In response to criticism that the Army Corps of Engineers has failed to take needed action, President Obama is creating a federal task force to overhaul management of coastal restoration efforts in Louisiana and Mississippi.

White House Council on Environmental Quality Chair Nancy Sutley made the announcement this week in an interview with Bloomberg News. The panel will consider options for revamping how the federal government manages environmental restoration and protection efforts in the region, which suffers from a serious coastal erosion problem.

The administration's budget and environmental offices will lead the effort, according to Sutley. The Corps will be part of the task force and continue to work on its projects in the Gulf, Sutley told Bloomberg:

"We thought it made sense to have an interagency working group on restoration that would include the Corps, but include other agencies as well," Sutley said. Discussions about how the group will be structured are in the early stages, she said.

U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) recently wrote a letter to Obama calling on him to reform the Corps and create just such a working group to address coastal restoration and flood protection. She told Bloomberg that she was "pleased that the President has responded to my request to elevate the challenges that face coastal Louisiana to a higher level of priority within the federal government."

As Facing South reported, a coalition of 17 advocacy groups held a press conference this week calling on the Corps to honor the president's pledge to restore wetlands that provide critical protection from storms.

The coalition noted that Congress directed the Corps to come up with a comprehensive plan for closing the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet navigation channel near New Orleans and restoring adjacent wetlands by May 2008. But the agency doesn't expect to complete its draft plan until next year.

In another example of slow movement by the Corps, it was more than four years ago that the agency completed a report recognizing the severe wetland loss in coastal Louisiana and recommending five critical restoration projects. Congress authorized those projects under the Water Resources Development Act of 2007 -- but only one is scheduled to begin construction before 2012. That meant none were eligible for funding as "shovel-ready" under the recent economic stimulus.

Louisiana officials recently offered recommendations for speeding up hurricane protection efforts. Pointing out that it currently takes an average of 40 years for the Corps to complete a project, they say the state's coastal communities don't have that much time.

(This story originally appeared at Facing South.)

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Louisiana's threatened wetlands provide a critical barrier to hurricanes and flooding.With the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaching, a coalition of 17 advocacy groups called on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to promptly honor President Obama's pledge "to restore nature's barriers -- the wetlands, marshes and barrier islands that can take the first blows and protect the people of the Gulf Coast."

The MRGO Must Go Coalition held a press conference and media tour in New Orleans yesterday to highlight the slow progress in restoring wetlands east of the city along the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a navigation channel the Army Corps of Engineers constructed in the 1960s as a shortcut between the Port of New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico.

When Hurricane Katrina blew ashore four years ago, MRGO directed wind-driven floodwaters into New Orleans and adjacent St. Bernard Parish, contributing to the catastrophic failure of levees and flood walls. Levees along the channel were breached in approximately 20 places during Katrina.

The channel's construction, use and maintenance also caused the loss of more than 27,000 acres of surrounding wetlands, another factor that exacerbated Katrina's impact on the New Orleans area. During the storm, levees protected by wetlands remained intact while those exposed to open water -- like the ones along the MRGO's banks -- failed.

Congress ordered MRGO's closure last year, and construction of a rock dam was completed last month. But the coalition points out that the dam is only the first step to protecting communities from storm surge.

Congress directed the Corps to develop a comprehensive closure plan that includes restoring adjacent wetlands with a deadline of last May -- but the agency doesn't expect to finish its MRGO Ecosystem Restoration Plan until next year. The coalition is urging faster action.

"There are good people at the Corps and at other relevant federal agencies who are trying to get their job done and quickly move these projects forward, but we need an unequivocal commitment from the Corps, Congress and other responsible agencies that they won't let outdated bureaucratic procedures stand in the way of necessary action," said Col. David Dysart, chief administrative officer for St. Bernard Parish. "It's going to take creativity and breaking away from some long-standing ways of doing business, but the stakes call for nothing less."

(This story originally appeared at Facing South)

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To understand our current environmental dilemma, it helps to look at earlier civilizations that also got into environmental trouble. Our early 21st century civilization is not the first to face the prospect of environmentally induced economic decline. The question is how we will respond.

As Jared Diamond points out in his book Collapse, some of the early societies that were in environmental trouble were able to change their ways in time to avoid decline and collapse. Six centuries ago, for example, Icelanders realized that overgrazing on their grass-covered highlands was leading to extensive soil loss from the inherently thin soils of the region. Rather than lose the grasslands and face economic decline, farmers joined together to determine how many sheep the highlands could sustain and then allocated quotas among themselves, thus preserving their grasslands. Their wool production and woolen goods industry continue to thrive today.

