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Agenda 21 comes to Greenville, SC

By Henry Lamb
web posted May 9, 2011

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Greenville, South Carolina is a great city in a great state.  The
area across Caesar's Head Mountain to Brevard, North Carolina is one of
the most beautiful places on earth.  The people in South Carolina are
hard-working, down-to-earth folks who appreciate their freedom, and their
private property rights.

Few of the folks know that back during the 1970s, South Carolina was
one of a handful of states that yielded to the Progressive push to require
comprehensive land use planning.  Senators "Scoop" Jackson and Morris
Udall tried unsuccessfully to get Congress to adopt a National
Comprehensive Planning Act.  The same national initiative persuaded
Oregon, Florida, and South Carolina to adopt statewide legislation.

South Carolina's law requires counties to develop a comprehensive land
use plan, and to update it every ten years.

Even fewer folks know that this comprehensive planning initiative that
swept across the country during the 1970s was caused by the United
Nations, and promoted by an assortment of U.N.-accredited non-government
organizations.  The initiative culminated in the U.N. Conference on
Human Settlements held in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1976.

This conference produced a 65-page
report on land.   The preamble to this report declares that:

"Land…cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by
individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the
market. Private land ownership 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."

The United States officially agreed to, and accepted this U.N. Policy
document when William K. Reilly, future- EPA Administrator, and Carla A.
Hills, future- U.S. Trade Representative, signed the document.

This idea of government control of land use was dressed up with a new
name in Our Common
Future, the report of the 1987 World Commission on Environment
and Development.  The new name given to government control of land
use in this report is "Sustainable Development."

Sustainable development was further defined at the 1992 U.N. Conference
on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro with the adoption of
Agenda 21 by delegates from 179 nations who attended the conference.
George H.W. Bush signed the document.

When Greenville's comprehensive was updated in 1994, very few people
had even heard about Agenda 21, and had no awareness that eight of the
nine plan elements closely matched the eight program elements set forth in
Chapter 7 of Agenda 21.  This match was no accident.  The
Clinton administration created by Executive Order, the President's Council
on Sustainable Development expressly for the purpose of implementing
Agenda 21 throughout the federal, state, and local governments –
administratively.  Tons of money was appropriated and distributed in
the form of grants to local governments and non-government organizations,
to promote "visioning" processes that led to the development of
comprehensive land use plans.

In 2008, Greenville County once again set out to update its
comprehensive land use plan.  Both the process and product are well
documented on the County's website: "Imagine
Greenville County: Tomorrow's Vision Today."

Most communities that have developed similar comprehensive land use
plans in recent years make their plan legally binding.  It is the
mechanism through which sustainable development is enforced in many
communities.  The Greenville plan makes a point of assuring residents
that the plan is not legally-binding. It is offered as a guideline for
future land use, but it is not legally binding.

It doesn't have to be.  Greenville County has a legally-binding
Official Zoning Map, and has already adopted most of the available
regulatory codes offered by the International Codes Council.

The Comprehensive Plan is the public relations tool used to sell the
sustainable development idea to the community.   People are told
that the Comprehensive Plan was developed from the ground up through
citizen participation.  The fact is, according to their reports,
fewer than 350 people from a population of nearly 450,000 (.0008%)
participated in the process.

The fact is that much, if not most, of the plan can be directly
attributed to the recommendations in Chapter 7 of Agenda 21.  The
Chapter title is: "Promoting
sustainable human settlement development."

It is unlikely that many of the elected officials, or even those who
participated in the development of the Comprehensive Plan, were aware that
what they were led to consider was initiated by the United Nations.
It is certain, however, that the county's consultant, LandDesigIn, Inc.
knew about Agenda 21 and sustainable development.  On their website
they boast:

"LandDesign and Audubon Lifestyles are united for change – embracing
the International Sustainability Council's Principles for Sustainability
that promote sustainable solutions for life and business that are
reliable, practical, efficient and economically viable."

What's dangerous about sustainable development and Agenda 21 is not
that it comes from the U.N., but that it promotes government control over
the decisions of free individuals.  Government-planned communities
and government-planned economies were tried extensively by the Soviet
Union throughout most of the 20th Century.  The result was
catastrophic.  To promote the repetition of government-planned
communities and government-planned economies in the United States, and
expect a different result, is the classic definition of insanity.

Let the free market, powered by free people, decide where to build,
what to build, and how to build it.  Government's only legitimate job
is to see that it is built to adequate safety standards.

Henry Lamb is the author of
"The Rise of Global
Governance,"  Chairman of Sovereignty International , and
founder of the Environmental
Conservation Organization (ECO) and Freedom21, Inc.

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