Western alberta corridor, y2y plans... Quadders and sledders beware!!

[Summitric]

THE ALBERTA NDP IS IN BED WITH Y2Y AND THEY'RE GONNA TRY AND TIE UP ALL THE WESTERN ALBERTA CORRIDOR, BEFORE THE NEXT ELECTION.... THIS IS HAPPENING!!!!

 

[Billy Boy]

This is the biggest threat to riding the Alberta Eastern Slopes ever!!!! Contact your local MLA better yet write them about your concerns about Y2Y. Get informed as this is sneaking up on all of us!!!

 

[TylerG]

This is the biggest threat to riding the Alberta Eastern Slopes ever!!!! Contact your local MLA better yet write them about your concerns about Y2Y. Get informed as this is sneaking up on all of us!!!

Here are some suggested ways that you can help as well:

Join a club..... without numbers reported thru the AOHVA (for Summer Off Highway) or the ASA (Winter Off Highway) we don't have a leg to stand on.

Register your machines..... I know you only ride in BC..... wait you need registration there now too...... DO IT.... these numbers also help us when it comes to the government.

Attend rallies, get involved, don't let these clowns push us over.......

Stop posting photo's of your buddies stuck up to his handlebars in mud ripping the crap out of a mud hole..... No matter if its on your own land or not, the greenies don't care.....

 

[Billy Boy]

Also if you want a good backgrounder on what your dealing with when it comes to Y2Y. Try and track down an Alberta Outdoorsman article by Rob Miskosky called "Wolves in Sheep's Clothing" (if you goggle Rob's name and the article it should come up). This article was very informative when it came to the Y2Y issue.

 

[Summitric]

here's part 1:

​

OUTDOOR PURSUITS with Rob Miskosky

Wolves in Sheep's Clothing?
It’s big. It’s beautiful. And it’s wild.
It’s called the Willmore Wilderness and it encompasses more that 1700 square miles of pristine wildlands untouched by industrial activity. In fact, it has its own Act that protects it from such use. An Act that states that it is dedicated to the use of the people of Alberta for their benefit, education and enjoyment... and ...shall, by the management, conservation and protection of its natural resources and by the preservation of its natural beauty, be maintained for the enjoyment of future generations.

​

The Willmore is more than 1700 square miles of sheer wilderness wrapped in beauty.

Having spent many days here over the course of two hunting seasons I can attest to its beauty—it truly is a unique and absolutely wonderful part of Alberta.

Unfortunately, many want a piece of it.

They are called UNESCO, which stands for United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Their World Heritage Program “seeks to encourage the identification, protection and preservation of cultural and natural heritage around the world considered to be of outstanding value to humanity.”

And this is where Willmore Wilderness Park comes into play.

Mike Murtha, a representative of Parks Canada, was approached by UNESCO to put forward a proposal to expand the existing World Heritage Rocky Mountain Parks.

Murtha believes the Willmore is the perfect candidate for such an expansion and has formed a steering committee designed to establish whether or not the Willmore meets the World Heritage Site Committee criteria for World Heritage status.

Which all sounds wonderful. Until you start looking at what this all means.

The UNESCO World Heritage Centre is based in France, far removed from the Willmore. There are 21 members from different countries on the World Heritage Committee. Their job, from an international level, is to ensure that governments of World Heritage Sites ensure those sites keep their values. UNESCO is also said to have no legal jurisdiction in a World Heritage Site and that their only authority could be to remove a site from the “list”.

If such is the case, then why would Parks Canada go through all the bother?

Considering the Willmore can only be accessed by foot or on horseback, a huge economic boom is hardly likely.

What is more likely is outside parties having leverage in determining the future conservation of this area?

And, will European influences suddenly have a say in the Willmore, possibly impacting those who use this area for hunting, fishing and trapping, guiding and outfitting?

Those who make a living here see little benefit from UNESCO and Murtha’s plan.

