The Longest Walk 2

What if you had something so important to tell that you were willing to walk across the country to say it? That's what the “Longest Walk” is about.

Native Americans across the country are joining together in sending a message to Washington. We intend to “bring attention to the environmental disharmony of Mother Earth.”

The walkers just passed through Ely, Nevada. If you want to see what they are accomplishing; check out www.earthcycles.net

We in Nevada were glad to see them. We helped where we could. We even walked a couple of miles with them... Solidarity! We won't forget. When they reach Washington, we will be reminding the world to pay attention.

We also sent two messages with them. Here's one:

Conservation and Desalination First

The Great Basin is a vast, mostly natural area; smack-dab in the middle of the American West. Here you can find some of the last of America's open range. Here cattle don't live in pens. Here some wild horses still run free. Here is where the deer and antelope play – along with the elk, the lions, the cute little fuzzy animals, the migratory song birds, the sage hen, and the eagle.

The Western Shoshone (Newe) people have lived here for thousands of years. When the European immigrants showed up, they found this land healthy. We now fear that within less than 200 years to our first introduction to capitalism, our homeland will become uninhabitable. Why? To sustain unsustainable growth in Las Vegas.

Southern Nevada Water Authority intends to take a river of water from a place that has no rivers. The land area effected here will be larger than some of America's smaller states. And yet our own state laws are impotent to protect us. Would you consider the State of Vermont to be expendable? Just drain it? Turn it into a dustbowl? Of course not. But that's what greedy developers in Las Vegas want to do with an equivalent size of our home. And they want to do it without even considering sensible alternatives.

• Las Vegas could learn to live within their means. They will have to someday.

• Las Vegas could desalinate sea water and trade it with California and Mexico for a bigger allotment of the Colorado River. The desalination facilities could be built offshore so as not to harm coastal ecosystems.

Southern Nevada has better options than committing an environmental holocaust. But they complain that it's just too hard or too expensive. Sure it's cheaper to take than it is to make. But we should not make our decisions based upon how cheap it is to steal.

It is a humbling analogy to compare humanity's habitat destructing ways to a dangerous virus infecting it's host. But it is actually life on Earth that supports us. And all natural life on Earth is in decline. We all know what happens to a virus when it kills it's host. The virus dies too...

It is our duty to protect our host; life on Earth.

Help us influence Las Vegas to live sustainably.

Thank you,

concerned citizens of White Pine County, Nevada