The Maine Woods Coalition has sent out the alert, appended below, regarding the renewed political activism for Federal takeovers of private property in Maine. This campaign is coordinated with the release of the Ken Burns/Dayton Duncan PBS "documentary" series promoting National Parks later this month.
The National Parks 'documentary' concentrates on ten existing National Parks, including Acadia in Maine, but is intended to emotionally manipulate viewers and to pressure Congress into supporting expanded new Federal acquisitions nationwide.
The Burns/Duncan 'documentary', which whitewashes and ignores the role of eminent domain and other land use prohibition controls in establishing Federal parks, promotes the myth that Acadia was a "gift to the nation", ignoring the controversies and use of condemnation to acquire land.
The viro pressure groups are concentrating for now on obtaining massive new funding for government land acquisitions and planning -- in the form of a guaranteed Federal entitlement intended to prevent current limits on funding from slowing or stopping acquisistions of private property.
In an attempt to head off public controversy their current strategy is to downplay what regions will be hit until the money is in place. But a National Park System Plan for acquisition that includes Maine is already in place and Maine is already being publicly promoted as an acquisition target.
Here is the Maine Woods Coalition alert on an upcoming televised 3 million acre park takeover debate and the Burns/Duncan "documentary". One of the debate participants, Jym St. Pierre, was part of the original Wilderness Society planning in the 1980s targeting Maine for massive new Federal parks:
To Maine Woods Coalition Members,
This is to inform you that the Maine PBS Maine Watch show (Ch. 12 and Ch.10) that airs on Thursday Sept. 24th at 8pm, and Sunday Sept. 27th at 5pm will feature appearances from both sides in the national park debate in the Maine woods with Jym St. Pierre from RESTORE:the North Woods, and Eugene Conlogue, Millinocket Town Manager and Vice-Chair of the Maine Woods Coalition. This Maine Watch segment is planned specifically to air before the Ken Burns National Park "documentary" begins on Sept. 27th.
As we told you earlier, this newest Ken Burns PBS series is unlike his earlier works (The Civil War, Baseball) in that it is not an unbiased documentary on our national parks, but is political advertising conceived and promoted by Dayton Duncan after he was appointed by the Clinton Administration to the government-created National Parks Foundation, a "non-profit" lobbyist organization promoting the National Park Service. Duncan scripted and produced the series, which dishonestly uses scenic and rhetorical imagery to emotionally manipulate viewers to promote government land ownership without telling them the truth about how the National Park Service gets the land and how badly the government treats private citizens once it obtains power over a region.
Burns and Duncan are also collaborating with the National Parks and Conservation Association (NPCA), the private lobby arm for the National Park Service in Washington that in collaboration with the National Park Service and other enviromental pressure groups organized the 1988 political agenda to take over five massive areas in Maine and many more around the nation for Federal parks in what they called "mega conservation". Private landowners everywhere rebelled and their "National Park System Plan" failed. The release of the Burns/Duncan "documentary" in September is being coordinated with another big NPCA political initiative for more power and money for the National Park Service. The Maine Natural Resources Council is currently waging just such a campaign for funds for government land purchases in northern Maine.
Please send this message along to others who care about life in the northern half of Maine.
Thank you.
MWC Steering Committee
