Preserving Farmland, or Taking it Over?

An essay about the real goals of modern-day environmentalists

The Chatham Courier newspaper, in Chatham, New York, recently carried the headline “Grant will help town continue to protect farmland”

The story said that the town of Chatham, along with the Columbia (County) Land Conservancy, submitted a proposal for which the New York State Department of Agriculture gave the town $25,000 as a Municipal Agricultural and Farmland Protection Plan Development grant.

Since 1992, Chatham has maintained a Farmland Protection Board, one of the prerequisites for obtaining the grant.

So let’s look at this whole issue, which has been rearing its head all over rural America. Because there is a hidden agenda at work here that most people do not recognize.

First, Chatham is three hours north of New York City, and today is a prime place for the purchase of country estates by upper-income, rich, and very rich - and overwhelmingly liberal - people from the city and its environs. Their predecessors have been maintaining elegant homes and estates along the Hudson River for centuries. Chatham itself has been unglamorous, but an important junction for five separate railroads, a farm town and a small manufacturing center. It was a Republican bedrock.

But now, after two decades of a surging influx of transplant New Yorkers taking up permanent residence for a quieter rural life not far from the city; for second-home and retirement-home owners, and for other upper-income people  wanting the country life; and for regular people who want to live away from the city, Chatham has become very liberal just like the people who are coming in.

Chatham is in a beautiful area of rolling hills, dairy farms, horse farms, Hudson River views, mountain vistas and quaint landscapes. The antique homes and mansions of the region are being snapped up by wealthy urbanites for record sums, while other brand-new country estates are being built all the time.

Meanwhile, Chatham’s local economic fortunes have suffered. While the new transplant economy is sustaining some growth, much of the old local industry and agriculture is gone. The trains do not stop in Chatham any more whereas they once employed many people in the town. The region's population is thus declining as people move away.

For years now, many of the new people, including environmentalists, who have been moving into Chatham have been trying to preserve its “open space”, once known as farmland. Several years ago the town board instituted, and then extended, a moratorium on developments on open acreage, and its town board now has received this Agriculture Department grant to promote the preservation of farm land. This all sounds very good on the surface, and it is happening all over rural America, particularly in areas near major cities where second-home development is more prevalent.

But let’s go back a few steps and look at the issues.

First, what is the best way to preserve open farmland in the first place? And who is spearheading the move to preserve farmland anyway?

The answer to the first part is simple. The best way to preserve open space and farmland is to allow farmers to stay in business in the first place.

Then the question becomes: Why is agriculture suffering? Why are farms going out of business?

The answer seems like an easy one: Obviously farming has changed since the days when millions of small family farms dotted the land. The economics have changed, and more and more small farms have been consolidated by conglomerates and corporations.

Farming has become more efficient as it has expanded in scale. This conglomeration is a natural force that coincides with the conglomeration of mom-and-pop grocery stores into supermarket chains, and local hardware stores into Home Depot.

And while there are many pressures at work pushing farmers out, there is a significant part of those forces that are man-made and that easily could be ameliorated.

But a closer look at these man-made forces shows that they are being foisted on farmers by the very same liberals who now are moving to places like Chatham and are trying to “protect farmland”.

Here is how it works:

Farming is a hard business. There are many natural and man-made forces working against the farmer. You can't do much about the natural forces like the weather and crop prices, which in some cases be adjusted by government policies.

So it is the man-made forces that are really tightening the noose, leading farmers to sell out to real estate development; to go out of business; or to sell to agribusiness, which happens less in a place like Chatham which doesn’t have much large-scale farming.

First and foremost of the man-made forces is taxation. Farming is a business, and taxes are killing farmers everywhere, taxes on every single service and product that farmers use (8.25% statewide sales tax in New York State!), taxes on farmers’ incomes, taxes on land, government fees for endless permits and licenses and enviro requirements, taxes that must be paid to the government on behalf of farm employees etc.

And who is relentlessly imposing taxes upon taxes upon taxes?

Liberals, that’s who, the same people who now are moving into places like Chatham and are seeking to “protect” farmland.

Farms are small businesses, yet in nearby Massachusetts, the 85% Democrat legislature killed all 14 pro-small-business bills in 2006 alone. Now in Massachusetts, there is a big debate about how to save the remaining farms as the Democrats in power put them out of business in a hundred different ways.

Meanwhile, the Columbia Land Conservancy in Chatham, a liberal/environmentalist group that is working on farmland protection, is seeking to absorb as much land as it can into its trust. Much of this land will be kept wild, depending on the wishes of the giver.

These conservancy groups are part of a bigger political movement all over rural America that is seeking to lock up land and withdraw it from productive use like farming, logging, mining or housing development. These groups get land in several ways. Sometimes rich landowners from the cities give their land to these conservancy trusts so that the land will remain “forever wild”. Other times, local people give it or put it under protection for financial reasons. In other instances, farmers give their land or land rights to these conservancy groups in exchange for farmland preservation protection and tax benefits.

