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  Ok, What Is U.N. Agenda 21 And Why Should I Care?

  Jul 22, 2022

  Note:  This Article is an abridged version of two chapters from Rosa Koire's book,  Behind the Green Mask: UN Agenda 21.   Ms. Koire learned of Agenda 21 and its impact on her community over a decade ago when she tried to resist the Gateway Redevelopment project of Santa Rosa, California.     More information about Ms. Koire can be found in our companion article Rosa Koire and Agenda 21.  Purchase her book Behind the Green Mask to learn more. 

  Have you wondered where these terms 'Sustainability' and 'Smart Growth' and 'High Density Mixed Use Development' came from? Doesn't it seem that about 10 years ago you'd never heard of them and now everything seems to include these buzz words? Is that just a coincidence? That every town and county and state and nation in the world would be changing their land use/planning codes and government policies to align themselves with . . . what?

  It's the United Nations Agenda 21. But what is it?

  Considering its policies are woven into all of the General (Comprehensive) Plans of the cities and counties in the United States, it's important for people to know where these policies are coming from. While some people support the United Nations for its peacemaking efforts, few know that it has very specific land use policies that it wants implemented in every city, county, state and nation. The specific plan is called United Nations Agenda 21 Sustainable Development. By now, most Americans have heard of sustainable development but are largely unaware of Agenda 21; the agenda for the twenty-first century.

  In a nutshell, the plan calls for governments to take control of all land use and not leave any of the decision making in the hands of private property owners. It is assumed that people are not good stewards of their land and the government will do a better job if it is in control. Individual rights in general are to give way to the needs of communities as determined by a globalist governing body. Moreover, people should be rounded up off of the land and packed into human settlements or islands of human habitation, as they are called in the UN Agenda 21 documents, close to employment centers and transportation. Another program, called the Wildlands Project, spells out how most of the land is to be set aside for non-humans. In anticipation of our objections to such plans, our civil rights will be dissolved.

  UN Agenda 21 cites the affluence of Americans as being a major problem which needs to be corrected. It calls for lowering the standard of living for Americans so that the people in poorer countries will have more; a redistribution of wealth. Although people around the world aspire to achieve the levels of prosperity we have in our country, and will risk their lives to get here, Americans are cast in a negative light and will be taken down to a lower condition. Only then will there be social justice which is a cornerstone of the UN Agenda 21 plan.

  UN Agenda 21 policies date back to the 1970's but it got its real start in 1992 at the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro when President Bush signed onto it along with the leaders of 178 other countries. Because it is a 'soft law' it did not have to be ratified by the Congress. The following year President Clinton began to implement it by creating the President's Council on Sustainable Development (PCSD). Made up of cabinet level government officials, captains of industry, and non-profit groups, one of the first tasks of the PCSD was to give a multi-million dollar grant to the American Planning Association to design a legislative guidebook to be used as a blueprint for every city, county, and state in the United States in order to implement UN Agenda 21.

  This document, called Growing Smart Legislative Guidebook: Model Statutes for Planning and the Management of Change, took seven years to complete, and a full nine years to arrive at the final version. The guidebook, and it's not just a guidebook but a blueprint, contains sample legislation, ordinances, rules, regulations and statutes to be incorporated into the General Plans of every single city and county in the United States. By 2002 every planning department and every local, state, and federal department that governs land use had a copy and was implementing the practices. Every university, every college, every junior college, private school and teaching institution in our nation was using Growing Smart in its curriculum. Sound familiar? Growing Smart is Smart Growth.

  A non-governmental organization called the International Council of Local Environmental Initiatives, ICLEI, is tasked with carrying out the goals of UN Agenda 21 locally. Over 600 cities and counties in the U.S. are members. The costs are paid by taxpayers.

  Ok, you say, interesting, but I don't see how that really affects me. Here are a few ways:

  No matter where you live, I'll bet that there have been hundreds of condos built or planned in the center of your town recently. Over the last twenty years there has been a 'planning revolution' across the US. It was the implementation of Growing Smart. Your commercial, industrial, and multi-residential land was rezoned to 'mixed use.' Nearly everything that got approvals for development was designed the same way: ground floor retail with two or three stories of residential above. Mixed use. Very hard to finance for construction, and very hard to manage since it has to have a high density of people in order to justify the retail. A lot of it is empty and most of the ground floor retail is empty too. High bankruptcy rate.  So what?

