These are the most important words you will read today

It is a dark reality what is happening and something needs to be done. YOU ARE LOSING YOUR COUNTRY. IT IS TIME TO DO SOMETHING.

DO SOMETHING.

Sandspur

---------------------------------------------
January 19, 2026
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
JAN 20
Late last night, Nick Schifrin of PBS NewsHour posted on social media that the staff of the U.S. National Security Council had sent to European ambassadors in Washington a message that President Donald J. Trump had already sent to Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre of Norway. The message read:

“Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT”

Faisal Islam of the BBC voiced the incredulity rippling across social media in the wake of Schifrin’s post, writing: “Even by the standards of the past week, like others, I struggle to comprehend how the below letter on Greenland/Nobel might be real, although it appears to come from the account of a respected PBS journalist… this is what I meant by beyond precedent, parody and reality….” Later, Islam confirmed on live TV that the letter was real and posted on X: “Incredible… the story is actually not a parody.”

International affairs journalist Anne Applebaum noted in The Atlantic the childish grammar in the message, and pointed out—again—that the Norwegian Nobel Committee is not the same thing as the Norwegian government, and neither of them is Denmark, a different country. She also noted that Trump did not, in fact, end eight wars, that Greenland has been Danish for centuries, that many “written documents” establish Danish sovereignty there, that Trump has done nothing for NATO, and that European NATO members increased defense spending out of concern over Russia’s increasing threat.

This note, she writes, “should be the last straw.” It proves that “Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him. Also, he really is maniacally, unhealthily obsessive about the Nobel Prize.” Applebaum implored Republicans in Congress “to stop Trump from acting out his fantasy in Greenland and doing permanent damage to American interests.” “They owe it to the American people,” she writes, “and to the world.”

Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s doctor Jonathan Reiner agreed: “This letter, and the fact that the president directed that it be distributed to other European countries, should trigger a bipartisan congressional inquiry into presidential fitness.”

Today three top American Catholic cardinals, Blase Cupich of Chicago, Robert McElroy of Washington, D.C., and Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, issued a joint statement warning the Trump administration that its military action in Venezuela, threats against Greenland, and cuts to foreign aid risk bringing vast suffering to the world. Nicole Winfield and Giovanna Dell’Orto of the Associated Press reported that the cardinals spoke up after a meeting at the Vatican in which several fellow cardinals expressed alarm about the administration’s actions. Cupich said that when the U.S. can be portrayed as saying “‘might makes right’—that’s a troublesome development. There’s the rule of law that should be followed.”

“We are watching one of the wildest things a nation-state has ever done,” journalist Garrett Graff wrote: “A superpower is [dying by] suicide because the [Republican] Congress is too cowardly to stand up to the Mad King. This is one of the wildest moments in all of geopolitics ever.”

In just a year since his second inauguration, Trump has torn apart the work that took almost a century of struggle and painstaking negotiations from the world’s best diplomats to build. Since World War II, generations of world leaders, often led by the United States, created an international order designed to prevent future world wars. They worked out rules to defend peoples and nations from the aggressions of neighboring countries, and tried to guarantee that global trade, bolstered by freedom of the seas, would create a rising standard of living that would weaken the ability of demagogues to create loyal followings.

In August 1941, four months before the U.S. entered World War II, U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill and their advisors laid out principles for an international system that could prevent future world wars. In a document called the Atlantic Charter, they agreed that countries should not invade each other and therefore the world should work toward disarmament, and that international cooperation and trade thanks to freedom of the seas would help to knit the world together with rising prosperity and human rights.

The war killed about 36.5 million Europeans, 19 million of them civilians, and left many of those who had survived homeless or living in refugee camps. In its wake, in 1945, representatives of the 47 countries that made up the Allies in World War II, along with the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and newly liberated Denmark and Argentina, formed the United Nations as a key part of an international order based on rules on which nations agreed, rather than the idea that might makes right, which had twice in just over twenty years brought wars that involved the globe.

Four years later, many of those same nations came together to resist Soviet aggression, prevent the revival of European militarism, and guarantee international cooperation across the Atlantic Ocean. France, the U.K., Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg formed a defensive military alliance with the U.S., Canada, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland to make up the twelve original signatories to the North Atlantic Treaty. In it, the countries that made up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) reaffirmed “their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments” and their determination “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.”

