Depopulating the Gulf Coast

Rebuild or Retreat: U.S. Debates Evacuation of Gulf Coastline

· Another Katrina cannot be prevented, plan concludes
· Cash earmarked to buy up 17,000 Mississippi houses

Originally Published on October 11, 2007

The Guardian - The United States is working on a multi-billion-dollar plan to depopulate vast swaths of coastline along the Gulf of Mexico in a move which it is hoped would help re-establish a natural barrier against the catastrophic flooding caused by the likes of Hurricane Katrina.

In the first sign that the federal government is favouring a retreat from the coast rather than rebuilding, the Army Corps of Engineers is to present to Congress a radical plan which includes rebuilding the wetlands that have been disappearing at an ever-accelerating rate in recent years.

The Corps, the engineers responsible for protecting the coastline, has been working on the plan since Katrina struck in August 2005. President George Bush promised after the floods to rebuild New Orleans and other Gulf communities.

But federal agencies and environmentalists have concluded that climate change has increased the threat of further devastation and continued rebuilding makes no sense. To be included in the overall plan is $40bn (£20bn) to be spent on the Mississippi coast. Part of this would be for a voluntary buyout of 17,000 houses in Mississippi, particularly in Bay St Louis, east of New Orleans. The corps is likely to extend the plan to New Orleans and Louisiana.

Susan Rees, project director, said:

"The whole concept of trying to remove people and properties from the coast is very, very challenging. The desire to live by the water is strong."

The plan has had a mixed reception. While some have welcomed the chance to leave the area rather than face further storms, others have rebuilt their homes and are reluctant to leave. Local politicians said the plan would destroy communities because they could not be sustained if many people opted to take the money. Fishing and tourist villages on the coast were already fragile after Katrina, with many families opting against return.

Among those opposed to the buyouts is Gene Taylor, a Democratic congressman:

"It ain't going to happen. There's no money for it, there's no will for it and there's no public support for it."

He is rebuilding his home in Bay St Louis, which could lose about 60% of its land to buyouts.

William Walker, director of Mississippi's marine resources department, said some communities had opted to move out en masse.

"These areas probably should not have been developed in the first place. It's not practical to ask the federal government to keep rebuilding and repairing after repetitive floods," he said.

Oliver Houck, a professor at Tulane University who has studied coastal controls, called buyouts a reasonable option.

"Any programme that attempts to subsidise their continuing to stay in place is simply subsidising another wipeout," he said.

Part of the $40bn would also be spent on rebuilding the fast-disappearing wetlands, which provide a natural barrier against flooding. The loss of wetlands is partly man-made: silt from the Mississippi that built them up has been prevented from reaching the Gulf by flood-protection levees constructed by the army corps.

Orrin Pilkey, director of a shoreline programme at Duke University, said the coast was eroding, sea levels rising and hurricanes may be becoming more forceful.

"A retreat is our only solution," he said.

Taking Liberty: How Private Property in America Is Being Abolished (Excerpt)

Fall 2005 [(view as html) (view as PDF) (play audio)]

Michael S. Coffman, Ph.D. - ...The poster (below) showed the lower 48 states overlaid with hundreds of red islands representing wilderness areas interconnected by thousands of red ribbons called corridors, all surrounded by yellow buffer zones. Small green patches were "human occupation zones." The agenda was so outrageous it would have been discounted, except that Hutchinson had the proof in her hands. The date was September 29,1994, and the agenda was called the Wildlands Project.

Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell (D-ME), along with several other senators, withdrew the scheduled cloture vote on the treaty and a vote was never taken. That should have been the end of it, but in reality it was only the beginning.



Follow the Money

While environmental concerns may be legitimate in some cases, many of the accusations made by environmental nongovernment organizations (NGOs) today are nothing more than perceptions created to indoctrinate the public and cause unfounded fear that generates income for the NGO. Environmental fear has become a multibillion-dollar business that preys on unknowing urbanites.

