Viewpoint – Bad green regulation is harmful
By Elizabeth Nickson on March 13, 2013
Rather than answer Greg Spendjian’s extensive complaints last week about my earlier column on Land Use Bylaw 355, (which apparently one is not permitted to question), I would refer him and other complainants to my recently published book, Eco-Fascists; How Radical Conservationists Are Destroying Our Natural Heritage.
Therein he will find a great deal of properly performed research around the issues I brought up in the disputed column, especially that much green regulation satisfies and pleases the comfortable and educated middle class because the costs do not fall on them, but on the working class, young families and the elderly who pay for that regulation by a diminishment of their lives.
The book was commissioned by one of the most distinguished editors working today, Adam Bellow, Saul Bellow’s son, who has his own imprint at Harper Collins in New York. Adam Bellow’s intent as a publisher is serious, as is mine as writer. As a result, the book received extensive vetting, and a rigorous copy edit, after which an independent fact checker was hired, and the corporation’s lawyer (himself a confessed man of the left) was so shocked, he took six weeks to further check my work.
Upon publication, the National Center for Policy Analysis in Washington, D.C. was surprised enough by my findings they sent my original statistical analysis (in which I was aided by Matt Watters, a young statistician on the island and the kind of resident we need) to the National Agricultural Statistics Service at the U.S. Department of Agriculture for checking. The USDA should not have been inclined to approve my work, because I lay a large part of the blame at their door. But no, they were impressed. As at every stage in this most rigorous of processes, the word came back that I had done a very good job. Subsequently the Mercatus Center, also in D.C., based a November 2012 paper and conference, called From Presumption to Proof, the Future of Regulation, in part, on my work.
Bad green regulation, of which we have a lot on Salt Spring, has many unintended and truly awful consequences, and these latter almost always impact the less advantaged. Bad regulation rarely attaches a cost analysis to its implementation. Employment loss is routinely under-estimated and trivialized and the benefits of many regulations go disproportionally to wealthier households while the costs fall more on lower-income households. An extensive examination of the harm caused by bad green regulation can be found in the above-cited paper, and in Eco-Fascists.
Let me reiterate that I live in a carbon-neutral rammed earth house and I have covenanted half my property. A salmon enhancement pond sits at the intersection of my creeks. I want good green regulation that increases human health and wealth, which I argue are strongly linked, but I want data, not utopian or fear-based projections. I want genuine harm demonstrated in the real world before I vote to choke the lives of the less fortunate.
Our culture has come a long way using evidence-based management; any other way is pure folly. Hard evidence — audits of forests, ranges, watercourses and rural lives — is now showing the extent of that folly.
Not having an indexed government pension, I appear to have about four jobs, and cannot enter into an extended debate with my critics, unless they read the book, at which point, I’d be happy to oblige.
And the sneering attitude and ad hominem attacks of Mr. Spendjian form the reason that we cannot have a civil dialogue about very real problems on the island. His piece was a form of bullying; I am used to it and can tolerate it. Most people cannot and are thereby silenced.

Not to put too fine a point on it, I expect to have the crap beat out of me with this book. If I had wanted an easy life I would have written fiction or begged my way back into the commentariat. It is however, a nice synchonicity that the first interview about Eco-Fascists is happening Wednesday on local radio and I am being interviewed by a former head of the Salt Spring Conservancy, a perfectly nice woman, who is now our head librarian.

It was the Conservancy and its storm troopers who changed the way I thought. When I came here, I was a comfortable, un-budgeable member of the cultural left. Yes I had an MBA, but it was in arts administration. Yes I’d started three businesses and had to fire people and deal with at one count, NINE levels of government all with hands in my pockets, but essentially I was comfortable with an increasing level of government intrusion, with benign experts determining the shape of my life and that of others. To me, freedom in the arts was the only freedom that really mattered. Naturally I thought only the left wanted to improve the lot of the less fortunate. I had red diaper baby friends, and friends with Communist fathers, one even spent time on Interpol’s Most Wanted list – I thought he was a hero – I thought it was cool that when I stayed with her, MI6 was parked outside the house. That’s how left I was.

The fury unleashed on me by the environmental movement after an essay of mine was published in Harper’s, changed everything. From mild questioning and a bit of mockery, they divined danger and then went to war. All left of center, my critics lied and misrepresented me, and unleashed thugs who threatened me by phone in the middle of the night. Flashlights raked my walls after midnight, accusations filled the newspaper, and I was told it was dangerous to go to town by anonymous voices in the middle of the night and that perhaps I should get off the island.

After I recovered, I started to ask questions and none of the answers soothed me.

I decided to stand up for people less fortunate, with less access and power than I. If not me, I asked myself, then who? I’d gone to a country high school before I was whisked off to a posh boarding school; in an attachment formed only by the very young, country people were my people first and always. The rural middle and working class – bitter clingers – are the most voiceless in our society. Once strong and independent, they are now skirting poverty. Despair is a constant companion. Shorn of property rights and their traditional role as stewards of the land, they are fast becoming serfs begging for minimum wage. Families are broken; meth is epidemic. And despite the trillions in government aid lavished on marginal communities over the past 50 years, none of it has made much difference. In many prototypical communities, the poverty rate is 5 points higher than it was before Johnson began The Great Society.

