UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention and its similar Man and the Biosphere Program are centerpieces of the UN’s anti-human "Wilding" effort. Over 40 Biosphere Reserves and 20 World Heritage Sites have been declared in the U.S., covering more than 50 million acres. They include some of America’s most famous historical treasures and natural wonders. In addition to Yellowstone National Park, we’re supposed to consider ourselves honored to have other national parks, such as the Everglades, the Grand Canyon, and Yosemite all registered as World Heritage Sites. Not to mention Monticello and Independence Hall. Yes, Independence Hall! — a symbol of our national independence — is being converted into a token of globalist interdependence under the UN.

As Environment magazine explained in 1992, ratification of the World Heritage Convention "constitutes a unique precedent," in that it "implies what might be called a voluntary limitation of sovereignty." Moreover, the magazine noted, it implies a recognition that "other countries have, through the convention, an obligation — and therefore a right — toward these sites." Yes, other countries, and the socialists running the UN, claim a "right" to these American (now "World Heritage") sites.

This doesn’t mean, as some opponents of the WHC have erroneously concluded, that UNESCO now "owns and controls" these sites. The danger is more subtle than that. Working in collaboration with "green" government officials and eco-extremist groups, the UNESCO folks are helping effect policies that are gradually transforming these sites in ways that are detrimental to U.S. interests, to the environment, and to the U.S. citizens most directly affected. Much of the area covered by these programs is situated in the western states, where the federal government already owns and/or controls a very large percentage of the land base and has tremendous impact on the jobs and livelihood of the people who live there. However, the rights of all Americans are threatened by these programs and policies.

As important as the World Heritage Sites and Wildlands Project are, they are not the only threats to property rights emanating from the United Nations. Some people, undoubtedly, would take issue with my statement above characterizing the folks running the UN as socialists. However, no one familiar with the sorry record of the world body should find any difficulty with that description. When it comes to the issue of property rights, the UN is certainly socialist.

This fact is made evident in one of the UN’s primary documents concerning real property, the report of its 1976 Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat I), held in Vancouver. In typical Marxist prose, it declares: "Land, because of its unique nature and the crucial role it plays in human settlements, cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market."

Eroding Liberty’s Foundation

A major problem with the dangers to property rights emanating from the United Nations is that the UN hand, if not entirely hidden, is not always evident. That is the main reason why the World Heritage/Man and the Biosphere programs have provoked such opposition, I believe; signs and plaques suddenly appeared at parks and monuments announcing that these are now UNESCO sites. If American farmers, ranchers, loggers, miners, hunters, fishermen, hikers, campers, recreationists, property owners, automobile owners, and energy users could see the hidden UN tags on all of the costly and onerous regulations and restrictions they must contend with, they would be astounded — and outraged.

Today we are facing a plethora of assaults with potentially great costs and devastating impacts. Ostensibly devised to deal with such global crises as "global warming," "deforestation," "endangered species," and "loss of biodiversity," UN treaties and agreements are forming the basis for policies and legislation that are ravaging our economy and assaulting our liberty. However, because these assaults are structured so as to be implemented piecemeal, their effects are only gradually felt, and the source of the offense only dimly perceived, if at all. The green subversives call this deceptive strategy their "soft law" approach.

Hilary French, a leading eco-strategist for the Worldwatch Institute, candidly explained this process in the Worldwatch study After the Earth Summit: The Future of Environmental Governance. Said French:

Paradoxically, one way to make environmental agreements more effective is in some cases to make them less enforceable — and therefore more palatable to the negotiators who may initially feel threatened by any loss of sovereignty. So-called "soft law" — declarations, resolutions, and action plans that nations do not need to formally ratify and are not legally binding — can help to create an international consensus, mobilize aid, and lay the groundwork for the negotiation of binding treaties later.

Yes, these instruments have teeth (or are rapidly developing them), and they are hungrily devouring our national sovereignty. President Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and others insist on using weasel-word definitions to conceal the fact that their environmental agenda represents a full-fledged attack on sovereignty. Hilary French is more forthright. "Nations," French admits, "are in effect ceding portions of their sovereignty to the international community, and beginning to create a new system of international environmental governance as a means of solving otherwise-unmanageable problems."

Other experts on both sides of the sovereignty debate agree with Ms. French. One who not only agrees with her on the fact that the transfer of sovereignty is taking place, but, like her, approves of and is assisting this transfer, is Louis Henkin, chief reporter for the Restatement of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States. In his influential Foreign Affairs and the Constitution (1996), Henkin approvingly compares the process underway to the unconstitutional delegation/usurpation process of the past several decades that has brought about the vast expansion of the federal government. "Early in the twentieth century," Henkin writes, "Congress concluded that it can exercise its powers effectively only through administrative agencies and U.S. constitutional jurisprudence accommodated to that ‘fourth branch’ of government. At the end of the twentieth century, the political branches have found that they can achieve effective governance only through international agencies. Is there any reason why the Constitution cannot accommodate to that development?"

Is there any reason why Heaven cannot accommodate Lucifer, or why liberty cannot accommodate tyranny? Mr. Henkin’s statement and question are astounding, and the implications they raise even more so. The expansion of the federal regulatory-police state has been a tragic and dangerous development, vitiating many of the most vital constitutional checks and balances. The "fourth branch" of the federal government — combining legislative, executive, and judicial powers — fits precisely what James Madison condemned as "the very definition of tyranny."