Seventy-seven percent of all Americans live in about three percent of America's land area classed as urban by the U.S. Bureau of Census. The number only climbs to a little over six percent when all developed areas are included. Activist NGOs have found it easy to leverage legitimate environmental concerns into profitable campaigns that have marginal or negative environmental benefits.

Why Property Rights Matter

Because urbanites out-vote rural residents by a 3-to-1 margin, they can pass laws that harm rural residents in the belief we need more government land and open space. Yet, most environmental laws strip rural citizens of their ability to use proven management practices to provide goods and services to urbanites. As a result, groceries, appliances, lumber and other commodities cost more.

The higher cost of goods and services is not the most dangerous threat to America. Our founding fathers recognized the critical nature of private property rights as they were firsthand witnesses to the abuse of power that occurs when government controls private property. James Madison and others even claimed that the entire purpose of government is to protect private property. They knew that private property is the foundation to liberty and wealth creation.

Hernando de Soto, a Peruvian citizen, completed a massive study for the World Bank in the early 2000s, the findings of which were published in "The Mystery of Capital. " De Soto's team studied many nations for several years to determine why capitalism triumphs in the West and fails in Third World nations. He found that strong property rights are the basis of liberty and wealth creation— just as was claimed by America's founding fathers.

For instance, equity loans on personal homes provide the funding for 70 percent of all small business starts in the United States. Small businesses are the economic backbone of America. This would not be possible without strong property rights. In turn, unencumbered legal property rights allow banks the security needed to make the loan in a few days or weeks.

This is not the case in Third World nations. Because of arbitrary regulations and corresponding corruption, de Soto found that it takes 10 to 20 years and many payoffs to register property ownership in these countries. Hence, impoverished citizens do not register their ownership so their property rights are not legally established. DeSoto calls this real but unregistered property "dead capital"because its equity is not available for investment. No equity means no capital to build wealth. Since citizens cannot build wealth, neither can the nation, condemned to perpetual poverty no matter how many socialist income-redistribution plans are imposed by the United Nations.

Manipulating Property Value

Loss of liberty to faceless bureaucrats who use a corrupt and arbitrary regulatory system to their own advantage is happening to more and more rural citizens in the United States.

Rural citizens are not alone. A growing number of communities are faced with arbitrary regulations under the umbrella of "smart growth"and "urban-growth boundaries. Depending on who draws the arbitrary boundary, low-value agricultural land can instantly be worth millions. Immediately across the urban-growth boundary, these arbitrary regulations prohibit development and the value of the land remains low. Within 100 yards, one landowner reaps millions and another gets nothing. Arbitrary regulation— no matter how noble the intent—always breeds corruption.

Studies conducted by the Harvard Institute of Economic Research clearly show this enormous economic impact. Quarter-acre lots in cities with minimum smart-growth regulations average $10,000 to $40,000 per lot, while similar lots in cities imposing heavy smart-growth regulations average $200,000 to $600,000 per lot. There is a strong correlation between the time it takes to get a permit and the cost of the land, just as de Soto found in Third World nations.

Harvard economists Edward L. Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko, in their paper "The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability" (March 2002), emphasized that the entire increase was due to smart-growth regulations. These "feel-good"regulations represent a huge drag on future urban economy.

Little did I know when I prepared the map Sen. Hutchinson used on the Senate floor, that environmental operatives were already in key positions of our government, ready to implement the anti-property rights directives of the United Nations Treaty on Biodiversity. Although the treaty did not pass the Senate, they were able to shift gears, developing the authority necessary to implement the Wildlands agenda under an administrative cloak that didn't require congressional approval. It has been just over 10 years since they actively began transforming America into a Wildlands. What is most frightening is how much they have accomplished in that short period.

For anyone who doubts that environmentalists are serious about destroying private property in America, redistributing the wealth, and reducing the use of our natural resources, those doubts should be put to rest. They are more than halfway there.

