I don't seek trouble and I can ignore trouble even after it slaps me up 'side the head. I recognize trouble quite reliably, but stirring me to action takes some doing.

If someone were to ask (as I asked myself at the end of that last sentence), I'd have to respond very vaguely about what causes me to react when I detect trouble, but I suspect I would have to mention the fact that some raw, cathartic emotion like my own self-righteous indignation must be present to draw me out of complacency and impel me to act. And that's not a very good platform from which to leap into action.

So Saturday afternoon, while listening to KSU blow out overmatched North Texas in a 55-10 win that would eventually drop KSU from fourth to fifth in the AP poll as they lost ground to idle Virginia Tech (yeah, I got issues), when I felt my hackles rise and my knee jerk at the words of a representative of Kansas Farm Bureau during the halftime report, I paused, took a breath, walked to the phone, called the radio station (KMKF-FM) and asked the station employee who answered the phone if he would please identify the owner of the football broadcast I had been listening to. He confirmed that WIBW-580AM (Topeka) owned the broadcast, as I had guessed, and I politely thanked him and hung up.

I wanted to be sure who owned the broadcast, you see, because I was going to write some letters.

A year ago, the Kansas Natural Resource Council and the Kansas chapter of the Sierra Club brought a suit against the Environmental Protection Agency asking them to enforce EPA rules regarding the quality of both the ground and surface waters. The groups settled this summer.

The Kansas Farm Bureau and other farm organizations around the state have found some of the terms of the settlement to be onerous to farmers, ranchers, and other owners of property in Kansas, particularly those who have farm or stock ponds on their property � in this part of the country, usually man-made impoundments. The Farm Bureau has focused on the portion of the settlement that clarifies the regulations that make bodies of water on private property that are inaccessible to the public subject to regulation. In public hearings and in the media, opponents of the settlement's terms have begun to shift the debate from the issue of clean water and the elimination or reduction of pollution in those waters to one of property rights.

It's a complicated issue � more complicated than I've made it here � and one in which I might seem to be acting in my own selfish interest as a consumer of water who doesn't happen to own a private pond. But in general, I believe that when individual rights conflict with the welfare of the general community, the individual rights are subordinate to community rights, particularly when those individual rights pertain to mere property and the community rights pertain to something so vital as water.

We all give up something when we live in society. Property rights might be restricted by zoning laws or, in their absence, by deed restrictions or covenants. In my residential neighborhood near the town's center, the city restricts the number of dogs, cats, chickens and goats I may keep on my property. They can prevent me from using all my property as I might wish, forbidding me, for instance, from building too close to the property line or erecting a convenience store. They probably should do more to control the types and quantity of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers I apply to my property, but they don't do so currently (other than the general unavailability of chlordane, for instance). The city prevents me from burning leaves and trash on my property, and during times of drought, they might restrain me from watering my yard or washing my car. They can fine me for disposing of used motor oil on my property, just as they might hold a gas station operator responsible for leakage from the station's underground tanks.

I will aver that most landowners, both rural and suburban, are responsible stewards of their property and resources, and I'll also aver that some of the restrictions might be costly or be inconvenient. I'd really like to be able to give my kids the chance to smell leaves burning in the fall rather than having to compost them or spend the money for a special paper bag to have them hauled to the landfill, for instance. But the straw-man argument that I have heard voiced by some farmers about a landowner being held responsible by big gubmint for the pollution caused when a deer poops in his pond is unworthy of them, and yet hear it I have.

And I have little patience when a representative of an organization with the stature of the Kansas Farm Bureau appears on a football halftime show, and while being "interviewed" by a sportscaster, begins to circle the bandwagons against these incursions by the federal government against the rights of all Kansans, using rhetoric more likely to come from the lips and pens of the more jingoistic of our modern militias.

The Kansas Farm Bureau represents many Kansans, but so do the plaintiffs in the case, the Kansas chapter of the Sierra Club, and the Kansas Natural Resource Council.

I heard nothing from the station or the sportscaster that indicated that this part of the program was a paid political advertisement. A casual listener might have gotten the impression that the Farm Bureau's position was endorsed by the radio station, the university, and Coach Snyder, and that irked me.

So, yesterday afternoon, with hackles at ease, I wrote to the Farm Bureau, the radio station, the university president, and the athletic department advising them of my concern, not about the water issue, and not about the Farm Bureau's right to be heard, but about the manner in which the Farm Bureau position was conveyed. No doubt they are quaking in their boots this morning as their paper shredders vibrate on my pages.

But they're not going to screw with my water.

Or my football.

Eating is an agricultural act.
--Wendell Berry,
communitarian and damned fine English major

Reading:
I'm between books. Otherwise, I've been catching up on The New Yorker and reading background on the clean-water issue.

Weathering:
Drizzle. Murky dismal days, Friday through Sunday. Clear but cool Monday and today. Sweaters and sweatshirts are out of the closet. A few of our tweedier types at work have already donned their turtlenecks and tweed jackets.

Watching:
Yeah, just watching. Got my eye on 'em now.