SUMMARY: Excerpts from a letter to Cato Institute Director of Natural Resource Studies Jerry Taylor, from Michael Shaw regarding "Sustainable Development: A Dubious Solution in Search of a Problem."

"Sustainable Development/Agenda 21 is the ultimate collectivist design, and is therefore, more than dangerous. Fortunately, its underlying precepts are simple to understand and condemn. The challenge is in the exposure."

Summary: When Earth First! co-founder, Dave Foreman, first voiced his vision in 1990, of wolves and grizzly bears roaming, unmolested by humans, through unbroken wilderness from Mexico to Canada -- many people laughed. The "Wildlands Project" is no longer a laughing matter. Nine bills have been introduced to expand wilderness in America and surround them with "primitive areas" in which human activity is severely limited. Dave Foreman's vision should be rejected. Free people create free markets; neither can survive when the government owns the sources of production.

The Global Biodiversity Assessment report directed by the United Nations Environment Programe (UNEP) calls for urgent action to reverse unsustainable effects on global biodiversity. The report is based on the false premise that "Population growth has exceeded the capacity of the biosphere.” In order to understand what is sustainable, one must understand what is not sustainable... 

Sustainable communities will ensure that individuals and nations pursue the future o­nly along the paths deemed "sustainable" by those self-appointed bureaucrats who think they know what is best for the world. [California's Senate Bill SB 375 "Sustainable Communities Strategy" of 2008 follows this principle.]