But UNESCO is not the only one who wants a piece of the Willmore. It appears there may be a few more wolves dressed in sheep’s clothing also making big plans for the Willmore and other regions of Alberta’s Rocky Mountains.

Its acronym is Y2Y, which means “Yellowstone to Yukon”.

And their motto is “People working together to maintain and restore the unique natural heritage of the Yellowstone to Yukon region.”

The group’s vision is to reconnect the Rocky Mountains, from Yellowstone National Park to the Yukon’s Mackenzie Mountains, by creating “core protected areas connected to one another by ‘wildlife linkages,’ mosaics of public and private lands that provide safe passageways for wildlife to travel freely from place to place.”

Sounds wonderful.

Until you start looking back through their history and suddenly have to wonder what the underlying goal of the Y2Y initiative really is.

Y2Y is just one of several projects that falls under the umbrella of another organization called “The Wildlands Project” (TWP) based out of Florida with field offices in Vermont and Arizona.

The Wildlands Project first began in 1991 when the founder of Earth First! (EF!), Dave Foreman, left EF! to found TWP.

It should be noted that Earth First! is known as a “direct action” environmental organization and a “warrior society” with no members, just “Earth First!ers, who have engaged in arson, violent assault and vandalism.

Foreman’s leaving Earth First! in 1991 may have had something to do with his being arrested on eco-terrorism charges. Seems our TWP founder and four others were charged for plotting to sabotage several nuclear facilities.

Foreman is also the author of a book called Eco-Defense: A Field Guide to Monkey Wrenching. The book is an instruction manual for sabotage and gives instruction on how to destroy dams, power plants and industrial equipment while equipping eco-saboteurs with the knowledge to make “social change”.

In another book, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, Foreman lays out the plans for The Wildlands Project and puts his master plan into the arena of public opinion where many environmental extremists buy in.

The Wildlands Project gathers steam and soon Foreman’s concept becomes an actual model published in a special edition of Wild Earth.

To put it simply, The Wildlands Project seeks to “restrict human civilization to limited patches of Earth”. In fact the project calls for the “establishment of systems of core wilderness areas where human activity is prohibited, linked with biological corridors.” Buffers are to be created around these corridors with regular human activity only allowed outside of these buffered zones. Foreman suggests that National Parks and Wilderness Areas are useless because they only “protect scenery and outdoor recreation”.

Soon, Reed Noss, a colleague of Foreman’s, publishes a new Wildlands Project model in a paper entitled “Endangered Ecosystems of the United States: A Preliminary Assessment of Loss and Degradation”. With many of Foreman’s original ideas, the paper soon becomes the principal design for biodiversity protection within Section 10 of the United Nations Global Biodiversity Assessment authorized under the United Nations Convention for Biodiversity held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. This conference produced Agenda 21, the ultimate plan of action to save the world from human activity.

The Wildlands Project has been described as “islands of human habitat surrounded by wilderness.”

Dave Foreman resigns from TWP in 2003 to form the Rewilding Institute, a group noted for its belief that Pleistocene rewilding could put African animals such as elephants and cheetahs back on North American soil.

However, Foreman still plays a role with TWP. According to their website, “The Wildlands Project continues to maintain a strong working relationship with Dave.”

It should be noted that The Wildlands Project is just one of several elements that are part of the goal of implementing the United Nations Agenda 21, which includes the relocation of wildlife, the creation of large wilderness and roadless areas, and the relocation of people into sustainable communities.

So, knowing the background of The Wildlands Project and how the United Nations have bought in, what exactly are the underlying goals of Y2Y, a spin-off of TWP and also promoted by Dave Foreman and The Rewilding Institute’s website?

Y2Y, whose head office is based in Canmore, Alberta, have suddenly raised the alarm bells of many. Their grand vision of the Rocky Mountains appears to be covered in fluff, leaving those who visit their website with an urge to help in fixing a part of Alberta that isn’t broken.

