Two new documents are available to help those interested in responding to  the anti-Agenda 21 campaign that has been the subject of the last two papers on Ethicsandclimate.org  that is undermining local and regional land use and sustainable development planning in the United States.

As we have explained in the last two articles, an anti-Agenda 21 campaign has been surprisingly successful in the United States in undermining land-use, transportation, and energy planning at the local and regional level. The Tea Party in the United States appears to have a new focus: they are fighting local and regional government land-use and sustainable development planning on the basis that it is part of a United Nations plot to undermine national sovereignty and impose a Marxist/socialist new world order.

The first article in this series on Ethicsandclimate.org described the rapid success of this phenomenon and critically looked at four claims frequently made by this campaign. The second article continued the critical examination of nine additional claims frequently made by anti-Agenda 21 activists. The second paper also reviewed the anti-Agenda campaign’s claims as a matter of ethics.

Although the claims that have been made by activists in the Anti-Agenda 21 campaign are so looney, absurd, and woefully ignorant of international law that some who have been aware of this recent development in US history have chosen to ignore it on the basis that it could never achieve traction in a modern democracy in the 21rst Century. Yet as we have explained in considerable detail in past articles in this series, the anti-Agenda 21 campaign has been remarkably successful in the last two years in preventing local communities from implementing plans necessary to achieve their democratically derived community aspirations concerning. among other things, protection of air and water quality, reducing traffic congestion, creating bike lanes, improving public transportation, reducing carbon emissions that are contributing to climate change, and land-use and energy planning.

As we have demonstrated in the past two articles, the claims made by the anti-Agenda 21 campaign are directly contradicted by the text of Agenda 21. They are also deeply misleading about what Agenda 21 is, its legal affect on the the United States, and staggeringly inconsistent with international law.

A new paper is now available that combines the previous two entries in Ethicsandclimate.org while expanding on them. This paper is designed to be a rigorous reference for those who want to respond to the claims of the anti-Agenda 21 campaign in detail.

This first paper is:

TheAnti-Agenda21 Disinformation Campaign in the United States: An Ethical Critique of an Attack on Sustainability

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2277882

Also available  is a one page paper that can be used more easily by those interested in responding to this campaign. This one page paper is a summary of the longer paper above. The paper is:

Responses to Claims Made By The Anti-Agenda 21 Campaign

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2279098

By:

Donald A. Brown

Scholar In Residence, Sustainability Ethics and Law

Widener University School of Law

dabrown57@gmail.com