Thoughtless actions badly damage rivers

Tom Kruzen

There is a dirge playing now for Missouri's Ozark National Scenic Riverways. The beat of the funeral drums grows louder with each passing day. Greed and ignorance are the main instruments creating an ugly cacophony that will reverberate downstream for decades.

Although these sparkling gems were supposedly protected by federal legislation in 1964, continued assaults on water quality and the quality of the watershed have steadily diminished them. Below Cedar Grove on the Current, volumes of silt and algae coat the formerly clear stream and its pristine gravel and rocky bed. Whether the silt and sediment are coming from a nearby off-road vehicle playground, or from thousands of horses that poop in the river and along its banks is unclear. The sludge is there. I suspect oil and gasoline could also be detected if anyone cared to test. Missouri's former governor recently gave the off-road vehicle establishment $100,000 to build even more motorized trails!

Not too far away another tributary, Big Creek, recently was rearranged by Shannon County's commissioners. For reasons yet to be revealed, the commissioners straightened and bulldozed about 1,000 yards of this crystal clear stream. It empties into the Current River as well. Big Creek's bed was bulldozed and gravel piles as high as 20 feet left along its banks. Trees and brush holding valuable soil and lots of silt, sand, gravel were destroyed to help redirect the stream. The faster water is much more capable of carrying the soil downstream with successive rains. Clear violations of the Federal Clean Water Act were perpetrated upon the creek and the citizens of Missouri and the United States. These elected men, at a recent meeting of the Land Reclamation Commission of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, plead ignorance. "We didn't know we needed a permit to do any of that." These streams are Outstanding Natural Resource Waters so designated by Congress and the state of Missouri!

No federal or state agency was even aware of this sacrilege until ordinary citizens discovered the damage and filed official complaints. ... A just judge would make them restore the stream and its original banks using only a tablespoon and sand bucket.

Other major tributaries have been damaged or will be damaged by off-road vehicles, clear-cutting of forests, more county road intrusions on private, state and federal land, a proposed county-owned quarry and thousands of people riding horses in and along the banks of the rivers. ...

So, with such friends as these the quality of the Jacks Fork and Current Rivers and their watersheds will continue to degrade. All the state and federal laws won't mean spit, if you can't find people to enforce them or obey them.

True friends of these National Scenic Rivers will let the National Park Service in Van Buren and the soon-to-be-appointed head of the National Park Service in Washington know that you want the laws of the United States enforced and obeyed. Tell the new governor of Missouri, Jay Nixon, that you want state water laws enforced and obeyed. Several times during his campaign, he promised he would protect Missouri streams. Now it is time to fulfill those promises.

Great lapses of law or enforcement of law do nothing to protect forests or watersheds. Water protection laws in past years have all too often been broken or circumvented ... . Our children and their children will judge us as to how we protected these natural crown jewels of the United States. A new president and a new governor have promised to reverse course. We can all help them do that and now is the time. Call and write them. Tell them to do their jobs.

Source: http://www.news-leader.com/article/20090209/OPINIONS02/902090313

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