  Most of your towns provided funding and/or infrastructure development for these private projects. They used Redevelopment Agency funds. (Urban Renewal) Specifically, your property taxes. Notice how there's very little money in your General Funds now, and most of that is going to pay Police and Fire? Your street lights are off, your parks are shaggy, your roads are pot-holed, your county hospitals are closing. The money that should be used for these things is diverted into the Redevelopment Agency for 30 years. It's the only agency in government that can float a bond without a vote of the people. And they did that, and now you're paying off those bonds for the next 30 to 45 years with your property taxes. Did you know that?

  So, what does this have to do with Agenda 21?

  Redevelopment is a tool used to further the Agenda 21 vision of remaking America's cities. With redevelopment, cities have the right to take property by eminent domain—against the will of the property owner, and give it or sell it to a private developer. By declaring an area of town 'blighted' (and in some cities over 90% of the city area has been declared blighted) the property taxes in that area are diverted away from the General Fund. This constriction of available funds is impoverishing the cities, forcing them to offer less services, and reducing your standard of living. They'll be telling you that it's better, however, since they've put in nice street lights and colored paving downtown. The money gets redirected into the Redevelopment Agency and handed out to favored developers building low-income housing and mixed use. Smart Growth.

  Cities have had thousands of condos built in the redevelopment areas and are telling you that you are terrible for wanting your own yard, for wanting privacy, for not wanting to be dictated to by a Condo Homeowner's Association Board, for being anti-social, for not going along to get along, for not moving into a cramped over-priced apartment downtown where they can use your property taxes for paying off that huge bond debt. But it's not working, and you don't want to move in there. So they have to make you. Read on.

  Human habitation, as it is referred to now, is restricted to lands within the Urban Growth Boundaries of the city. Only certain building designs are permitted. Rural property is more restricted in what uses can be on it. Although counties say that they support agricultural uses, eating locally produced food, farmer's markets, etc, in fact there are so many regulations restricting water and land use that farmers are losing their lands altogether. County roads are not being paved. The push is for people to get off of the land, become more dependent, come into the cities. To get out of the suburbs and into the cities. Out of their private homes and into condos. Out of their private cars and onto their bikes.

  Bikes. What does that have to do with it?   It's not just about bike lanes; it's about remaking cities to the 'sustainable model.' High density urban development without parking for cars is the goal. They call them 'Transit Villages.' This means that whole towns need to be demolished and rebuilt in the image of sustainable development.

  What plan? We're losing our homes since this recession/depression began, and many of us could never afford those homes to begin with. We got cheap money, used whatever we had to squeak into those homes, and now some of us lost them. We were lured, indebted, and sunk. Cities cannot afford to extend services outside of their core areas. Slowly, people will not be able to afford single family homes. Will not be able to afford private cars. Will be more dependent. More restricted. More easily watched and monitored.

  This plan is a whole life plan. It involves the educational system, the energy market, the transportation system, the governmental system, the health care system, food production, and more. The plan is to restrict your choices, limit your funds, narrow your freedoms, and take away your voice. One of the ways is by using the Delphi Technique to 'manufacture consensus.' Another is to infiltrate community groups or actually start neighborhood associations with hand-picked 'leaders'. Another is to groom and train future candidates for local offices.

  Another is to sponsor non-governmental groups that go into schools and train children. Another is to offer federal and private grants and funding for local programs that further the agenda. Another is to educate a new generation of land use planners to require New Urbanism. Another is to convert factories to other uses, introduce energy measures that penalize manufacturing, and set energy consumption goals to pre-1985 levels. Another is to allow unregulated immigration in order to lower standards of living and drain local resources.

  Everything that has happened was meant to happen by your government.

  Let's Dig a Little Deeper

  The three cornerstones of UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development are Economy, Ecology, and Social Equity, sometimes called the Three E's.

  Economic collapse creates a chain of events, but on a micro level (county, city) there is a marked reduction in revenue for maintenance of services. Loss of services to outlying areas means, for example, roads not being maintained to rural and suburban areas. Roads not being maintained to those areas, schools not being supported in those areas, law enforcement, fire, social services not being supported in those areas means a gradual movement into the denser city centers. Add to that the increased cost of gasoline (manipulated), and the higher cost of energy (manipulated) to heat and cool statistically larger homes, and you have more pressure to leave rural and suburban areas.

