Monday, July 21, 2008

Prepare to be “transitioned” into your new “habitat”


Paul has a plan for you. It may require “a vast array of policies and regulations,” and heavy taxes, he says.

One of the backers of smart growth plans for major cities envisions a global “Great Transition” of humans into concentrated population centers. Paul D. Raskin, director of the Boston-based Tellus Institute (Note: Tellus is now blocking access to its site, but much of the same material is here), expects people to resist the Great Transition. That’s why intergovernmental organizations and transnational corporations must create a marketing campaign “to inspire people [and] to seize the public imagination,” Raskin says in a Tellus video.

The problem of a push-back from a reluctant populace was echoed by Rappaport Institute Director and Harvard economist Ed Glaeser, in a Boston Globe article this week (see excerpt and link, below).

Both Raskin and Glaeser contributed to what is now called MetroFuture, a smart growth initiative for Greater Boston that will “shift growth from remote new suburbs to existing town centers,” according to the Globe.

A large group of financiers and institutes, the Kraft family, and the real estate tycoon Dick DeWolfe are also members of the MetroFuture initiative.

Similar smart growth plans are underway in Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore, as well as in Utah, Central Florida, and the Midwest. All of the plans are directly linked to the United Nations plan to create “habitat areas” in which human consumption and labor can be more easily controlled.

Alan Watt has recently been discussing the U.N.’s “Agenda 21“–which outlines the plan for human habitats, at Cutting Through the Matrix and Red Ice Creations Radio. You will not read about Agenda 21 in any mainstream article about “smart growth”–for that I recommend listening to Alan’s blurbs at Cutting Through the Matrix, and his interviews at Red Ice.

clipped from www.boston.com


Plan envisions bustling town centers

‘MetroFuture’ puts focus on suburbs

Planners mapping the future of Greater Boston want to encourage people to live and work in suburban town centers, and cut pollution, water usage, and traffic to improve the quality of life over the next two decades.
“The plan is fighting against both economic and political factors that will make this difficult,” said Ed Glaeser, economics professor at Harvard University and director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston.