Susan Guy: ART for Nature

Nature is the reason that I paint – it is my therapy – now it is time for me to try to help Nature. I am very concerned about the current threat to our nation’s wild lands by those who seek short term profit at our expense. Lake Casitas is the home to nesting bald eagles and is also the source of our water. It is currently under threat from proposed uranium mining. This puts the people of Ojai and Ventura at risk medically.  I hope that somehow my art can help to protect our watershed. I have created some art about this- see above- and there will be more coming too!- with a special surprise announcement coming in the next few months as well.

I will be periodically posting updates about the current threats to our wild spaces. Let's start with some information about Lake Casitas

Susan Guy, MD

-For Purple Mountains Magesties

From J H-

 A young boy, who grew into a teenager and to an young adult would wake up each morning in his family’s ranch house on historic Rancho Santa Ana and look just up the hill from his home at the wild natural setting of Superior Ridge and White Ledge Peak in the Los Padres National Forest just two miles north of Lake Casitas.

I was that person and now I work to stop a proposed uranium mine on that very site. 

The journey to stop the orginial uranium mine proposed on a 64,000 acre claim started in the late 1970s was ultimately denied, then the idea moved to the first Trump Administration and the application was halted when Trump left office. 

Now Trump is back and the uranium mine proposal is back as well.

I give regular updates to a group of dedicated Ojai  Valley activists and there has been good coverage in the Ojai Valley News on this issue.

Now the time has come I feel as we inch ever closer to an actual mine to let a broader world of western Ventura county know for Lake Casitas does supply drinking water to a large region of western Ventura County. 

I speak regularly with the staff of the Office of the U.S. Secretary of the Interior (Interior issues ALL permits for mining and drilling on ALL federal lands) and the energy broker/mining company about plans for the mine.

President Trump has issued a number of executive orders and Secretary Burgum has also issued a number of secretarial orders related to opening up ALL known uranium deposits on ALL federal lands in the west.

A master executive order is being prepared at Interior for the President to sign to allow a number of uranium mines on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon in a 12 million acre national monument which President Biden created. The uranium brokerage and mining company, EF Resources is elated about all of this, my contact tells me. 

This is part of the Trump/Musk Administration plan to downsize and shrink a number of protected land units in the west.  The EO is to be signed sometime in April...possibly on Earth Day itself and the President will travel to Arizona or Utah to sign the order.

I am told that smaller uranium deposits such as the one above Lake Casitas ( a domestic water supply) would be impacted by this EO.

The President in earlier EOs and the Secretary of Interior as well have suspended ALL environmental laws, rules and regulations related to mining on YOUR national public lands and even limiting public comment or involvement in any review process.

We will have a challenge, but we are organized, we were ready for this in the 1970's and in 2019 and now we are ready once again, though this time the Trump Administration has taken a number of actions to limit our abilities to stop the proposed mine.

My Ojai Valley activist team includes a number of citizens, local business owners.lawyers and others.  

The proposed uranium mine is just one of several threats through executive orders to the Ventura County portion of the Los Padres NF such as increased oil drilling planned next to the Sespe Condor sanctuary north of Fillmore and massive logging operations in the Fraser Park, Mt Pinos and Pine Mountain region. 

I speak truth to power each time I am in DC....we have developed a tactic of being in the face of decision makers all the time and everywhere...White House staff, Dept of the Interior staff, U.S. House members and U.S. Senate members. 

The Los Padres National Forest is faced with major threats. 

for the wild, Jim