Mora County citizens fight for rights of community

By Kathleen Dudley, Co-founder, Drilling Mora County

Mora County citizens have entered their fifth year staving off industry development in spite of the slick natural gas ads on TV, radio and newspapers that extoll the proposed benefits for communities.

Over these past four years the awareness of the impacts from natural gas development has become an integral part of daily life for the people here, and there is no doubt, the message is clearly understood—“fracking destroys our water.”

To add salt to the wound, a military plan to fly low-altitude ospreys for “flying and spying drills” sets war maneuvers against its citizens from overhead while industry and government force gas drilling beneath their feet. These corporate and military takeovers are poised to devastate all that sustains healthy living in Mora County.

It takes a land-based community like Mora County, to understand the importance of unpolluted, natural water—the sustenance and freedom it brings to this rural population. The people nurture families and grow and harvest crops that are fed from mountaintop headwaters that supply life-sustaining water to their acequias and aquifers. A drought this spring and summer diminished considerably the harvests in the fields. With one natural gas well consuming upwards of 160 million gallons of their pure water, how would the people fare during a season with equal drought factors, let alone with 30,000 natural gas wells?

The citizen group in Mora County expanded dramatically this year after a second Democracy School was held. The Mora Democracy School Committee crafted a community-rights ordinance with the assistance of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. Yes, the same community-rights ordinance Pittsburgh passed nearly a year ago banning natural gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing in the city.

Communities across the country are turning to this self-empowering ordinance that recognizes the rights of ALL people to unpolluted water, air, land, and health and safety over and above those rights the state and U.S. Constitutions afford corporations. At the core of this ordinance are the citizens’ rights to local self-government.

The new commission in Mora County that stands united to protect the water, health and safety of its citizens is considering this ordinance. Pressure from industry to open the county to drilling presents each of these commissioners with a ticking time bomb. If they ponder and wait a moment too long, or act too quickly without strong support of their citizenry, devastation could take place either way.

The Air Force war maneuvers threaten air and water quality. It will be imperative for the commission to take a strong stand, which they have yet to do through a resolution opposing this activity, if they hold to their oath of office, “to protect the health and safety of the citizens.”

Taking action on both issues now—oil industry development and the military “practice”—will separate the wheat from the chaff in this commission, in the eyes of many citizens in Mora County. Everyone is waiting and watching.
Drilling Mora County
drillingmoracounty@gmail.com