In Carroll County, Md., all five county commissioners were swept from office for supporting the plan. In Missoula, Mont., police had to be called in to quell an uproar over paying dues to an organization to help implement it. And in Albemarle County, Va., the harried board of supervisors quit paying those dues and even backed out of a related national agreement.

From one end of the country to the other, a 22-year-old, entirely voluntary United Nations planning document known as Agenda 21 has increasingly come under bitter attack from a wide array of far-right fearmongers. Led by nearly a dozen extremist groups and their propagandists, the plan — a document meant to help local communities deal with overpopulation, pollution, poverty and resource depletion — is being pilloried as a secret conspiracy to impose global governance. The end point, these ideologues insist, is the destruction of freedom and the onset of tyranny.

Already, the results have been shocking.

At least three states — Arizona, Missouri and Oklahoma— have considered laws, each of which passed one chamber of their legislatures, to halt the purportedly noxious effects of Agenda 21; Alabama went all the way, passing a 2012 law that was signed by Gov. Robert Bentley. Major political battles have broken out over it in Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Montana, Ohio and Texas. Even the Republican National Committee, in January 2012, denounced Agenda 21 as a “destructive and insidious scheme” to impose a “socialist/communist redistribution of wealth.”

Agenda 21 is not a treaty. It is not a legally binding document. Even its recommendations do not come from the top down, but are meant to encourage local communities to come up with their own solutions. It does not have the slightest power to force anyone, American or otherwise, to do anything at all.



President George H. W. Bush signs a United Nations accord on climate change in 1992.

And it was signed, in 1992, by President George H.W. Bush and the leaders of 177 other countries — nations representing 98% of the world’s population.

But the fears Agenda 21 has provoked plug directly into more than a century of far-right worries about any international body imposing any kind of control on the United States. It is the latest iteration of the decades-long property rights movement, a movement that has included militant upsurges like the “Wise Use” movement of the 1980s and the militia movement of the 1990s. Taking the place of the communist bogeyman, the United Nations has become the fearmongers’ chief demon.



Tom DeWeese

“Any time you get some sort of UN program that suggests any kind of change in the way people live, even if it seems outwardly benign and even voluntary, it’s going to be taken up by people with a conspiracist bent,” explained Michael Barkun, a Syracuse University political scientist and scholar of conspiracy theories.

The hysteria is palpable.



Glenn Beck

To Tom DeWeese, perhaps the leading critic of the plan, Agenda 21 will lead to a “new Dark Ages of pain and misery yet unknown to mankind.” To TV and radio conspiracist Glenn Beck, it is the leading edge of a push for “government control on a global level.” It is an “anti-human document,” a “False Religion,” a mandate to “round up” Americans, a conspiracy to cut the population by 85%, the first step toward a “police state,” a “seditious new plan” for “totalitarianism.”

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who led the 2013 government shutdown, even claimed it would “abolish …. golf courses, grazing pastures and paved roads.”



Ted Cruz

“The anti-Agenda 21 movement has had a demonstrable impact on land use policy in Virginia,” said James A. Bacon, a newsletter publisher and conservative activist who focuses on land use issues there. “The fixation on Agenda 21 creates a bizarre distraction from the very real challenge of articulating principled conservative positions on how to manage growth, development and the environment — issues that won’t go away just because we choose to ignore them. Sadly, just uttering the words ‘Agenda 21’ is sufficient in some quarters to shut down the discussion.”

Back to the Beginning

To be sure, when Agenda 21 was adopted at the so-called Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992, it was heralded as a key agreement, the first global effort to take on what was increasingly seen as a looming environmental crisis.

In a semi-official 1993 book explaining the plan, Daniel Sitarz described it enthusiastically as “a document of hope,” a “comprehensive blueprint for humanity to use to forge its way into the next century by proceeding more gently upon the Earth. As its sweeping programs are implemented world-wide, it will eventually impact on every human activity on our planet. Deep and dramatic changes in human society are proposed by this monumental historic agreement.”

Sitarz was being optimistic, to say the least.

Perhaps because the document was, in fact, so sweeping — even though it contained no requirements, enforcement mechanisms or even significant funding — it quickly came under attack from conservatives in the United States. In the years that followed, a surprising number of conservatives and right-wingers took on the basic premise of the plan, disputing the world’s scientists on such issues as global warming, the ozone layer, rising oceans and a host of related problems.

