More on Agenda 21: Talking to "Steve"

I found a comment “awaiting moderation” yesterday, and was impressed that Blogspot had read my statement that I’m not going to allow anonymous comments on my blog.  This comment was submitted by “Steve.”  “Steve” has been on Blogger since December 2011, and “his” profile has been viewed 4 times (twice by me).

Well, hi, “Steve.”

“Steve” commented on my blog “Agenda 21:  A Straw Enemy.”    That blog took issue with the claim by some folks that the United Nations, through “Agenda 21,” is pushing a one world government to be implemented through “local visioning,” “historic preservation ,” “consensus,” and the like. 

The blog pointed out that this view is entirely divorced from history, in light of the fact that these concepts existed (and were being implemented) before Agenda 21.

Long before Agenda 21. 

For example, here’s a pre-Agenda 21 example of comprehensive planning.  It’s L’enfant’s plan for Washington, D.C., developed in 1791:

Source:  http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/wash/lenfant.htm

Whether or not we believe that planning is an outrageous assault on property rights, whether or not we believe that it’s OK for a French person to tell Americans how to build a city, can we at least agree that the United Nations wasn’t responsible?

That was the point of the blog, and I’m afraid that “Steve” missed it. 

In the blog, I reprinted a paragraph of Agenda 21 that calls for “broad public participation in decision-making."  This paragraph states:

23.2. One of the fundamental prerequisites for the achievement of sustainable development is broad public participation in decision-making. Furthermore, in the more specific context of environment and development, the need for new forms of participation has emerged. This includes the need of individuals, groups and organizations to participate in environmental impact assessment procedures and to know about and participate in decisions, particularly those which potentially affect the communities in which they live and work. Individuals, groups and organizations should have access to information relevant to environment and development held by national authorities, including information on products and activities that have or are likely to have a significant impact on the environment, and information on environmental protection measures.

I asked:  “Are you shocked, are you outraged, by the statement that ‘individuals, groups, and organizations’ should be allowed to ‘participate in environmental impact assessment procedures and to know about and participate in decisions, particularly those which potentially affect the communities in which they live and work’”?

Well, “Steve” was.  “He” wrote:

You wish to rally for critical thinking - Ok. Where in that section of text quoted does it say that participation is voluntary? To highlight further "the need for new forms of participation has emerged." What new forms of participation? Many people already participate in using green products, recycling, and many other environmentally friendly movements voluntarily. There is no necessity for the UN to become involved. (Unless their goal isn't just environmentally friendly nations). We can do it ourselves, and better than they can. Also, your article is essentially Reductio ad absurdum considering you don't address any of the reasons "The Tea Party" or "conspiracy theorists" dislike Agenda 21 - Namely the removal of privacy and property

Well, I could rise to the bait.  I could point out that “participation” is not an ominous term.  Coercion is not inherent to the term “participation.”  The On Line Dictionary says it means “The act of taking part or sharing in something: Teachers often encourage class participation.” 

That hit home.  I’m a teacher.  I try to encourage class participation.  And I swear on everything that I hold dear:  the United Nations has never forced me to do so. 

I could also point out that Agenda 21 wasn’t talking to us, or at least not to us alone.  It’s also talking to Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Angola, Botswana, Brazil, Bulgaria. . . It’s a big world out there. And most people, in most countries of the world, don’t have the opportunities to participate in decision-making that we have here.

So Agenda 21 suggests (and that’s all that it can do) that countries adopt a proud American product:  the environmental impact assessment process.  This is not “new” to us, since it’s been around since 1969 in our country.  It’s not “new” in other developed countries.  But it might be “new” to Afghanistan.

But no, I’m not going to rise to the bait. 

The point of disagreement between “Steve” and me is not really the benefits of participation or even issues relating to property rights and privacy, where we might find some points of agreement. 

The disagreement is that “Steve’s” underlying premise, untouched by any of the facts in my blog (and unresponsive to them), is that the United Nations dictates U.S. policy.  At every level of policy.  

When that premise remains in place regardless of all evidence to the contrary, we can’t talk about issues.  We can’t debate or discuss.  That big scary straw man stands in our way. 

As Cervantes* said, “Fear is sharp-sighted, and can see things under ground, and much more in the skies.”   Once you accept the premise that the United Nations runs our government, you can see Agenda 21 in every policy.

