Gta Vice City Style Stories Redux
Sharon Harris
A housing development that would have made up the bulk of possible growth within the city limits of Sierra Vista appears to be dead. Castle and Cooke Arizona, the company who had shepherded the area through development and legal challenges for 20 years says it is not going forward with the Tribute subdivision. We hear reaction from various people around this news, and learn about why this may have happened.
ZZ: And this vibrant ecosystem that surrounds the San Pedro has seen some pretty big changes from a legal standpoint, including one just after our episode that clears up an issue we mentioned. It now has some defined water rights.
There was also another big development in the story. Castle and Cooke Arizona, the company that planned to build a development in Sierra Vista that was about five miles from the river, announced that they are abandoning that project.
SH: Since this was a considerable amount of news, we decided a short update was in order, so we can take a look at what this means for the San Pedro and Cochise County moving forward.
Now that lawsuit was originally filed in 2013 and the case landed at the Arizona Supreme Court over one unanswered question: does the state have to take that unquantified federal water right into account before guaranteeing a 100-year supply of water?
ZZ: Now the Arizona Supreme Court ruled in favor of ADWR and Pueblo del Sol, ruling at the time that they did not have to consider a yet-to-be quantified federal water right. But now, the river has been given some water rights.
SH: Well, to try to answer that question, amongst many others, I spoke with the director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, Sarah Porter, and she broke down how all of this began.
SH: That military base is Fort Huachuca, which is located near Sierra Vista. And Sarah says that this Gila Adjudication began in 1974. She says part of the reason for this adjudication was (a) the fact that water is a scarce and frequently sought out resource in Arizona and (b) there were lots of kinks in the administrative system at the time as to how we measured and defined the amount of water we actually had in Arizona. One big thing the state had to wrestle with is the relationship between groundwater and surface water.
ZZ: Right, surface water meaning water you can see: rivers, lakes, whatnot. And groundwater, as implied through the name, is water below that: aquifers and subsurface water basins, etc.
SH: Yes. And Sarah broke down what this ruling means and how it will protect the river moving forward. The main purpose for even having these water rights is to protect the desert ecosystem.
SH: And part of that significance comes from the fact that the river serves a critical role to this ecosystem, which is home to 100 species birds, 250 species of migratory birds, more than 40 species of reptiles and amphibians and more than 80 species of mammals.
ZZ: Wow, and I remember you calling me after you confirmed that with Castle and Cooke that they are not going to develop the Tribute subdivision. Did they ever say why that decision was made?
SH: Yeah, I spoke with Tricia less than 24 hours after the Herald/Review newspaper broke the news about the development. She and I met at the San Pedro house and we talked about her reaction to the news.
One thing I remember hearing many people involved in this saying is that the worst-case scenario for future development around the San Pedro is what's called wildcat development, basically people building on a small scale, maybe just a home or two at a time. To my recollection, that type of development can skirt water assuredness rules. Did that come up at all with anyone you talked to, Summer?
SH: She says that has happened, like the whole recent saga in the far northwest Phoenix area of the Rio Verde Foothills, where people were hauling water from Scottsdale but then the city cut off their access. But that style of developing is pretty rare.
SH: And since that ruling can be appealed, it looks like the legal landscape surrounding the water rights of the San Pedro will still be in flux for awhile. But as for Castle and Cooke, we will await to see what they end up doing with the Tribute land.
ZZ: And I'm sure that announcement will come just as soon as we hit publish on this. We will definitely be following what happens every step of the way moving forward. Thanks again Summer for following this, following up and joining us today.
For the rest of this season, we'll be heading north to a single source that provides the state with more than a third of its water, the Colorado River. We'll bring you stories that start right where the river crosses into Arizona and we'll follow it through the state's main tourism destination and just a bit south. I hope you'll take the trip with us.
Thank you for a thorough discussion - reading the reviews I was astonished at the ignorance of the reviewers - the film seems to be trying to set atheists and religious folk against each other based on fabrications - what a foolish thing to do. Cause we really need more conflict nowadays
Thank you for this balanced and thoughtful review. I think you hit on all the major points. The "astronomy" depicted in this film is anachronistic beyond belief (witness Hypatia carrying out an "experiment" an a ship drawn straight from the works of Galileo Galilei). I also agree that the notion of Hypatia being an "atheist" is quite silly. As numerous scholars have pointed out over the years, the fact that she still held an influential teaching position by the year 415 in a predominantly Christian city, strongly indicates that her brand of philosophy must have been quite compatible with Christianity.