Many of those opponents saw Agenda 21 as inimical to business and industry — it did, after all, focus on carbon emissions and related issues — and also believed that it represented an attack on property rights because it proposed to not allow owners completely unfettered use of their lands and businesses.

But to denizens of the radical right, particularly those involved in the growing antigovernment “Patriot” movement, it was worse than that. Agenda 21, they insisted, was merely the latest step in a dismal march toward a totalitarian, socialistic “one-world government,” or New World Order. This kind of conspiratorial thinking was particularly evident among certain Patriot groups that warned in the 1990s that the UN intended to turn most of America into a human-free “biosphere,” or gigantic wildlife preserve, necessitating the murder of most of the U.S. population.

After all, the far right had been sounding the alarm about all international agreements and controls going back to the League of Nations in the early 20th century and even before. Indeed, one Patriot website, Sovereignty.net, produced a “Timeline to Global Governance” that started in 1891 and included financial pacts, treaties, regional and international associations, plus, naturally, Agenda 21.

The Activists

Tom DeWeese, who heads an organization called the American Policy Center, was probably the first to focus on Agenda 21, launching attacks on it almost before the ink on the document was dry. To DeWeese, the plan is the “ruling principle of the revolution,” a sea change that will end with the imposition of “a new kind of tyranny,” something akin to both socialism and fascism. He believes that Agenda 21 is ultimately responsible for what he sees as destructive forces in American society, including multiculturalism, same-sex marriage and other cultural changes.

DeWeese produces materials including an anti-Agenda 21 kit, complete with workbooks, DVDs, and the book Shattered Dreams: One Hundred Stories of Government Abuse. Another one of the books he distributes includes a section on the “Delphi Technique,” said to be a form of mind control to aid propagandizing.



Political provocateur Glenn Beck may have done more than anyone to spread false

conspiracy theories about Agenda 21, which he describes as part of a globalist plot to

“suck all the blood” out of American communities.

For many years, DeWeese soldiered on almost alone, but as time passed he began to gain adherents, or at least his ideas did. DeWeese and the others saw the plan as a direct attack on the American way of life, a scheme to force Americans out of large suburban homes into urbanized, “pack’ em and stack ’em” apartment complexes, and to insist on mass transportation rather than individual vehicles — a way, in a phrase, to impose a collectivist ethos on a freedom-loving people.

Ultimately, many of those who followed DeWeese thought, the UN intended to create a kind of radical-left utopia, where guns will be banned, the UN will raise a global army to enforce its directives, and freedom will die as globalist planners impose their vision of social order, equality, sustainability and “smart growth.”

The John Birch Society — the ultra-paranoid organization best known for accusing President Dwight D. Eisenhower of being a communist agent and claiming that fluoridation of water was a nefarious attempt to poison Americans — also got into the act early, sending a correspondent to cover the original Earth Summit in 1992. Although it didn’t concentrate heavily on Agenda 21 at first, in recent years it has conducted hundreds of one-day briefings around the country on the topic.

In those sessions, many of which involve local and regional politicians, the JBS has shrilly warned about the perils of environmentalism. In 2008, for instance, it handed out cards mocking “The New False Religion, Worshipping the Earth.”

“Advocates of a UN world government have drafted an Earth Charter, which they compare to the Ten Commandments and keep in an ‘Ark of Hope,’ the group said in a comment about Agenda 21 with no apparent reference to reality. “Will you let the United Nations or any other group undermine the faith of your family?”

DeWeese and others are part of a network of radicals peddling essentially similar ideas about Agenda 21 (see profiles, p. 13). Michael Coffman, for example, is the executive director of Environmental Perspectives Inc. At a 2008 “Freedom 21” conference in Texas, Coffman described the plan as “[a]n anti-human document, which takes aim at Western culture, and the Judeo-Christian and Islamic religions.” He said it would ultimately lead to a communist redistribution of property.

Michael Chapman of Ed Watch, a group against public education, sounded similar at the conference. To Chapman, the plan is to restrict economic development, not so as to protect the environment but just to give more power to the government. “The new world theology is pantheism,” he added. “Nature is God.”

Another fairly well-known right-wing activist, John Bush of Texans for Accountable Government, cited Agenda 21’s alleged final goal when he tried to get his hometown of Austin, Texas, to drop a resolution meant to make the city more energy efficient. “Before carbon was thought of as the most evil thing in the world,” he said, “there were … internationalists hashing out a plan to further their scheme for world government through the means of excessive environmentalism.”