But are those involved with Y2Y and TWP little more than global socialists trying to control the human population? Furthering Agenda 21?

Next month we’ll look deeper into these organizations and see how they operate, who’s involved and what their plans are for the Yellowstone to Yukon region, how those plans will impact you and me and what we can do about it. ■​

 

[Summitric]

here's part 2(deux):

(Please note that the following is a copy of a column, "Wolves in Sheep Clothing? Part II", written by Rob Miskosky in the June 2008 Alberta Outdoorsmen (c) 2008--Don Meredith, Board Administrator.)

It’s tough to write about. The research is never-ending and the dots are near impossible to connect. But they are there and they do connect once you begin the research.
Let’s begin with; what does Dona Ana County, New Mexico have to do with Alberta?
And, how is Dona Ana County connected to The Wildlands Project and the Canmore based group Y2Y?
Or, better yet, just who the hell is the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance?
Before we can answer those questions we have to take a look at a movement across North America to protect public and private lands from, well, people.
Last month we talked about the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, or Y2Y as their acronym suggests. Y2Y, in conjunction with many other environmental groups who have the same vision, born by the infamous eco-terrorist Dave Foreman, hope to create “connected” wildlife corridors and protected areas all the way from the Yucatan in southeastern Mexico through Alberta and to the Arctic. These areas, in eventuality, would be off-limits to human activity.
We see it all the time right here in Alberta with the creation and expansion of provincial and wildland parks, most born under the pressures of these same groups who have a grand vision of human population control.
The premise is that we are moving further and further into those last remaining wild areas, creating less room for those creatures that depend on this same land. And there is some truth to that.
In Alberta gas and oil exploration is seen by many as the plague of the province. But for an equal amount, if not more, oil and gas have given us the prosperity we have come to depend on. It’s a slippery slope we tread and much needs to be done to protect what is still wild, of that there is no doubt.
But there are many different ways to protect lands without going to the extremes of a man such as Foreman who came up with the idea of tree spiking, hammering spikes into trees to stop the timber industry while endangering the lives of loggers and sawmill workers.
And who publicly stated, “destroy civilization and technology, and eliminate the need for the word ‘wilderness’ because everything will be wilderness.”
And a man connected to Y2Y in Canmore through The Wildlands Project.