It seems like your standards for this film are way too high. You seem to be nitpicking (what the Romans wore, etc). As movies go, this is about as accurate as you are ever going to get. And I don't think you gave any proof that the writer and director had an anti Christian agenda. You assume too much. If anything, this movie is rather fair to the Christians of Alexandria, who were like the Taliban. And from what I can gather from your review, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of any real historical evidence either way for Hypathia. Also, your writing is very clunky.
Anonymous wrote:
It seems like your standards for this film are way too high. You seem to be nitpicking (what the Romans wore, etc). As movies go, this is about as accurate as you are ever going to get.
Actually, sadly enough, this is about as accurate as we're likely to get. Which is kind of sad. And I made it pretty clear that my comment on the armour was clearly nitpicking compared to the other criticisms - thus my use of the phrase "for nitpicky obsessives like me".
And I don't think you gave any proof that the writer and director had an anti Christian agenda. You assume too much.
You seem to be the one who is assuming things. If you read over my review again you'll find I never said his agenda is "anti-Christian" at all. Several of the Christians are presented in a fairly positive way. His agenda is to present a rather clumsy dichotomy between the "bad guys" (who are all religious) and the "good guys" (who are non-religious or not fanatically so). And to present Hypatia as a martyr of science and reason to religious ignorance. And he has to resort to twisting of the story and invented elements to do this.
And from what I can gather from your review, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of any real historical evidence either way for Hypathia.
We have enough evidence to show us that she was murdered because of the political dispute between Cyril and Orestes, not because she was a philosopher, because she was a woman or because she was a pagan. And that's the point. This movie distorts that evidence to paint a picture that fits Amenbar's sermon.
Also, your writing is very clunky.
*Chuckle* Well, as a guy with a Masters in English who is also a published freelance journalist, I think I'll manage. Thanks all the same.
Great review, Tim! I agree that the film has some redeeming qualities but, on the whole, is just as simplistic and manichean as any peplum from the 50s, perhaps even more. "Quo Vadis", although extremely pious, at least had a sympathetic pagan villain (the emperor Nero) delightfully played by the great Peter Ustinov. And if I remember well the character of Petronius (another pagan) was the most noble and complex of that film.
While, in "Agora", the Christian characters are all deeply unsympathetic: Cyril, Ammonius and the Parabolani are nothing more than a bunch of hateful fanatics, and even the moderate ones like Orestes and Synesius are ultimately shown in a negative light, acting for their own personal gain in the name of political opportunism. The character of Synesius is particulary problematic, since he humiliates Orestes over his loyalty to Hypatia and then viciously abandons her when she refuses to convert to Christianity. This, of course, contradicts all the historical evidence we have about him, available here: -sz/synesius/synesius_cyrene.html.
This was really thorough, Tim, and for the most part, fair. Though, I think you overstate Amenbar's mistakes and/or inventions. They don't seem to me to work that much against either his thesis or the facts. They elaborate, probably for purposes of telescoping and making it easier for those of us who don't have all the facts at our fingertips. You're probably right, though: This IS just about as close to accurate as we're likely to get...
James wrote:
I think you overstate Amenbar's mistakes and/or inventions. They don't seem to me to work that much against either his thesis or the facts. They elaborate, probably for purposes of telescoping and making it easier for those of us who don't have all the facts at our fingertips.
If that's all they actually did I'd have no problem with them. Several fictional additions to the film (eg Davus, Orestes as her student etc) are there simply for this kind of reason.
But the problem lies in additions/changes that do far more than this. The whole business with "the Library" is the most obvious example. We have five accounts of the destruction of the Serapeum and none of them mention any library there. And Ammianus tells us why - it wasn't there any more. Yet the movie makes the destruction of this non-existent library the focus of its first half. That's hardly a small addition for the purposes telescoping etc - that's a major addition designed to support the film maker's heavy-handed agenda.
And there are multiple other examples: Cyril's sermon on 1Timothy 2, the scene where the Parabolani burn the pagan aristocrat in the agora, the fictional stoning of the Jews in the library etc. All of these additions are there purely to keep the movie's agenda clear, despite the fact they are all fictional inventions.
Yet over and over again I keep reading reviews of this movie that accept its distorted history as fact. And that's the problem.