They vowed that any attack on one of the signatories would be considered an attack on all, thus deterring war by promising strong retaliation. This system of collective defense has stabilized the world for 75 years. Thirty-two countries are now members, sharing intelligence, training, tactics, equipment, and agreements for use of airspace and bases. In 2024, NATO countries reaffirmed their commitment and said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had “gravely undermined global security.”

And therein lies the rub. The post–World War II rules-based international order prevents authoritarians from grabbing land and resources that belong to other countries. But Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, for example, is eager to dismantle NATO and complete his grab of Ukraine’s eastern industrial regions.

Trump has taken the side of rising autocrats and taken aim at the rules-based international order with his insistence that the U.S. must control the Western Hemisphere. In service to that plan, he has propped up Argentina’s right-wing president Javier Milei and endorsed right-wing Honduran president Nasry Asfura, helping his election by pardoning former president Juan Orlando Hernández, a leading member of Asfura’s political party, who was serving 45 years in prison in the U.S. for drug trafficking. Trump ousted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and seized control of much of Venezuela’s oil, the profits of which are going to an account in Qatar that Trump himself controls.

This week, Trump has launched a direct assault on the international order that has stabilized the world since 1945. He is trying to form his own “Board of Peace,” apparently to replace the United Nations. A draft charter for that institution gives Trump the presidency, the right to choose his successor, veto power over any actions, and control of the $1 billion fee permanent members are required to pay. In a letter to prospective members, Trump boasted that the Board of Peace is “the most impressive and consequential Board ever assembled,” and that “there has never been anything like it!” Those on it would, he said, “lead by example, and brilliantly invest in a secure and prosperous future for generations to come.”

The Kremlin says Putin, whose war on Ukraine has now lasted almost four years and who has been shunned from international organizations since his indictment by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, has received an invitation to that Board of Peace. So has Putin’s closest ally, President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, who Ivana Kottasová and Anna Chernova of CNN note has been called “Europe’s last dictator.” Also invited are Hungary’s prime minister and Putin ally Viktor Orbán as well as Javier Milei.
And now Trump is announcing to our allies that he has the right to seize another country.

Trump’s increasing frenzy is likely coming at least in part from increasing pressure over the fact the Department of Justice is now a full month past the date it was required by law to release all of the Epstein files. Another investigation will be in the news as well, as former special counsel Jack Smith testifies publicly later this week about Trump’s role in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Smith told the House Judiciary Committee in December that he believed a jury would have found Trump guilty on four felony counts related to his actions.

Smith knows what happened, and Trump knows that Smith knows what happened.

Trump’s fury over the Nobel Peace Prize last night was likely fueled as well by the national celebration today of an American who did receive that prize: the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. The Nobel Prize Committee awarded King the prize in 1964 for his nonviolent struggle for civil rights for the Black population in the U.S. He accepted it “with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind,” affirming what now seems like a prescient rebuke to a president sixty years later, saying that “what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up.”

Trump did not acknowledge Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year.
While the walls are clearly closing in on Trump’s ability to see beyond himself, he and his loyalists are being egged on in their demand for the seizure of Greenland by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who is publicly calling for a return to a might-makes-right world. On Sean Hannity’s show on the Fox News Channel today, Miller ignored the strength of NATO in maintaining global security as he insisted only the U.S. could protect Greenland.

He also ignored the crucial fact that the rules-based international order has been instrumental in increasing U.S.—as well as global—prosperity since 1945. With his claim that “American dollars, American treasure, American blood, American ingenuity is what keeps Europe safe and the free world safe,” Miller is erasing the genius of the generations before us. It is not the U.S. that has kept the world safe and kept standards of living rising: it is our alliances and the cooperation of the strongest nations in the world, working together, to prevent wannabe dictators from dividing the world among themselves.