Enter Calgarian Harvey Locke.
Locke is an Honourary Board Member of The Wildlands Project—who openly promote Dave Foreman—a Board Trustee for the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society and founder and “strategic advisor” for Y2Y.
Locke, a retired lawyer, suggests that Canada should set aside 50 per cent of its land mass as a protected area.
Protected from? Well, people.
Which sits well with Foreman’s grand plan of Pleistocene rewilding and a “drastic reduction of the human population.”
The word “wilderness” is a word used to describe an area left in its natural state. For most of us the word invokes images of wild animals in a wild and beautiful setting. Places where we can spend some time inhaling the earth’s beauty.
But the reality is many environmental groups would rather see these areas set aside completely void of human activity. These environmental groups have successfully lobbied governments, both in Canada and the US, to set aside vast tracts of highly regulated public land that, in time, will again be lobbied by these same groups for even further regulation against human activity.
And this brings us back to Dona Ana County, New Mexico.
Dona Ana County is farm and ranch land and has been for many generations, its people left alone in a beautiful and unique part of the world to do what they do best. That was until the environmental extremists got involved and decided the lands in Dona Ana County had to be protected from the very people who live and work there.
Enter the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance (NMWA), founded at the hands of the everreaching Dave Foreman after his exodus from The Wildlands Project.
Foreman alone is intriguing and volumes could be written about the man many believe spawned the terrorist group Earth Liberation Front (ELF). His exploits with EarthFirst! Are well documented and his name shows up often in eco-terrorism discussions, including those of a past Subcommittee on Crime of the US Congress.
In an e-mail discussion with James Scarantino, an attorney and accomplished writer and a former Executive Director of the NMWA, I was told he resigned from his position because “I was not fully aware of Dave Foreman’s philosophy until a bit later when I bothered to read his work.”
According to Scarantino, “Underlying the problems with the Dona Ana County
wilderness campaign is the fact that the persons ultimately calling the shots, behind the screen of a legitimate-seeming coalition and local organizers, hail from the most radical wing of the environmental movement.
They include persons who founded and participated in EarthFirst!, the nation's first eco-terrorist group.”
And the deeper you dig, the more you find out just how connected these groups are to each other, including Canmore’s Y2Y. It becomes quite clear that these same groups have a much broader agenda, which is to remove the general public from federal and provincial lands.
While the residents of Dona Ana County continue their battle in New Mexico, here in Alberta, those who live and work in the Willmore Wilderness continue their fight to retain the existing legislation of this pristine part of Alberta. Their battles are not so separate; in fact, they are very similar.
According to Robin Campbell, MLA for West Yellowhead, there is definitely a connection.
“Y2Y is a concern,” said Campbell, who spent many years as a fishing guide in Jasper National Park. “They are a group of people who want to put their ideals on the rest of us. They are well-organized and well-funded and they pull at people’s heart strings.”
Campbell, who is listening to his constituents regarding the expansion of the Rock Lake Provincial Park boundary, is concerned with the direction his area is headed. Vast tracts of land previously used for hunting, fishing and trapping are suddenly being gobbled up by expansion without public consultation, something that doesn’t sit well with the feisty MLA.
“These people are preservationists. But you just can’t preserve something and expect it to stay the same. Like it or not, man has to manage the land in a responsible manner. Shutting people out isn’t the answer.”
Bazil Leonard has been guiding and outfitting in the Willmore for nearly 40 years. His reputation is synonymous with outfitting and his knowledge of the region is second to none. He also has a deep desire to keep the Willmore with its current legislation.
“We’ve been aware of Y2Y for quite some time now,” said Leonard in disgust. “They have no concern for the people who make their living here. They want people control, and they use the grizzly bear as a carrot on a stick to convince others they are right.”
The Willmore is currently being considered for World Heritage status in a UNESCO plan to expand the existing World Heritage Rocky Mountain Parks. A plan that worries Leonard.
“We got a management plan for the BC Kakwa and started to investigate UNESCO and their World Heritage Site Program and saw nothing but red flags,” said Leonard, who is the president of the Willmore Wilderness Foundation.
“In time, every site that has been given World Heritage status has seen tighter and tighter restrictions. Pretty soon it’s just a pane of glass you look through and can’t use. “Since Day 1 man has left a footprint. Man is here to manage the land, not abandon it,”
said Leonard, clearly disturbed by the actions of the environmental activists in his backyard.
We’ve been watching from the sidelines for years as massive tracts of land are set aside and placed under heavy restrictions against human activity. These land masses are given names like, “wilderness and conservation areas”, “wildland parks”, “wildlife corridors”, “wildlife sanctuaries”, “heritage sites”, “natural areas”, “national parks” and other names.
Many have merit, but just as many are the result of environmental activists who believe that human activity is the undoing of creation. That population control and the rewilding of North America are the only way to stop the scourge of the human race.
Ironically, this same vision will result in the loss of future generations to fully appreciate and admire the wonders of wild areas and wild places, to enjoy the fruits of the earth and all she has to offer.
Preserving wilderness is a grand idea, provided that preservation includes the responsible management of that same wilderness. Removing man from the scene is clearly, in the words of Bazil Leonard, “A Grand Illusion.”​

 

[250mark1]

http://www.albertaoutdoorsmen.ca/archives/outdoor-pursuits-may-08.html

 

[Billy Boy]

It is a four part series.

