Mission
The mission of The Amy H Remley Foundation, Incorporated, is to help people better
understand the world around them.
Using education, science and charity, the Foundation promotes the recognition and understanding that water
is the foundation of human existence, and a vital resource for the well-being of the community as a whole.
Particular issues important to the waters bounded by Citrus County, Florida, provide a focus.
The provisions of the Clean Water Act, October 18th, 1972, including the additional protection
of ground waters, shall be upheld as a basis for this Foundation to exist. The Foundation shall be independent
of any government entity, political party or institution of whatever kind. Operations are conducted in accord
with Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, or the corresponding section of any future federal tax
code. Employing donated funds to facilitate actions sooner than would otherwise be possible by relying solely
upon public resources, should enable problems faced by the community to be overcome more readily.
The governance of the Foundation shall be in accordance with its Bylaws,
which enlarge upon this general aim. This website is an aid to understanding the issues involved.
As basic premises for the website:
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Scientific knowledge is meaningless unless it is widely disseminated and becomes common knowledge among the
public.(The public are instruments of change)
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Sustainable use of water resources cannot be achieved unless resource users agree on basic principles of
resource availability in the past, for the present and the future, with due protection and conservation
measures collectively introduced. (Without public participation change will fail).
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Making judgments on the sustainability of water resources without scientific knowledge in regard to
possible natural and anthropogenic variances would be futile. A scientifically well-informed decision is
important, not because the decision will always be correct, but, because the decision can be assessed
scientifically and updated to reflect new scientific findings over time. (The true worth of science, and
integral to the principles of Adaptive Management.)
The World Around Us
The United Nations Economic and Social Council on the 26th November, 2002, commented, "Water is a
limited natural resource and a public good fundamental for life and health. The human right to water is
indispensable for leading a life in human dignity. It is a prerequisite for the realization of other human
rights."
Mark Malloch Brown, administrator of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), in 2002, said, "The
old environmental movement had a reputation of elitism. The key now is to put people first, and the
environment second, but to remember that when you exhaust resources, you destroy people." What was said
then applied globally and led to the watchword of "sustainable" development – a truth then just
as it is today in Citrus County.
Our local environment is fragile, having been severely strained by years of prolonged drought and
population growth. Land use maps over a period of time clearly show a coincident depletion of our natural
resources.
We have become all too familiar with consequences of over use of fossil fuels, both as gasoline for
transport and for generating electricity. Fossil fuels are found in the ground and once used up are used
for ever – not renewable. Hence, as demand grows in the world and "easy oil" is consumed faster
than it can be found, prices inevitably rise to our personal cost.
E.F.Schumacher, in Small Is Beautiful (1973), cites fossil fuel together with "living nature" as
natural capital – the latter including plankton in the oceans, the green surface of the earth, clean air and
water. He asserts that squandering fossil fuel threatens civilization, but squandering the capital of living
nature around us threatens life itself. The modern industrial system consumes the very basis upon which it
has been erected, living on irreplaceable capital, which it happily (foolishly) treats as income.
Bishop Lesslie Newbigin writing a dozen years later asserts, in Foolishness to the Greeks, "Growth ...
for the sake of growth...(is) the exact phenomenon which, when it occurs in the human body, is called
cancer."
Deforestation (whether of uplands or wetlands) can be likened to cancer of the "lungs of the planet",
and land degradation likened to melanoma of the very fabric of our land.
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