By Don Wiltshire
Yes folks, it’s the last call for all of you formal protesters of the “water grab” to get your checks for $25 into the State Engineer’s Office before the June 28th deadline. It’s too late to become a formal protester at this point, but we need all of the support, moral and otherwise that we can get. Our water belongs to ALL of us! This $25 “hearing fee” seems a bit bizarre to me and people that I’ve talked to in a supposedly “free country.” It will, in effect, keep us in “good standing” with the Litigation Office, so that they might take our protests “seriously.” It’s one thing to send in a protest letter; it’s quite another to cough up $25 for the privilege of “speaking”, whether you choose to speak or not. For those of us who are being represented collectively by an attorney, our collective $25s will put more “weight” behind his or her testimony. Money talks.
For those of you with limited economic means, which is certainly nothing to be ashamed about in these outlandish economic times, there is help available. Please contact Danielle Fitzpatrick at 854-3310. This is what we’ve been fund-raising for. More funds will be needed when the formal hearing starts, whether it be for transportation or for maintaining the “tent city” on the nicely watered lawns of the Litigation Unit in Santa Fe. If we go the “teleconference route,” funds will be needed to set up computer & web-cam centers out here in the boonies.
Although I’m certainly not one to advocate civil-disobedience (heh-heh), I do enjoy a good dose of conceptual art. Remember all of those wonderful installations by Christo and Jeanne-Claude? They all overcame nearly impossible structural and environmental problems. They all made us stop and experience them. Running Fence in Sonoma and Marin Counties, California, 1972-76: eighteen feet high and 24.5 miles long; Valley Curtain in Rifle, Colorado, 1970-72: 1,250 feet wide and 182 feet high (it was ripped to shreds by a 60 mph wind 28 hours after completion); and The Wall - 13,000 Oil Barrels in the Gasometer, Oberhausen, Germany 1999. It stood 85 feet tall, 223 feet wide with a depth of 24 feet. Ironically, this is the amount of oil that is “leaking” into the Gulf of Mexico every two days.
Picture, if you will, gallon milk or water jugs, spray painted red and hanging on the front fence of the San Augustin Ranch LLC. We could start small, representing the number of gallons of water that would be removed from our common aquifer every second. Let’s see, 17.5 billion gallons every year divided by 31,556,926 seconds in a year equals 554.5 gallon jugs. It’s do-able! What a photo-op to make our point! By the way, if it ever gets that far, the pipe to carry that much water from the plains, over the hill west of Magdalena, then down Rt. 60 to the Rio Grande, at a rate of 36 inches per second, would have to be 5.6 feet in diameter.
As you watch the oil spewing up from the Gulf floor, it is the same amount per day of water that would be ripped from our aquifer in 6 ½ minutes! And all for what? So that the housing developments in Albuquerque and Santa Fe might expand unabated? So that the well-off might continue to fill their swimming pools in these same areas? Go ahead, use Google Earth to scope out the luxurious backyard pools in that region. Don’t be shy; this is the same technique that’s being used now in Greece to spot and slap “luxury taxes” on those same pools: just another austerity measure being used on a country that couldn’t keep its corporate borrowing under control (sound familiar?).
In order that we might be better prepared for the upcoming hearing with the State Engineer, The Magdalena Public Library and the Friends of the Library have scheduled a speaker on Wednesday, June 16 at 7:00 pm. in the Library meeting room. Denise Fort, Professor of Law, at UNM will present Water Marketing in the West: A Legal Perspective. A student of Prof, Fort’s has written a paper on the attempted “water grab” by the Augustin Plains Ranch LLC, so she will be well aware of our dire situation. Bring your questions.
Be sure to keep plenty of water available for both you and your pets in these incredibly hot days. The GRIZZ Project is contributing a valuable group of programs on animal care for our youth. Check out the schedule at the Magdalena Public Library Summer Reading Program, weekdays at 10 a.m.
If you have any comments, problems, solutions, upcoming events or Empty Milk Jugs, contact me at mtn_don@yahoo.com.
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