We sent the following letter several days ago to an Elfrida resident. The recipient is a friend of all Cochise County residents. It received a positive response among his circle of friends. He suggested we share it with a wider audience.
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Dear friend,
Ben Franklin is famous for thinking through the relationship between words and action:
Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.
—Poor Richard’s Almanac (published 1732-1758 by Franklin)
We’d like to think that we’re doing something so important that people should be writing about it. Our actions to stop groundwater theft are our top priority.
We can summarize the entire Cochise County dilemma in the one-panel cartoon above.
It doesn’t matter whether anyone voted for or against the AMA. Both blocks (symbolized by Harry Potter and his mate Ron Weasley) feel the terror. The much greater menace by a thousand is Corporate Ag. It will drain our aquifers whether we have an AMA or not. The same desecration occurring in “unmanaged” Willcox occurs in “managed” Elfrida.
Corporate Ag will continue taking us for dupes and rolling over us. The Riverview manager and the orchard owners have said as much. In their public statements posted on the ADWR site, they say the silent part out loud. To them, Cochise County is nothing but a giant pool of water for them to mine. They foresee no future for our piece of Paradise that folk today would one day recognize. Recognize as Cochise County, that is. They have no use for safe yield. For them it’s managed depletion–a technical term for “drill, baby, drill.”
Friend, soon the ADWR will reveal the AMA for the farce that it is. Or, as friend of the campaign Michael Gregory called it, the nothing burger. It’s the only thing on the menu.
Our hope is to unite Voted for the AMA and Voted against the AMA. We need these two groups, who were once opposed to each other, to come together to overpower Corporate Ag.
The county needs the dedication and resolve that you’ve shown for years now. In fact we should commemorate the meeting you had at your house last year. What should we call the stage you’ve helped inaugurate? “The End of the Beginning”? Soon we’ll be at the Beginning of the End, which we’ve written about before. The end we refer to, of course, is the end of the open veins of Cochise County.
Let’s make sure our actions today always give people something to write about!
Your friends, –The Groundwater Guardians