Only problem is, allies of these conservancy groups in the government and in the enviro movement are making farming extremely difficult in the first place through taxation, enviro regulations, red tape etc., so that, in desperation, the farmer then gives his land rights or his land itself to the conservancy group!

Gee, that’s a convenient circle of cause and effect…

This is just a clever way for these socialist/enviro/conservancy groups to drive people off the land in rural America, and to take over that land while acting like they "care". Meanwhile, ecologists use all sorts of other tactics to stall or halt every type of rural/small-town economic development, making life even harder than it already is for the folks who have lived there for generations, while the newer people, often with economic connections in the cities, survive just fine.

Come up to New England and you will see economic development questioned, stalled, thwarted, delayed, postponed, nitpicked, made more expensive and killed by environmentalists in every town, meeting by meeting.

So as these conservancy groups increase their power through monetary contributions from rich liberals from the cities and suburbs, and through land contributions from the various sources, they are increasingly pulling open land off the market and hurting small towns’ economies and development prospects. The idea that a bunch of anti-business leftists/environmentalists are holding Chatham to a development moratorium at the same time they are taking more and more land out of the private domain means that they are double-hurting the town.

This is happening all over rural/small-town America. And what it really means is that these urban/academic socialist/environmentalists are seeking to increasingly control the lives and economies of rural and small-town America for their own interests. And their interests never are farming or manufacturing or logging or mining, because these people are lazy bureaucrats, while their rich patrons work in offices in the cities, accumulating money. They are interested in turning rural America back to a wild state wherever possible, under the guise of helping preserve the family farm and “open space”.

Meanwhile the conservancy’s environmentalist friends are installing themselves on planning boards in towns like Chatham, as they are doing all over the nation. They then  make rules about every possible use of land -- that you cannot build housing on open space, that you cannot fill in a wetland, that this land is “wild”, that you cannot build a shopping center or something else that is deemed politically incorrect, that you need endless state permits etc. In other words, these people really are working toward one goal… slowly squeezing the private-property rights of rural/small-town America until they cease to exist. In other words, government socialism.

And they are being bankrolled by their rich friends from places like New York City who have plenty of money to own property themselves while their policies are hurting small towns all across rural America and driving farmers out of business.

What else is having a devastating effect on farmers across America?

You guessed it… massive sets of environmental rules that burden farmers with huge costs and endless paperwork for everything from pesticide application to wetland preservation. Farmers have lived for millennia without all these rules, yet today thousands of small farmers are being driven out of business ever year by endless sets of eco-regs imposed by enviro groups, at the same time that other environmentalists on the local planning boards are claiming to want to preserve the family farm.

Yeah, right.

This is all a very carefully crafted plan to take over land in rural America.

What else is driving farmers off the land?

How about the rise in fuel costs? Farmers are being hammered by rising energy costs. Yet who is blocking the production of oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, offshore oil production all along America’s coasts, nuclear power plant construction, refinery construction and other forms of energy generation that would increase supply and bring down prices?

You guessed it, the same people whose friends run the Columbia Land Conservancy and the town planning board, along with their wealthy allies in the New York-based and San Francisco-based enviro movement.

The goal is to dominate rural America and to reduce the people there to servants for the rich urban socialists who are taking over increasing amounts of land all over America, much of it being vacated by farmers, ranchers and loggers who no longer can afford to work it.

One final observation: Where does a large majority of the funding come from for the enviro movement?

Answer: It comes from the places where wealth is concentrated, from upper-income and rich people who live in cities and in suburbs, which are totally man-made environments that are far from nature.

And people live there for a reason. Because that's where the money is...

Environmental Impact Statements

Above is a picture of an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). Most people have heard about them, but never have seen one. It is quite a document, and it is not even the whole document. This part only goes up to the letter R. There is more, which was not available to Nikitas3.com

You may wonder what this thick document is for. A football stadium? A skyscraper? A shopping center?

No, this document had to be prepared for the installation of one single 115-foot tall cell-phone pole near Chatham, New York. The pole being about 5 feet in diameter at its base, the total amount of ground covered by the pole itself is 16 square feet. The total installation, including fencing and an equipment shed, is one-quarter acre. The pole will stick up about 40 feet above the surrounding trees.

I was not able to determine what was the exact cost of this EIS was, but it certainly must have been substantial, probably more than the cost of the pole itself. These EIS need to be technically precise and assembled by qualified engineers at high cost because any discrepancy would be nitpicked by the environmentalists. If you’ve never witnessed how these ecologists work, just go to a small-town local planning board or conservation commission to see how these people want to have power over everything that is built in the town, fact by fact, item by item.

