"Enviros play a very dirty game. Theirs is the politics of personal destruction on a major scale. Do I think the members of most 'environmental' groups support this? No. I think that if the average citizens who belong to one of these organizations understood the group's true agenda, they would be outraged. But they haven't watched their leaders. Where you don't have checks and balances you have abuses. There is no question that the environmental movement has discredited itself and in so doing has done a grave disservice to the country."
--Jan Michael Jacobson, GladesGuru@aol.com

Jan Michael Jacobson, an environmentalist and Everglades expert who is part of a battle against the government's habitat policies in South Florida, claims the leadership of the environmental movement has betrayed both its core constituency and the U.S. Constitution.

In an exclusive interview with The Paragon Foundation, Jacobson, the founder and director of the Everglades Institute, described himself as "something of a constitutionalist."

He was asked his views on the environmentalist movement and its impact on America and the Constitution.

"The Greeks dreamed of creating a society their philosophers called 'the shining city on a hill,'" he explained. "Our Founding Fathers believed in ownership and protection of private property, and that sovereignty by grace of God resides in the individual. From those beliefs the framers of our Constitution created a system of government which far exceeded the Greek dream of 'the shining city on a hill.' Unfortunately, the environmental leaders are what could be described as hard-core socialist psychotics. They are the lunatic fringes of socialism, and they are killing the American dream.

"Enviros play a very dirty game. Theirs is the politics of personal destruction on a major scale. Do I think the members of most 'environmental' groups support this? No. I think that if the average citizens who belong to one of these organizations understood the group's true agenda, they would be outraged. But they haven't watched their leaders. Where you don't have checks and balances you have abuses. There is no question that the environmental movement has discredited itself and in so doing has done a grave disservice to the country."

Jacobson sees no contradiction between environmentalism and private-property rights.

"There should never have been an argument between the environmental movement and the private landowner," he said. "The Enviros' agenda is to destroy private land ownership. If America is to survive and prosper as intended by the Founding Fathers, her individual citizens must be allowed to own property.

"The media compete for readers or viewers and a crisis brings in readers and viewers. Therefore, they keep looking for a crisis. However, in the natural world, things proceed at the speed of mammalian evolution. There are no great instant crises in the biological world, but if the media require one and someone is willing to pay, there will be one."

The Everglades expert demonstrated his point with an example from the Antarctic.

"People used to bleep hideously that if you wipe out any single species, even impact the population, the whole world would be destroyed because the whole world is linked together.

"Do you know it's possible that the fluttering of a butterfly in Africa could start a wind circulation that could build into a hurricane? Well, it's possible. It's also possible pigs will fly and the price of bacon will be sky-high. But do you really want to count on it?

"Consider this scenario: The population of great whales in the Antarctic is reduced to somewhere between slim and none. The single biggest appetite for krill (mini-shrimp) that ever existed was gone. The krill are now swarming the oceans. Nothing happened in the Antarctic - the sky didn't fall, the ice cap didn't melt, and no population crashed except the whales. There was not the slightest detectable change except the whales were not around. In due course, when we quit sticking sharp explosive charges into them, they came back, too. So the ecology turns out to be profoundly resilient."

Jacobson sees the original environmentalism movement as a worthy cause that went bad due to its leaders' desire for power.

"Environmentalism was hijacked," he said. "The original people in the movement could arguably claim to be the largest grass-roots movement in America, and one of the greatest. People joined together to do good. Then they made a crucial and critical mistake: They gave power - unchecked power - to their leaders.

"We allow the Enviros to write critical legislation. We elected many to the House and Senate who just blindly accepted that what the Enviros were doing was good. Now we're unwilling to examine what the Enviros say and do to see if it is flawed.

"It is one thing for the Enviros to say, 'We are going to do good,' but if what they do creates profoundly negative impacts on the habitat and turns out to be unconstitutional, it is proof that the power handed to their leaders has corrupted them.

"Right now, taxpayers are paying for 'Green Bureau-babble,' which equates to power. The people who come up with these ideas are power perverts. They don't want to stand for election. They want the power without the responsibility. These people are a perversion of the republic."

J. Zane Walley is a spokesman for the Paragon Foundation, Alamogordo, N.M., The Paragon Foundation is "dedicated to preserving the constitutional principles established by the Founding Fathers." The Paragon Foundation can be reached at 1-877-847-3443.