I advocate for them. I am an apostate from the cultural elite and all I miss is the food.

Go ahead, throw a punch.

http://www.elizabethnickson.com/wordpress/

sorry for inconvenience, webmaster on holiday

This blog is a mash-up of journalism, local, regional and national, letters to the local paper by me, letters to the local paper complaining about me, bad press, good press, criticism, well founded and especially not, response to that criticism, expurgated sections of ECO-Fascists, and observations short and long, sacred and profane. I’ve always thought of myself as suspended midway between writer and journalist, an uncomfortable position at best, but nonetheless where I hang. The real world and acting within it – fascination is too weak a word, but unhooking myself and diving deeper for longer periods of time than that granted to any working journalist or even traditional non-fiction writers, gives me a deep satisfaction, amounting almost to gratitude. Put another way, to know something to its plumbed depths? That, for me, is everything.

Since the Greeks, and no doubt before, from time to time, country people have been forced to call the city to account. Digby Baltzell points out that, historically, the struggle has been between aristocrats, landed gentry and yeoman farmers and the patricians of the cities, who believe they are better suited to determine the future of the countryside and its people than those who live on and love the land. During the early 18th century, an ancestor of mine joined with Swift, Samuel Johnson and other thinkers of the time to oppose Disraeli’s Corn laws, forming the Country Party of disaffected Tories and Whigs. They fought what they called the Court party, made up of rent seekers, urban merchants and the usual suspects – interchangeable with those today who live on other people’s money. Country people, gentry or yeoman were libertarian, self-reliant, individual. They wanted a frugal and efficient government, low taxes, and personal liberty. The court was just that: courtiers, their allegiance available for the right price, the case remaining the same whether in the 1st, 14th, 16th, 18th or 21st century. Bolingbroke was exiled before the fight was over – the stakes were higher in 1715 – but those ideas shared by Burke, Locke and others informed in part, what was to become the American revolution.

Plus ca change. While the fight is no longer carried on by aristocrats and gentry, those of us who live in and love the country find ourselves in one hell of a fight. Outmatched at every turn and facing more money than we can imagine, the ideas remain the same: liberty, limited government, low taxes. Policy makers have long thought that the actions of governments supersede the ancient ways of the land and the knowledge of those who live on that land. They could not be more wrong, and after many decades of interference, the land itself is suffering, no more or less than those who live on it. Culture is more fragile than nature and rural culture, the founding culture in every country but city-states is breaking apart. This could not be more wrong. That connection between people and their lands should be, must be unbreakable. The ground on which we stand, the food we eat, the water that brings life, the air we breathe trumps any marketplace, no matter how elevated.

Forest-lot families on Galiano barred from building homes for 20 years.

The Islands Trust, Canada’s blue-chip experiment in conservation government has decided not to take a $250,000 Gas Fund grant to review its policy statement. Gulf Island residents heaved a sigh of relief.  Was the Trust actually considering the will of its subjects?  Could it be that the Trust was finally listening to people who were not fanatic supporters?  Could the Trust learn, grow and even survive?

The Gulf Islands have roiled in discontent for many years.  The lack of proportional representation, the inefficiencies caused by the fact that, with one exception, none of the islands have a local government, and the seeming elevation of place over people – means that government on Canada’s Gulf Islands contravenes Canada’s founding principles. As a result, some of the messes have been spectacular.  If the Trust is in a responsive mood, cleaning up some of those messes should be top of the agenda.

The disaster it might start with is the plight of 90 odd forest lot families on Galiano island, who have not been able to build even one house (legally) on as much as 160 acres for twenty years.  As far as train wrecks go, this is spectacular, unless you enjoy the sight of aging middle class people begging, tears in their eyes, to have a house, swearing allegiance to environmental values, and spending all their money in futile efforts to conform without losing all their self determination. Health has been broken in this 20 year long fight, family wealth gutted, educations foregone, holidays not taken, family gatherings bleak. The island is locked in a Hatfield/McCoy battle,  shameful in 21st century Canada.

The Trust has not been able to find a solution.  In fact, on the evidence it appears that the Trust does not want a solution unless property owners cede many of their rights.  While the rules change perpetually, a forest lot owner could have a house on their 160 acres, but the Trust decides on the site, the Trust decides on the house size, and owners have to give away 75% of their land.  Recently an additional 21 pages of regulations that would control activity on those lands and houses have just been written.

B.C. taxpayers have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars funding the many Galiano court fights, as well as paying for the thousands of hours bureaucrats in various ministries spend trying to find a solution.  Last week, those bureaucrats reached for yet another solution.  Eleven hundred hectares of Galiano’s forest lots lie under the Private Managed Forest Lands designation.  Nowhere else in the Province are forest owners not permitted to live on their lands.  The point was made to the island trustees who essentially, shrugged. Galiano is “unique”, it was in the Trust area, it required special treatment with special legislation.  Yes, said the Ministry, but you cannot prohibit a house.  All right, fine, said the Trust, but we can regulate, we are the Trust.  And with that, the can was kicked down the road for the two years it will take to write special legislation the Trust demands for Galiano.

By the time the Galiano forest lot owners receive permission to build a house, they will all be dead.  Which means, conservation government?  Epic fail.  If the Trust is to survive, and most of us want it to, it must address its human catastrophes.

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.

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?

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.

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.