Tucson Weekly: Name Of The Game (May 14

The Nature Conservancy Tries To Grab The Water And Control The Town Of Patagonia.
By Jeff Smith
WHAT'S IN A name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
Smith Bill Shakespeare said that. Bill who? Shakespeare. Maybe you remember him as William. Sounds more important that way, doesn't it? You're more inclined to take this shit seriously when I invoke the mighty name of William By Jesus Shakespeare.
The first thing you want to do when you're planning a successful career is to give yourself the right name. Avoid anything ending in Hitler, Oozing Boils, Rats With Dicks This Long...things of that sort.
Nature would be nice. Even people who live in cities like Nature. Even people who really have little use for nature like Nature, because it sounds so, well, natural. You can invoke some truly nasty stuff, and if only you amend it with some variant of the term nature you're bound to wind up with something wholesome and appealing.
Take shit, for instance. No thank you. But make that Natural Shit and you've got yourself a product that invokes the very compost of life...fertile, fecund...with just the right soupcon of funk to make it marketable in the as-yet-ungentrified inner-city.
So, if your purpose were to capitalize on the blue-blooded appeal of returning the earth to those bygone better days when baronial estates supported vast herds, flocks, prides, coveys, ostentations and mobs of game animals, inaccessible to the Great Unwashed (Shakespearean ref. 2) save by permission of the feudal lord, you wouldn't want to create an organization named, say, The Elitist, Exceedingly Well-Educated White Persons' Tax-Exempt Corporation For Telling The Rest of You Pitiable Slobs What You Can Do With Your Own Land, Air and Water.
Far more politic to call it something more cuddly. Like The Nature Conservancy.
Which is what they did. And the crowd went wild. Because after generations of fouling our own nests until the smell offended even the smelly, and worse yet, watching the wealthy capitalist swine getting steadily richer by poisoning us in the process of gobbling up our limited resources, enough of us normal, blue-collar working stiffs came to embrace the idea of environmentalism. If only to preserve a bit of backyard lawn to mow and smell of a summer afternoon...or a woodlot to stalk some twilight in autumn in search of venison for the family larder.
Environmentalism is one of those core philosophies that simply makes sense to anyone with common sense.
And like any other good idea, environmentalism can--and will be--carried to insensible, insensitive extremes by people blessed with too much time, too much money, too much success. Because as some dead white guy said, power corrupts. Or as somebody else said, success spoils. Same idea. This wonderful thing known as The Nature Conservancy has come in certain--widening--circles to be seen as a monster. The Soup Nazi of the green world. Old couples leave them the family farm and die happy, thinking the north forty will be forever green and pristine. The Conservancy's lawyers and real-estate department trades the farm to a developer for a chunk of ground that better suits the Conservancy's long-range ambitions, and--hey presto!--the north forty becomes North Forty Estates, a gated community.
Down here in poor benighted Begonia, the Nature Conservancy owns more land surrounding the town (Patagonia, to you auslanders) than anyone. They've got the place surrounded on three sides, and threaten to control virtually all the water rights.
Is this a problem? Not if you listen to the increasing percentage of people who wear natural fibers, sensible shoes and drive Swedish cars. My dear friend Mary Monroe, who started The Patagonia Press to provide a voice other than the then-fascist Weekly Bulletin out of Sonoita, reports the preachings of The Nature Conservancy and its local manager Jeffrey Cooper with utmost reverence, and will not hear a discouraging word said of them in her paper. Not even a mild demurrer in a letter to the editor.
How can one even think of questioning the motives of (drum roll) The Nature Conservancy?
I'll tell you how: When a single organization, a single land-owner, a single monolithic 900-pound gorilla gets the whip-hand in a small community such as Patagonia, you can kiss democracy good-bye. No matter how good you assume that gorilla's intentions to be, they can change.
They can go from good to very, very bad. Or from bad to worse. In any case, the wishes of the gorilla are not the wishes of the people, and last time I checked, We The People still were the party of the first part in these parts.
I've got a lot of background to fill you in on, but for now suffice it to say that what's happening in Patagonia is that the Nature Conservancy wants a certain guaranteed amount of the water that runs through Sonoita Creek from up north, through the town of Patagonia, and through the preserve that was given to the Conservancy years ago by Lucia Nash.
So far, so good. But the Conservancy was not content with the half-century of carefully gathered stream-flow calculations made by the U.S. Geological Survey at sites all over the watershed. The Conservancy applied to the Arizona Department of Water Resources for a guaranteed allotment of the stream flow. They then persuaded the ADWR to allow them--The Nature Conservancy--to generate new stream-flow data, and to be paid for doing it, by in-kind contribution credits. So the Conservancy has replaced 50 years of data comprising more than 13,000 measurements, with 120 samples taken over six years.
Surprise, surprise, the Nature Conservancy data show something like five times the stream flow that a half-century of study by the federal government has proven. What this means is that the way Sonoita Creek actually flows is about a fifth of what the state Department of Water Resources is accepting as scientific fact from The Nature Conservancy.
This means that the Conservancy can say, legally, if their figures and their application are approved:

Gee, the creek is running slow this year and we're not getting the acre-feet of water we've been guaranteed so these speckled dais and Gila top-minnow can thrive. Therefore the Town of Patagonia and other upstream water-users will have to cut back their pumping. Shower with a friend and drink whiskey.
Attractive as communal bathing might be to some, the herb-tea crowd isn't going to feel comfortable brewing it in Jack Daniels. And if you think it can't happen, you're more gullible than you look.
And dumber. Stay tuned.

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