Like Louis Henkin, Karl Raustalia, writing in the Harvard Environmental Law Review, draws a parallel between the accretion of power in Washington and the international powergrab underway at the UN. "As international environmental law has expanded its substantive ambit in significant ways, it has concurrently expanded access and participation of private actors...," says Raustalia. "In so doing, the international community has traveled a path taken by American administrative law many years earlier."

Treaty Trap

The accumulation of power into the hands of world bodies, and especially into the hands of the UN, has been greatly abetted by vast new authority supposedly created through a profusion of international treaties and agreements. "In the first hundred years after the adoption of the Constitution, the United States ratified 277 treaties, and presidents made 265 executive agreements," writes Cornell University Professor of Government Jeremy Rabkin in his timely study, Why Sovereignty Matters (1998). "Over the next century, the number of treaties had tripled, while the number of executive agreements multiplied more than twenty-five-fold. Between 1980 and 1992, another 4,510 executive agreements were concluded and only 218 further treaties." Since 1992 a flood of additional treaties and agreements have ensued, many of them dealing with environmental matters.

This is frightening enough, but there are still worse things happening in the steadily evolving realm of what is called today "customary international law." Many judges, academics, and political figures are claiming that this new form of law trumps all constitutional limitations on government power.

"Once ‘customary international law’ is seen as binding international law, a series of consequences plausibly follows," warns Professor Rabkin. "Of course, that law will take precedence over contrary enactments of American state or local governments, just as any federal law would. Distinguished commentators also argue that since customary law has the same status as a treaty, it must take precedence over earlier federal statutes — just as a later treaty would supersede an earlier statute."

Well, say these "experts," we are merely following the American Founding Fathers, who, after all, expressed their reverence for the "law of nations." It says so right there in the Constitution. As usual, we’re dealing with semantic subterfuge here.

Professor Rabkin exposes the deception. He writes: "First, where the traditional view saw the law of nations as resting on long-established custom (related, in turn, to basic laws of nature), the modern view sees international law as highly malleable, so that new doctrines of ‘law’ can be coaxed into existence in a very brief time. Second, the traditional law of nations was built on respect for sovereignty."

Today’s revolutionary jurists even propose what they call "instant customary international law." Instant custom? Yes, it’s an oxymoron, but that doesn’t faze these activists; it is too convenient and useful a tool and it is being accepted by courts and law schools that share their radical legal perspectives. They can conjure "customary international law" out of thin air, rather than wait on the slower processes involved in procuring treaties, agreements, and legislation.

How does this work? Rabkin explains: "Words spoken by diplomats at conferences are given much weight, and then the reconfiguring of those words by commentators is supposed to give more weight, and the repetition of the words by yet other commentators is thought to lend still more weight to contentions about the law. Soon there is a towering edifice of words, which is then treated as a secure marker of ‘customary international law.’"

Each new international treaty and agreement offers these "experts" new opportunities for conjuring still more fraudulent "law." One of the eco-trophies to come out of the UN’s Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Agenda 21, offers a veritable gold mine to these global social engineers. Agenda 21 is a massive blueprint for regimenting all life on Planet Earth — in the name of protecting the environment. Agenda 21: The Earth Summit Strategy to Save the Planet (EarthPress, 1993), one of the UN-approved editions of the program, makes this bold assertion:

Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced — a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level.

With breathtaking hubris, the document continues:

There are specific actions which are intended to be undertaken by multinational corporations and entrepreneurs, by financial institutions and individual investors, by high-tech companies and indigenous people, by workers and labor unions, by farmers and consumers, by students and schools, by governments and legislators, by scientists, by women, by children — in short, by every person on Earth.

Still another global UN attack on property rights and freedom is the so-called "Global Warming Treaty." One of the newest proposals for implementing this monstrosity can be found in an article in the March/April 1998 issue of Foreign Affairs by Professor Richard N. Cooper of Harvard University. Entitled "Toward a Real Global Warming Treaty," it argues that "a successful attack on global warming will only happen through mutually agreed-upon actions, such as a nationally collected tax on greenhouse gas emissions."

Dr. Cooper notes that "the pervasive sources of greenhouse gas emissions — notably burning fossil fuels, cultivating wetlands, and raising cattle — imply that restraint will involve changes in behavior by hundreds of millions if not billions of people." And taxation is the best way to accomplish this, he states.

He advocates starting with a tax on fossil fuels, but then says: "In principle, it would be possible to extend the idea of a common carbon tax to methane as well, covering wetland rice production, decomposable refuse, gas pipeline losses, and cattle raising. That more difficult step could be phased in later."

"The revenue these taxes would raise is substantial," says Cooper. How substantial? "An OECD [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development] model suggests," he says, "that a worldwide tax on 5.2 billion tons of global carbon emissions in 2020 would yield $750 billion in annual revenue." That’s not exactly chump change. How does he expect to get such a tax passed? Cooper suggests that "passage of such a tax might be politically easier if coupled with the reduction of other taxes."

Who would be the recipient of this new revenue windfall? Cooper suggests that it should go to "the international community," as represented by, naturally, the United Nations.

"Caring for refugees and peacekeeping are only the most apparent" of the UN’s "collective obligations" that are growing increasingly expensive, Cooper declares. Then, he points out, there are our financial obligations to the developing countries to assist them in reducing emissions under the Rio convention.