Behind the environmental lobby: it may seem stranger than fiction, but it's a documentable fact: the eco-socialist movement is financed by the super-rich as part of a comprehensive agenda for global control.

Homer Hickam was a 14-year-old living in a tiny West Virginia mining village called Coalwood when he learned that the Soviet Union had placed the Sputnik satellite into orbit. Like tens of millions of Americans, Hickam was at once inspired by the opening of a new frontier and alarmed to discover that the Soviets had taken an early lead in the Space Race.

Driven by the desire to explore the skies, rather than spending decades toiling in the bowels of the Appalachian earth, Hickam and his friends began to design and build their own rockets. In 1960, Hickam's rocket design earned him a gold medal at the National Science Fair--and put him on a trajectory leading to a career as a NASA rocket engineer.

Today, Hickam--whose memoir, Rocket Boys, was the basis for the 1999 film October Sky--has retired from NASA and become a bestselling novelist. In some ways, however, he is more worried now about our nation's future than he was as a 14-year-old looking for Sputnik in the October skies above Coalwood.

"Our economy is built on cheap, readily available energy," Hickam pointed out in an interview with THE NEW AMERICAN. "Without an adequate supply of it at a reasonable cost, I believe this country will fail, fragment, and its various components slip into third-world status. I fear our children and grandchildren will have to learn to live in poverty."

"We already see signs of the coming intense competition for fossil fuels, especially between us and China," continues Hickam. "Oil prices today are higher than they've ever been and are continuing to increase. Why? Because the Chinese, whom we've apparently decided should manufacture most of the products on Earth, need energy to make those goods and are bidding against us for it."

As Hickam observes, there are other potential sources of clean, inexpensive energy, such as controlled nuclear fusion. "Fusion is the energy source of our Sun and also hydrogen bombs, so we know it works," he points out.

The elements required for controlled nuclear fusion are deuterium (heavy hydrogen)--which "is plentiful in the world's oceans"--and Helium-3, which is difficult to find on the Earth, but can be found in abundance on the moon. "The moon is covered with Helium-3, a byproduct of the solar wind," notes Hickam. "One of the surprises of the Apollo [lunar] missions was the great quantities of Helium-3 found there. What we need to do is get back to the moon and learn how to mine Helium-3 while here on Earth intently developing a fusion plant."

Hickam's 1998 novel Back to the Moon addresses these concerns, albeit sometimes "with tongue firmly in cheek." In the near-future described in Hickam's story, the United States and the rest of the industrial world are threatened with economic and cultural extinction from a proposed UN World Energy Treaty that would impose draconian limits on energy production in the name of "saving the Earth."

The story's protagonists are "brave Americans who decide to take matters into their own hands" by mounting a private lunar expedition to recover a supply of Helium-3 for use in nuclear fusion experiments. The main antagonist is a shadowy and immensely powerful secret society known as the January Group, which was "named after Janus, the two-faced god who looks forward and back at the same time."

In the novel, the January Group controlled immense wealth--much of it provided by global oil interests--and claimed members at the highest echelons of politics, journalism, finance, and academia. Its objective is described by one conspirator as insuring "that at least some tranquility remained in the world, and [ending] wars by ending want--and competition.... [We are] dedicated to an orderly exploitation of the earth's resources for the benefit of all mankind."

Toward that end, the group not only promoted the UN's World Energy Treaty and radical environmental activism, it also used its financial clout to control any potential opposition. Where necessary, its agents could arrange for military conflicts and political turmoil as a means of advancing its designs for global control.

Near the end of the book, one of the group's most important assets, a traitorous eco-radical vice president, gives candid expression to the cabal's attitude toward the United States: This is a country that has been too powerful for too long, a shameless country of racism, pollution, out-of-control capitalism, and disregard for the poor and afflicted. Now I can say what I've always believed: It will be a great day for the world when this country gets a boot shoved in its face, is made to kneel before the peoples of the world.