Not all societies have fared as well as the Icelanders. The early Sumerian civilization of the fourth millennium BC had advanced far beyond any that had existed before. Its carefully engineered irrigation system gave rise to a highly productive agriculture, one that enabled farmers to produce a food surplus, supporting formation of the first cities and the first written language, cuneiform.

By any measure it was an extraordinary civilization, but there was an environmental flaw in the design of its irrigation system, one that would eventually undermine its food supply. The water that backed up behind dams built across the Euphrates was diverted onto the land through a network of gravity-fed canals. As with most irrigation systems, some irrigation water percolated downward. In this region, where underground drainage was weak, this slowly raised the water table. As the water climbed to within inches of the surface, it began to evaporate into the atmosphere, leaving behind salt. Over time, the accumulation of salt on the soil surface lowered the land's productivity.

Shifting from wheat to barley, a more salt-tolerant plant, postponed Sumer's decline, but it was treating the symptoms, not the cause, of their falling crop yields. As salt concentrations continued to build, the yields of barley eventually declined also. The resultant shrinkage of the food supply undermined this once-great civilization. As land productivity declined, so did the civilization.

The New World counterpart to Sumer is the Mayan civilization that developed in the lowlands of what is now Guatemala. It flourished from AD 250 until its collapse around AD 900. Like the Sumerians, the Mayans had developed a sophisticated, highly productive agriculture, this one based on raised plots of earth surrounded by canals that supplied water.

As with Sumer, the Mayan demise was apparently linked to a failing food supply. For this New World civilization, it was deforestation and soil erosion, likely on top of a series of droughts, that undermined agriculture. Food shortages apparently triggered civil conflict among various Mayan cities as they competed for something to eat. Today this region is covered by jungle, reclaimed by nature.

The Icelanders crossed a political tipping point that enabled them to come together and limit grazing before grassland deterioration reached the point of no return. The Sumerians and Mayans failed to do so. Time ran out.

Today, our successes and problems flow from the extraordinary growth in the world economy over the last century. The economy's annual growth, once measured in billions of dollars, is now measured in the trillions. Indeed, just the annual growth in the output of goods and services in recent years exceeded the total output of the world economy in 1900.

While the economy is growing exponentially, the earth's natural capacities, such as its ability to supply fresh water, forest products, and seafood, have not increased. Humanity's collective demands first surpassed the earth's regenerative capacity around 1980. Today, global demands on natural systems exceed their sustainable yield capacity by nearly 30 percent. We are meeting current demands by consuming the earth's natural assets, setting the stage for decline and collapse.

In our modern high-tech civilization, it is easy to forget that the economy, indeed our existence, is wholly dependent on the earth's natural systems and resources. We depend, for example, on the earth's climate system for an environment hospitable to agriculture, on the hydrological cycle to provide us with fresh water, and on long-term geological processes to convert rocks into the soil that has made the earth such a biologically productive planet.

There are now so many of us placing such heavy demands on the earth that we are overwhelming its natural capacities to meet our needs. Forests are shrinking. Each year overgrazing converts vast areas of grassland into desert. The pumping of underground water exceeds natural recharge in countries containing half the world's people, leaving many without adequate water.

Each of us depends on the products and services provided by the earth's ecosystems, ranging from forest to wetlands, from coral reefs to grasslands. Among the services these ecosystems provide are water purification, pollination, carbon sequestration, flood control, and soil conservation. A four-year study of the world's ecosystems by 1,360 scientists, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, reported that 15 of 24 primary ecosystem services are being degraded or pushed beyond their limits. For example, three quarters of oceanic fisheries, a major source of protein in the human diet, are being fished at or beyond their limits, and many are headed toward collapse.

Tropical rainforests are another ecosystem under severe stress, including the vast Amazon rainforest. Thus far roughly 20 percent of the rainforest has been cleared either for cattle ranching or soybean farming. Another 22 percent has been weakened by logging and road building, letting sunlight reach the forest floor, drying it out, and turning it into kindling. When it reaches this point, the rainforest loses its resistance to fire and begins to burn when ignited by lightning strikes. Scientists believe that if half the Amazon is cleared or weakened, this may be the tipping point, the threshold beyond which the rainforest cannot be saved. Daniel Nepstad, an Amazon-based senior scientist from the Woods Hole Research Center, sees a future of "megafires" sweeping through the drying jungle. He notes that the carbon stored in the Amazon's trees equals roughly 15 years of human-induced carbon emissions in the atmosphere. If we reach this tipping point we will have triggered a major climate feedback, another step that could help seal our fate as a civilization.

The excessive pressures on a given resource typically begin in a few countries and then slowly spread to others. Nigeria and the Philippines, once net exporters of forest products, are now importers. Thailand, now largely deforested, has banned logging. So has China, which is turning to Siberia and to the few remaining forested countries in Southeast Asia, such as Myanmar and Papua New Guinea, for the logs it needs.

As wells go dry, as grasslands are converted into desert, as fisheries are depleted, and as soils erode, people are forced to migrate elsewhere, either within their country or across national boundaries. As the earth's natural capacities at the local level are exceeded, the declining economic possibilities generate a flow of environmental refugees.

Countries today are facing several negative environmental trends simultaneously, some of which reinforce each other. The earlier civilizations such as the Sumerians and Mayans were often local, rising and falling in isolation from the rest of the world. In contrast, we will either mobilize together to save our global civilization, or we will all be potential victims of its disintegration.

Adapted from Chapter 1, "Entering a New World," in Lester R. Brown's Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, available for free download and purchase from the Earth Policy Institute.

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Florida's intent buy out a giant sugar operation in a move to restore the Everglades is being complicated by a competing offer from the Lawrence Group, a Tennessee farming company.

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Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (R) is set to announce Tuesday that his state is modifying a deal struck this summer to buy out a massive sugar company in the Everglades and turn the company's land back into wetlands. The retooled deal will likely cost the state about $400 million less than the original plan and would not include purchase of some of the company's expensive assets like a sugar-processing plant and railroad lines.

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The roughly $10 billion restoration of the Everglades is "making scant progress toward achieving its goals" due to built-in bureaucracy, funding troubles, and more, according to a report from the National Research Council. The report paints a bleak picture of federal and state rescue efforts, which together comprise the largest ecosystem restoration project in history. Of the rescue plan's more than 60 components, not one has been completed yet. As it stands, "it appears that planning rather than doing, reporting rather than constructing, and administering rather than restoring are consuming [state and federal workers'] talents and time," the report says. In short, it's long past time for action. If the plan's many flaws aren't addressed soon, "the Everglades ecosystem may experience irreversible losses to its character and functioning." Florida's plan to buy 187,000 acres of sugar-industry land in the Everglades to help restore water flows is a noble effort, the report says, but benefits from it won't be seen for at least a decade and the Everglades need action now in order to be saved.

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When Florida Gov. Charlie Crist announced in June that the state would buy 187,000 acres of land from U.S. Sugar Corp. to "jump start" an Everglades restoration effort, environmentalists cheered visions of flowing, fresh water and pristine, untouched habitat. But that may not turn out to be exactly the case. Crist initially said he would use the land to build a flow way between Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades, quenching the thirsty River of Grass with water untainted by phosphorus from sugar production. But for that plan to go forward, the state will also have to obtain 40,000 acres owned by a subsidiary of sugar behemoth Florida Crystals. Since the flow way would require less land than what Crist is buying from U.S. Sugar, many expect that the state will orchestrate a swap with Florida Crystals instead of taking the land out of production. Closed-door negotiations are ongoing. Meanwhile, a Florida Crystals spokesperson says the company has cleaned up its act and is not the Everglades' nemesis, as most phosphorus pollution in the region now comes from non-sugar sources.

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The U.S. EPA has vetoed a giant, expensive plan to build the world's largest water pump in the Mississippi River delta. The so-called Yazoo Pump flood-control project would have sucked 6 million gallons of water a minute from 67,000 acres of wetlands along the Yazoo River. The scheme, proposed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and first authorized by Congress in 1941, would have cost $220 million. The EPA concluded that maybe, just maybe, sucking all that wet out of the wetlands would have been damaging to fish, wildlife, and migratory birds. "The EPA truly deserves our thanks for killing this unnecessary and economically wasteful Corps of Engineers project," says the Sierra Club's Ed Hopkins. "The natural, and free, flood protections offered by these wetlands are far more effective than an expensive pumping project." Today's veto was only the 12th time since 1972 that the EPA has put the kibosh on a Corps project; the last was in 1990.

