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'No
Darby Refuge' leader responds to request for USFWS meeting
by
Julie Kay Smithson
4/18/02
- Ohio - (Note to the thousands who are also receiving this email:
Unlike the 'giving
up' on the 'proposed wildlife refuge' that we've been fighting here in
Ohio
for 3 1/2 years, this USFWS employee is offering to meet with me to
discuss
"a local conservation action alternative (LCCA)." Why
would travel from
Minnesota to Ohio be necessary if the entire proposal had been scrapped?
Perhaps you could ask him yourself. 1-800-247-1247.)
Mr. Larson, Regional Director, USFWS, Region 3:
This email is also being sent to many editors, friends who attended the
Darby
Farmland Rally in 2000, and other interested parties. Let's get
this issue
out into the open, since the 'media' won't print it, shall we?
Let's see if
I can get it published and posted and spread, so many will know that
what is
being said and what the intent is, is not one and the same. Either
USFWS
gives up and takes its 'partners' and leaves us alone, or USFWS still
lusts
after our Ohio prime farmland and clean waters (natural resources) --
you
can't have it both ways, sir.
Pardon the difficulty in being respectful, when your employer continues
to
browbeat my rural community and its human population. I have, to
my
knowledge, never sought to tell you how to manage your home, or that
your
family should move so I could put a park where you live, or told you
that you
could be retrained as a diesel mechanic, as Mr. Hegge so artfully and
arrogantly told one of my neighbors, who asked what he was expected to
do
besides farm (read: FEED PEOPLE, like you and Mr. Hegge).
You are surrounded by those who use language reengineering in order to
put
people through unspeakable hardship. You may be one of them.
I've seen that
faint smile flickering when my neighbors and I ask questions that come
from
our hearts. Do you find pleasure in our discomfiture, sir?
Why would you seek a meeting with me, if the area will be permitted (LOL)
to
use what we were using before anyone trespassed into our area -- local
initiatives? Why would you offer to travel from Minnesota to Ohio
to meet
with me, if LOCAL is the operative word here? Why do you think we
need a
federal agency representative to 'help' us? Why would the
oh-so-cooperative
media keep printing stories about how USFWS has given up efforts on the
'proposed refuge,' when it is so crystal-clear that the lust for our
'natural
resources' has not diminished in the least? What happened to the
talk of
'endangered species' after the Army Corps of Engineers masterfully
smothered
over 50,000 ENDANGERED FRESHWATER MUSSELS in the Muskingum River at the
Devola Lock, the same mussel species that farmers have in the streams
here
(gee, I guess the production agriculture 'practices' aren't nearly as
hazardous to the mussels as the federal agencies)? The COE -- or
"the
polluters of the Potomac" -- never paid a dime of the $258,507 that
the Ohio
Attorney General sought in damages, money that, incidentally, would have
come
from my and my neighbors pockets in tax payments.
Just a few questions before you pack for the trip.
By the way, pasted below is my latest letter
to the editor, so there'll be no
confusion about where I stand on this. The ONLY 'conflict
resolution' that
will be achieved here is when the whole kit and kaboodle of you, OSU,
TNC,
OCSC (Ohio Chapter of the Sierra Club), etc., pack and leave, never to
return, and we get to go back to what we were doing when we were so
rudely
interrupted.
Miss Julie Kay Smithson
213 Thorn Locust Lane
London, OH 43140-8844
1-740-857-1239
www.nodarbyrefuge.0catch.com
(it is a zero, not a capital "O")
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