Miller is not an elected official. Appointed by Trump and with a reasonable expectation that Trump will pardon him for any crimes he commits, Miller is insulated both from the rule of law and, crucially, from the will of voters. The Republican congress members Applebaum called on to stop Trump are not similarly insulated.
Tonight Danish troops—the same troops who stood shoulder to shoulder with U.S. troops in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021—arrived in Greenland to defend the island from the United States of America.
—
Notes:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/trump-letter-to-norway/685676/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/22/honduras-elections-leftist-party-libre

https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/19/europe/putin-board-of-peace-gaza-trump-intl

https://www.icc-cpi.int/defendant/vladimir-vladimirovich-putin

https://www.nato.int/en/about-us/official-texts-and-resources/official-texts/1941/08/14/the-atlantic-charter

https://www.nato.int/en/about-us/nato-history/a-short-history-of-nato

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1964/summary/

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1964/king/acceptance-speech/

https://eng.belta.by/president/view/trumps-letter-to-lukashenko-full-text-and-what-it-means-175942-2026/

https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/us-catholic-cardinals-urge-trump-administration-embrace-moral-129346423

https://www.politico.eu/article/denmark-to-boost-military-presence-in-greenland/

https://www.nato.int/en/about-us/official-texts-and-resources/official-texts/1949/04/04/the-north-atlantic-treaty

https://www.nato.int/en/about-us/official-texts-and-resources/official-texts/2024/07/10/washington-summit-declaration

https://fortune.com/2026/01/17/trump-nations-1-billion-membership-payment-peace-board-united-nations/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-17/trump-wants-nations-to-pay-1-billion-to-stay-on-his-peace-board

https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/2025-12/Smith-Depo-Transcript_Redacted-w-Errata.pdf

X:
nickschifrin/status/2013107018081489006
faisalislam/status/2013143632522445099
faisalislam/status/2013177130536890877

Bluesky:
joycewhitevance.bsky.social/post/3mcs5zlstp224
ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3mcslnjb2622n
gtconway.bsky.social/post/3mcsmygfb3c2k
vermontgmg.bsky.social/post/3mcsqlpp6ls2g
noelreports.com/post/3mcsndx5qcs2e
antongerashchenko.bsky.social/post/3mcse2pf5js2v


© 2026 Heather Cox Richardson
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
Unsubscribe

Messing with DNA

On January 25, 2008  what was then the Tampa Tribune I stumbled upon the below article by Rick Weiss in its “Nation/World” section.  It struck me as something extraordinary even though it was apparently not considered of significant news value since it was buried in a back section of the paper on page three.  

If you’ve seen the movie “Legend”, it will send shivers up your spine.  

If you’re a strict Creationist, it’ll probably make you anxious that mankind may be about to transgress on turf that should be strictly reserved for the Heavenly Creator.  And, if you’re an evolutionist who finds comfort in the thought that whatever will evolve will evolve and it won’t be your fault, you’ll probably not be able to sleep at night for fear of what we may be on the verge of doing to ourselves and our only known home in the cosmos. 

Is this really an extraordinary development in mankind’s penchant for dabbling in dangerous places?  I don’t know, but if you don’t think this is worth registering in your list of life’s priority events that happened when you were alive, you might want to consider this thought:  

It appears we are moving toward a point where mankind may be able to finally improve his miserable lot in some manner that meets at least somebody’s idea of earthly perfection, or, as is more likely the case given our history of violence and abuse of forethought, we may be stumbling stupidly toward our own final destruction.

Ponder that as you go about your day today.

Sandspur

------------------------------------

Md. Scientists Build Bacterial Chromosome

By Rick Weiss

Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 25, 2008

Scientists in Maryland yesterday said they had built from scratch an entire microbial chromosome, a loop of synthetic DNA carrying all the instructions that a simple cell needs to live and reproduce.

The feat marks the first time that anyone has made such a large strand of hereditary material from off-the-shelf chemical ingredients. Previous efforts had yielded DNA strands less than one-twentieth the size, and those pieces lacked many of the key biological programs that tell a cell how to stay alive.

On the basis of earlier experiments, the researchers believe the new, full-length loop would spontaneously "boot up" inside a cell, just as a downloaded operating system can awaken a computer -- a potentially historic event that would amount to the creation of the first truly artificial life form.

Team members emphasized that they have not done that yet but expressed confidence that they would do so before the end of the year.

"There are barriers . . . but we are confident that they can be overcome," said J. Craig Venter, who led the effort with Daniel G. Gibson and Hamilton O. Smith at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville. The work appears in yesterday's online edition of the journal Science.