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Louisiana's people and property fared better under Hurricane Gustav than had been feared, but acres of valuable wetlands were likely irrevocably destroyed. "The last thing on anyone's mind during a hurricane is how the wetlands are going to do," says activist Aaron Giles. But since happy and healthy wetlands act as storm barriers, "wetlands are a critical piece of keeping coastal Louisiana safe." Heavy storms toss around fauna in marshes and deposit saltwater where it ain't supposed to be. Louisiana's wetlands have been severely eroded by natural disaster and development; some estimates hold that healthier wetlands could have knocked Gustav's 12-foot tidal surge down by three feet. The hurricane shut down oil production in the Gulf of Mexico but caused no structural damage or spills on offshore platforms, leading President Bush to reiterate Tuesday, "This storm should not cause members of the Congress to say, 'Well, we don't need to address our energy independence.' We need more domestic energy. One place to find it is offshore America.''

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Florida and the U.S. EPA have been skewered by a federal judge for their Everglades cleanup efforts (or rather, lack thereof). In 2003, Florida pushed back a deadline for reducing phosphorus pollution in the River of Grass from 2006 to 2016. By doing so, the state "violated its fundamental commitment and promise to protect the Everglades," U.S. District Judge Alan Gold ruled Tuesday. He also turned his Gavel of Shame on the EPA, saying the agency violated the Clean Water Act by not holding Florida to its deadline. The EPA turned a "blind eye" in concluding that the delay meant no change in water-quality standards, said Gold, and was "patently wrong and acted arbitrarily and capriciously." The ruling forces the EPA to review Florida's water-pollution standards for the Everglades and determine whether they pass federal muster.

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The U.S. EPA has neglected to pursue hundreds of potential violations of the Clean Water Act because of regulatory uncertainty, according to an internal memo. The lack of clarity stems from a 2006 Supreme Court ruling that left plenty up in the air about the types of waterways and wetlands that fall under EPA jurisdiction. The confusion has had "a significant impact on enforcement," wrote an EPA enforcement and compliance official in a March memo to the agency's assistant administrator for water. From July 2006 to December 2007, said the memo, the EPA failed to pursue 304 cases that would have clearly violated the Clean Water Act before the court's ruling. The agency also chose to "lower the priority" of 147 other cases. The memo was released Monday by Reps. Jim Oberstar (D-Minn.) and Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), who stated that they have "grave concerns over the current status of implementation of the Clean Water Act" and asked that the EPA provide information about its enforcement process.

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Nearly 300 square miles of sugar plantation in the Everglades will once again become marsh, as Florida Gov. Charlie Crist announced Tuesday that the state will buy the land from U.S. Sugar Corp. If all goes to plan, the $1.75 billion deal may be the largest environmental restoration in the history of the United States. Environmentalists have long lamented the sugar industry's role in diverting and polluting the Everglades' water supply; the River of Grass is only half the 11,000 square miles it was in the early 20th century. U.S. Sugar, which has farmed the Everglades for nearly 80 years, plans to go out of business within six years. The deal is, says Kirk Fordham of the Everglades Foundation, "an achievement of breathtaking significance and priceless value." Sweet.

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Sen. John McCain swung through Florida last week, taking time for a boat tour of the Everglades on Friday. The Obama campaign promptly criticized McCain for his opposition last year to a water bill that included major funding for Everglades restoration. McCain said he would have supported a stand-alone Everglades bill, but the broader water bill was chockful of pork. "I am in favor of doing whatever's necessary to save the Everglades," McCain said. "But I will not vote for bills that have projects and other things on them that have not gone through the proper scrutiny." Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (R), an eco-minded politician who may be a contender for McCain's veep spot, was reassured: "I am sure he supports the Everglades and the restoration of the national park."

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It's hard to believe, now that it's been overrun by 7 million residents and 7 jillion strip malls, but southern Florida was once America's last frontier. As late as 1880, the census recorded just 257 residents in a county covering most of the region -- because most of the region was a watery wilderness called the Everglades. Mapmakers weren't sure whether to draw it as land or water. Politicians dismissed it as uninhabitable swampland. Explorers described it as a "godforsaken" and "hideous" and "abominable" morass, "suitable only for the haunt of noxious vermin, or the resort of pestilential reptiles."

When good wetlands go bad.

Photo: usgs.gov

Those explorers never would have imagined that the Everglades would get so dry that it would burn out of control, or that desolate southern Florida would become a sprawling megalopolis. But those two weird developments are intimately related. The wildfires raging through nearly 40,000 acres of the Everglades this week are the direct legacy of the elaborate water-management system that made southern Florida safe for human civilization. The system has functioned according to design for decades, but it's killing the Everglades, and it's ultimately unsustainable for human South Florida as well.

Environmentalists like to say that the Everglades is a test; if we pass, we may get to keep the planet. I wrote a book about the death and possible rebirth of the Everglades that was basically dedicated to the proposition that southern Florida is where we're going to find out whether humans can live in harmony with nature, and perhaps avoid the water wars that could otherwise dominate the geopolitics of the 21st century. The fires are a vivid, symbolic reminder that we've got a long way to go. History's bill is coming due for a century of bad decisions, and we haven't yet figured out how to pay it.

For all its famous sunshine, southern Florida has always been one of the rainiest swaths of North America; with 60 annual inches, it's significantly wetter than Seattle. And for thousands of years, most of that water ended up in Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades, a panoramic sheet of shallow water flowing through 100 miles of serrated sawgrass from the lake all the way down to Florida Bay. In fact, the fires that are now raging in the northeast corner of Everglades National Park are incinerating one of the wettest sloughs of the original "river of grass." Another fire ravaging 25,000 acres around Lake Okeechobee is actually burning drought-exposed lakebed.

The scientific term for this phenomenon is FUBAR. Sloughs and lakes are not supposed to be flammable. Sure, there were fires in the natural Everglades, but they were caused by lightning strikes during summer rains, and were quickly extinguished by the waterlogged landscape. The Everglades is incredibly flat, declining just a few inches per mile, so its original wetlands were incredibly wet, storing rainfall and recharging underground aquifers in the summer so that there was still water on the ground when the rains stopped in the winter. If you were a glutton for punishment, you could have walked across the entire marsh without getting your hair wet, and without stepping on dry ground.

But starting in the 1880s, Americans determined to subdue Mother Nature started trying to drain the Everglades with canals, hoping to create a new paradise for agriculture and development. A few lonely voices warned that ditches could turn the swamp into a desert, but most Floridians agreed with Gov. Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, who declared in the early 1900s that if drained swamps could really burn, "the great bogs of Ireland would have been ash heaps long before St. Patrick drove out the snakes."

But sure enough, the early ditches started sucking the marsh dry, ruining wells, damaging soils, and, yes, igniting fires so smoky that children in Miami had to cover their faces at school. And in the summer, southern Florida's torrential downpours overwhelmed the ditches, converting farmland back to swampland, inspiring the first jokes about buying Florida land by the gallon. The jokes seemed a lot less funny in 1928, when a hurricane blasted Lake Okeechobee through a flimsy muck dike, killing 2,500 pioneers in the Everglades.

Enter my friends in the Army Corps of Engineers, the ground troops in America's war against nature. They built the massive Hoover Dike around the lake, forever cutting off the Everglades from its wellspring. Then they built America's most ambitious flood-control system, with more than 2,000 miles of levees and canals, plus pumps so powerful the engines were cannibalized from nuclear submarines. The project gave water managers power to move almost every drop of rain that fell south of Orlando, allowing them to whisk floodwaters into the lake, the Everglades, or its estuaries for the convenience of thirsty farms and communities that only wanted water when they wanted it.

These waterworks made southern Florida safe for 400,000 acres of sugar fields, as well as one of the spectacular development booms in human history. On the southeast coast, suburbs like Coral Springs, Miami Springs, Sunrise, Miramar, Weston, and Wellington began sprouting west of I-95, paving over the eastern Everglades. And on the southwest coast, Naples and Fort Myers started marching east into the western Everglades.

Unfortunately, most of that boom took place back when wetlands -- which absorb stormwater, cleanse drinking water, and nourish wildlife -- were still considered wastelands. The result is a dying ecological treasure, but also a megalopolis that still seesaws between dangerous floods in the wet season and harsh droughts in the dry season.

Today, half the original Everglades has been lost, along with its ability to smooth out high-water and low-water events. The other half is a mess -- usually too dry, occasionally too wet, always polluted and discombobulated. The ecosystem hosts 69 endangered species, including the Cape Sable seaside sparrow, which exists only in Everglades National Park, and could use some flame-retardant pajamas this week. Water is supposed to be the lifeblood of the Everglades, but these days it barely reaches the park.

