One Utah

Las Vegas, as we speak, is changing the way we will live in the West, forever. (See KUED Desert Wars) While claiming not to do once again to the farming and ranching folk, and indeed all of us, in the Owens Valley early in the last century, Las Vegas liars in every way are patterning their duplicitous disastrous greed for money and water in precisely the same game plan. (NPR Story) As they deny doing this, through the mouths of those claiming to represent us all in Congress (our folks and Nevada’s representatives), the Las Vegas creatures are buying up the ranches and farms of the West Desert in Utah and Nevada for huge profits for a few and a barren wasteland forever for the rest of us. Folks, Mexico, Brigham Young and Native America and everyone since who settles in the West look first for water. Land and food come later and demand the former. It’s water, not oil, that is and will yet be more of the world’s real treasure as we proceed into this century.

Even if no water changes hands, with the critical mass, as my dear friends Cecil Garland and Annette Garland said, in a letter I delivered to the Governor and the Lt. Governor a few days ago, is disappearing. People in small numbers, and spread out to accommodate farms and ranches, need each other to survive. For calving, fencing, haying, a doctor or two; a school teacher, like Annette, trained at BYU years ago. For trips to a town to buy an occasional thing that local commerce cannot provide. And they watch after each other, love each other, and provide, again, the critical mass to allow civilization to exist in cowboy land and farming life; human beings to share and love life with each other.

If Las Vegas is allowed to continue this planned robbery, it is no exaggeration to say that Las Vegas will extend to Phoenix and to Springville, Utah: one solid mass of people in one vast human…or perhaps inhuman…mass. For a very short time. This land is desert, folks. And low or high plateau desert land was never intended to contain such an inhumane habitation.

This is not the Jeffersonian vision. Nor the vision of Native America. Nor the vision of Brigham Young and Joseph Smith, a true Jeffersonian. Again: if no water changes hands; and this lying thieving bunch of power hungry and money hungry people sell other people’s birthrights, then the entire West….the Great Basin Kingdom of Native America, the Mormons, and all the way of the West will change, disastrously, until Mother Nature bites back, which it most surely will.

And if water is indeed pumped from Utah’s West Desert, and Rural Nevada, the West we know is forever gone. It is not possible to return to the wonders of the West after Las Vegas glitter and grime replace the rural west and, for that matter, the urban West as we know it now. The plans are to place hundreds of pumps to steal Utah water, and rural Nevada water, to Las Vegas, whose growth rate, with that of St. George, Utah, to our shame, continue to grow like rabbits humping each other, plus and invasion of all the rabbits from Australia as well, replicating, to put it with more piety, geometrically, which even Mormons and Catholics have never been able to do, arithmetically.

The lessons of MX missile and the violation, once again, by White America against the interests of Native America, in the intent to place MX missiles in the areas Protected by the Treaty of Ruby Valley, now repeats itself. The thieves are patterning their heist of Owens Valley, that is, their success in killing rural food-producing Southern California, by creating the monster of modern limitless Las Angeles, are once again confronting us in another way to destroy ourselves in Las Vegas’ attempt to violate each of the seven deadly sins: greed, avarice, lust, power, money, treacherous treason against the national interest.

Some of us are trying to revive the MX coalition that stopped the creation of a vast area of concrete and water-sucking monster of thousands of hydrogen bomb-laden missiles to be based, of course, amongst the Mormons, the Native Americans, the Mexicans (legitimate former Mexico that we stole in the last century’s Unjust War). Join us, please.

This water matter doesn’t raise the natural interest of everyone, as MX did. The Mormon Church is silent, as usual, as the real moral ethical and spiritual interests go unnoticed. Sons of general authorities, attorneys all, are hired as public relations lobbyists to sell our heritage for their mess of pottage. Let’s get into this one, folks, right now.

Here’s a big dose of reality, for those of us, supposedly, in the liberal tradition of humanity: and that means all of us old Whigs, meaning libertarians, who want our party back, after tilting, in 1812: Harry Reid, one of the real good guys, my buddy, in the fight against MX, along with Sisters Rosemary Lynch and Clarita, Franciscan sisters, is now Majority Leader, not a Congressman as he was then, but a Senator, the Nation’s senior senator. His votes and his money (vastly more important) come from Las Vegas. So, his natural instincts to follow the money, honey, will put him in the enemy’s camp. We in Utah have no such double-bind: conscience v. money and power. They want our water. They can’t have it. Join me and Cecil and Annette Garland, and thousands of others. Let’s stop this stupidity. Those who want to replicate like rabbits, get a hobby. No, I mean another one. Try bird-watching, or stamp collecting. Or just maybe, sit down and read Cadillac Desert, the splendid history of water and the West, by Marc Reisner, circa 1990-92. That’s the bible, for those of us who love and treasure our West.

Edwin Brown Firmage (website, bio)
Samuel D. Thurman Professor of Law, Emeritus
University of Utah College of Law Salt Lake City, Utah

This entry was posted Thursday, December 21st, 2006 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Las Vegas Water Grab, Utah Politics. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.