It is an empirical fact that a lot of groups influence government policy.  The Chamber of Commerce, the Building Industry Association of Washington, and the fossil fuel industry come to mind at the local, state, and federal levels.  In some small way, the dreaded ICLEI (a nonprofit intended to help local governments to implement “sustainability” goals contained in Agenda 21) may have influenced our government.  That doesn’t mean that the United Nations runs the world.  Nor does it mean that One World Government is either the cause or the result of every Agenda 21 policy.

-------------------------------------------------------------

*While it’s never possible to know for sure, it seems unlikely that Cervantes (1547-1616) was an agent of the United Nations.  After all, his character Don Quixote was the ultimate opponent of windmills. Windmills, an example of "green energy," are alleged to be the spawn of Agenda 21.  Ergo, Don Quixote must be a prequel.  By tilting at windmills, the Knight of the Woeful Countenance was fighting against the "giant," which was really Agenda 21.

Coal Train Noise: Are You “Significant”?

We are here!  We are here!

David’s blog about the “no action alternative” for the proposed Gateway Pacific Terminal – North America’s largest coal export terminal  -- made me think about how we measure environmental “impacts,” also known as environmental “effects.”   

An impact is an effect, an effect is an impact, and both words refer to costs that the project applicant will impose on others.

Here’s one thing to know about environmental impact statements:  No impact matters unless the “Lead Agency” (here, the Army Corps of Engineers) decides that the impact is “significant.” 

If an impact is “less than significant” – poof! For all intents and purposes, the impact goes away. No mitigation measures are required.  The agencies don’t have to worry about the impact.  Your elected representatives won’t worry about the impact.  Really, nobody ever has to think about that impact ever again.

Except the folks who have to live with the project's "effects."  They may think that impacts are significant, but if the Corps doesn't think so, it doesn't matter.  

And so, I wonder how the Army Corps of Engineers is going to measure noise impacts from coal trains.  I wonder what standard it is going to apply. I wonder what impacts it will call "significant" and which impacts it will call "suck it up, sucker."

The Corps isn’t ordinarily in the business of dealing with large-scale noise impacts from trains.  I can’t find anything in the Corps’ NEPA regulations, or in any Corps guidance documents, that sets standards for noise impacts or provides guidance about how noise impacts will be measured.   Maybe it's there and I just didn't find it.

As far as I can tell, though, the Corps will establish a standard of "significance" based on its view of what makes sense.  It will listen to agencies.  And maybe it will even listen to the people who will be most affected. 

 

Here are a few things that we know about trains and noise. ·        
  
We know that there are at least two kinds of noise:  wayside noise (engine and wheel noise) and train whistle noise.  

We know that the Federal Railroad Administration requires freight trains to blow their whistles at 96-110 decibels, measured 100 feet in front of the train and 15 feet above the rail, near intersections. That’s a straightforward measurement of sound at a point in time.

Except that it isn’t straightforward, because decibels are logarithmic. An increase in ten decibels is roughly equivalent to a doubling in noise.  So a noise that we hear as 110 dBA isn’t 10% higher than a 100-decibel noise.  It’s about twice as loud.  A 20-decibel gain is about four times as loud.  A 40-decibel gain is about 16 times as loud.

Unless you have a vacuum cleaner or dishwasher going, your living room at the moment is probably around 40 to 60 dBA.  So a train whistle at 100 feet would be at least 16 times as loud.  With distance, the sound level goes down, and walls and windows reduce it too, of course. 

We know that noise varies over time. Time variability is usually addressed by averaging sound over a period of time – often, 24 hours.   You may see the term “Ldn.”  

• Ldn measures the “cumulative noise exposure from all events over a full 24-hour period, with events occurring between 10 pm and 7 am increased by 10 dB to account for greater nighttime sensitivity to noise."  
• (For those who want to read along, and especially if you want to learn more about train noise, here is the Federal Railroad Administration’s web page on “Horn Noise Questions and Answers.” )

When you put all that together, what do you get?

Train horns are really loud.   They’re not the loudest sound in the world – jet aircraft at 500 feet are louder, and some military blasts are louder.  (The Army Corps had consultants test whether night time military exercises affect people’s sleep.  They do.  The offending sounds were 110-120 dBA.)  

