Contrary to the claims being spread by “wise-use” corporate-front groups, the U.N.’s Global Biodiversity Assessment characterized as “simple and perhaps over-ambitious” the Project’s “controversial” 1992 proposal to “expand natural habitats and corridors to cover as much as 30% of the U.S. land area.”
Far from being the centerpiece of a U.N./environmentalist conspiracy to violate sovereign American property rights, as the “wise-use” groups assert, the Wildlands Project receives a mere two-sentence description on page 993 of this hefty academic survey of the causes of the accelerating worldwide decline in species diversity, and various proposals for slowing it. (See text extract below.) Because the Assessment is an expensive and hard-to-plod-through tome, it has been very difficult until now for most people to check up on the extremely distorted claims being made by these groups.
Find out about the conspiracy theory being manufactured and advanced by corporate-funded “grassroots” groups in “Astroturf organizing,” by Steve Rasmussen, Mountain Xpress, Nov. 13, 2002.
Excerpt from Global Biodiversity Asessment, V.H. Heywood, executive editor, published in 1995 by Cambridge University Press for the United Nations Environment Programme, pg. 993:
“13.4.2.2.3 Protection and management of fragments. The protection and management of natural habitat fragments requires a reduction in the deleterious effects of matrix-derived influences on remnants and an increase in the area and connectivity of habitat. Where fragmentation is ongoing, this can be achieved by ensuring that the remaining native vegetation is arranged optimally, as far as we can determine with current knowledge. This means that representative areas of all major ecosystems in a region need to be reserved, that blocks should be as large as possible, that buffer zones should be established around core areas, and that corridors should connect these areas. This basic design is central to the recently proposed Wildlands Project in the United States (Noss 1992), a controversial long-term strategy (100 or 200 years) to expand natural habitats and corridors to cover as much as 30% of the US land area. While the basic recipe appears simple and perhaps over-ambitious, the actual selection of core areas and of priority areas for reservation can be problematic, and must be linked to clear conservation objectives. A variety of reserve selection procedures is available (e.g. Usher 1986; Margules et al. 1991; Pressey et al. 1994; see also 13.2).”
View PDF file of page 993 of the Global Biodiversity Asessment.
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