The Planner

My new novel The Planner was released on Friday and is available for free as a download on Kindle or PC using a free Kindle App this week through July 5th.  Since The Planner deals with many of the issues that I have blogged about for the past two years, I decided to take this post to explain what this book deals with and why writing it meant so much to me.

The Planner is a work of fiction. All characters in this book are strictly products of my imagination. However, the issues that The Planner addresses are very real. From the statistics about our aging population, to the data about annual food waste in the U.S. which was obtained from the EPA’s website, this book deals with real challenges that our world is facing.

U.N. Agenda 21 is also real. In 1992, the United Nations’ Earth Summit launched an initiative called Agenda 21, which had as one of its primary goals redistribution of the world’s wealth and reallocation of the world’s resources.   Agenda 21 calls for an aggressive environmental agenda to be imposed through local ordinances mandating common green spaces and tightly-packed “human settlements.”  These goals were initially marketed to Americans under the guise of “global warming” and then “climate change.” Today they are being repackaged using the term “sustainability.” One of the ultimate goals of Agenda 21 is to eliminate the American way of life—single family homes, private property and individual automobiles.  Instead, proponents of Agenda 21 aggressively promote public transportation and mixed-use housing—tiny, crowded apartments situated above shops and stores. This initiative creates cities where the government can control where and how we live, where we work, where we worship, and how we raise our families.

Over the past twenty years, Agenda 21 has been voluntarily adopted by cities and municipalities throughout the United States through membership in the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives—now renamed ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainable Solutions. The organization has over 1100 member cities, and nearly six hundred of these are located in the United States. Most major U.S. cities are members of ICLEI. From Portland, Oregon, to El Paso, Texas, cities across the United States have embraced the concepts of sustainability by passing city ordinances mandating “Smart Growth” and “Smart Code”.  These ordinances rob individual property owners of basic ownership rights, including the rights to rebuild or remodel properties or to construct homes or buildings on their own land. Smart Growth and Smart Code policies also permit municipalities to exercise eminent domain to confiscate private property for the greater good of the community.

In 2010, retiring Senator Chris Dodd sponsored the Federal Livable Communities Act which mandated federal standards for environmentally-sustainable housing.  His bill created a new federal czar who would have had oversight over development in all cities and towns in the United States. Dodd’s bill was to have been his final crowning achievement in the Senate, but it failed to obtain the needed votes for passage.

In June of 2012, Agenda 21 celebrated its twentieth anniversary in Rio de Janeiro with the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development. Rio+20 promoted radical initiatives, including creation of a new international environmental agency with authority to mandate green agendas—investing in green technologies and structures, reducing pollution caused by animal husbandry, introducing sustainable diets and reducing food waste both at the point of sale and consumer-use levels.  The conference goals also called for worldwide legalized abortion and access to birth control and “conservation of genetic resources.” The conference proposed that these goals and the massive social indoctrination program needed to successfully implement them be financed using a number of methods including a new green tax on every American family.

Also, in 2012, Alabama became the first state to pass legislation to protect private property rights of all individuals, to safeguard citizens against the loss of their property without “due process of the law,” and to prohibit implementation of any of the goals of Agenda 21, either directly or indirectly. The Alabama law also forbids any municipalities from giving or receiving any funding to any organization which is connected in any way to Agenda 21. The bill was passed and signed into law because ordinary citizens became concerned about the far-reaching implications of this U.N. global power grab and decided to take action to stop it. However, in spite of citizen activism and recent attention given to Agenda 21 by the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and other conservative and libertarian organizations, most Americans do not even know that it exists, and they remain completely unaware of the threat that it poses to our freedoms, our national sovereignty and our way of life.

As I said at the beginning of this post, The Planner is fiction, for now.  But I do believe that the nightmare of Section W and the FMPD could become reality for many of us if we refuse to act to reign in big government.

Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen. Her newest novel, The Planner, about an out-of-control, environmentally-driven federal government, was released June 29, 2012. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net/.