The greening of America is so common and so little understood that it has gone almost entirely unanalyzed and unchallenged. It has become common to the point of universal acceptance, and invisible with respect to what it actually is. Nearly everyone has become green, yet no one knows what that means.
To understand greening, one must understand its roots, environmentalism. The latter coincides with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962, and her conservationist activism which lead to a reversal in national pesticide policy. Federal regulations shifted from serving the interests of the pesticide industry, to impeding the industry with excessive regulations out of a misguided concern for the safety of the planetary environment. Mirroring a cultural reversal, Carson’s political agitation precipitated the environmentalist movement, prefiguring a unique historical episode, the greening of America.
A conservationist working in the Federal Department of Fisheries, Rachel Carson helped to guide the American mind toward awareness of the alleged destruction brought upon the planet by industrial capitalism. The subsequent ozone scare, among other planet-based concerns, triggered a frenzied scramble for the safety of the Earth. Ever since this concern became mainstreamed into American consciousness, countless initiatives to save the earth have been enacted, from recycling to so-called sustainable redevelopment, that is, the greening of cities and governments on local, national, and global levels, all in the name of saving the planet.
As it evolved into the defining element of popular consciousness, the environmental movement became an historical event - the greening of America. Emerging from within the social atmosphere of the country, it expands outward into a global-historical phenomenon.
Regarding this transformation in politics and law, federal regulation shifted its purpose from ensuring the efficiency and safety of free-market activities, to shutting down free-market operations that were not green enough. Anti-pollution legislation took on a life of its own. The Environmental Protection Agency – proposed by president Nixon – began its operations after Nixon signed an executive order in 1970. Since its conception, the EPA has expanded its jurisdiction under the Clean Water Act, which it interprets to include all U.S. territory. This means that private economic development must gain the approval of the EPA or an EPA approved agency to do business. At this point, any genuine, albeit misguided, concern for the environment gets bound up in a process of hijacking and exploiting it to serve the interests of federal expansion, followed by corporatist hegemony. The stakeholders in this scheme feed the flame of the illusory fear of impending global catastrophe.
The hegemonic agenda is woven into the fabric of its surprisingly convincing illusion that the planet will be destroyed if sovereign consumers are left to their own devices – if the free market is left to evolve on its own. The industrialization of the West has polluted the environment, they say, and the planet will be destroyed unless people limit Co2 emissions, stop using coal to produce energy, stop driving cars, put an end to the coal, oil, and gas industry, and, indeed, to any human activity that is defined by the EPA as harmful to the earth. Believe it or not, activities such as spitting can fall under EPA jurisdiction.
Natural human activity is poisoning the earth, they say. Therefore, as the logic goes, power and wealth must be transferred from the sovereign consumer to the central planners – that is, to the green-experts who claim to know how to save the planet and who tell you how you must live in order to prevent global catastrophe. In reality, when you buy into the illusion, you are simply volunteering to give up your freedom and your wealth to the corporatist powers that are planning your future without you knowing it.
In the shift from industrial safety regulations based on traditional free-market jurisprudence to non-traditional green jurisprudence (the interpretation of regulatory legislation in light of the ostensible axiom that free economic activity results in the destruction of the earth) the EPA began regulating greenhouse gases from mobile and stationary sources of air pollution under the Clean Water Act for the first time on January 2, 2011, strangling private business and free market activity, while large corporations merged and pushed out small business. The corporate monopolies alone can afford to pay off the EPA for permission to expand their economic interests. In fact, it is analogous to the Catholic Church’s abuse of indulgences through commercialization in the late Middle Ages. Yes, it’s all about the money, the concern is not really about environmental health. The free market is thus dissolved before the neo-feudal lords – the “1%” - and the middle class becomes all but impoverished before the wave of corporate hegemony.
All the while, the citizens of the country are blindly handing over their paychecks, furthering the concentration of the corporate government agenda. Your tax dollars are diverted to the sustainable redevelopment of your cities, while city general funds are exhausted and the general upkeep of the city is ignored. City planners are using your money to finance the implementation of an agenda that you know nothing about. Cities are hiring contractors to build sustainable housing and law firms specializing in eminent domain in order to legally implement the hidden process of neo-feudal gentrification.
This redevelopment is called Smart Growth or New Urbanism. For green activists, it answers the question to the problem of the traditional – that is, the free market – city. There will be smaller living units, attached condos, little or no parking, few private cars, and more eyes on the street. Redevelopment projects are one implementation arm of the hidden plan, and it includes rezoning of huge sections of your cities to smart growth zones whose redevelopment will be justified by eminent domain through the logic of green-jurisprudence.