But they’re loud.  Rock concert loud.  Rock concerts are sometimes given as an example of a 110 dBA sound.  I also saw “squeaky toy held close to ear.”  Ouch.  Vacuum cleaners, by contrast, are 60-85 dBA.

“Loud” can go away when you "average" noise over time.  What happens when you “average out” the noise level?   

For people who live a thousand feet away from a “suburban crossing with horns,” the Federal Railroad Administration suggests that the average noise (60 Ldn) is no worse than an “urban residential environment.”  

This raises a red flag:

What if the Corps decides to "average" noise when it is determining significance?  What if it decides that, say, 65 or 70 Ldn is its standard for significant impacts? This would not be unheard of.  In fact, based on precedent, it may be more likely than not.

This would mean that everybody who experiences an "average" noise level that’s significantly worse than conditions today -- five, ten, forty times louder -- but not above this "level of significance," would just have to grin and bear it.  Train whistles disrupt your sleep?  Too bad, you're not "significant."

If that’s the standard of significance, an awful lot of people will be sacrificing an awful lot of sleep for the coal trains.

Or, the Corps can set a lower standard.  It can set a standard for high decibel, noncontinuous noises -- train whistles --  especially when they disrupt sleep.

How can that happen?  If you demand it.  If you think that you are significant, tell the Corps to measure noise impacts as if you mattered.   

Your comments don't have to be technical.  Just tell the Corps that "averaging" the noise isn't enough.  If loud whistles already bother you, say so.  If your friends and neighbors join you, and folks all along the rail route have the same concern, maybe somebody will listen.

You can also tell the Corps whether noise mitigation measures will make the impacts “less than significant” for you.  Some possibilities include:

• Creating “quiet zones,” where whistles aren’t required.  Unless We the People want to pay for this to happen, point out that it’s an impact of the project that must be paid for by the project sponsor.  Quiet zones won’t reduce “wayside” noise, but they can reduce train whistle noise.
• Soundproofing your house – for those who don’t mind sleeping with their windows closed and who never sit outside.
• A before/after assessment :  An assessor can determine the value of the property before the use, the value of the property after the use, and the project proponent then makes up for the difference.

Of course, a before/after assessment doesn’t address every impact.  Nothing has been built yet on the waterfront, for example.  What kinds of costs will noise and vibration impose on those future homes and businesses, and how can those impacts be mitigated?  Perhaps the project applicant should put funds into escrow, to help reduce the cost burden on new businesses downtown. 

 
If citizens demand to be treated as if they are “significant,” will the agencies have to agree?  They might not.  But even if the agencies ignore people's concerns, even if the courts won’t step in, your elected representatives ought to care.

Many of our current elected officials, as well as most of those running for office, have stated that they don’t have a position on the Gateway Pacific Terminal.  They’ll just wait and see what the environmental impact statement says.

And that’s fine, as long as the EIS measures what matters.  And doesn’t leave a great big steaming pile of “non-significant” impacts for just plain folks to live with.

Every public figure who is going to “wait and see” about one of the largest projects ever to take place on our continent has an obligation to make sure that his or her constituents matter.

So tell them. 

In your scoping comments, tell the agencies how noise affects you. And while you're at it, why not send those comments to your elected officials – federal, state, and local.  They need to know.

And yes, that includes the County Council.  

There is nothing about a request for an appropriate standard of environmental review that requires Council members to be "for" or "against" the project.  In fact, project proponents have repeatedly stated that this will be a rigorous review.   County Council members will be using this information to make their decision, so they ought to be confident that they will get the information that they need.  That's only "fair."

Agenda 21: A Straw Enemy

In the autumn of 1421, a thirty-year-old clerk named Cyriacus Pizzacolli walked to work in the city of Ancona, south of Venice, Italy.  Beware, because what happened next is ominous:

"As Cyriacus hastened along the quay, something caught his eye and caused him to look up at the Roman arch that rose over the port. . .The gleaming white monument was astonishingly well-preserved, considering it had been erected centuries ago.  Its inlaid bronze letters had been pried out, leaving the inscriptions as ghostly cavities, but the rest of the structure was intact and appeared light and graceful. . ..

