This Land Is Ours. Give It Back.

We'll fix your broken economy, which you broke-asses brokeity broke.

A decade ago cool cities were all the rage and tax money was pouring into cultural events and buildings to “attract” and densify people because “climate change”. Richard Florida, drawing upon a dubious book about cultural creatives had started his ferocious PR drive towards the mega-city as the apex of modernist civilization, a mixed-race cauldron of creativity and more, an economic engine that would power the world and leave the countryside to the bees and trees. Smart Growth was insinuated into every regulatory structure in order to, just like Captain Picard, make it so.

There were a few oppositional voices. There was me, a very minor chord along with Randal O’Toole, Wendell Cox, Joel Kotkin who detailed the risks. But mostly it was all rah rah rah. If we build it they will come. Masses of public money poured in to attract “them”. Country infrastructure was starved, and if broken, left to rust.

And did they come. To all the glamorous cities came the genius thieves of the modern age, oligarchs creating bolt holes for their money and mistresses, looters from Communist regimes, ditto for Africans stealing aid money. Every crime syndicate facing looser immigration rules started branch-plants, laundering money, and seducing the marginal into lives of misery. 

Increased levels of crime was one of our objections, but hell on wheels, the devastation in LA, San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Vancouver sure wasn’t foreseen.

Housing affordability would collapse said Wendell Cox, and was he right. In Vancouver, which has been taken over by Chinese mega-crime-syndicates, is the third most expensive city in the world. People whose families founded the city, can’t afford a studio apartment.

Politicians did nothing but take the laundered cash earned by ruining the lives of their citizens, and used it to build casinos so laundering drug money from all over North America would be easier. We Canadians are so helpful. And nice. To everyone, Even child traffickers. Yeah, come here, the scenery is grand and we can take care of all the people you broke with our “free” health care.

I objected to the potential noise being noise sensitive. Also viruses. That was a big one. Courtesy of my ex-husband’s trips to Asia, I picked up a couple viruses which my immune system couldn’t suppress, since I had no built immunity. The indiscriminate mixing, flooding of people overwhelming resources would create health catastrophes I thought, and lo and behold, it looks like WHO is planning for world-wide pandemics as far as the eye can see.

So, like all the other bad ideas of the age, cool cities failed leaving massive massive debt. Everyone with a scrap of money and initiative is plotting to leave the mega cities for the distinctly uncool country these days. Out here we are bracing ourselves for your bad ideas, but we are also ready. We know what you are like. You are as dumb as rocks, and you would destroy the country just like you ruined the cities. You have zero humility. You are a nightmare coming to join the other nightmare visited on our home places, the mass confiscation of our land. The land that feeds you idiots.

Come here and be greeted by truckers as far as the eye can see.

This weekend in Nebraska, one of my personal heroes is showing us a good future. Margaret Byfield, is the daughter of famous rancher Wayne Hage, who was persecuted by Harry Reid for a hundred years. Hage and his family kicked off the Sagebrush Rebellion the seeds of which you see growing like kudzu in national populism all over the world. When the dust settles, Margaret and her family will be seen as heroes of the Age.

Margaret runs workshops all over the U.S., training residents in how to keep your resources for your community, rather than have them assigned to plutocrats’ land-banks and government neglect. Margaret and her husband Dan, of American Stewards argue that people who live on the land are the best stewards and they train people how to overcome the regulatory catastrophe created by green bureaucrats.

You don’t have a lot of time so let me explain why it’s catastrophic. Clearing the country of people and resource-based businesses causes human and environmental devastation. Wherever land is “saved”, it runs not to pristine wilderness but this: choked by invasive weed, dirt starved of nutrient and water, scrub, tinder, fire. Wildlife flees to biodiverse areas which are invariably near humans. Biodiversity around humans skyrockets. This has been proven all over the world from Nevada to deepest Africa.

I’m going to leave you with this last thought. Our countryside needs people living in harmony with the earth. Townships and counties must steward their own lands, only they can see the future clearly. Ideas and laws must not come from the UN or DC or Brussels. Bureaucrats cannot understand local complexities. Our economy needs a real engine, real production, not financialization and securitization. People are already voting with their feet. The next decades will change everything and during those decades country people will save the world. For real this time.

More later.