  Reduction of energy usage is key. Smart Growth-New Urbanism in Redevelopment Areas is the supposed answer: smaller units, attached condos, little or no parking, few private cars. More eyes on the street. Redevelopment projects are one implementation arm of the UN plan, and include rezoning of huge sections of your cities to Smart Growth zones. This physical manifestation of UN Agenda 21 is social engineering paid for with your property tax dollars. These areas then have their property taxes diverted away from services and into the pockets of a few developers and bond brokers for decades. Result? Bankrupt cities and counties.

  In addition to these factors, ecologically motivated regulation makes rural/suburban development prohibitive. From stream/creek/ditch protection to watershed protection, to bayland/inland/rural corridor prohibitions, to increased species protection (lists are growing), the use of land is greatly limited. Water well monitoring and loss of water rights reduce the opportunity for living outside of cities. Wildlands programs that prohibit roads and trails into rural areas while supposedly protecting them with conservation easements increase the loss of our food source independence. The sale of development rights to Agricultural Land Trusts that restrict farmers and ranchers from using their lands and therefore make it impossible to farm for more than one more generation endanger our ability to feed ourselves.

  Add to this the pressure from ICLEI Climate Protection Campaigns to reduce our energy usage to pre-1985 levels, and increased regulations on industry and you have the perfect storm for loss of jobs and greater dependence on other countries for goods. The push for neighborhood gardens and urban gardens is a manipulation. You can't grow enough food to do more than provide a minor supplement to your purchased food, and most people are not farmers. Dedication, knowledge, inexpensive water, good quality soil not contaminated with lead (as is most urban soil), and sufficient land to provide economies of scale are required to provide food. Otherwise you're just playing.

  As the population becomes more and more urbanized and less able to provide food or necessary products, more people will be dependent on the government for housing, food, and other basic necessities. Government itself becomes dependent on grants and loans with requirements attached. In this way policy-makers are influenced and pressured by the corporatocracy. Public/private partnerships favor some businesses over others and completely unbalance the playing field. Independent businesses go bankrupt. Poverty works its way into the middle class.

  Social equity, another cornerstone of Agenda 21 comes in here. As a major leveler, the loss of money, land, food, and energy independence will bring the US into 'social equity' with the poorer countries. This is a goal of Agenda 21. In 1976 the UN Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat I) stated in its preamble that "private landownership is also a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice. . . Public control of land use is therefore indispensable."

  Think about the implications of that when we're discussing eminent domain, land use restrictions, and conservation easements. You might have thought that social equity would mean that the poor would be raised up. Nope. There are elements of the social equity concept that block development of 'dirty industry' or anything that would be 'bad for the community' in a low income area. Low income areas should not be viewed as a dumping ground for pollution. Yes, I agree. So do you, probably. But it's the Green Mask. Behind that is the removal of ALL industry from all areas. The only thing being built in low income areas is low income housing (with redevelopment funds.) Warehousing of the poor is the result. Health will suffer, presumably health care will suffer, and nutrition will suffer. Psychological problems, stress from living in tight Smart Growth areas with other underemployed people, and crime will result.

  Community Oriented Policing (under the Department of Justice) will encourage, if not require, people to watch their neighbors and report suspicious activity. More activity will be identified as 'crime'—such as obesity, smoking, drinking when you have a drinking problem, name calling, leaving lights on, neglect (in someone's perception) of children, elderly, and pets, driving when you could ride a bike, breaking a curfew, and failure to do mandatory volunteering. The 'community' will demand more law enforcement to restore order, and more rules and regulations will ensue. The lines between government and non-governmental groups will blur more and more as unelected local groups make policy decisions using The Delphi Technique to manufacture consensus.

  You can see that the groundwork for this has been laid and is being implemented throughout the nation. When you create deep dependence and then withdraw assistance the result is chaos and poverty.

  Propaganda infuses our culture with messages that there are just a few winners and many losers; that we are killing the earth and time is running out; that prosperity is an anachronism and detrimental to life; that individual freedom is selfish and injures those who are less free.

  These messages are crafted to shame and pressure you, and to create a sense of urgency that impairs your ability to reason clearly.

  Excerpted from "Behind the Green Mask" by Rosa Koire. 

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