The Wildlands Project

Under the Wildlands Project, the United States would be transformed from a land where people can live where they choose and travel freely, to a Wildlands-dominated landscape where people live in designated population centers with limited travel allowed through highly restricted corridors. The Wildlands Project is the master plan for both the United Nations' Agenda 21 and Biodiversity Treaty. In classic socialist utopian idealism, Agenda 21 defines how every human being must live in order to save mother earth.

The Wildlands Project represents a grandiose design to transform at least half the land area of the continental United States into an immense "eco-park"cleansed of modern industry and private property.

Wildlands Project coauthor Reed Noss explains their intent:

"The collective needs of nonhuman species must take precedence the needs and desires of humans. "

Federal Programs

While many key laws like the Endangered Species Act (ESA), Clean Water Act and dozens of others that would facilitate implementation of the Wildlands agenda were already in place, environmentalists needed to identify areas that had no protection in order to begin converting land to conform to their agenda. The Clinton administration undertook two major programs with no congressional oversight during the 1990s to identify and begin targeting these areas. They were the Gap Analysis Program (GAP) and the Roadless Area Rule.

The GAP process starts by analyzing existing protected government land, then overlays geographical data of vegetation habitat, animal distribution and property ownership. Land ownership is further divided into stewardship classes:

1. "fully protected" (such as wilderness areas);
2. "mostly protected" (national parks and many wildlife refuges);
3. "partially protected" (national landmarks and multiple use areas like U.S. Forest Service lands); and
4. "no known land protection" (usually private land).
   Classes 1 and 2 are often combined.

Although GAP sounds innocent, even noble, it is designed for the sole purpose of defining where gaps exist between already protected areas and those that require protection. These gaps are huge in Midwestern and Eastern states where very little government land exists. Federal, state or local governments already own over 40 percent of the land area in the United States; however, most of this federally owned land is in the West.

The only way to close these gaps is by taking private property through condemnation, conservation easements or uncompensated regulations. In most cases, access to this land represents a rural family's livelihood and GAP represents a direct threat to their way of life.

The second federal program implemented at the end of the Clinton administration is the U.S. Forest Service Roadless Area Conservation Rule (RA). RA established blanket, nationwide prohibitions generally limiting timber harvest, road construction and reconstruction within 58.5 million acres of inventoried roadless areas on national forests and grasslands. The lives of thousands of people depend on these historically available resources for their living in forestry, livestock production and mining for critically needed minerals. This was one of the first major efforts to convert already restricted government lands into Wildlands status, and accelerated the process of extinguishing the use of private lands within these areas.

On July 14,2003, the U.S. District Court for the District of Wyoming issued a permanent injunction and set aside the roadless rule. However, the U.S. Forest Service issued a new rule on May 5,2005, that allows the roadless rule to be imposed with the permission of the governor of each state.

Already existing laws such as the ESA have made it easier for environmentalists to push their Wildlands agenda. By threatening landowners with species listings or habitat designations, they can force private property owners into signing conservation easements, or into giving away a large portion of their property to the government or to a land trust as mitigation in order to use just a small portion of their land.

Taking Liberty in the Southeast

Except for parts of Florida and the southern Appalachians, the Southeast generally has very little federal, state and local government land that activists can use to lobby for creating Wildlands. So, to speed the process up and help identify private land for Wildlands protection, Region 4 of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the University of Florida's GeoPlan Center conducted a GAP analysis called the Southeastern Ecological Framework Project in 1999-2000.



The project prioritized ecological areas in the Southeast that need protection. Because GAP gives such a high priority to ecosystems over people, more than 60 percent of what the state would have had to pay to buy the land outright. The landowners often sell the easement for quick cash, figuring the land will never have much future value. Or the landowners sells the easement because regulations have made it increasingly difficult to make a living on or to otherwise use the land.

Florida is cannibalizing its private land in the name of protecting nature. It is not the only state in the East that is doing so. Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Rhode Island and New York are also following closely in Florida's footsteps. These states are also identify greenway hubs and linkages for the Wildlands Project.

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