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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Dorothy's memorial is today.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>TS</FONT></DIV>
<DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal style="BACKGROUND: white"><B><FONT face=Tahoma size=4><SPAN
style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold; FONT-SIZE: 14pt; TEXT-TRANSFORM: uppercase; FONT-FAMILY: Tahoma">Dorothy
Green's Final Fight: Before She Died, Heal the Bay Founder Said <st1:State
w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">California</st1:place></st1:State>'s Drought Is a
Fake<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></B></P>
<H2 style="BACKGROUND: white; MARGIN: 0pt"><B><I><FONT face=Tahoma size=4><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 14pt; FONT-STYLE: normal; FONT-FAMILY: Tahoma">"If we managed
water differently — better — there would be plenty of water for the state of
<st1:State w:st="on"><st1:place
w:st="on">California</st1:place></st1:State>."<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></I></B></H2>
<P class=MsoNormal><st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on"><B><FONT face=Tahoma
size=4><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold; FONT-SIZE: 14pt; FONT-FAMILY: Tahoma">Los
Angeles</SPAN></FONT></B></st1:place></st1:City><B><FONT face=Tahoma
size=4><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold; FONT-SIZE: 14pt; FONT-FAMILY: Tahoma">
Weekly – 10/16/08<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></B></P>
<P class=MsoNormal><B><FONT face=Tahoma size=4><SPAN
style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold; FONT-SIZE: 14pt; FONT-FAMILY: Tahoma">By Judith
Lewis<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></B></P>
<P style="BACKGROUND: white; MARGIN: 0pt"><STRONG><B><FONT
face="Times New Roman" size=4><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 14pt"><o:p> </o:p></SPAN></FONT></B></STRONG></P>
<P style="BACKGROUND: white; MARGIN: 0pt"><STRONG><B><FONT
face="Times New Roman" size=4><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 14pt">I didn’t go to talk
to Dorothy Green</SPAN></FONT></B></STRONG><FONT size=4><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 14pt"> because she was dying. I wasn’t looking to do a
tribute. I went because I was working up a story about water, about how we use
it and abuse it, mismanage it and waste it, and about how the bipartisan water
bond being pushed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Senator Dianne Feinstein
— with its provisions for new dams and “water conveyance” projects — is a really
bad idea. In August, I had gone to a protest rally against the water bond at
which Green had spoken, and in the brief interview we had that day, I realized
how much of my thinking about water — about Southern California’s wasted storm
water, the Central Valley’s reckless and polluting agricultural irrigation, the
rage that simmers up in me when people call storm drains “sewers” and dump crap
into them —traced back to Green. I had never sat down and talked to her. She
gave me her card and told me to call.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="BACKGROUND: white; MARGIN: 0pt"><FONT face="Times New Roman"
size=4><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 14pt"><o:p> </o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="BACKGROUND: white; MARGIN: 0pt"><FONT face="Times New Roman"
size=4><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 14pt">A few weeks after the rally, I did. I told
her I wanted to follow up on some of the ideas she’d brought up, specifically
her claim that <st1:State w:st="on"><st1:place
w:st="on">California</st1:place></st1:State> wasn’t really suffering an epic
drought. “It’s a manufactured drought,” she’d told me. “It’s being staged so
that Big Ag can take control of the water supply and sell it back to consumers
at a profit.” I asked if we could set up an interview.
<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="BACKGROUND: white; MARGIN: 0pt"><FONT face="Times New Roman"
size=4><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 14pt"><o:p> </o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="BACKGROUND: white; MARGIN: 0pt"><FONT face="Times New Roman"
size=4><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 14pt">“Sure,” she said, “but you’d better hurry.
Because, you know, I’m dying.” <o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="BACKGROUND: white; MARGIN: 0pt"><FONT face="Times New Roman"
size=4><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 14pt"><o:p> </o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="BACKGROUND: white; MARGIN: 0pt"><FONT face="Times New Roman"
size=4><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 14pt">Two days later, we sat down on the couch in
the living room of the Westwood home where she’d lived for 40 years and raised
three sons. She spoke haltingly, frequently stopping to scold herself for losing
her train of thought. The melanoma she’d fought back for 30 years had resurfaced
in 2003 as a brain tumor, “the first of a half-dozen metastases,” she explained,
and left her struggling to keep her body balanced and her mind from stubbornly
wandering. “Oh, brain!” she’d say as she paused, and then continue on in a
perfectly articulated explanation of the Reclamation Act of 1902, which
stipulated that water subsidized by the state, harnessed and husbanded for
agricultural irrigation, should go only to family farms.