Venter said the goal is to design novel microbes whose handcrafted genomes endow them with the ability produce useful chemicals, including renewable synthetic fuels that could substitute for oil.

Critics, however, countered that without better oversight of the fledgling field, synthetic biology is more likely to lead to the creation of potent biological weapons and runaway microbes that could wreak environmental havoc.

"Venter is claiming bragging rights to the world's longest length of synthetic DNA, but size isn't everything. The important question is not 'How long?' but 'How wise?' " said Jim Thomas of the ETC Group, a Montreal-based group that has called for a moratorium on the release and commercialization of synthetic organisms pending further public debate.

Venter's team started by determining the precise order of all 580,076 base pairs, or "letters" of DNA code, inside one of the simplest microbes known to science: Mycoplasma genitalium, a bacterium that can infect the human genital tract. The scientists bought small pieces of DNA, then perfected painstaking methods to stitch them together inside bacteria and yeast cells in exactly the right order.

The final product -- 582,970 base pairs in all -- is a near-exact replica of M. genitalium's genome, with a few intentional differences. The team omitted a DNA snippet that allows the microbe to infect other cells, for example, and added extra DNA as "watermarks" to differentiate their construct from the naturally occurring variety.

"It's the first synthetic bacterial chromosome," Venter said. "Every one of those base pairs started as a chemical in a bottle."

George Church, a Harvard geneticist leading competing efforts to develop novel life forms -- not from scratch but by modifying existing bacteria -- said the work marks something less than the dawn of a new era.

"This is not a 'creating life' paper. It is not a test of vitalism. It's an assembly paper," Church said. "The question is: Is it faster or cheaper than other methods? But they don't lay out their economics. They missed an opportunity there."

Venter said he could not provide an estimate of the project's cost.

Venter and others have already made synthetic genomes for viruses, which are about one-hundredth the size of bacterial genomes. Some activists contend that synthetic bacteria pose more dangers because, unlike viruses, they can replicate on their own and can survive a long time in the environment.

Venter said the work was green-lighted by government offices, the National Academies and an independent ethics review board.

© 2008 The Washington Post Company

A killing at sea marks America’s descent into lawless power

 

The peremptory strike on a speedboat is a warning to all who serve. Remember your oath.

By Jon Duffy

September 8, 2025

The United States has crossed a dangerous line.

Last week, an American military platform destroyed a small vessel in the Caribbean, killing 11 people the Trump administration claims were drug traffickers. It was not an interception. It was not a boarding with Coast Guard legal authority. It was a strike—ordered from Washington, executed in international waters, and justified with little more than “trust us.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Fox that officials “knew exactly who was in that boat” and “exactly what they were doing.” He offered no evidence.

This was not a counterdrug operation. It was not law enforcement. It was killing without process. And it was, to all appearances, against the letter and the spirit of the law.

For decades, the U.S. military and Coast Guard have intercepted drug shipments in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific under a careful legal framework: Coast Guard officers would tactically control Navy ships, invoke law enforcement authority, stop vessels, and detain crews for prosecution. The goal is not execution; it is interdiction within international law.

This week’s strike ripped up that framework. The people on board were not given the chance to surrender. No evidence was presented. No rules of engagement were cited. The administration claimed authority to kill on suspicion alone.

International law does not permit such action. A vessel in international waters is not a lawful target simply because officials say so. Contending that narcotics pose a long-term danger to Americans is at best a weak policy argument, not a legal justification for force. Unless this boat posed an imminent threat of attack—which no one has claimed—blowing it out of the water is not self-defense. It is killing at sea. A government that ignores these distinctions is not fighting cartels. It is discarding the rule of law.

Beyond the gross violations of the law and the Constitution lies an enormous strategic danger. By redefining traffickers as legitimate military targets, the administration has plunged the United States into another war without limits.

Who is the enemy? “Cartels,” we are told. But cartels are not armies. They are networks that span countries and blend with civilians. Declaring war on them is like declaring war on poverty or terrorism—a plunge into an endless campaign that cannot be “won.”

Where is the battlefield? The Caribbean? Venezuela? Central America? Overnight, officials shifted their story about the destroyed vessel’s destination: first, it was “probably headed to Trinidad or some other country in the Caribbean,” then it was among “imminent threats to the United States.” If geography is that malleable, there is no limit to where the next strike may fall.

