Lincoln County Coalition provides glimpse into a dark future

To the Editor:

The Lincoln County Coalition, through consensus of their diverse group, announced an unprecedented collaborative effort of many individuals, that will reduce conflict and legal challenges for forest harvesting projects in Lincoln County.

The 10-member Lincoln County Coalition unveiled this past week a draft bill to be submitted to Congress. This bill would provide for timber thinning projects, job creation, recreational access and wilderness.

This "coalition" billed as "diverse" and that had "announced a consensus, of the willing, in Lincoln County that will reduce conflict and legal challenges for forest harvesting projects in Lincoln County" tells it all by what it does not say. It is a glimpse into a dark future, the future only imagined in science fiction novels like Fahrenheit 451 and the Orwellian 1984.

Just as Orwell observed in 1984 and Animal Farm, and Carroll noted in Alice in Wonderland "words mean no more and no less than I mean them to." To use the word "diverse" about this "coalition" is like calling one of those of Mafia get-togethers a "cross-section of America."

Where are the people directly affected by the "coalition"? Where are the ranchers and farmers and hunters and the rural residents and rural town governments? Who spoke for the private landowner? Who looked out for rural businesses and future road expansions and improvements? Who represented all the rural employment needs? Who represented government costs and private property rights?

Bureaucrats, consultants, and the powerful non-government organizations with all their radical agendas that run the show, that's who. The Founding Fathers knew the danger of giving power to elite rulers, but decades of affluence and belief in a growing hodgepodge of nonsense that masks the hidden agendas of those who would rule us has led us to think the elites "know best."

Look at that "contact list" and think about the future of hunting and ranching and fishing and farming and pet ownership in America. Soon enough it will be the USDA and HSUS and PETA setting the "New Animal Guardianship Rules." Then there will be Greenpeace and the Commerce Department setting the "New Fish Sanctuary and Boatpath Rules."

Then based on "precedents" there will be the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Defenders of Wildlife and World Wildlife Fund setting the "New Native Ecosystem Preservation Rules" and the U.S. Forest Service and the Wilderness Society and Sierra Club setting the "New Urban Corridor Connection Rules." All the while the papers and press releases will chirp about the "Diverse Coalition" and how it "will reduce conflict and legal challenges".

Who has paid the thousands of dollars for the media blitzkrieg? The Yaak Valley Forest Council.

George Orwell and Ray Bradbury and Lewis Carroll were all correct and insightful in what they wrote. Only thing is we thought they were describing a future totalitarian society of Russia under communism or England during the Victorian period. Who'd a "thunk" they were talking about the U.S.A. in 2007?

Jim Beers

Centreville, Va.