The Fox has been released and we have seen her early splendor.
The fifth Friends of the Fox River Watershed Weekly this month comes at a perfect time for an update on Carpenter Dam, with an early look at the Fox River and public lands restored. It is also time for an urgent appeal.
courtesy of Friends of the Fox River
The Fox is free through Carpentersville with great new sand beaches, a clean river bottom and evolving shoreline. Acres of prime habitat that have been flooded for over a century are already providing a great new place to hike and see eagles, even before the first greening of spring.
The Fox needs its friends now.
We can now more clearly see the opportunities for eight additional communities downstream and the watershed as a whole. Our local elected leaders have barely six months to “Say Yes” to the Army Corp and secure the promise of a clean Fox River and large tracts of self-sustaining beaches for generations to come.
We need to sing a song.
We have barely six months left to “Say Yes” to a once in a generation opportunity to restore the Fox River. We don’t have to do twenty years of fundraising to get our dams removed. We don’t have to fight layers of federal, state and local bureaucracy by ourselves. We don’t need another twenty-five years of research. We just need our local elected officials to “Say Yes.”
We need a choir of voices to be heard.
The opponents are few but are loud and well organized. Our Fox River has no clear voice of her own. As friends we should join together to sing as the voice of the Fox. Our numbers are many, our cause, righteous.
We need a song to sing.
There are hundreds of good things that can be listed to support freeing the Fox River, but a choir needs to sing together or it is just making noise. We need a simple message, a consistent message that we all share. What words will carry that message?
We need to sing the same song.
It is clear that repetition is essential to effective messaging. In the FAQs look for: Give me three good reasons to remove the dams, which contains the lyrics of our song and I invite you to join along. Four or twelve lines that are my best distillation of hundreds of issues I’ve considered over the past ten years. Actually, there’s a lot of great new information in the Dam FAQ update above and everyone should visit.
And now we need to sing our song.
It is clear that repetition is essential to effective messaging. Teach others the lyrics to our song so our friends, our families and our local elected officials can all sing in the voice of our river.