And what is the objective? To “blow up and get rid of them,” in the words of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. That is not strategy; it is bravado. We have tried it before, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen. Killing “high-value targets” didn’t end the war on terror.

The U.S. is drifting into an undeclared war of assassination across half a hemisphere, led by unaccountable officials who equate explosions with effectiveness.

Even more dangerous is the backdrop: the Supreme Court’s ruling that presidents are immune from prosecution for “official acts.” Experts warned this would give the commander-in-chief license to commit murder. The majority waved those fears away. Now the president has ordered killings in international waters.

Eleven people are dead, not through due process but by fiat. The defense secretary boasts about it on television. And the president will face no consequences.

This is no longer abstract. The law has been rewritten in real time: a president can kill, and there is no recourse. That is not strength. That is authoritarianism.

What does this mean for the principle of civilian control, when those who wield it face no consequence for abuse? What does it mean for our military, when they are ordered to carry out missions that violate the standards they have sworn to uphold?

What happens abroad does not stay abroad. A government that stretches legal authority overseas will not hesitate to do the same at home. The same commander-in-chief who ordered a strike on a boat in international waters has already ordered National Guard troops into American cities over the objections of local leaders. The logic is identical: redefine the threat, erase legal distinctions, and justify force as the first tool. Today it is “traffickers” in the Caribbean. Tomorrow it will be “criminals” in Chicago or “radicals” in Atlanta.

This strike is not only about 11 lives lost at sea. It is about the precedent set when the military is unmoored from law, and when silence from senior leaders normalizes the abuse. 

The cost will not be measured in a destroyed boat. It will be measured in the corrosion of law, strategy, and trust. Legally, the U.S. has abandoned the framework that distinguished interdiction from assassination. Constitutionally, presidential immunity has been laid bare: the commander-in-chief of the most destructive military power in history has been placed beyond the reach of law. Strategically, we have entered another endless war against a concept, not an enemy. Internally, the erosion of boundaries abroad feeds the erosion of boundaries at home.

The laws of war, the principles of proportionality, the training drilled into every officer—all run counter to what happened in the Caribbean. Yet silence has prevailed. And silence is acquiescence. Each concession ratifies the misuse of force until it becomes routine. That is how institutions corrode. That is how democracies die.

The strike in the Caribbean is not the action of a strong nation. It is a warning. This is about whether the U.S. military remains an institution of law and principle, or whether it becomes an obedient weapon in the hands of a lawless president.

A republic that allows its leaders to kill without law, to wage war without strategy, and to deploy troops without limit is a republic in deep peril. Congress will not stop it. The courts will not stop it. That leaves those sworn not to a man, but to the Constitution.

The oath is clear: unlawful orders—foreign or domestic—must be disobeyed. To stand silent as the military is misused is not restraint. It is betrayal. 

Jon Duffy is a retired Navy captain. His active duty career included command at sea and national security roles. He writes about leadership and democracy.

 

For want of a home-grown tomato ...

On April 4, 2009, I responded via email to a question from Dan Dewitt, a reporter for the “St. Petersburg Times. He had heard I was living in a small community called Spring Lake growing muscadine grapes and an organic vegetable garden. After an apparent failure at trying to start his own small garden, he wondered why doing it seemed to be getting popular generally and was wondering why the phenomenon, why was it becoming a ‘thing’? In 2009, remember, we were deeply into a world-wide recession, suffering economically, and involved in a perplexing and costly “War Against Terror.”

-----Original Message-----
From: Sonny Vergara
Sent: Monday, April 06, 2009 7:55 PM
To: Dan DeWitt
Subject: Why the backyard garden?

Dan,

No, I don’t live directly on the lake, but it was, in fact, surrounded by groves at one time.  In fact, most of the open pastures and hay fields in Spring Lake were groves before the winter freezes of the 1980’s.  One can still see the faint outlines of their rows in the terrain on my 20 acres, for example, which is now a pasture.  Not sure in what year the worst freezes occurred but when they did it devastated Florida’s citrus industry … again.   

