With that said, it is increasingly difficult to ignore the growing popularity and public saturation of the Tea Party Movement. It's everywhere, and highly controversial. Although I have not followed this movement much over the last few years, there is one argument that I have heard from the group that I am having trouble grasping. That is, their argument against sustainable development.
I first heard about this opposition through a colleague who told me that when the county became a certified FGBC Green Local Government, there was resistance coming from the Tea Partiers of the county. This obviously sparked my interest. For at least two years, I've learned and heard about everything that sustainability and sustainable development can do for the world, and how much we need it to save the environment and ourselves. Now, I find out that there's a huge culture of people who believe that sustainability is a sort of scheme that is the United Nation's "vision for a completely managed society, dictating the process to be used for industry, agriculture, housing development, and especially education. It’s an all-encompassing plan to rule from an all-powerful central government.” This is a direct opposition to Agenda 21 which was adopted by more than 178 governments in 1992.
So in my research, I found this article called The Tea Party's Next Target: Sustainable Development, which as you can probably tell by the title, is not exactly unbiased. However, I think that the article makes some good points. The article also has a sarcastic tone to it, which attracted me to it, of course.
The author pulls some quotations out of Agenda 21 about its 27 Principles, such as "#1 which states that, “Human beings are at the centre of concerns for sustainable development. They are entitled to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature.”" Yepp, that sure sounds like a terrible idea to me...
A few other things that stuck out to me from this article. The first was that there is/was a group in Florida that was urging people to oppose a bill that would "require homeowners to responsibly maintain their septic tanks". Really? I understand that many people believe that the government should not have the right to decide what people do to their land. But septic tanks affect so much more than your land. And in my opinion, people do not have the right to pollute our already diminishing ground water supply or to negatively affect their neighbors, since they have rights, too.
Another spot in the article explains that in her new book, author Beverly Eakman blames our education system for training us to focus on the collective, rather than the individual. So it's our kindergarten teachers' faults for teaching us to share. However, I do know that this article is biased, and therefore is probably skewed and drastic (I hope).
This has all been almost directly from the article, with some narration by me. So here is just me saying what I see and how I see it...
Sustainability means something different to almost everyone, but all definitions share the want to impact the planet less and conserve our land and resources rather than using them all up as quickly as we have been. I understand that there are many different stances on sustainability and even climate change and that some people believe that these are just works by certain people to control the population. However, what I would like to say is... who cares?
Who cares why some people are behind certain initiatives. The truth is that the less materials we use, the longer our planet lasts, the more generations our planet can sustain. And if you don't believe that our resources are scarce, then think of it this way... If we don't recycle our plastic and aluminum and paper, etc, the faster our landfills will fill up. Then, as landfills fill up, we are going to have to open more landfills and chances are, we are going to run out of room for landfills that are far away, so they will get closer to our houses (and not only do they smell, they are also not great to look at). And the longer landfills sit, the more likely they are to seep into our groundwater, forcing us to create systems that are complicated and expensive in order to clean our water before we can drink it. These systems will most likely be heavy duty machines that will cause more air pollution which will cause more smog in cities, which will reduce your right/ability to clean air, which will probably increase disease and lower life spans. And as the population continues to increase, there will be less and less rural places to escape to. So why don't we recycle? because recycling is a scheme someone invented to control us?? ok.
Enough ranting. As I have said, the article that I linked here is very biased, and I am not saying that I 100% agree with it. Also, I am not claiming to be extremely knowledgable about these topics, especially the stance of the Tea Party. However, I would like to learn more, and although I am going to continue researching the topics, I would really like to hear what you think about this and how you feel sustainable development and Agenda 21 may affect our county and world, or even just reactions to what I have written.
