Bradley Booster

It was a pleasant surprise to find the picture and profile of my old boss Dave Bradley in Jim Nintzel's "Democratic Doldrums" (May 17). The article appeared to present a good summary of the challenges to be faced by Dave and the Democratic Party as they strive to regain ground in Pima County. At one point in the article, Nintzel refers to Dave as being self-effacing, and nothing could be more true and at the same time so inadequate to describe him.

I had the honor of working for Dave as a Behavioral Health Technician at La Paloma Family Services for several years. During that time I had the opportunity to experience his quiet leadership, that challenged us all to rise to our own potential. His style of responding to a question with a question (betraying his counseling background) could be frustrating for those who did not want to grow and challenge themselves. For the rest of us, it pushed us to make the same kinds off tough decisions we demanded of the troubled youth we worked with.

As Dave works to lead the Democratic Party out of its current situation, I have no doubt of their success. In his work as the director La Paloma Family Services he has been challenged to do the impossible on a daily basis. Faced with the challenge of a population of ever more troubled teens, woefully inadequate community mental health resources, and maintaining staff for an extremely difficult job, Dave always appeared to take it in stride. Whatever the challenge or frustration presented by one of our clients or more often the various adults in their life, Dave never let us give up on a situation. I can remember many times my co-workers and I would proclaim the impossibility of working with a given kid, and Dave would nod and say, "Yes, but what can you do to make it work?"

Often when I hear of a person taking a leadership role in public life I wonder if they are deserving of the trust placed in them. In the case of Dave Bradley taking on the role of Chairman of the Pima County Democratic Party, I can only hope that the Democratic Party is deserving of him.

--George Marsden

Sea Sick

I am always overjoyed to see any article advancing the awareness of the consistent and ruthless rape of the delicate ecology of Southern Arizona, and the rest of the world, for that matter. Cows, cotton and alfalfa, and the over-irrigation needed to fuel the cultivation of these alien species in our desert, have caused irreversible damage to our water table. The Tucson valley is sinking into the ground at an exponentially increasing rate.

Tucson is not alone in the world in experiencing this depletion. Susan Zakin's column "The Next Holocaust" (May 10) was very pertinent, obviously, given the current state of things in the world. It pointed out that golden rule of chaos: The smallest changes in the natural flow of a system, in this case the ecology, can have monstrous repercussions, i.e. HIV and ebola surfacing from the Congo, one of the most threatened areas of the world.

But I would like to add one area of our natural world that seems to be continually overlooked, and was missed in Zakin's column, and that is the oceans. Ocean life depletes at a much greater rate than any rainforest. As our technology increases, we (humans) spotted the elusive and mysterious Architeuthis, the giant squid, for the first time recently. Scientists find new species of deep-sea life every other day, but for every one that is found 10 have just gone extinct. It is estimated that in the last 20 years, the net weight of all ocean life has gone down about 20 percent.

Squids have oversized nerve axons that, along with powerful jet propulsion and an otherworldy habitat, make them a formidable quarry to find, but how many more will be seen before they are all gone? My point here is that we can destroy all the land, mammals, birds and trees we want and still have a rock to stand on, but destroy life in the oceans ... who knows what could happen? If anything needs protection, it is the water.

--David Medine