The first time the industry was hit in Florida was toward the end of the 19^th century when the citrus belt was much farther north of here.  The little town of Satsuma near Lake George and just south of Palatka was named after the Satsuma orange, for example, which was planted ubiquitously throughout that area.  In the early 1980’s, I lived in an old wooden house on the St. Johns River just north of East Palatka that was built to house grove workers. Interestingly, they had used sphagnum moss for insulation between the walls. I was told there was at one time a dock nearby where barges carrying the fruit to the Jacksonville market and elsewhere would tie up to receive their loads. That was where the citrus belt was then, running east and west, coast to coast.   

After the freeze of 1898 (?), the citrus belt moved south and by mid-century was running generally east and west through Orlando including Hernando County and as far south as Highlands County.  Even so, most of the land at that time was just woods, I believe, because the country’s focus was obviously on WWII and recovering from the Great Depression. 

After the war ended, the citrus industry’s markets expanded exponentially through the fifties and sixties and the central Florida citrus belt became more defined.  “Woods” were converted in large scale and the citrus industry as we know it today was established.  Ownerships were consolidated and “barons” like Emmitt Evans, Charlie Lykes and Ben Hill Griffin were created. 

It all changed again in the late 1980’s.  My memory isn’t clear, but I remember it happening somewhere around Christmas 1988, maybe.  After that freeze, the citrus acreage in Hernando County was massively reduced, as it was across all of central Florida.  But as fate would have it, farmers found houses could be “grown” just as profitably, perhaps more so, and land development became the new face of agriculture … and we all know where that has taken us today. 

But significant to Hernando County, citrus as an industry was reduced to a few acres and agriculture as an industry was moved to the brink of extinction.  Farmers who held on to their land and didn’t sell to developers were faced with losing their green belt tax status and thus their property to impossible ad valorem land taxes.  So, if they didn’t sell outright and they didn’t replant citrus, they planted pine trees.  Lots of them. 

Drive around Spring Lake today and you’ll see sour root orange trees growing among rows of planted slash pine.  Why?  Because most of the fruit trees then were sweet orange wood budded onto sour-root stock.  The sour-root stock was heartier and disease resistant.  The freeze killed the budded part of the tree but not the sour-root so it came back as a sour fruit tree. 

Thus, the central Florida citrus belt moved south again, and agriculture became essentially a hobby in our area to be pursued for tax purposes or because you don’t play golf.  The big guys like those mentioned concluded that it made no sense to tempt the whims of Florida weather a second time, so they again moved further south to Collier, Desoto, Hardee, and Okeechobee counties, anywhere the land was cheap, and the new belt was established there. 

I remember having to process a water use permit for one grove that was 40 square miles, so large it could be identified by satellite.  It was developed and managed by one entity with portions sold to others, many from outside the country.  I’ve long forgotten the name of the company but the regulatory folks at the water management district could probably identify it. 

So, what is happening to bring our national focus back to a vegetable garden in the back yard?  In my estimation? It’s the hard realization that we, as a country or a people, are not invincible.  Terrorism can and probably will reach us again.  It’s the fatigue of an unpopular, unwinnable, intractable, unending war that is creating an historic national indebtedness that can steal the future of our children and theirs. 

It’s the disastrous failure and subsequent loss of confidence in one of the greatest economic machines ever known to man.  It’s the realization that the system in which we entrusted our savings and therefore our fate as aging citizens is so cynical and infected with fraud that our final years as secure and comfortable elderly humans may well have been stolen from us. 

It’s realization that our political presence on the world stage is waning even after so many wars, battles, lives and trillions of dollars spent over the last century ostensibly to make the lives of others better.  

It’s the realization that we will have to pay more than any of us can afford for energy, and we can and will be held hostage until we pay the ransom. 

It’s the realization that it is foolish to debate further that our planet is at risk due to our own actions, because we all now know for a fact that the risk grows even more ominous every day. 

It’s because the new global economy which sends us most of the goods we use and the food we eat, commodities which touch our lives at every level and which we can no longer produce ourselves, can arrive poisoned and dangerous. 

It is because of the growing realization that the endlessly partisan and inflexible dogma of our two dominant political parties is, alas, not at all aimed at improving our lot as a nation of people, but only to perpetuate and protect the advancement of their own existence even if it risks the very soul of the nation. 