Fox News, Glenn Beck and the RNC

Conservative commentators have enthusiastically joined the attacks, too.

Dick Morris, the Bill Clinton adviser-turned-Fox News conspiracy theorist, excoriates Agenda 21 backers in his 2012 book, Here Come the Black Helicopters: UN Global Government and the Loss of Freedom. He accuses them of “cancelling out both free will for the individual and democratic determination of policies for the nation. Only their fetish has priority.” Fox News’ Eric Bolling sounds similar, saying in 2012 that a proposed White House Rural Council sounded “eerily similar to a UN plan called Agenda 21, where a centralized planning agency would be responsible for oversight into all areas of our lives. A one-world order.”

Remarkably, there is also some opposition to Agenda 21 from the left, notably in the form of Democrats Against UN Agenda 21. The group, which hosted a major conference on the plan in 2011, is led by self-described lesbian feminist Rosa Koire, who came to the issue through battles over zoning in Santa Rosa, Calif., where she owns property. Koire, who wrote the popular book Behind the Green Mask: U.N. Agenda 21, claims the plan will ultimately bring on the economic collapse of the U.S. She reserves special animus for those who lobby for bicycle lanes, describing them as “testosterone-laden zealots” who are the “‘shock troops’ for this plan.”

Perhaps the most effective purveyor of the Agenda 21 conspiracy theory has been Glenn Beck, especially before he left Fox News in mid-2011. “Those pushing … government control on a global level have mastered the art of hiding it in plain sight and then just dismissing it as a joke,” he said around that time as he waved a copy of the 294-page document. “Once they put their fangs into our communities and suck all the blood out of it [sic], we will not be able to survive.”

In 2012, Beck went further, publishing a dystopic novel with co-author Harriet Parke called Agenda 21. It purports to tell a post-Agenda 21 tale of America, a place where the beleaguered heroine is confined to a depressing apartment in a planned community, spending her days treading on a special pad to produce energy. In this world, children are taken from parents and raised in group homes, mating partners are assigned, and people recite pledges in honor of squirrels.

“[I]f the United Nations, in partnership with radical environmental activists and naïve local governments, get their way, then the themes explored in this novel may start to look very familiar, very quickly,” Beck writes in an afterword.

The most dispiriting aspect of the entire book may be Beck’s comment that “since those who speak about Agenda 21 are constantly marginalized as radicals or conspiracy theorists, I wanted to include a link to the official 2012 GOP platform.” Although that platform, by the time it was adopted in August 2012, dropped some of the RNC’s wilder language about communism from earlier that year, it still had this: “We strongly reject the U.N. Agenda 21 as erosive of American sovereignty.”

On the Ground

In this era of extreme political polarization, politicians with relatively large followings have jumped on the Agenda 21 bandwagon, simultaneously demonizing environmentalism, the United Nations and any kind of global planning.

During his short-lived presidential campaign, Newt Gingrich said that he would “explicitly repudiate” the plan signed by the first President Bush, who led Gingrich’s Republican Party until just two years before Gingrich became House Speaker in 1995. He described it as “interference from the United Nations.”

That was comparatively calm talk.

Introducing anti-Agenda 21 legislation that ultimately failed, Oklahoma state Sen. Sally Kern (R), already infamous for her wild-eyed anti-gay commentaries, said that the plan would destroy American property rights and result in a ban on cars powered by fossil fuel. Arizona state Sen. Judy Burges (R), an anti-Obama “birther” who also introduced an anti-Agenda 21 law that failed, said that the “sinister and dark” plan would require that certain “people should be rounded up.” Burges said it would force Americans from the land they own, ruin Arizona businesses, mandate a “redistribution of wealth,” and, in the end, “control every aspect of our lives.”

In Georgia, Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers organized a four-hour, closed-door anti-Agenda 21 briefing in October 2012 for fellow Republicans that was delivered by “birther” Field Searcy. Attendees were told President Obama was using “mind control” techniques to push land use planning, and that the UN planned to force Americans from suburbs into cities and also was implementing mandatory contraception to curb population growth. Around the same time, after a debate about raising sales taxes to pay for transportation improvements, state Sen. Bill Heath (R) said Agenda 21 advocates wanted to “essentially conquer the world through limiting everything we do.” And a former state gubernatorial candidate, running for the Cobb County Commission, condemned plans for a jogging and biking trail along a certain highway, saying that it was the work of auto-hating backers of Agenda 21.

