"Up in Smoke" ..............follow me @teapartypassion: fun song @ i-tunes song "17 Trillion" https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/17-triiillliiiooonnnn-single/id636938802

   

 

Up in Smoke

      Hard to take a deep breath these days? A little burn in the eyes from the haze? Have to go out of town or in the hospital for oxygen? Smell a little BBQ spotted owl or the singed hair of some newly released wolves?   I actually smell money and opportunity burning;  money and opportunity that could have been Sierra County’s.

     The  Silver Fire in the Gila National Forest has reached over 30,000 acres.  It began from a lightning strike so the environmentalist can’t go crazy blaming environmental damage on imperfect humans.  An interesting letter to the editor last week though gave a time line for the fire and suggested that perhaps the fire could have been put out rather quickly when it first started.  So, maybe imperfect humans, or rather imperfect policy, did turn what might have been a manageable issue into an environmental catastrophe.

     Sierra County is rich in resources.  We have the largest lake in New Mexico.  We have a huge wilderness area for our backyard.  We have the resource of lots of space.  But the reality is we are a welfare county.  We have turned much of our resources over to big government.  Our lake is run by N.M. State Parks which siphons off a lot of the revenue generated here to sustain other parks and a large bureaucracy in Santa Fe.  The U.S. Forest Service controls millions of acres.  It is my understanding that Sierra County receives compensation from the U.S. government for surrendering control to them.  So instead of trying to utilize our resource of billions of trees for fuel and building materials, we rely on the U.S. Forest Service to ‘manage’ it for us and now witness that mismanagement in the smoke we see and air we breathe.   Finally, the Environmental Protection Agency and Santa Fe say they are going to make it painfully expensive for any city to have a landfill so we have to adhere to their regional plan of transfer stations costing the citizens of Sierra County even more money.

     Our resources of space, forest, and water are fully controlled by the State and Federal government.  If only our local counties, our officials, would only realize our full potential for independence.  As a county, we have fallen prey to the government handout;  no pride,  no respect,  no opportunity, and no dreams of what could be.  The smoke and ashes tell of something greater when the citizenry gives up its freedoms.

Mario diGesu                                                 Truth or Consequences                                                         6.19.13