SUSTAINS Act is Not Sustainable for Our Western Way of Life
By U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman
An emerging and dangerous issue which should be of concern to everyone in the Western U.S. is the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) implementation of the Sustainability Targets in Agriculture to Incentivize Natural Solutions (SUSTAINS) Act of 2021.
The USDA’s news release on this bill notes the SUSTAINS Act will use private donations to “expand implementation of conservation practices to sequester carbon, improve wildlife habitat, protect sources of drinking water and address other natural resource priorities.”
The environmental impact of these still-unidentified projects will then be quantified – using United Nations accounting practices – and the private donor is able to keep some portion of the financial value the government designates for the so-called resulting “environmental services.”
This is a bad law – designed with nefarious purposes – and it fits neatly within President Joe Biden’s disastrous 30×30 agenda.
The 30×30 Initiative is an international “sustainability” agenda intended to “rewild” and block human use of our lands and waters – essentially returning them to the condition they were allegedly in before mankind set foot here.
This is a radical and unworkable plan which would wreak havoc on food, energy and mineral production, which has given us the greatest quality of life in world history – the very prosperity allowing us to protect our environment and resources.
Since their first week in office, the Biden-Harris administration has pushed this radical agenda on the American people, while bowing to the international community and their climate change hysteria.
The latest mechanism Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are using to push this agenda is through what they refer to as “natural capital accounting,” and Nancy Pelosi’s parting gift as speaker was to provide the administration another tool to implement this scheme.
Natural capital accounting is being used to attempt to quantify the value of nature to society. Arbitrary values, derived from political extremism rather than economics, measure not just nature but its benefits to society, which includes everything from air and water to pollen, photosynthesis, dirt and more.
Determining the value of these “environmental services” derived from American lands is the catalyst to use regulations, federal spending and outside influence from radical climate groups to seal off these lands from productive use, including food and energy development, harvesting of building materials and more in the name of avoiding harm to these so-called “environmental services benefits.”
Congressional Republicans advocate against omnibus spending bills not just because they are bad fiscal management, but because they have also become a vehicle for bad people to stealthily implement bad policy – “poison pills,” as I have often referred to them.
This was a common tactic of Pelosi for years and gave the 30×30 activists a massive win in her final omnibus with the inclusion and passage of the SUSTAINS Act.
Claiming USDA’s mandatory spending of billions of dollars on conservation programs was not sufficiently meeting demands, the SUSTAINS Act authorizes private entities to contribute and partner their funds with federal dollars to extend the scope of these programs on private lands, thereby setting up a direct conflict between private property rights and the “natural assets” associated therewith.
On a surface level, saving taxpayers from more spending in the face of our growing national debt may seem like a good idea. In reality, this entire concept will empower the private entity contributing the funds to dictate the terms of their investment, which includes prioritizing specific natural resource priorities – conservation and non-use – in targeted areas of the country and prescribing their share of the environmental service benefits derived from the land.
And there you have it. The SUSTAINS Act gives outside entities ownership of the “natural processes” on private lands, which will limit the productive use of lands to maximize environmental service benefits, all in the false name of conservation.
To be clear, these private contributions can come from any entity or individual.
Corporations would be able to pay USDA to expand flawed environmental solutions to protect their bottom line or advance their environmental, social and governance profile. Valuable farmland could be blocked from being used for farming. Foreign entities, such as the Chinese Communist Party, could provide funding for purchasing these lands – taking them out of productive use, which is the ultimate goal of the 30×30 agenda.
The SUSTAINS Act is the newest tool in the natural capital accounting arsenal and provides federal bureaucrats a way to extend their tentacles into private land management, a goal the Biden-Harris administration has not been shy about.
The federal government already owns 48 percent of our surface estate in Wyoming, yet this does not seem to be enough for the radicals in the Biden-Harris administration.
USDA using private funds to purchase the “natural assets” of our private lands is just one more cog in their wheel as they move to control more and more lands, primarily in the Interior West.
As Wyoming’s lone Congressional representative, I have been at the forefront of the fight against this idea of natural capital accounting and was successful in blocking the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposal to list natural asset companies on the New York Stock Exchange.
We must be just as aggressive in engaging with the SUSTAINS Act to limit the damage it can do to private property rights.
Rep. Harriet Hageman represents the state of Wyoming in the U.S. House of Representatives. She grew up on a ranch, attended Casper College on a livestock judging scholarship and earned both her bachelor’s degree and law degree from the University of Wyoming. She can be reached by visiting hageman.house.gov. This opinion column was originally published in Northern Ag Network on Sept. 23.
