Joe Delk Presentation

INSIGHT-USA COMMENTS

Joe Delk

            Good Afternoon, my name is Joe Delk and I am a son of the American West as I am a child of a living and all powerful and graceful God. It is my great pleasure to be here today to be a part of Insight-USA, New Mexico style!

            Yes, I serve as chairman of the Dona Ana Soil and Water Conservation District, chairman of the Council of Border Conservation Districts, and board member of too many other similar organizations that are predicated on preserving and perpetuating our customs and culture. It has never been my intention of spending so much of my life in this protection, but my government has required me to defend the things that our pioneer families worked so hard to build only to have it destroyed through the tyranny of our federal government. . . What a shame it is?

            In my brief time this morning as a participant of this rancher panel, I am going to alert you, the audience, of the rising importance of conservation districts for the defense of our country.

            Conservation districts are a hidden reserve of community leaders who have direct ties to the natural resources that form the foundation of our economy and our moral and spiritual standards. We are discovering in New Mexico, the efforts from those grassroots bodies may stem the tide of the onslaught we face against the federal government and the environmental cartels.

            Let’s speak briefly about that term, Environmental Cartel. A cartel is a combination of producers joined together to control the integrity of their product all-the-while working toward a monopoly on the outcome. Every one of us must recognize what the environmental front is doing. They are a body of participants working to control and expand measures that elevate a secular spiritualism while suppressing and diminishing the presence and importance of Christian men and women. They seek domination … they seek a monopoly of direction and policy. They are a cartel and we must henceforth adopt that concept and understand the dark consequences of its proliferation.        

            Conservation Districts, by their direct ties to the land, have not yet been altered or corrupted to become an arm of the progressive environmental cartels. They are a bastion of conservative leaders who are more closely aligned with traditional values that start with the sovereign individual and family units.

            It is clear in federal law that federal land agencies are required to reach out to local governmental entities to assure consistency of federal actions with local land use plans and policies so as to minimize socio-economic impacts to the custom and culture of the communities. But do they adhere to those requirements . . . not in New Mexico they don’t.

            So our approach has been to adhere to the dictates of federal law and pursue our rightful and legal place at the planning tables of the federal land agencies and their like-minded environmental contemporaries. We have come to the realization that our only hope is to have some degree of control of the local federal planning process to protect our communities.

If we were forced to array a progression of events that must take place, we would first have a continuing voice after our planning presence is established. We must then work to force the issue that nothing takes place in our communities unless the need arises from that community. Outside agendas are not acceptable. Those agendas are inevitably dangerous and destructive. If something appears in the Federal Register regarding our area, it must be work that we directed.

Next, we need to embark on the process that reveals that the greatest inequality in the United States today is the wreckage of our most basic God given rights, our property rights, our freedoms to act, and the sovereignty of the individual.

We must recognize the immensity of this effort, but we must also be vigilant and intent on not duplicating errors that have elevated such leadership matters beyond what we can control from our communities. Our Founders got it right. The problem is too few of them actually understood the concept, and the vast majority of today’s leaders and citizens have no clue as to the simplicity of those original concepts.

Conservation Districts may be a most pure form of local government in our system. They may also be the key to our future.

Thank you