Secretary of State James Baker travelled to Colorado to give the keynote address at the Fourth World Wilderness Congress in September 1987. The congress was a project of the International Wilderness Leadership Foundation, whose board includes Michael Sweatman, formerly of the Royal Bank of Canada; Dr. Ian Player, a leading British conservationist; and Sir Laurens van der Post, intimate of Prince Charles and devotee of the Satanist Carl Jung. According to an IWLF official, one of the group’s benefactors is a longtime friend of James Baker.
     In addition to Baker, the September 1987 congress drew such prominent participants as Baron Edmond de Rothschild, David Rockefeller, Sweatman, representatives of various U.N. agencies, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and Gro Harlem Brundtland, the pro-Soviet Norwegian Prime Minister who unveiled Our Common Future, the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, which she chairs.
     The key objective of the meeting was to build international political support for the Brundtland Commission’s principal recommendations, especially its call for creating a World Conservation Bank, which would facilitate swaps of Third World debt for conservation projects in the debtor countries. In other words, debtor countries would hand over masses of their national territory to an international holding company, in return for a partial write-off of debt that they couldn’t possibly pay under any circumstances.
     Baker not only gave his tacit approval to the proposal at the Wilderness Congress, but, according to reliable sources, has been urging the Bush administration to throw its weight behind it. There is, consequently, a very strong likelihood that the Bush administration will give its official blessing to some version of a World Conservation Bank, most likely the one which Michael Sweatman is now developing under the auspices of the World Resources Institute.
     In its original form, the WCB drew sharp criticism from various quarters because it could potentially gobble up the entire one-third of the world’s land mass that is classified as “wilderness.” Sweatman, who takes credit for first proposing the World Conservation Bank concept five years ago, heads up the International Conservation Financing Project, which has been charged with cooking up a politically saleable version of the WCB.
     Financed by the United Nations Development Program, the Canadian International Development Agency, the MacArthur Foundation, the Organization of American States, the Pew Foundation, the United Nations Environment Program, and U.S. Agency for International Development, the ICFP issued its first report Feb. 6. Repeatedly referencing the Brundtland Commission, and calling for a “vision that transcends borders, that places the interest of humanity above the interests of nations,” the 160-page report proffers a number of recommendations for imposing a “global environmental ethic,” especially on the Third World.

Among the most important these are:

-          Establishing an International Environmental Facility – Sweatman’s revised version of the WCB – which would “help mobilize substantial, additional financing at appropriate terms for conservation projects from the bilateral development agencies, the multilateral development agencies, and, where possible, the private sector.” The Facility’s “basic function would be to help identify, design, and finance sound conservation projects in the Third World.”

-          Setting up a World Environmental Fund, administered by the UNDP, which would be financed by fining “polluters,” and especially those activities which produce “greenhouse gases.”

-          Furthering various forms of the debt-for-equity exchange, including, for example giving some debt relief to Third World countries which prohibit the use of tropical forest areas for cattle ranching; or directing foreign loans to preservation of wilderness areas, rather than for development.

     Sweatman and others associated with the project have privately expressed great confidence that the Bush administration will soon go to bat for the ICFP’s proposals, which will be produced in final form this summer. “We have many ins to the Bush administration,” someone close to the ICFP disclosed. “Bush and Baker are both ardent environmentalists. That’s clear not only from the public record, but also from private discussions. We are very well connected to Baker, and, with the President’s known outlook, we anticipate strong support for the project.”
     Through Sir Laurens van der Post, a leading backer of the project, Prince Charles’s support is also being enlisted, although that’s supposed to be kept a big secret until later in 1989.