Only because I grow weary just thinking about all the other problems we can mention, I might offer, finally, that we are interested in growing our own gardens because we realize how dangerously complex bringing any one of these issues to resolution will be, much less all of them.  And if we can’t solve all of them what’s going to happen … to us? 

I hear a national sigh of resignation for want of something as simple as a home-grown tomato.

To you I suggest that growing a tomato would seem much more satisfying and predictable than all the misery of the present world, despite your unfortunate experience.  Try again.  It’s good for the soul.   

Drop by sometime.  I’ll show you my muscadine vines and organic garden and share a glass of homemade muscadine wine, if you’re so inclined.

 Regards,

Sonny

Again, an email thread suggests an historic truth about the "Water Wars" of Tampa Bay

What really brought about the end to Tampa Bay's decades long "Water Wars?

This thread occurred in April 2009 after I heard Cynthia Barnett give a talk in which she suggested Florida is not committing enough attention or dollars on alternative water supplies. My email was to inform her of SWFWMD's specific efforts in that regard and gave its participation in bringing about the historic "Tampa Bay Partnership Plan" as an example of its efforts.

From: Sonny Vergara 
To: Cynthia BARNETT 
Sent: Monday, April 6, 2009 5:05:11 PM
Subject: Alternative Water Supply Funding 

Good morning, Cynthia!

It’s trying to rain here. Glory!

When you spoke to the group in Tampa recently, you made the point that it was unfortunate more wasn’t being spent on alternative water supplies and urging the public to be more conservative and use less water. This was in support of your position that continuing to pump more groundwater and divert more surface water to meet growth needs isn’t sustainable, with which I agree by the way. You suggested it was shortsighted and unwise, therefore, that the legislature was in the process of reducing the funds it had been allocating for development of alternative water supplies for the last few years, a threat to both the environment and the state’s growth-based economy.

I suggested that it might be of interest to you to find out what the water management districts have been spending on alternative water supplies and water conservation. My thought was that when analyzed, you would find that what the state was putting into the program was paltry to the point of being irrelevant compared to that of the districts. So, I asked Gene Schiller (SWFWMD Deputy Director) to give me the numbers that SWFWMD has spent over the last ten years. I am right. It is an astounding $856,176,165! Nearly a billion, just within the 16 counties of SWFWMD! (see attachment)

My point is that it’s going to take decades and billions to meet the needs of the future and what the legislature is contributing is laughable. I think I remember the legislature has been funding something like 20 to 25 million a year for the entire state. That’s about what it costs to build one small conventional water treatment plant. What it will no longer be contributing, if it’s no more than that, therefore, is not going to make a ripple of difference to the currently ongoing efforts by the water management districts, in my opinion, or meeting the state’s growing needs.

In context, it was Joe Davis of Wauchula, as a SWFWMD Governing Board member, who strove to establish what would become the most progressive and assertive effort in the state and maybe even the nation, to change the way water use was occurring by both residential, agricultural and other commercial users in our area. 

What he did was convince the governing board and the district’s basin boards to begin setting aside $20 million each, a total of $40 million a year, for development of alternative water supplies. It was called the New Water Source Initiative. And, it was this fund which, after he had left the Board and the funds cumulative total was approaching about $100 million, that put us in a position to contemplate the precedent-setting Partnership Agreement with, then, West Coast Regional Water Supply Authority. 

Ultimately, the District’s total commitment for the agreement was about $300 million including its participation in the cost of the desalination plant at TECO and the land for the 15 billion-gallon Young Reservoir (for which the district used about $26 million of state land funds, as I remember).

One final thought. I keep hearing how the so-called “water wars” were brought to an end by the restructuring of West Coast into Tampa Bay Water. That’s like saying it was the gasoline engine that brought about the Model A Ford. In one sense it’s not exactly untrue, but in another it completely belies the fact that it was Henry Ford who conceived the revolutionary idea of building many widgets at a time by moving them along a line and letting a string of stationary assemblers put the part for which they were responsible on each widget as it passed. This instead of a bunch of people building one widget at a time, of course. Thus it was mass production that made the Model A affordable, and it was affordability combined with Henry Ford’s entrepreneurial genius, not the gasoline engine, that made the Model A such an historic success.

