The UN and its sustainable development

II. Land Issues and Property Rights

Freedom 21 illustrates that the United Nations bases its concept of sustainable development on the misguided belief that the state should be the principal agent to both safeguard the environment and reduce poverty by managing property rights and the marketplace.

Tragically, this belief is fatally flawed. Numerous studies in the twenty-first century reveal that wealth creation is dependent on well defined, legal private property rights enforced with minimal corruption.

Property rights of landowners enhance true sustained development while common ownership or excessive regulation diminishes it. There exists a positive correlation between the wealth of a nation’s people and its ability to protect the environment. Likewise, property rights provide landowners an incentive not to harm their land. By doing so, property rights preserve and enhance people’s dignity and standard of living year after year.

Property rights allow landowners to be creative in finding new ways to use limited resources,while simultaneously protecting the environment. The wide diversity of societal goals within a free market, in conjunction with scientifically based natural resource management practices, invariably results in a good cross section of biodiversity and thus sustainability of natural resources as well as human dignity and progress.Protection of private property rights is therefore a sacrosanct duty of government.

United Nations-style sustainable development practices call for vast tracts of wild lands and tightly managed human activity. Yet these drastic actions are necessary only in rare instances and are harmful and counterproductive in most circumstances. There is no basis for creating vast tracts of interconnecting wild lands as most current sustainable development practices recommend.

Biodiversity and habitat health can be optimized using existing scientifically proven management practices. Research clearly shows that time-tested scientific management practices enhance biodiversity and habitat health. Natural resource uses that provide maximum benefits to national economies, local communities, and human dignity/justice, limited only by the historically proven common law principle of harm and nuisance, should be the emphasized goal.