Imagine you have agreed to be an official host at an environmental conference in Denver. Wilderness, that is the word in the title. World Wilderness Congress. You are expecting biologists. Foresters. Park rangers. Maybe the odd policy person from the Department of the Interior. The badges arrive. You start reading them. And the first name you see is David Rockefeller.
The second name is Edmund de Rothschild.
After that, in no particular order, you read: James Baker, the United States Secretary of State. The then Secretary of the Treasury. Maurice Strong, a Canadian oil executive turned senior United Nations operator who would within five years be running the Rio summit itself. William Ruckelshaus, chairman of the largest waste company in the world and former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. The Secretary General of the United Nations operation in Geneva. Officials of the World Bank. Officials of the International Monetary Fund.
You stand there, badge in hand, and you ask the obvious question. What are the heads of the central banking and trust families of the western world doing at a wilderness conference?
Hunt asked it in 1987. He did not get an answer. He got a programme. He got dinner invitations. He got placed near the front for the keynote sessions. And then he started listening.
The thing to understand about a meeting like this is that the agenda printed in the brochure is not the agenda. The agenda is whatever the men with the most money in the room have decided will be the agenda. The other delegates are scenery. They are there so that the press release can describe a broad coalition of interests. The decisions are taken in the panel sessions where Rockefeller, Rothschild and Strong are seated together at the table and the chairman is one of their own. Everyone else watches.
What Hunt watched was the conversion of a planetary environment movement into a banking instrument. By the close of the Denver congress the World Wilderness Foundation had endorsed the creation of a new institution. The World Conservation Bank. It would, on paper, lend money to poor countries to protect their forests and wetlands. In practice it would take title to those forests and wetlands as collateral. Default on the loan and the bank takes the land. The land in question being roughly thirty per cent of the surface of the earth.
Read that again. Thirty per cent of the surface of the planet, transferred quietly into the collateral pool of an institution chaired by the same families that issue the currency the loans are denominated in. That was the deliverable from the wilderness congress. That is what the bankers came for.
What are the heads of the central banking families of the western world doing at a wilderness conference?