Similarly, it was SWFWMD’s intentional shift away from dependence upon its use of regulatory police powers and its new focus on the strategic commitment of funds that gave West Coast the means and the motivation to begin building its way out of the water “hole” it was in. And it was being able to get SWFWMD’s funding and becoming motivated to achieve the goals of the Partnership Agreement that required West Coast to be reorganized into Tampa Bay Water. Tampa Bay Water did not come about through some internal revelation of genius or political largesse by its continuously feuding members. So, the water wars were ended not by the birth of Tampa Bay Water as much as it was by the strategic targeting of dollars by SWFWMD and its reaching agreement with West Coast on how those dollars would be used.

I should also mention that it was the unwavering courage and larger-than-life drive of Roy Harrell (SWFWMD Board member of 12 years and chairman when the agreement was being negotiated) who saw the opportunity presented by Joe Davis’ New Water Source Initiative funds and conceived the idea that eventually resulted in the Partnership Agreement.

To close, you should feel free to contact Gene Directly at SWFWMD: gene.schiller@swfwmd.state.fl.us or 352-796-7211.

Again, I much enjoyed your comments both before the group and on my copy of Mirage. Am certain you’ll be getting a call from Oprah anytime asking if she can promote it on her show.

Regards,

Sonny

-------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Gene.Schiller@swfwmd.state.fl.us
Sent: Monday, April 06, 2009 1:21 PM
To: Sonny Vergara
Subject: Re: Alternative Water Supply Funding 

Sonny, the majority of the dollars mentioned are just District funding with a like amount provided by the cooperators for an investment in access of $1.5 billion thru partnerships. Take care.

Gene Schiller
Deputy Executive Director
Management Services
SWFWMD
352/796-7211, ext. 4605

-------------------------------------------

From: Sonny Vergara 
To: Cynthia BARNETT 
Sent: Monday, April 6, 2009 5:05:11 PM
Subject: Alternative Water Supply Funding

Cynthia, 

Please see Gene’s comment after he read what I sent to you.  He makes the point that the district’s expenditures were only about half of the real total.  Since most of the contracts entered by the district with its partners requires them to be an equal contributor thereby essentially doubling the amount in play. 

FYI
Sonny

 ----------------------------------------------------------

To: Sonny Vergara 
From: Cynthia BARNETT 

Dear Sonny & Gene,

Hello, thank you as always for your emails Sonny, I hope that you keep them coming. I always learn a lot from them. I thank you for the background on the water wars. Yes, understand the very paltry amount of money that the Legislature is spending on anything related to water. I find it so odd that the entire country is swept up in a green craze that ignores the primary color -- blue. I was doing some national research and found that Sacramento, which prides itself on being green and calls itself "Sustainable Sacramento" has the highest per-capita water use in California ...in one suburb nearly 500 gallons per person per day.

Not necessarily "alternative" vs. groundwater/surfacewater, I was trying to make the point that we spend so much more attention and money on the "hard path" water-supply projects than the "soft path" -- demand-management which, as SWFWMD has proven better than any other district, can get you to the large numbers of gallons that you get to by taking the hard path. Your numbers seem to confirm that ... it looks like conservation project spending is about 1% this year.

At any rate, when I speak in SW Florida, I usually do say that SWFWMD is making inroads on the demand side, while the state as a whole doesn't have the vision. Here is the direct line that I use:

"I do want to say that I think southwest Florida is doing a better job than anyone else in the state of helping farmers reduce water use. For example, the West-Central Florida Water Restoration Action Plan, or WRAP, envisions offsetting 40 million gallons of agricultural water use a day in this region by 2025. But again, statewide, our top priority is on building new water-supply projects rather than helping farmers, other businesses and people use less."

I think the false premise is the idea that we need more and more water in the future to grow and prosper. In everything we do as a society, we are using less and less, even as we grow, and even as we prosper. It doesn't have to be this way. It's up to us. I think Americans' buy-in on the green craze would be equally passionate on the "blue" side, but it is oddly being left-out of both the state and national conversation. Why do you think this is? 

Thank you again, both of you. 

Cynthia. 

Cynthia Barnett
Senior writer, Florida Trend magazine (www.floridatrend.com)
Author, Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S. (www.cynthiabarnett.net) 

 ---------------------------------------------------------------