In order to create a sustainable city, however, new industries must be created – the recycling industry and the windmill industry, for example. But the pollution, expense, and inefficiency of these industries is not on your cultural radar. What’s more, there is not really any pollution at all – Co2 emissions are no real threat, landfills are benign, efficient, and effective, the ozone was never a real problem in the first place, and global warming/climate change is a mere natural shift that has no relation to human industrial activity. Basic scientific data regarding these truths is easy to find. On the contrary, green science has not been able to prove its claims, and in fact has not moved beyond the level of speculation and hypothesis regarding the causal relation between human production and climate change.
In short, the illusion is that human activity is destroying the planet. The hidden agenda is the fusion of corporate and government power to re-plan cities and to create centrally planned economies in which property and privacy rights no longer exist. Your landlord, employer, and government will be the corporatist regime – that is, the fusion of corporate and government power. The future might look something like South Korea’s Samsung Digital City.
Politically speaking, the agenda and the illusion trickle down from United Nations Agenda 21. This global redevelopment initiative is deployed by ICLEI (International Council for Environmental Initiative), which has helped over 100 countries and 1300 cities to sign on with the United Nations Agenda 21 to redevelop free cities into sustainable – that is, corporatist - cities. Corporatist cities are not Constitutional – they are structured by corporate and government stakeholders, much like Chinese cities or Soviet style central planning. In a centrally planned city, there can be no right to life, liberty and property, there is no balance of power, no competition, and no economic independence. There is only corporatist monopoly. But green spokespeople will disguise the corporatist agenda with green propaganda. They will distract you by making you think that sustainable redevelopment is necessary to save the planet, and that it is necessary that you participate in it, when in fact it is necessary only to concentrate power and wealth into the hands of the few. It’s not about the planet, it’s about power.
Among the many illusions created by the green movement are: 1) the Earth is running out of landfill space, 2) landfills are dangerous because of active decomposition of methane, 3) the trees of the world are becoming scarce, 4) recycling saves money, energy, and reduces pollution, and 5) Carbon emissions are at an all time high and are causing catastrophic global climate change. In reality, there is an abundance of landfill space. In fact, one landfill, 35 miles on each side, could handle all American waste for 1000 years. Landfills are not dangerous, and the methane they produce is used to generate power for surrounding towns. Trees used for paper product are grown on tree farms and are therefore replaceable. As such there is no damage to naturally growing trees. In fact, there are three times as many trees on the earth than there were in the 1920s. Recycling actually wastes money and energy while increasing pollution due to the industrial recycling process. And finally, Carbon emissions, in addition to not having risen with global economic growth in the past three years, cannot be convincingly connected to climate change, nor can green science prove that there is any real catastrophic climate activity. In all likelihood, the climate seems to be changing in accordance with the natural flows of change that have been occurring for thousands of years, with or without humans.
Because of the truth, green activists constantly find new ways to disarm and distract the public. To drum up fear and panic, they will frequently refer to the community and to future generations whose existence hangs in the balance. Therefore, they claim, the “rights” of the community and future generations must be protected by saving the earth. Their definition of “rights” runs contrary to the definition by which our Constitution is governed. Human and civil rights guaranteed by the Constitution are individual rights, they are not the rights of the community. The rights of the individual – such as rights to privacy – are clearly defined and are the foundation of the possibility of a functional community. The green activists start with the idea of a community and define its best interests to serve their purpose. They do not consider the individual because that would interfere with their agenda. It is in their best interest that you give up your individual rights - indeed, your individuality itself - for the sake of the community and for that community’s best interests. A community with no individuals is no community at all. It is a nameless, mechanical population that serves the corporatist agenda. In such a “community”, green leaders can make decisions that disregard the individual, reduce the individual to anonymity, and replace individual freedom by socially engineering all human activity. The concept of the rights of the community is so ambiguous that it can be used to justify almost any dubious claim about the community’s “best interest”.
If the community’s “best interest” is determined to be the salvation of the planet, and if the key to salvation lies in the minds of green-experts who have determined that individuals functioning freely in an independent, evolving, decentralized economy inherently results in global catastrophe, then it follows that individuals cannot be left to their own devices, and must be monitored and instructed in everything they do. Your daily behavior patterns are already constantly being gathered in databases as you frequent the internet, handing over your privacy to anonymous corporate, marketing, and government entities. This massive data collection will be enhanced in various ways, such as smart-meters being put into your home, more traffic surveillance cameras, and law enforcement specifically trained to enforce green policies.
Being green means cooperating blindly with the agenda whose purpose it is to inventory and control all resources and all human populations by moving people into centrally planned cities, eliminating suburbs, taking away property rights, and making you serve the corporate government for which you helped to pay and which you helped to create without even knowing it.
To be sure, the issue is not about true versus false greening, it’s about letting go of the belief that greening - the fabric of popular consciousness - exists at all.
