Badlands replies to local lit doyenne's bad vibes

The Badlands Journal editorial board received this e-mail from Ocean Jones, director of the Valley Voices Writers Project and partner in the unsuccessful grant application by the East Merced Resource Conservation District for a half a million dollars to turn the Merced River into a public relations extravaganza. The people of California would have paid staffers with the Merced River Alliance a large part of that grant for the benefit of this hoopla.

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "ocean jones"
> To:
> Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2007 7:01 AM
> Subject: bad vibes
>
>
> > Dear BADLANDS,
> > What an appropriate title you have selected. I think that before you take
> > up any more of anyones' time you, yourself need to get your facts straight and
> > stop misrepresenting and attacking people who are out to try to make an
> > improvement in the environment and our communities. Why you think it is OK to spread
> > this nonsense any further is beyond me. If you want to make a positive contribution -
> > then please try to rethink what you are putting out into the universe and be more
> > responsible for the effect your words have. On the other hand, if that is not your
> > intent - as your continued vengeance against specific people would seem to
> > suggest - then maybe you could take that vindictive energy and turn it around into
> > something that would build up our community instead of tearing it down.
> > I wonder how you have come to the conclusion that you know and speak the
> > truth - think again and again and then again.
> > Ocean

The Badlands Journal editorial board has a soft place in its collective heart for poets. God love 'em, society gives them the back of its hand. But most poets we've met are upfront about their dyslexia. Reading tedious prose documents like grant proposals, environmental impact reports, environmental legal briefs and such, is just not their thing. These documents don't swing. And, of course, many poets are far too refined to participate in distasteful public processes where ill is likely to be spoken of them to their faces and behind their backs. Such people would be incapable of one hard day of environmental justice work in a county whose landuse authorities are owned--lock, stock and barrel--by finance, insurance and real estate special interests.

Poets are loyal to a fault to their friends, a quality you can't get enough of in this society. However, when defense of friends crosses the line to defense of grant proposals for large sums of public funds -- like this EMRCD $500,000 grant proposal shot down by the real stakeholders on the Merced River -- what in private life is called friendship, in public life becomes cronyism, wherein the poet sacrifices her innocence.

We are going to take a wild guess and say that Ms. Jones has no more idea of what was in that failed grant than she does about what's in a pony motor on a D-2 Caterpiller tractor. We guess she has no more idea about how that grant fits in with a regional integrated water plan, regional transportation blueprint, riparian rights on the river, riparian wildlife corridors or the county general plan update--than how the pony motor is connected to the deisel engine, the final drives and the tracks of an old Cat. Yet she was a partner on this failed grant. She would have attended very expensively facilitated workshops with guys from public works, CalTrans, and kids from the 4H, Farm Bureau and UC Merced staff, and a host of consultants, among others. She would have been part of:

An education group (that) will bring together various educational entities (including agencies) in order to combine resources in watershed education, as well as develop a plan for addressing needs. Outreach will be conducted through media throughout the project as well as development of an outreach plan for the watershed.--Watershed Management Plan Proposal, East Merced Resource Conservation District, May 2007

It didn't swing for us but maybe a poet could hear it's inner lyric. To us, it sounded like a collection of loosely connected grant-grifter cliches assembled to build a propaganda machine to railroad environmental values, property interests and water rights on the Merced River for the benefit of special interests. It almost achieves the level of prime UC Merced Bobcatflak on behalf of the most environmentally ruinous project to ever hit Merced County.

There is a system of near perfect political projection going on in Merced at the moment and this grant proposal is a flashpoint. According to this wacko system, Merced River Alliance staff is free to badmouth members of the Merced River Stakeholders who have been working on river issues collectively for nearly a decade and individually for much longer at public meetings and in private -- including declaring "war" on them. When stakeholders respond, those tedious documents in hand, these bullies whine that they are being attacked and enlist the aid of poetical cronies to counterattack. It's a sick scene.

Badlands Journal editorial board