<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="BACKGROUND: white; MARGIN: 0pt"><FONT face="Times New Roman"
size=4><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 14pt"><o:p> </o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="BACKGROUND: white; MARGIN: 0pt"><FONT face="Times New Roman"
size=4><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 14pt">Her pauses were mitigated by the urgency of
her message, by the sense she had that this was her last chance to save the
declining species of the California Delta, including the smelt and salmon, and
to put right more than a century of corruption that had robbed California’s
citizens of their right to clean, safe water — to drink, to water their gardens,
to swim in. <o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="BACKGROUND: white; MARGIN: 0pt"><FONT face="Times New Roman"
size=4><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 14pt"><o:p> </o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="BACKGROUND: white; MARGIN: 0pt"><FONT face="Times New Roman"
size=4><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 14pt">“If water were managed differently — better
— there would be plenty of water for the state of <st1:place
w:st="on"><st1:State w:st="on">California</st1:State></st1:place>, even with all
the people in it now,” she insisted. “What we need is for the state to do its
job.” She was calling for a restructuring of the State Water Resources Control
Board, “so that appointees to the board could never be fired for political
reasons.” She was still working hard to make it
happen.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="BACKGROUND: white; MARGIN: 0pt"><FONT face="Times New Roman"
size=4><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 14pt"><o:p> </o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="BACKGROUND: white; MARGIN: 0pt"><FONT face="Times New Roman"
size=4><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 14pt">And she was still trying to persuade
<st1:place w:st="on"><st1:State w:st="on">California</st1:State></st1:place>’s
lawmakers and citizens that “Big Ag,” as she called it, had spent the past
century pulling a fast one on the public. At the time of the Reclamation Act, “a
family farm was 160 acres,” Green explained. “The <st1:place w:st="on">Central
Valley</st1:place> clearly does not have family farms. And yet they exist on
water subsidized by the state. It’s a huge scandal.” As she explains in her 2007
book, <EM><I><FONT face="Times New Roman">Managing Water: Avoiding Crisis in
California</FONT></I></EM>,the limit was later raised to 960 acres. “But before
that, they played a lot of interesting games, setting up farms to make them look
like family farms, when they were actually
corporations.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="BACKGROUND: white; MARGIN: 0pt"><FONT face="Times New Roman"
size=4><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 14pt">“What we want to find out now is who really
owns the farms in the <A
href="http://www.westlandswater.org/wwd/default2.asp?cwide=1152">Westlands Water
District</A>, which is the largest water district in the nation. Nobody has
really taken a look at this business of Big Ag, of all these corporations. Who
are the real owners? How many owners are there, really, of this subsidized
water?”<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="BACKGROUND: white; MARGIN: 0pt"><FONT face="Times New Roman"
size=4><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 14pt">And then the phone rang, as it would many
times while we talked. She took every call. “I’ve got many, many good friends,”
she said, smiling. “Really good friends. I’ve been
lucky.”<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="BACKGROUND: white; MARGIN: 0pt"><FONT face="Times New Roman"
size=4><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 14pt"><o:p> </o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="BACKGROUND: white; MARGIN: 0pt"><FONT face="Times New Roman"
size=4><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 14pt">Dorothy Green died on October 13, at the
age of 79. She’d been an activist since 1972, and over her lifetime worked on
campaign finance reform, lobbied for laws to protect the environment and fought
the irresponsible siting of nuclear power plants. But nothing mattered to her as
much as water. In 1985, she founded <A href="http://www.healthebay.org/">Heal
the Bay</A> to address the problem of sewage and other pollution pouring into
local coastal waters; 11 years later, she brought together disparate water
agencies, politicians and environmentalists to form the <st1:City
w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Los Angeles</st1:place></st1:City> and San
Gabriel Rivers Watershed Council. She was outspoken, but, unlike her mentor,
coastal-protection activist Ellen Stern Harris — who once openly wished a
tsunami would wipe away coastal development — Green kept her head. <A
href="http://www.amazon.com/Managing-Water-Avoiding-Crisis-California/dp/0520253272/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1224042596&sr=1-1"><EM><I><FONT
face="Times New Roman" color=#344c7c><SPAN
style="COLOR: #344c7c; TEXT-DECORATION: none">Managing
Water</SPAN></FONT></I></EM></A>, published last year by <st1:PlaceType
w:st="on">University</st1:PlaceType> of <st1:PlaceName w:st="on">California
Press</st1:PlaceName>, is a straightforward and sober analysis of where
<st1:State w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">California</st1:place></st1:State>’s
water comes from, who gets it and how. There are many things to learn from it,
including how to tackle a topic you’re passionate about without alienating the
people who most need to hear you. #<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="BACKGROUND: white; MARGIN: 0pt"><FONT face="Times New Roman"
size=4><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 14pt"><A
href="http://www.laweekly.com/2008-10-16/news/dorothy-green-39-s-final-fight-before-she-died-heal-the-bay-founder-said-california-39-s-drought-is-a-fake/">http://www.laweekly.com/2008-10-16/news/dorothy-green-39-s-final-fight-before-she-died-heal-the-bay-founder-said-california-39-s-drought-is-a-fake/</A><o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="BACKGROUND: white; MARGIN: 0pt"><FONT face="Times New Roman"
size=4><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 14pt"><o:p> </o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0pt"><FONT face="Times New Roman" color=black size=4><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 14pt; COLOR: black"><o:p> </o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P class=MsoNormal><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=4><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 14pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Times New Roman'"><o:p> </o:p></SPAN></FONT></P></DIV>
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