From fires spewing toxic air to multitudes of wildlife on the brink, it’s easy to conclude the planet is in danger.
Many focus on climate change as the source of this eco plight. Canadian author Elizabeth Nickson, with over three decades’ writing experience including Life and Time magazines, emphatically does not.
The real villains plaguing the earth are dictators pushing destructive public policy, she said in a recent Federal Newswire interview, hence the title of her tome: “Eco-Fascists: How Radical Conservationists are Destroying Our Natural Heritage”, described as a must read for anyone worried about global warming and the environment.
For Nickson, her quest started with questions raised during her own ordeal, which began in 2005 fighting green regulations to subdivide 30 acres in Salt Spring Island, where she lives and built a carbon-neutral earth house. When the lengthy process cost her $150,000, she wondered how those with lesser means manage their turf battles.
Known for standout work at both Time and Life magazines, as well as "The Monkey Puzzle Tree", her novel on CIA mind control in Montreal, Nickson was well-equipped to explore an issue that to her cried out, road trip. In fact, highlights of her career include photo stories and interviews with famous figures, including Nelson Mandela, Margaret Thatcher and the Dalai Lama, and she achieved much as European bureau chief of Life in the late 80s, early 90s.
So, once her ordeal on the home front was over, it was time for that road trip and exploring some 20,000 miles of rural America to dig up what she considers the real story told by people most affected by public policies reshaping our forests. She is known for diverse interviews ranging from pop icons to prisoners, royalty to politicians, but believes these rural dwellers also have a powerful story to tell, one that could decide the fate of our wilderness.
Today, environmental issues have become a passion for Nickson, which isn’t surprising considering the pink rammed earth house she constructed. “Eco-Fascists” describes the detrimental effects of radical conservation efforts and bureaucrats not only on forests, landscapes, waterways and farmland, but also the local economies residents count on for their survival. The book documents the struggles of rural America against these conservation giants in a battle Nickson says has far-reaching consequences for us all. Nickson describes her journey in a Federal Newswire question-and-answer interview.
Q: What inspired you to write your book ‘Eco-Fascists’?
A: I had 30 acres on Salt Spring Island, and I wanted to subdivide it and in order to do that I had to comply with a lot of green regulations. That I thought was interesting enough to explore and I found that the regulation, which was onerous in the extreme and which cost me I think about $150,000 to comply with, was being instituted all over the world. And while I'm you know sort of a well-heeled, competent, educated, middle-class woman, this was being forced on people much less privileged than I am and destroying their way of life. So that's why I wrote the book.
Q: Your bio says that you drove 20,000 miles through rural America to see the problems rural dwellers face. What did you discover on this trip?
A: I discovered that what was facing me subdividing my property was facing everybody. It was facing ranchers, farmers, foresters, small-town mayors, county councilors, county lawyers and every conceivable form of rural business. And people were moving into their counties and shutting them down and destroying their economy in order to “save the environment.” And these were activists sent out of Washington, D.C., from two or three environmental organizations who were funded in the billions of dollars in order to do this. What they do, these organizations, is that they fund activist non-governmental associations who then fund individual activists in a tree of power and influence.
Q: In “Eco-Fascists” you discuss how radical conservationists are doing more harm than good to our natural heritage. What led you to these conclusions?
A: Well, the people that I interviewed showed me land that had been “conserved” as opposed to land that had been well managed by property owners, and the land that was conserved was going to invasive species—it was…dying. All the forests that were conserved in the Pacific Northwest after the spotted owl were left basically to rot, and foresters couldn't maintain those forests any longer so new little trees would grow very close together like carrots and they would be spindly and weak, and fire ladders of brush would crawl up the trees causing the whole forest to be a tinderbox and it would then explode in flame given a lightning strike or arson or whatever causes fires…So conserved forests were dying, and it was so bad that that there would be canopy fires. The Forest Service estimates that as many as 200 million acres of American forest every summer are at risk of exploding in a canopy fire, given sustainable forestry regulations creating tinderbox conditions, which means everything dies. It's not a controlled burn; it's not a normal burn...Now, there's no maintenance; they won't let ranchers raise their cattle and sheep in the forest… they would crop all the underbrush and now it just grows rampantly, and that's why you've got these fires.