 

[Caper11]

Stop posting photo's of your buddies stuck up to his handlebars in mud ripping the crap out of a mud hole..... No matter if its on your own land or not, the greenies don't care.....

You hit the nail on the head with all of your points, but this one is the biggest IMO Tyler. I see so many people on FB and Instagram posting this sort of stuff hoping for likes and attention, but never think of the negative attention it also attracts.

 

[Summitric]

I was going to get back into quadding, after my knee replacement, but i don't think i will... I truly suspect shannon phillips and nutley are going to try and get this whole thing jambed through before their term is up in a little over a year. It's sad, but who's gonna stop them?

 

[TylerG]

You hit the nail on the head with all of your points, but this one is the biggest IMO Tyler. I see so many people on FB and Instagram posting this sort of stuff hoping for likes and attention, but never think of the negative attention it also attracts.

we have been saying it on here for a long time, why do you think Mr Ostacruiser was banned from this forum? He HAS to be one of the WORST for our sport on social media..... the greenies don't care if he's in Saskatchewan, they just see the destruction.

 

[TylerG]

I was going to get back into quadding, after my knee replacement, but i don't think i will... I truly suspect shannon phillips and nutley are going to try and get this whole thing jambed through before their term is up in a little over a year. It's sad, but who's gonna stop them?

there are lots of groups working to try to slow them down and stop them Ric..... even if you aren't an active quadder right now.... join a club buddy...... its $20......

 

[Billy Boy]

When you start peeling back the layers of who is involved in the Y2Y it becomes quite disturbing. There's more to it than the warm fuzzy feeling about saving wildlife.

 

[Billy Boy]

Another good site is Activist Cash. Look it up and you can start to see the money trail with a lot of the environmental groups.

 

[Summit 934]

Y2Y has no interest whatsoever in preserving the environment...it's all smoke and mirrors. In regards to the Castle area the minute we are out there will be big plans for development of condos, conference centres, hotels, shopping, etc...all it will be is another over priced tourist trap like Banff. And Y2Y will turn it all around and say "Just look at how we're living in harmony with nature" all while the relocation of wild animals is happening in every other mountain community...and we do more damage than that, not likely. But of course the provincial government is backing it...think of all the tax revenue and new jobs that will come along with that. So for those of you that don't join a club or get involved somehow by making your voice heard I hope you have a really big office desk because your about to have a $15-$20000 Sled/Quad as a paperweight!! Personally I hate Banff, I won't spend one cent of my money there and I won't in Castle either if that's the direction it goes.

Just my 2 cents...

 

[Billy Boy]

Follow the money!!!!!

 

[rknight111]

Snowandmud.com organized a rally last summer at the Alberta Legislature grounds and at the most 300 people showed up. It was advertised here, at dealers, on facebook, at the boat and sportsman show. Some common answers I received from many people, "Why should we go, what difference would that make, there going to do it anyway" that was a bad answer, and I head this from at least 20 people I've ask to attend.
So we need to support the dealers with this issue as well. We can all put some roadblocks in front of there plans but this will only work with LARGE attendance at these rally's. Spring is around the corner and its time to get involved all of you if you want to see trails in the near future.

 

[rknight111]

Please fill out this survey everyone, things like this help a lot.



https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/LYTFB2018

 

[tex78]

Please fill out this survey everyone, things like this help a lot.

View attachment 209037

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/LYTFB2018

Now that's a good survey that's not biased to y2y granola crunchers

Filled out

 

[ferniesnow]

Tyler, in all due respect, all the rallies, surveys, letters, etc.. aren't going to work. We can believe they will but the they have a mission and the political power to do it. It will be done and we will be sitting in the weeds.

How can the majority of people balk at protection of "their watershed"? The large centres have so many sheeple that it is totally discouraging.

IMHO, the only thing that will work is to dump the NDP and have a government with enough guts/balls to recind all the garbage. Maybe I'm wrong but I can't see the orange machine slowing down anytime soon.