Unlike texts on the pages of books, handed from one generation to the next by more or less caring hands and prone to errors of transcription or misunderstanding, physical artifacts were direct links to the past.  They reflected immediately and tangibly the preoocupations of the ancients, bore their fingerprints and traces of their breath. . .

Though elated by this visceral connection with the past, Cyriacus also felt troubled.  Throughout Italy and in the East he had seen ancient remains not merely disregarded by the locals, but regularly despoiled by them for building blocks and burned for lime.  If they were not somehow safeguarded, they would be gone. . .

Standing before Trajan’s arch in Ancona, Cyriacus sensed his life coming into focus.  His curiosity, his hunger for travel, his quest for a meaningful existence, his need for intellectual enrichment would all be amply satisfied if he were to take on this new mission:  to seek out, study, and preserve for future generations the material remains of classical cultures."

From To Wake the Dead:  A Renaissance Merchant and the Birth of Archeology, by Marina Belozerskaya (W.W. Norton & Co., 2009), pp. 3-12.

What the author of this book did not tell us – perhaps because Pizzacolli himself was not aware of it – is that Renaissance merchant Cyriacus Pizzacolli was a tool of the United Nations.  And of George H.W. Bush. 

Yes, Agenda 21 (read it here), sponsored by the United Nations and signed by George H.W. Bush in 1992, reached back 550 years and made Cyriacus Pizzacolli an agent of the United Nations agenda of world domination. 

How?  Agenda 21 forced Cyriacus Pizzacolli to promote historic preservation.

In case you haven’t noticed that Agenda 21 is running YOUR life also, let me make one thing perfectly clear:

It isn’t.

What is Agenda 21?  It’s a long, aspirational statement of ways that people around the world might be able to reduce pollution and improve quality of life.  It is a compilation of concepts that ALREADY EXISTED IN  1992 – it didn’t really invent anything new, as far as I can tell. If it had been full of new, innovative concepts, would 178 nations – including the United States, under President George H.W. Bush -- have signed onto it?  Of course not.

Nonetheless, a strange and counterfactual conspiracy theory has grown some roots, both politically (in the Tea Party and, under that influence, the Republican Party) and geographically (here in Whatcom County).  The Agenda 21 conspiracy theory claims that every word in Agenda 21 is the cause of the concept that it discusses.  According to conspiracy proponents, Agenda 21 did not reflect centuries of experience or the best practices of the nations that contributed to it.  Instead, it gave birth to every concept that it mentioned. 

According to one easy-to-find website, Agenda 21 is responsible for all of these concepts – and more:  “Alternative Energy, Local Visioning, facilitators, regional planning, historic preservation, conservation easements, development rights, sustainable farming, comprehensive planning, growth management, consensus.”

Good grief.

I just clicked on a provision of Agenda 21 at random.  As it happens, this provision might have some resonance here in Whatcom County.  It says:

23.2. One of the fundamental prerequisites for the achievement of sustainable development is broad public participation in decision-making. Furthermore, in the more specific context of environment and development, the need for new forms of participation has emerged. This includes the need of individuals, groups and organizations to participate in environmental impact assessment procedures and to know about and participate in decisions, particularly those which potentially affect the communities in which they live and work. Individuals, groups and organizations should have access to information relevant to environment and development held by national authorities, including information on products and activities that have or are likely to have a significant impact on the environment, and information on environmental protection measures.

Are you shocked, are you outraged, by the statement that “individuals, groups, and organizations” should be allowed to “participate in environmental impact assessment procedures and to know about and participate in decisions, particularly those which potentially affect the communities in which they live and work”? 

I hope not.  

If facts mattered at all to this kind of debate, it might be important to recognize that the National Environmental Policy Act, which is the law that requires the preparation of environmental impact statements in the United States, was passed – by the United States Congress, not by the United Nations – in 1969.  That’s more than 20 years before Agenda 21.  But why let the facts get in the way of a good conspiracy theory.

I think that this analysis correctly explains the Agenda 21 conspiracy phenomenon:  “this type of fearful rhetoric helps create a perceived enemy to rally against.”  And that’s what we’re seeing here in Whatcom County.  It's too bad, because it creates a division that no amount of facts, and no appeal to common interests, can overcome.

Is there a way to get people to rally for critical thinking?