Q: In your opinion, what efforts should be made instead to protect Mother Nature and the planet?
A: I think it has to be local control. You cannot execute a top down (approach) because every piece of land is different and needs different management. And the best way to manage the land is to have people owning it, and I don't mean people like Bill Gates. I mean individuals who care about that land and take care of it. For instance, our ravine and forest is under a perpetual covenant because it is the headwaters of a main salmon-bearing creek on the island so we make sure that the forest is well taken care of…And people who live in the country are ranchers and farmers and foresters. They’re true stewards of the land; they're the ones who know what the land needs—not bureaucrats in Washington or corporations who've bought the land as an investment. More often than not, those lands degrade. In Africa for instance there's been a lot of conservation done by the UN and what they've done is they've driven Africans off the lands into shanty towns on the edges of forests and they find that all those (“conserved”) lands have desert because the people on the land were maintaining the land.
Q: What is the government's role in all this?
A: Right now, they are profoundly destructive. It doesn't matter what country you look at. Everything that they do is wrong because they are heavily influenced by environmental activists who lobby ceaselessly because they have an enormous amount of money to do so and that money comes from the Rockefellers, the Fords, the Gates, The Nature Conservancy. These people are paid to take lands out of the hands of people who own them and assign them to bureaucrats who live 2,000 to 3,000 miles away. So right now, we're way overregulated; we're way over-controlled, and the people who are controlling us live thousands of miles away and don't give a damn about what's going on. They believe people have to be taken off the land, cattle have to be taken off the land, people have to stop cutting trees, people can't do any mining because of climate change. And so, they are following this grim false ideology that’s destroying everything.
Q: Can you tell us about the process of subdividing your forest property and Salt Spring Island and building a carbon neutral house? Why did you decide to do this? What did it teach you about environmental land use and development?
A: At the time, you know in 2006, I thought that climate change might be something that is dangerous, but I also liked the idea of building an energy-efficient house. I wanted also to build a healthy house because I had at the time, I had chronic fatigue and I wanted everything to be non-toxic. Also, it was an intelligent, intellectual exercise to see how hard this would be and what are the processes that are so different about it. And, in fact, many of the ideas in the environmental movement are really well-founded. It's just that they've been hijacked by a grim political movement that is just anti-people and anti-human... so I built my house. It doesn't matter what the temperature is outside, my house is always at a perfect temperature because it has this huge thermal mass. The walls are 2 feet thick, and all our glass windows are triple glazed and argon filled, and we run a geothermal plant to heat the house in the winters that makes our energy use quite cheap. It would be twice as much if I was using government energy, and what else? It's also very beautiful and it seems that if you are taking care of the land properly, your environment is very beautiful and we're very into beauty.
Q: What other issues have you written about over the years?
A: Well, I was at Time Magazine so I wrote about just about everything. That's how I was trained. So, I wrote a book about the CIA mind control program MK-Ultra in Montreal…. When I used to live in London and New York, I worked for magazines and newspapers in those cities, but I moved home in ‘98 because my mother was sick and ever since then I've kind of been writing about land use and the environmental movement. It's a huge subject. I used to be sort of more culture and that's fun to do that, but I enjoy this. I mean it is sort of a sacred task at the moment because it's so destructive of our well-being right now, and… up here in Canada there have been arrests because environmentalists set those fires in order to force climate change regulation and in order to frighten people.
Q: What is the main take away you would like readers to get from “Eco- Fascist”?
A: That's easy—that people are better at taking care of the land than organizations like government or foundations or land conservation outfits. They are the first and best stewards of the land.
