socially engineered to give way to a cockamamie and visionary international scheme cooked up by a radical group of deep ecologists.

   Four quotes attributed to two co-founders of TWP typify the menacing nature of the rewilding plan:

     “We must make this (Earth) an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects…We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers, and return to wilderness millions of tens of millions of acres of presently settled land.”  “We advocate biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake.  It may take our extinction to set things straight.”  “Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.” - David Foreman

     “The collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans.” – Dr. Reed Noss

   Reed Noss put Foreman’s envisioned Wildlands Project into words when he wrote TWP’s plan, which has been integrated in the UN’s worldwide Agenda 21-Sustainable Development Programme through a series of UN conferences.  Though there is a wealth of verifiable information about Agenda 21 on the Internet, our federal and state agency personnel and few of our congressmen talk openly with the public about it.

   In 1986 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was urged through an International Biosphere Conference to establish a program to manage the world’s natural resources on a “biosphere” basis.  That UNESCO program became known as the Man and the Biosphere Programme.  Ten years later, in 1996, “The Seville Strategy” integrated The Wildlands Project into UNESCO’s MAB program, linking it to the 1992 Earth Summit’s Agenda 21 and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.

   The U.S. Congress has not ratified the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity since being presented with it in 1994, but, nevertheless, the Clinton administration developed its ecosystem management polices to comply with the unratified treaty, and the MI-DNR, among other government agencies, has been complying with those policies ever since. 

   The Wildlands Project plan entails returning (restoring) a minimum of 50% of America to pre-Columbus wilderness condition, as TWP and its collaborators envision it to have been prior to settlement by European immigrants. 

   In order to do this, the rewilders and compliant resource management agencies such as the MI-DNR and Federal Forest Service are adhering to TWP’s mission to use buffered migration corridors to link bioreserves, which, in turn, serve as buffers for UN-US biospheres such as those at Isle Royale and the U of M Biological Station near Petosky.  The MI-DNR’s “land consolidation” program and various land and conservation easement purchases by the State aid in building the bioreserves and corridors.

   The object of “buffering” the bioreserves and migration corridors is to protect their integrity and that of the core biospheres from disruptive human activities; only human activity compatible with protection of the

 buffering reserves and corridors, millions of tens of millions of acres in scope, is to be allowed through highly restrictive land use mandates so as to remove the non-indigenous “human footprint” as much as possible.  Those targeted lands and waters and all the natural resources therein are being given back to the raw mercy and whims of Mother Nature so that the interaction of all, including its effect on indigenous tribes of people, may be studied by researchers whose work can be capitalized on.

   While the gray wolf has never truly been endangered in North America, the Endangered Species Act has been manipulated to allow for non-essential experimental populations of wolves to be reestablished in distinct population segments (DPS) of America.  Michigan joins Wisconsin and Minnesota as a DPS where decades ago wolves were intentionally encouraged to repopulate in large numbers and go unmanaged without the approval of a majority of registered voters in each state.  In reality, a vote by the entire Michigan citizenry wouldn’t serve the purpose of determining the state’s social carrying capacity for wolves, as only citizens of the Upper Peninsula that occupy roughly one-third of the state are being forced to co-exist with the predators.

   The pathetic 1990 MI-DNR “public attitude toward wolves” survey indicating that a majority of Michigan residents were purportedly ready for the gray wolf to return to the state was a farce.  The survey, answered by a mere 1,050 of the 6,386,566 people age 21 and older then living in the state (total population was 9,295,207) clearly indicates that the survey only showed how stupidly gullible the MI-DNR believes state residents are.

   Few Upper Peninsula residents buy into the hype that wolves returned to Michigan without help from wolf biologist L. David Mech, who has made a career and decades-long income based on wolf research.  Mech helped write the IUCN’s Species Survival Commission’s Wolf Specialist Group’s “Manifesto on Wolf Conservation” (circa 1973 with updates in 1983, 1996, & 2000) and “Guidelines on Wolf Conservation”, which are international in nature and not specific to the State of Michigan, let alone the U.P.  There, again, is proof that the reintroduction of wolves had been planned by international collaborators decades ago, and that the MI-DNR’s claim that wolves magically moved into the area and repopulated the U.P. in the 1990’s by choice, not force, is nothing more than a “smoke and mirrors” fairy tale designed to socially engineer the masses into believing this was a natural occurrence.

   In fact, Michigan has the distinction of being selected as a testing ground for the first gray wolf transplant in America on March 12, 1974 when four wolves were released in the Huron Mountains; an experiment that was a collaborative effort of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Northern Michigan University with backing by the Natural Resource Departments of Michigan and Minnesota and financial support from the Huron Mountain Wildlife Foundation, the National Audubon Society, and N.M.U.

   That the MI-DNR, as a whole, has bought into the socialistic Wildlands Project without the general public’s knowledge or permission, but with the public’s money used to pay its employees and fund its programs is shameful.  Using wolves as an ecosystem management “target species” to commandeer public and private land rights is unconscionable and should not be tolerated.

   However, the vast majority of Upper Peninsula residents are being forced to tolerate the intolerable until such time as folks wake up to the fact that the entire U.P. is being turned into a wilderness bioreserve research lab and decide to reclaim it for traditional human use.

In the interim, I would strongly recommend that the MI-DNR, which managed to get an operating budget with an $9 to $11 million dollar deficit in it approved for Fiscal Year 2008, immediately use it’s environmental conservation NGO stakeholder groups’ financial spigot and translocate two-thirds of the U.P. wolf population to the Lower Peninsula so that all state residents can learn first hand about the gray wolves’ purported value to Michigan’s ecosystems.  After all, we were only supposed to tolerate 200 wolves for five years, but now even the MI-DNR can’t say how many there really are. 

   Surely the tax-paying farmers, sportsmen, and families living in the lower two thirds of the state will benefit from Michigan’s Wolf Management Plan culled from recommendations made by the MI-DNR’s invited Wolf Roundtable “tax-exempt” stakeholder groups, as they, too, are visited by carnivorous and predatory wolves in their yards and pastures and on their porches.

   In light of the IUCN’s “Manifesto on Wolf Conservation” and its “Guidelines on Wolf Conservation”, I highly doubt that this “public” comment period is much more than tokenism on the part of the MI-DNR or that the agency will stray very far from the Manifesto and those Guidelines regardless of any comments made by the general public who foots the bill for Michigan wolf management through sportsmen’s license fees, user fees, and taxes.

Sincerely,

Carole Williams

Cc:    Rep. Michael Lahti

Bcc:   Like-minded citizens in Michigan and all over America