The cell-phone service provided by this pole is essential to the town of Chatham. But these days, cell-phone towers are among the myriad man-made structures under assault by environmentalists. A series of cell-phone towers intended to make travel safer along the Albany-to-Montreal Northway (Interstate 87) was fought by enviros, despite the fact that drivers often found themselves stranded on remote stretches of the highway.

The giant EIS pictured above needed to be prepared for one reason only: Because the town board in Chatham, with liberal/enviro influence, deemed it necessary, completely arbitrarily, just by opinion. This is the same type of town board that is deciding that it needs to preserve farmland.

How about preserving cell phone communications for the people?

In the old days, a Republican town board would have said, "Go ahead, put up the tower. We need it."

This EIS is part of a bigger threat to rural and small-town America, and to all economic growth in this country and is one of the main reasons leading companies to shift jobs overseas. In this case, the EIS is completely unnecessary because this is just a pole. But the environmentalists who wish now to preserve farmland and restrict housing development are the same people whose enviro friends have foisted these EIS on small towns throughout America, putting huge financial stress on them in every way. Certainly the phone company will be paying for the EIS for this pole, but of course the costs will be passed on to customers in places like Chatham.

And what is the point? It is this. These environmentalists want to have power over all the business interests in America like cell-phone companies. And if the actions of environmentalists harm ordinary citizens in the process, they do not care. It is all about having power.

A closer look at this Environment Impact Statement shows how hard-hearted these environmentalists have become toward the hard-working people in small-town and rural America, whom they publicly embrace, but whom they privately disdain.

Here are just a very few excerpts from the EIS, a prime example of bureaucratic nonsense coming from the environmentalist left:

“Public need for the facility in light of the new State law banning the use of hand held cell phones while driving”… “Social benefits of the proposed (tower)”…”Terrestrial and aquatic ecology”… “Historic and archaeological resources”… “Community character (of Chatham)”… “Mitigation measures to minimize environmental impact” (including a set of tables showing how this pole is expected to affect home values in its ‘viewshed’ (the area where people can see it!))… Letters and affidavits about the proposed tower, PhotoShopped images of what various tower configurations would look like, power density studies (to study the electrical effect), special permits, geological studies of the site area (the one-quarter acre), impact on plants and animals (“Will proposed action threaten any threatened or endangered species?”), Statement of opinion from American Property Counselors on how the tower may affect home values, maps, charts, graphs, hundreds and hundreds of pages. And on and on.

It's just a pole, for pete's sake!

This is the type of paperwork outrage that is affecting every aspect of American life, including farmers. And this is propagated by the very same people who now wish to preserve farmland and whose Democrat party says it is the "party of working people".

What a crock!

These EIS are just the tip of the iceberg. Urban-based environmental activism is thwarting economic development all over rural America not only through EIS, but through outright obstruction. Here’s just one example out of thousands across the nation:

In 2006, St. Lawrence Cement, a Canadian company, abandoned a years-long effort to build a new, modern  cement production plant in Hudson, New York, about ten miles from Chatham. Environmentalists fought it tenaciously Many of the Stop the Plant signs were posted on the lawns of wealthy homes and businesses up to 30 miles away.  The plant would have created hundreds of jobs for the distressed people of the region, and would have cut pollution from older nearby cement plants that would have been closed.

Yet now environmentalists are seeking legal action against these older plants for excessive pollution!

Get the picture?

You cannot win with these people. They have a pathological obsession with harassing anyone and everyone in the name of power.

Conclusion

Consider in this brief 2,500-word document how much has been revealed:

*Very liberal and very rich people from New York City and its environs are moving to rural areas like Upstate New York and influencing the politics of small towns. You can replace “New York” with “San Francisco” and “Upstate New York” with other places.

*Their expensive home purchases are pushing up the cost of housing in these areas, making life more difficult for local people.

*Their political allies are using tactics from taxation to regulation to environmental red tape to local enviro restrictions to push up the cost of doing business in rural areas, and are driving people like farmers away from their livelihoods; or they are fighting to stop development outright.  

*Environmentalists are getting themselves elected and appointed to planning boards all over small-town America and are pushing those towns to develop laws that take private-property rights away from the people.

*Conservancy groups are taking control of more and more land, tract by tract, in order to build up a critical mass of land that, along with federal, state and local government land, eventually will make some rural areas uninhabitable because economic growth will be impossible to sustain on the fragmented land base that is left over. Once that happens, the conservancy groups can take increasing amounts of the leftover land.

The ultimate goal of these groups is to gut the economies of rural America, to drive people away, to take over land, and to install ultra-rich urban liberals on gentleman farms or manor farms that are surrounded by wilderness and serviced by poor rural people with no other options, much like the feudal systems of Europe.

Their ultimate goal is to reduce the independence of the conservative, hard-working people in rural/small-town America, and to take away their rights.