LETTERS: MISGUIDED FLOOD THINKING

To the editor:

For centuries before the arrival of European settlers, the Mississippi River, like all great rivers, marched to the beat of its own natural and seasonal drummer. During this annual cycle, it would pass through the spring flood cycle when upstream rains and ice melt increased the volume of water flowing down the channel.

This annual cycle produced the flood plain that all rivers such as the Mississippi exhibit. From annually to irregularly, this flood plain would be inundated and would be provided with silt and nutrients washed down from upstream. It is this flood cycle that provided Southeast Missouri with the productive agricultural soil that its farmers now enjoy.

Flooding, then, is certainly a natural component of such riverine systems and is not generated by human activity. However, in managing the river, it is sheer folly for us to ignore the message that recent flooding patterns are providing. We should ask, for example, why it is that flooding becomes more frequent and severe even when rainfall patterns do not substantial increase?. Only if we answer these questions accurately, and then behave accordingly, can we hope to develop solutions that work with rather than opposed to nature. Recent human history is surely too well filled with the consequence of our arrogance in thinking that we can make nature conform to our vision; it is clear that ultimately we simply must conform to the natural laws, the natural ebb and flow, that nature imposes upon us.

So, have we done anything that has an impact on flood intensity, duration and frequency? For an observer who wishes to see and learn from the evidence, some of the answers are pretty simple:

First, by undertaking extensive deforestation on hills from which rainfall flows into upstream tributaries, we have decreased the water absorption capacity of soil and increased runoff.

Second, by draining the natural wetlands adjacent to the river itself, which historically soaked up the spring floods, we have increased the downstream flow of water.

Finally, enhancing the second problem, we have constructed upstream levees which reduce the ability of the river to expand onto its flood plain and thus have forced that water to flow downstream where it causes flooding problems elsewhere.

As a consequence of these human activities upstream, downstream regions along the Mississippi, such as Southeast Missouri, suffer ever more severe flooding even when the rainfall and ice melt patterns upstream remain similar.

Whether we wish to think in terms of living within the limits that nature imposes or think in terms of throwing ever more money at a failing investment (poor economic decision-making at best), the blind adherence to a failed policy adopted by our congressional representative (Southeast Missourian, April 3), lamentably an influential yet uninformed member of the important House Natural Resources and Environment Committee, is unfortunate.

So long as we stick our heads in the sand, as Congresswoman Jo Ann Emerson suggests, and argue that the evidence nature is providing is nothing but the "preposterous" argument of "Washington special interests" rather than the natural education that our land is trying to offer us, we cannot begin to solve problems. We need to do better than this.

ALAN JOURNET

Department of Biology

Southeast Missouri State University

Cape Girardeau