Small Towns

Ten years ago, I could have more easily answered that question because I was more actively involved. If you are looking for a statement that says that we should encourage people to move from small towns to large cities, you're not going to find that, largely because the nature of bureaucratese is to state things in such a way that it can mean whatever you want it to mean. The answer is in the details of Agenda 21, and in its implementation.

The Settlement Management section speaks of the ability of well-managed cities being able to provide for people moving from rural areas to the cities. It also speaks of metropolitan regions, which are a creation of Agenda 21 thinking, extending over the boundaries of several political and administrative entities, and how this hinders the implementation of comprehensive environmental management programs.

In the implementation of this, some countries have arbitrarily eliminated smaller towns and cities, assigning them to the jurisdiction of whatever metropolitan center they saw fit. In the United States, this is generally done by making it more difficult for smaller town and city governments to continue, thereby encouraging them to merge with a nearby city. However, we had a governor here in Maine, about ten years ago, who tried very hard to place the majority of Maine's towns under the jurisdiction of eight cities in the state. Millinocket, although there are seventy miles of rural area between us and Bangor, would have been under the jurisdiction of Bangor. We would still be a dot on the map but we would no longer have a town government. He also wanted to close all but three hospitals in the entire state, and if you look at a map, you will see that Maine is not a small state, in terms of land area. He pushed through a law that would mandate school districts to put together consolidation plans. Most of them delayed in this until he was no longer in office and some of those that did consolidate split again after he was out of office.

Agenda 21 calls for the most efficient use of pretty much everything on the planet, which might sound like a sensible thing until you consider that you don't really have a say in any of this. In typical bureaucratese, the document speaks constantly of the importance of having input from everyone involved, but if you have ever been involved in a visioning session (they are called something different from place to place), you will know that your input is only recognized when it coincides with what they plan on doing anyhow. Those who agree with them become stakeholders, while everyone else is out in the cold.

The document speaks much of urban sprawl and, while they may not use the words, the implementation to combat urban sprawl is to pack everyone into compartmentalized communities within the city. Single-family homes are discouraged, and cities are split into several self-contained cities so that people don't feel the need to drive a car anywhere, and so that they don't realize that they are living in a cage.

The implementation of sustainable development is that someone else decides what you can or cannot do, what you can grow and what you cannot grow, which types of livestock you can grow and what you cannot raise, whether or not you can have a pond, and even to the point of whether you are going to be allowed to irrigate your crops or not. Collecting rainwater is banned in many areas now. This and all of the other little details are not clearly spelled out but are left for the regulators to regulate everyone into bankruptcy.

While small family farms are not specifically outlawed by Agenda 21, the regulations make it all but impossible for them to exist, and both the regulators and the regulations favor the large factory farm, where no one is living on the land, as they are trusted to regulate themselves through commissions that they set up.

America 2050, part of Agenda 21 implementation here in the United States, more specifically calls for the creation of Megacities or Megaregions, as artificially created political entities that would further remove the decision-making process from the people who are stuck with the results. This is the American implementation of Urban Future 21, I believe. Given that the United Nations is not particularly popular among people in the United States, Agenda 21 is rarely implemented under that name.

The implementation differs. In some countries, they are able to simply send the military in to forcibly remove people from their farms and small communities, while in other countries it becomes necessary to regulate them out of existence.

 

Millinocket has two streetlights. One of them was flashing yellow for about six months, and people were joking that so many people had left town that we weren't big enough for two streetlights anymore.