By Dr. Harold Pease
Are your city or county government leaders ICLEI members, or is your city an ICLEI city? If so, you, or they, may not fully realize that the United Nations has a big influence over your local government decisions. You need to void this influence as quickly as possible.
I too was slow to see the influence of the United Nations on city, county, or state governments but the documentation supporting that influence is now overwhelming. I was conversant with their use of environmental prongs to standardize regulations and govern allocations of resources on the nations of the earth through the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and through their United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), but we were okay because we had not signed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol Treaty. There were so many other fronts in trying to preserve our Constitution and Republic this seemed less unimportant.
While I battled the loss of freedom elsewhere, the United Nations formed in 1990 the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, or ICLEI, to ideologically infiltrate local governments into “winning enactment of global-warming legislation at the state and local levels.” A tentacle of a giant UN octopus has reached into our local governments. Now becoming recognized for what it is, it appears almost everywhere. It claims over 1200 local government members in 70 different countries. Of that number 130 are members of our county and city governments in California alone. California’s ICLEI cities include Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco and Sacramento, which sheds light on how California could be so easily enticed into AB 32, formally known as the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. This legislation, sometimes referred to as “cap and trade,” is driving businesses from the state and flooding those who stay with regulatory nightmares.
ICLEI’s purpose, according to their web page, is to “Connect cities and local governments to the United Nations and other international bodies… Mobilize local governments to help their countries implement multilateral environmental agreements such as the Rio conventions…. Forge multi-stakeholder partnerships such as Resilient Cities, a global framework on urban resilience and climate adaptation where local governments, international agencies, development banks, ministries, institutes and others, collaborate.” The master plan is Chapter 28 of Agenda 21.
Agenda 21 “proposes a global regime that will monitor, oversee, and strictly regulate our planet’s oceans, lakes, streams, rivers, aquifers, sea beds, coast-lands, wetlands, forests, jungles, grasslands, farmland, deserts, tundra, and mountains. It even has a whole section on regulating and ‘protecting’ the atmosphere.”
But Agenda 21 is far more than just extreme environmental regulation—that is just the beginning. The New American magazine gave the best description of what it includes. “It proposes plans for cities, towns, suburbs, villages, and rural areas. It envisions a global scheme for healthcare, education, nutrition, agriculture, labor, production, and consumption—in short, everything; there is nothing on, in, over, or under the Earth that doesn’t fall within the purview of some part of Agenda 21” (“Your Hometown and the United Nations,” February 21, 2011, p. 14). In short, it will affect every person on earth and that affect is not likely to be positive for individuals or their local governments. Like a vacuum cleaner it siphons power from local and state jurisdiction to the United Nations.
The list of environmental groups, foundations, and government agencies supporting Agenda 21 is mind-boggling. Local opposition is underfunded and overwhelmed.
“Sustainable development” (not defined) is the wording used to describe their end result. This is the most appealing part of Agenda 21 for visionaries of a perfectly, totally managed, world governing environment. Unfortunately, it is way too open-ended allowing the ruling class (the planners, of course) to modify the rules as necessary. Gone would be the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but Utopians do not think that far in advance. Fortunately, locally elected leaders generally do, but they need to rid themselves of this UN influence, like a cancer, to remain locally controlled and free. Once again, are your city or county leaders ICLEI members? Why not ask them?
Dr. Harold Pease is an expert on the United States Constitution. He has dedicated his career to studying the writings of the Founding Fathers and applying that knowledge to current events. He has taught history and political science from this perspective for over 25 years at Taft College. To read more of his weekly articles, please visit www.LibertyUnderFire.org.