From Fiction to Fact

While emphasizing that the problems his novel describes are real and that "all of the technology in it is either in existence or could be in fairly short order," Hickam emphasized to THE NEW AMERICAN that "Back to the Moon is no political dia-tribe; it was intended to be a page-turning novel." Asked about the inspiration for the fictional conspiracy he created, Hickam replied: "The January Group represents the coming together of radical environmentalists with those who think our wealth is not only permanent but in need of redistribution, while also believing the country is too powerful militarily. If you want an analogue for the January Group, I suppose the present Democratic Party would very well fit the bill."

It is beyond serious dispute that key elements of the Democratic Party reflect the viewpoint Hickam describes. But the party by itself possesses neither the formidable power nor the valuable anonymity attributed to the January Group. The Group also worked both sides of the political street --mobilizing radicals to storm the barricades while simultaneously controlling the pin-striped elites that enacted legislation and set global policy.

Surely, such cabals exist only in the pages of potboilers, or in their cinematic equivalent? Well, not exactly. There is a real-world equivalent of the covert Power Elite described in Hickam's engrossing work of fiction, and the strategies it employs are every bit as devious and amoral as those Hickam devised to entertain his vast reading audience.

For decades, subversive movements seeking to cultivate revolutionary political change have employed a technique often called the "scissors strategy." Political elites acting through government apply "pressure from above" by proposing "reforms" that drastically expand state power, supposedly to accomplish some common good. At the same time, street-level radicals and "grass-roots" activists supply "pressure from below" by creating the illusion of public support for the same supposed reforms. The key to ensuring that this strategy works is financial control over the supposedly independent radical groups by powerful tax-exempt foundations working in tandem with the political ruling class.

This process was described, in remarkably stark terms, by 1960s-era campus radical leader James Kunen in his 1968 memoir The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary. One of Kunen's comrades in the Marxist Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had been approached by representatives of the Business International Round Tables, who "tried to buy up a few radicals." "These men are the world's leading industrialists and they convene to decide how our lives are going to go," wrote Kunen. "They offered to finance our demonstrations in Chicago. We were also offered ESSO [i.e., Rockefeller Foundation] money. They want us to make a lot of radical commotion so they can look more in the center as they move to the left."

Jerry Kirk, who had also been involved in the SDS, as well as the Black Panthers and the Communist Party, gave an even more candid description of the scissors strategy in testimony before the House and Senate Internal Security Panels following his 1969 break with the revolutionary left. "Young people have no conception of the conspiracy's strategy of pressure from above and pressure from below," testified Kirk. "[The radical activists] have no idea that they are playing into the hands of the Establishment they claim to hate. The radicals think they're fighting the forces of the super rich, like Rockefeller and Ford, and they don't realize that it is precisely such forces which are behind their own revolution, financing it, and using it for their own purposes."

Laying the Eco-AstroTurf

In fact, the "super-rich" tax-exempt foundations devote substantial amounts of their wealth to the environmental movement to gain their own ends.

In 1968, to cite one noteworthy example, Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which laid out the key tenet of modern environmentalism: human beings themselves are aggressors against nature. Ehrlich's book, larded with now-discredited projections of civilization's collapse due to overpopulation, was used to generate widespread public alarm while foundation-funded activists and academics worked to alter public policy in the direction of authoritarian controls over the population.

This activism was coordinated by the Rockefeller-created Population Council and Population Reference Bureau, which in addition to receiving largesse from the Rockefellers, received millions from the Ford Foundation and similar bodies. The Ford and various Rockefeller foundations also sluiced millions of dollars into the coffers of groups advocating anti-capitalist, anti-private property campaigns, such as the Nature Conservancy, the National Audubon Society, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Conservation Foundation, the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and others devoted to eco-totalitarian objectives.

Astonishing as it may seem to many people, those on the inside of the emerging eco-socialist movement recognized the key role played by the super rich in funding and directing the revolution. One key admission came from then-Oregon Governor Tom McCall in the January/February 1974 issue of The Center magazine: "The Rockefeller Task Force on Land Use ... has said that, beginning now, development rights on private property must be regarded as being vested in the community." In 1975 the Rockefeller Task Force issued The Managing of Interdependence: The Planning Function, a report calling for a global central planning regime that would direct both world "peacekeeping" efforts and "environmental monitoring" activities.

