Hopedance Mag issue on Sprawl Sept/Oct 2000 inspires the Poorest County in Arizona to empower their Community

Fri Dec 1 13:36:02 PST 2000

Hi everyone
        Here is a copy of a letter Bob Banner received from Margot Tamez Poet
and community Activist. Who with her husband Ed read poetry and talked on
permaculture and their efforts in their community in the poorest county in
Arizona. The talk was last March at the CEC in Santa Barbara. Read below 
                        wes

>From Bob Banner publisher of Hopedance
        Just received this letter from Margo (who came to SLO last year
with her

husband. She read her excellent poetry and he gave a presentation about 
permaculture and how he was working with young men in prisons) and want to 
share it with other HopeDance enthusiasts... to show how the zine is 
affecting people outside our area. www.hopedance.org

<<Dear Bob: 
I want to share some feelings I've had about your remarkable issues on 
sprawl and the latest, water. Since I read the sprawl issue from cover to 
cover, as I do each of the Hopedance mags. I receive, I have learned such 
essential things as fundamental as who to call, where to get answers, how 
to approach other concerned citizens, how to start a local, organized 
movement to start improving citizen access to the truth, and methods to 
make change. I completely devoured Carla Grindle's article, which put me 
in touch with a number of wonderful people in the country, and locally who 
are also working these concerns in our large rural county. Since I read 
her astute and trustworthy conclusions, and her practical ideas to make 
changes, I have implemented two new groups from our home: Maricopa Families 
For Natural Resource Conservation, and The Pinal County Rural Alliance For 
Sustainable Growth. We are now having meetings for petition signings for a 
referendum, attending planning & Zoning meetings, testifying in front of 
our Board of Supervisors, and openly rejecting their shallow visions of the 
future of our rural land use. We are walking from house to house (out here 
that's a far walk inbetween two houses!) handing out flyers for open and 
public meetings with Spanish interpreters on hand. I hope I don't sound 
like I'm bragging. I"m not. I'm deeply & mercifully glad that I get 
Hopedance. You've brought ideas and practical solutions in an absorbable 
manner into my life, my family's life. We use your magazine like a 
barometer of what's happening in Phoenix, in ARizona government, and we 
apply the lessons you're learning to our own local situation. You provide 
a wise handbook, and we wish we could pick up a stack of your magazine like 
the folks out there in California can do, so we could distribute them at 
our local meetings that are now happening like never before. Some people 
think I'm a lunatic out here now, my face in the faces of the commissioners 
and in the newspaper alot now. Well, some of the people, some oldtimers 
out here, have come up to me, after I wrote a long letter to our public 
officials that the local paper published--I was totally inspired by Carla 
Grindle's article!--and these elders have said:"that's good what you 
did." Well, Bob, I want to let you know--this is good what you are 
doing. All this has inspired me to go beyond the aesthetic of poetry, and 
dive into the wreckage as Adrienne Rich says-- 
now I write a weekly essay in our local small town paper, and simply talk 
to my community about our lives, the web of life.
        <<We're having our first town hall meeting of the 20th and 21st
century 
(history in the making) tonight. We will be dealing with sprawl, 
destruction of our Vekol Wash, the damning of the Gila River (that went 
through the reservation), 48,000 new proposed homes in our area!, the lack 
of honesty and integrity of our Board of Supervisors and Zoning commission, 
strategies to deal with these. Frank Pierson, an organizer from another 
town across the county, and a worker for the Industrial Areas Foundation 
(do you know about them?) is our guest speaker tonight. We're so 
excited! We spread out on a walking campaign at the beginning of the week, 
have gone through each of our western county communites spreading out 
handouts about the meeting. Plus 1200 flyers went out with the kids at the 
local school. I've been getting calls from all over--from farmers, seed 
salesman, mothers, spanish speakers, (oh! we got two volunteers to 
translate at the meeting for the spanish speaking community), fathers, 
workers, its amazing--the wide spectrum of people who are coming out of the 
desert sand to find out about the meeting. Right now on the way to talk to 
a group of cattle-men who hired a lawyer to block a developer from 
attempting to re-zone their "hard-zone" road to residential. I'm working on 
a coalition with them. (they've still got major issues to resolve with us 
because they're contaminating the flood plain and ground water, but it is a 
beginning). I was interviewed by the big paper the other morning, and the 
story ran just in time for everyone to see it and get interested in the 
meeting, plus their going to cover the meeting too! Wow! is not sufficient 
to describe all this energy! We know the road is long an dhard, but we're 
committed to keep the energy going. I've gotten support from our local 
Indian spiritual community, and one is going to give an opening prayer 
tonight to start us off on the good road. Bob, you've been the fire behind 
my building confidence to get this going in my home community. I cannot 
express my deep and abiding love and respect for your work. Please keep us 
on your list for mailing! I swear I use every word from your articles, and 
please give my thanks to all your writers without whom my work here would 
be bleak and without light to travel by.
your friend, 
Margo>>
if you wish to give encouragement to Margo Tamez, here is her email address: 
tnafa-az at casagrande.com
f

My prayers are with you, may you walk in beauty.
Margo Tamez
PO Box 733 
Maricopa, AZ 85239 
(520)568-3509 
tnafa-az at casagrande.com >>

SHORT NOTE
 wes: "Margo and Ed Tamez live in an county that is an industrial 
agricultural 
pesticide herbicide hell and toxic waste dumping ground , they live in a 
corporate controlled fiefdom, we have no idea what courage it takes to 
speak out against these forces in the poorest county in Arizona. They are 
brave folks for their people and others." 
And we think we have problems. We should be so lucky.

Santa Barbara
Permaculture Network
224 E. Figueroa St, #C
Santa Barbara, CA 93101
805/962-2571
sbpcnet at silcom.com  
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