Corps no villain

May 5, 2011

Dear Julie,

When books and articles about the year 2012 began predicting the end of life as we know it, one contained a drawing depicting how North America supposedly will look once the Earth stops trembling and the poles shift. Instead of a contiguous land mass crisscrossed with rivers and punctuated by great lakes, the continent was divided by water into four smaller areas. The region where we live was separated from the East by a substantial body of water. The Mississippi River had become more of a strait or even a gulf.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is trying to prevent something much less apocalyptic but much more possible from happening. It has dynamited a levee in Southeast Missouri in hopes of reducing historic flood levels up and down the river.

The decision to blow the levee flooded 130,000 acres of farmland and 100 houses in two Southeast Missouri counties. Across the Mississippi at Cairo, Ill., where the Ohio and Mississippi converge, the Ohio was within a foot of topping the floodwall. Cairo had been evacuated. But the choice wasn't between saving Cairo or Southeast Missouri farmland. The picture is much bigger.

The corps is trying to prevent a repetition of 1927, when flooding and 145 levee breaks along the Mississippi River inundated 27,000 square miles of land in seven states and killed 246 people. The corps says more floodways could be opened downriver to reduce the pressure on levees even more. They are doing their job.

Its mission has always been primarily to pump up the American economy with hydroelectric and river navigation projects and to prevent disasters. But during the 20th century, the corps mismanaged the entire Mississippi River basin because engineers weren't trained to deal with an ecosystem.

The corps isn't the villain. Sixty percent of the world's wetlands were destroyed during the 20th century because we didn't understand their importance. We were busy being rational.

Quantitative analysis alone is no basis for a science, Titus Burckhardt wrote 50 years ago. An exponent of universal truths, Burckhardt said such a science is "blind to the infinitely fruitful and many-sided essence of things."

California has been the laboratory for trying to subdue and subjugate rivers. In the 1960s, water-hungry groups unsuccessfully backed a project that would have diverted the entire Klamath River from the top of the state to Central and Southern California. Now rivers are better understood.

Now Native Americans, fishermen, environmentalists, farmers and government agencies tentatively have agreed on a plan to tear down four hydroelectric dams on the river in 2020. The dams block runs of steelhead and salmon and have been blamed for creating toxic algae. Back in 1975 when Edward Abbey celebrated environmental sabotage in "The Monkey Wrench Gang," no one could have imagined such a compact.

I'm no doomsayer. We just have a lot of undoing to do.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.