $100,000,000 to subvert our natural resource policies.  Which they have done with a series of state-of-the-art PR campaigns.

Read Vivian Kraus at http://fairquestions.typepad.com/fishfarmfuss/  for a forensic accounting of where just some of the money originated, who spent it and how.  Trust me for just 15 seconds when I tell you that the science used to make this billion-dollar fortress, no-touch conservation decision is crap.  Then ask:  who suffers?  I’ll tell you who suffers.  The working poor.  The rural poor.  All of us who pay higher prices and lose the stumpage fees from the sale of the wood, which by the way, used to fund our health care.  Who benefits?  Ivy League foundation officers and their paid apparatchiks.  And when our forest, our greatest resource, the resource that built this province into the gleaming triumph it is, the forest that rebuilt Europe after WW2, dies a firey death, they’ll turn away satisfied, go back to Nantucket and boil lobsters at a beach party, so they can preen in front of their friends and neighbours.

Thanks Heinz.  Thanks Rockefeller.  Thanks Hewlett Packard.  Thanks Pew.  Aren’t we poor ignorant colonials lucky to have you subverting our sovereignty?  Spiral our economy into deflation.  We’ll be so much happier as simple peasants.  Who needs up-to-date cancer treatment but you, of course?

My Funeral

Who is coming to your funeral? I ask this question because one of my closest friends simply cannot stop talking about her own death. How it is soon approaching – her own parents died young – and how she plans to stockpile opium poppies so as to remain in some control of the agenda. I have forbidden her to talk about it anymore, which is about as effective as herding cats, besides I have the longevity gene, fully expect to see 105, and find the idea of death completely irrelevant at this point in my life. Death? Not going to happen.

But still, who? Driving home from a political meeting last night, I decided that the number of people at your funeral will be roughly equivalent to how much you have given. And yes, I suppose that would mean money, but wealthy people giving money – not so surprising after all, rather another way for them to preen. But take for instance my pal Kimberly, an overweight socialist who works at the RCMP and the dry cleaner. Everyone is coming to Kimberly’s funeral I can tell you, because there is not one night or noon hour, when Kimberly is not out serving her community. She is on a dozen committees and chairs most of them. Efficiently too. Every day Kimberly moves human progress forward another inch.

My father, who died at 84, retired from his charity work at 70. And since he moved to another city straight afterwards,  his funeral came as a surprise.  “Who are all these people?” I hissed to my mother as another grasped my hand and looked me in the eye and told me what a fine man he was. She shook her head in wonder. “They come from all over,” she said.

Indeed. For all his faults he was a moral man, a man of character who shunned the limelight, not because he was shy, but because he found it indecorous. Instead he patiently reorganized the bookkeeping of the Victorian Order of Nurses, bought a new fleet for Meals on Wheels, and stick handled the Red Cross through its tainted blood scandal with only the occasional temper tantrum. “Your mother,” he told me once, “cannot handle committees – she likes to have things her own way. Picks fights. Fightin’ Irish you know.”

There you go – the secret to civilization in three brief sentences. You can either fight or sit down, step on your almighty Narcissus and pitch in. Not only will people come to your funeral – or “celebration” of your life  or whatever syncretic abomination you choose in advance – but the time between then and now will be a whole lot richer.

I am going to follow my own advice.

The State of the World’s Ecosystems

This blogger asserts that just as global warming has created a whole warehouse of scandals, and politicized science to the point where reason has lost its moorings, conservation biology is equally as corrupt.  Over the past thirty years, our natural resources have been locked away from us by environmental NGO’s who have sold us a bill of goods about species and biodiversity loss, equally as bogus as the warming scam.  As a result, prices for all natural resources – particularly food and energy – are unnecessarily high, and penalize the least advantaged among us, preventing the very poor from climbing out of their poverty.

Because of this pseudo-science, country people numbering in the tens of millions have been driven off their loved lands in every nation on earth.  Most poignant is the state of those indigenous peoples in the developing world who have had their land stolen from them and resources locked away, by the heirs to the greatest American fortunes, who run the foundations based on those fortunes.  Well connected, with unlimited funds, Ivy league educations, and an adherence to a false ideology, they’ve created a mapping system covering more than 1/3 of the planet, that is nothing more than a pack of lies.  Nonetheless these mapping systems, once created are donated to local governments and thereby form the basis of all land use planning.  The assertion of massive species loss is the so-called rationale behind the takings of hundreds of millions of acres in hundreds of countries, developed and not.

Working country people in every locale say these maps cannot be ground-truthed, that more often than not, what the mapping says is there, is not there.  The mapping all too often is a politicized tissue of lies, created by pet scientists who are creating jobs for themselves first by establishing ecosystem collapse, then in finding ways to stop ecosystem collapse.

In April of 2010, the U.N. Panel on Biodiversity announced that 1/3 of the species on the planet are going extinct.  With this document, which had no citations attached to it, these so called experts assert, among other absurdities, that 90% of the grasslands of North America are going extinct.  Even a schoolchild on a bus on the Canadian prairies or in the great intermountain States of the U.S. would find this laughable. One hundred and twenty-four countries contributed to this report.  The reports will certainly be found to be a clever mix of fact, fiction, utopian fantasy and blatant fabrication.

Over the next year, this blog will attempt to gather data that ground-truths (fact checks) the assertions of the UN Biodiversity Panel, the Heinz Foundation’s 2008 The State of the Nations Ecosystems, an equally politicized report on species loss, and the grand-daddy of them all, The Nature Conservancy’s NatureServe.  I will publish the findings of conservation biologists on the ground all over the world, as I find them.  Conservation biologists who disagree with the prevailing zeitgeist, much like climate scientists who do not agree with the UN IPCC, are silent.  Many are afraid for their careers, since granting, especially from U.S. foundations, the U.N. and its satellites and most universities,  depends upon following party line.