The People’s Plan for Nature appears at first glance very much like a typical green activist grouping. On its website it makes some common, albeit alarmist, claims. For example, it reckons there are “just seven years left to halt and reverse the loss of our natural world”. However, if you look a little closer this organisation reveals some curious connections and agenda items.
For starters, the People’s Plan claims to be “a plan created for the people, by the people of the U.K.”. That seems rather an exaggeration for an unelected group of 103 people. The organisation also claims “partnerships” with the WWF, the National Trust, the Save Our Wild Isles Project and the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds).
The Plan also lists 26 “Calls for Action”. These include a variety of environmental and political imperatives, mostly advocating heavy government control.
An intrigued Charles Moore has dug a little deeper into the People’s Plan in his Telegraph column.
The facilitators “themed and organised” the Plan’s 26 “Calls for Action”. These, asserts the website in Soviet tone, demonstrate “an irrefutable, independent case… for action, grounded in the will of the people”.
The Calls for Action include a “new regulatory body” which would achieve “greater government accountability through a permanent Assembly for Nature made up of Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), industry and the public” and a “Union of influential organisations” to “establish a mandate for the proportionate inclusion of impact on nature in decision-making at all levels”, exerting control over all government and business decisions affecting nature. An eco-version of the Hippocratic oath would make government and businesses commit to “do no more harm to nature”.
Other Calls for Action include greater government intervention in land, such as “a network of local biodiverse and health-focused green spaces owned and run by the people, for the people” and “recognition of access to nature as a human right”.
In themselves, these recommendations are unremarkable – exactly what you would expect when green pressure groups combine to accrue more power. Their demands are not mad, unlike some of those from Extinction Rebellion. Some even show a glimmer of reality, recognising that farms and businesses may suffer from green transitions. But the People’s Plan, like most ecological movements, never questions the virtue of ever-greater government, and appears hostile to private property and economic reality and doom-laden about climate change. …
But why is a group of 103 people so carefully selected, paid for and groomed by numerous organisations who all think the same thing, better than what happens when, in their millions, the people (with a small p) vote in local and general elections?
And how does an attempt to alter democracy because you are annoyed by its results relate to saving nature, or to the charitable purposes of great organisations such as the WWF, the RSPB and the National Trust?
Worth reading in full.
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