In Missouri, legislators cut funding for the Department of Motor Vehicles after it came to light that it had turned over a list of 163,000 residents with conceal-carry permits to federal investigators. The move followed testimony to lawmakers from Melissa Wilson, wife of state Rep. Kenneth Wilson (R), in which she said, “With this information going to the federal government, I feel that I will be a target. With Agenda 21, I will be someone who will be put on a watch list.”



Although other states have passed resolutions and considered laws condemning Agenda 21, only Alabama actually enacted legislation meant to outlaw any possible effects of the UN plan. The law was proposed by state Sen. Gerald Dial (R-Lineville) and signed by Gov. Robert Bentley.

In Carroll County, Md., all five county commissioners were voted out of office over their support of the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), which supports Agenda 21 and helps local communities plan sustainable development. (The Huffington Post reported in October 2012 that 29 members of ICLEI had quit as a result of anti-Agenda 21 activism.) Local activist Richard Rothschild, who led opposition to the commissioners, said that Agenda 21 was “a direct assault on private property rights and American sovereignty” and “arguably an amalgamation of socialism and extreme environmentalism.”

In Missoula, Mont., police had to be called to calm a December 2012 government meeting where some $1,200 in dues to ICLEI was under discussion. In Albemarle County, Va., the board of supervisors halted dues payments in 2012 to ICLEI and also withdrew support for a national agreement on climate change. In the Springboro (Ohio) Community City School District in 2013, the ACLU threatened action when officials proposed a “controversial issues policy” requiring that students of sustainable development also read about Agenda 21 conspiracy theories.

And in Naperville, Ill., two female opponents of “smart meters” — devices that measure electricity use in businesses and homes in order to rationalize energy production — were arrested in January 2013 as they tried to prevent installation. Opponents of the smart meters claimed without evidence that they were linked to illness and cyberwarfare, and endanger property rights and liberty in general.

There are almost too many of these kinds of encounters to count. But the most dramatic action — outdoing states like Kansas, New Hampshire and Tennessee, which all passed resolutions condemning Agenda 21 — came in Alabama. There, on May 16, 2012, after just a few minutes of debate, legislators voted unanimously for Republican state Sen. Gerald Dial’s S.B. 477, which says “the state of Alabama and all political subdivisions may not adopt or implement policy recommendations that deliberately or inadvertently infringe or restrict property rights without due process.” Of course, existing laws plainly already prevented such property seizures.

Whither Agenda 21?

Is Agenda 21 on the ropes?

For all the agitation, it’s not clear. A June 2012 poll by the American Planning Association, which has been shocked by the attacks on what seems like a perfectly sensible approach to planning, found that 85% of respondents didn’t know enough to make a judgment about Agenda 21. Just 6% said they opposed the UN plan, while half again as many — 9% of survey respondents — said they supported it.

What does seem clear is that the world is growing more complex and facing more challenges that really do require serious advance planning. Despite the barrage of anti-science propaganda, there is virtually no doubt among climate scientists and others that we face huge challenges related to climate change, rising oceans, and resulting disastrous weather events — challenges that it seems certain can only be effectively met by multinational action. In addition, there are major challenges related to population growth and shifts in concentrations of people. By 2050, the Census Bureau expects the population to grow by 40% to 440 million people, and huge numbers of baby boomers are expected to very shortly begin moving to smaller homes and, in many cases, different parts of the country, as they retire.

There has been something of a backlash to the anti-Agenda 21 movement. In 2012, for instance, an anti-sustainable development bill was killed in Arizona after the state Chamber of Commerce lobbied against it, saying it could drive away firms with sustainable development plans, according to the Huffington Post.

“I think the Tea Party people who turn up shouting at planning meetings are heading for a McCarthy moment,” said Chattanooga, Tenn., Mayor Ron Littlefield, in a reference to Communist witch hunter and Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, according to the Post. “Many people are sick of their scare tactics.”

That may well be. But an enormous number of politicians, commentators, activists, conspiracy theorists and others have swallowed the story of the anti-Agenda 21 zealots, making any kind of rational discussion of the environment and related issues extremely difficult. And that is the basic problem. Dealing with the serious problems that confront our nation and our planet becomes incredibly difficult when the public discussion is poisoned with groundless conspiracy theories.