Green Manifest Destiny and 'The Wind Dancers' {Land Grabs}

Green Manifest Destiny and 'The Wind Dancers'
Diane Alden
Nov. 5, 2001

Eleven years ago, when I was still living in Atlanta, I decided to write a novel. As a frustrated cowgirl living in a big city, I thought I would work out my yearning for cows and cowpokes and wide vistas by writing a book about the contemporary American West.

At that time I was contributing to the Sierra Club and dutifully feeling anguish for clubbed seal pups and believing the notion that wouldn't it be nice to have wolves roaming our parks and wilderness areas.

So it was I began to write "The Wind Dancers." My plan was to research my topic and find out what was going on out where the winds blow all the time. I wanted to search out that place where the skies go on forever and the colors in the deserts and mountains paint a picture of what is best about life in the big wide somewhere of America.

Thus, with focus and determination and not much money, I formulated the "plan." It included months of research in the library, contacting various groups and individuals, and traveling in the West, in the upper Midwest, to Indian reservations, to ranches and farms, cafes and small towns scattered like so many rolled bales of hay on the wide plains of Big Sky Country.

Over a period of years I spent time in Montana, Nevada, the Dakotas, Minnesota, Idaho and the Sierra Nevada. What I learned changed my mind about how I thought about America, about the land, about what we are as a people and our attitudes toward the land.

It most certainly changed my mind about the environmental movement and the government of the United States as they impact rural areas. In the process I also learned how much trouble our Constitution is in.

Frankly, if it weren't for my Western journey, I probably never would have started writing essays. If it weren't for the time I spent working and traveling the intermountain West, I probably would not be writing for NewsMax on all kinds of issues.

It was my time as an analyst for a Western-based policy think tank where I came to some unanticipated conclusions about where this nation was headed. About what is hiding under the color green for environmentalism. What I discovered turned me into a passionate self-described spokesperson for a way of life that is going by the boards.

I discovered on my pilgrimage-sojourn that rural America was under assault by the same groups I sent money to so regularly. It was being attacked by a coalition of my government, which I trusted to do the right thing, and the environmental movement.

That same government that I believed honestly tried to do justice for all people – even though it might take a while. I actually thought the government extended justice to those who did not have clout, or money, or the votes needed to have the ear of the powerful in Washington.

But reality happens. One begins to understand that the powers that be make decisions which impact the lives of real people – negatively. Dispossession and destruction are as much a part of the picture as are new values extolled as more important than what happens to people.

Thus, expendable and powerless were the loggers, the ranchers, the farmers, the miners, the inholders, the little guy on 20 acres as well as the big guy on 100,000 acres. These folks seem to be in the way of our new "manifest destiny."

They are located mainly in the intermountain West and Alaska. But there are lots of folks who live in the Darby in Ohio, or the forests of Maine, Alabama, Minnesota and Vermont, or on the rivers of New York and Tennessee. They are no better off than their Western cousins.

The good places of rural America, of Nevada, Idaho, Montana, the Dakotas, northern Minnesota, Utah, Wyoming, Washington and Oregon, California's Sierra Nevada, as well as all the rest of the Western states like New Mexico and Arizona, have scenery or something that the powerful and the elites want.

The inhabitants of these states, some who had been there for generations and built up the land, have learned the hard way about the pitiless and uncompromising nature of the collusion between the green machine and the federal government.

Within the space of 12 years, for instance, from the early '80s to 1992, most of the rural counties of Nevada were on the economic ropes. In my two years in Nevada, I traveled to places so remote that electricity and telephones are unknown. Some ranches were powered by their own generators.

In a short space of time many of the people who were inholders or public lands ranchers were run out of business. No matter that they tried to go along with every new policy, with every new rule and regulation. The point of it all wasn't cooperation. The collusion of the greens and federal bureaucracy was about destroying old values and independent ways of life so that the new order and the "big park" under elite and federal control could be accomplished.

Entire communities in Nevada have gone under. What the bogus spotted owl controversy accomplished in Oregon and Washington with the destruction of loggers and their communities began to happen to other rural types. The rancher, the farmer, the inholder, the loner, artists, and independent souls who just wanted to survive and live independently were being painted as mere despoilers of "public lands."

What I discovered was that good people who took care of the land in their charge were losing out to the new green religion, to the federal bureaucracy, foundations, big business and the big business that much of the environmental movement had become.

I discovered this without an ax of my own to grind. I am not a rancher, a farmer or a logger. I do love nature and the outdoors, it's just not a religion to me.

In my travels, what I found was that the environmental movement had been taken over by zealots. Like Islam it had a combination of true believers and monied interests that had one goal in mind: to spread its outlook regarding the land and to make that outlook the policy of the federal government.

I discovered that many people use the environment as the reason for taking control for purposes that often have nothing to do with the environment. They will use lies and manipulation, thinking nothing of destroying those who get in the way. The mighty and merciless green machine stole the heritage of thousands of the rural poor and in the process have not improved the environment. Meanwhile, they have done immense harm to the Constitution of the United States.

The green machine has successfully broken communities apart, and people have fled the rural for the urban. It has destroyed the heritage of the American right to own property without interference from an intimidating federal leviathan.

But the new green religion considers that it has the moral high ground. It certainly has had millions of dollars to spread that religion nationally and internationally. Much of that money comes from a combination of big business, stock market and real estate transactions, foundations and – worst of all – YOU, the taxpayer.

What has developed in rural America is a tragedy. Not only the environment has lost out but also the very thing that greens and the feds should be encouraging: the notion of community and living gently on the land.

These concepts have been hurt – perhaps fatally. Tragically, environmentalism, like Islam, became the zealots' tool for conquest. Tragically, its noble goals have been replaced by self-interest, money, power and control over others.

I call my novel "The Wind Dancers." It is almost finished. As events unfold, I am waiting to see whether or not I can give it a happy ending.

This article concludes on Thursday with "The Process of Elimination" and the words of one of the main characters of "The Wind Dancers" as he copes with a world he no longer understands.

Visit my website at www.aldenchronicles.com or contact me at alden@newsmax.com.

THIS Article at News Max / Comment Max

"The inhabitants of these states, some who had been there for generations and built up the land, have learned the hard way about the pitiless and uncompromising nature of the collusion between the green machine and the federal government."

There is only one constitutional method our federal government can secure ownership of land within the boundaries of a sovereign state:

Article I, Section 8, Clause 17,

"and to exercise like authority over all places purchased by the consent of the legislature of the state in which the same shall be, for the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dock-yards, and other needful buildings."

The inhabitants of the states in question, need to look at themselves and their ancestors to determine what laws and what votes of consent their past state legislatures enacted that allowed our federal government to purchase land within their state boundaries, in which, now our federal government, in collusion with the enviromental movement, is exerting exclusive jurisdiction, much to their chagrine.

Remember the old saying, "you made your bed, now sleep in it."

Why would a state "sell" their land to our federal government? What "bribes" were offered to unprincipled state legislators, that they were willing to "sell" their soul (state land) to the devil? (federal government)

I think the western states inhabitants have a lot of soul searching to do before they start the victimization game.

You gave away your land.

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