That report was followed up two years later by The Unfinished Agenda, a blue-print for the transformation of the United States into a centrally planned society akin to the Soviet Union. The Agenda called for heavy taxation of gasoline and other fossil fuels; severe restrictions on the ownership and use of automobiles; draconian population controls; an end to development of nuclear power (a recommendation that has been fully implemented in the U.S.); and regimentation of agriculture and the food supply. This eco-totalitarian blueprint was the work of a panel underwritten by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and drew top leaders from foundation-funded eco-radical groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, Friends of the Earth, the Wilderness Society, the Nature Conservancy, and the Environmental Defense Fund.

Beginning with the first Earth Day in 1970, the foundation-fueled eco-lobby conducted an assault on the public mind. Propaganda promoting the Green Revolution was woven into the media, entertainment, and education. Millions of Americans were led to believe that the environmental movement sprang from authentic grass-roots concern for nature--rather than being built on a foundation of "AstroTurf" lobbies funded and organized by elitists seeking to control the human population.

In 1985, the Rockefeller Family Fund created the Environmental Grantmakers Association (EGA), described by the American Land Rights Association (ALRA) as "a cartel of eco-money." In form and function, notes the ALRA, the EGA "is the planning, coordination and monitoring center for hundreds of millions of dollars worth of environmental grant money that flow from the grantmakers themselves directly to the recipients."

The left-leaning investigative journal Mother Jones described the EGA's ability to control the supposedly grass-roots environmental movement thus: "By deciding which organizations get money, the grantmakers help set the agenda of the environmental movement and influence the programs and strategies that activists carry out."

Brief but instructive glimpses of that process were made available when the American Land Rights Association obtained and published transcripts from the EGA's 1992 Fall Retreat, in which eco-activists discussed strategies for indoctrinating and mobilizing the public to carry out Agenda 21, the UN's mammoth blueprint for global eco-regimentation unveiled at the Rio Earth Summit earlier that year.

In a session entitled "Environmental Education K- 12," for example, Barbara Link of the National Environmental Education and Training Foundation (NEETF) in Washington, D.C., disclosed: "We receive via the Environmental Protection Agency a federal appropriation every year. With those moneys we are mandated to make grants for environmental education and training ... to environmental education projects across the nation." The NEETF's objective, Link explained, was "environmentalism of the total curricula in public schools.... As a grantmaker we really have to focus on what is the best way we can really create an environmentally literate public"--that is to say, a public that accepts the Green Gospel uncritically.

The Charade Continues

Tax-exempt foundations are continuing their diligent application of the "scissors strategy." According to the 2000 edition of the authoritative Environmental Grantmaking Foundations directory, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which controls roughly one half-billion dollars in assets, lavishes millions on eco-agitators with the goal of "broadening and deepening the national environmental constituency and reinforcing its ability to act effectively." That is, to use tax-exempt donations "from above" to create political and institutional pressure "from below."

The International Center for Local Environmental Initiatives, for instance, received a grant from the fund "to expand the impact of its Cities for Climate Protection program, which helps municipalities develop plans for cost-effective greenhouse gas reductions"; this helps create the illusion of a public "consensus" in favor of the UN's Kyoto treaty to combat so-called global warming. It also opens the door to involving the U.S. in highly controlling international treaties like Kyoto, meaning that the U.S. would give its legislating function to an international power.

In similar fashion, the Rockefeller Family Fund, which controls approximately $60 million in assets, touts its "Citizen Education" and "Institutional Responsiveness" programs, which are also intended to cultivate radical eco-constituencies. The Family Fund also boasts of its "hands-on assistance to environmental groups," which includes acting as administrator for the Environmental Grantmakers Association.

The brightest star in the constellation of tax-exempt Rockefeller bodies, the Rockefeller Foundation, controls more than $3.4 billion in assets. Its areas of interest, according to the 2000 directory, included grants for "advancement of the Cairo Agenda"--the UN's 1994 global population control manifesto--as well as "advancing the theory and practice of sustainable livelihoods in the context of globalization."

Like the fictional January Group in Homer Hickam's novel, the EGA and its globalist allies seek to control the world in the name of saving the planet and ending "want." But their prescription for environmental ills would have lethal consequences for human liberty and prosperity.