Meanwhile, since the leaky Hoover Dike is at risk of a catastrophic failure, and water managers don't want a repeat of the 1928 disaster, they often blast billions of gallons out of the lake when it gets high, ravaging the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee estuaries to its east and west, wasting fresh water they need in times of drought. For example, they dumped tons of water into the sea to prepare for the 2006 hurricane season -- just in time for a two-year drought that has left Lake Okeechobee three feet below its normal level.

That's how southern Florida got into its current predicament. Raindrops that used to fall on wetlands, recharge aquifers, and dribble across the landscape all year long now land on yards, roads, and parking lots, migrate into canals, and get whisked out to sea. And now the exurbs have moved to the doorstep of the Everglades, where they constantly stick new straws into the aquifers. So now the Everglades is parched enough to burn out of control when some yahoo gets careless with matches. And millions of people in the surrounding suburbs suddenly have to worry about smoke and particulates as well as unbearable traffic, overcrowded schools, skyrocketing insurance rates tied to the omnipresent threat of a hurricane, and a disappearing sense of place.

The good news is that in 2000, Congress decided to fix all these problems, enacting the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan to restore some semblance of southern Florida's natural hydrology. It's a complex project, but the basic idea is to spend $12 billion on reservoirs and high-tech wells that will store rain that used to be stored by wetlands, then redistribute it to people, farms, and the Everglades when it's needed.

The project passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in both Washington, D.C. and Tallahassee, because everyone agreed that the Everglades was a national treasure. It's supposed to be a model for ecosystem restoration work in the Great Lakes, Chesapeake Bay, Louisiana's coastal wetlands, and even southern Iraq's Garden of Eden marshes.

The bad news is that the project is deeply flawed, particularly when it comes to getting water to the Everglades. And now it's stalled by money problems, engineering problems, and political problems. The Everglades is as sick in 2008 as it was in 2000.

Eventually, it will stop burning. But it will still be dying.

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Richton, Miss., is the lucky town picked as the fifth storage site for the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve. To create space to store strategic petroleum, the Department of Energy will drain 50 million gallons of water a day for five years from the Pascagoula River to dissolve underground salt caverns, pumping the resulting brine through likely-to-leak pipelines over fragile wetlands and dumping it into the Gulf of Mexico. (The DOE assures that this all will be done in an "environmentally friendly" manner.) In the face of public outcry, the DOE will hold a second round of public meetings next week; the first round was held shortly after Hurricane Katrina and 110 miles away from Richton, and for some reason had low attendance.

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The Bush administration has finalized rules for wetlands development that encourage developers to restore or create new wetlands when old ones are destroyed, sometimes far from the original site. While it sounds innocent enough on its face, opponents of the controversial approach say that natural streams and wetlands are more complex than simply wet places, and they're difficult to re-create effectively. "Under this plan, streams and wetlands that are permanently buried or filled by developers and polluters can suddenly be compensated by creating new streams and wetlands somewhere else," said Joan Mulhern of Earthjustice. "Just because the agencies say so does not mean it is possible to actually create a stream or wetland." The new rules are expected to make it more difficult to force developers to improve onsite wetlands, and they're also likely to make the process of developing wetlands less expensive.

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There are 8 million stories in the Mississippi Basin, and this week we've told only a few. As lead editor of this Army Corps series, I've been immersed for the last few months in all things Mississippi River. Coming out the other side, I have a few answers, yes, but even more questions to explore. Below is my personal working list of issues that -- while perhaps less acknowledged nationally than the spectacular disaster that is New Orleans and the Louisiana coast -- rank high in determining a bright or dim future for the Mississippi Basin's communities, both human and wild.

It makes one hell of a neighbor.

Photo: nasa.gov

1. Living with Risk
In New York City, most of us have installed bars across our windows and double locks on our doors. New Yorkers tend not to forget that living here, there's a relatively high risk someone will try to break into our homes and steal our stuff -- and no one tells us otherwise. We're not special, of course: many Californians live with the ever-present risk of earthquakes, and design buildings to increase the chances they'll survive the next one. In other parts of the West, officials urge homeowners to build, landscape, and maintain properties in ways that will help protect them from wildland fires.

But it's different for people living and working behind the levees of greater St. Louis, of New Orleans, and of other flood-prone spots on the Mississippi. They have been assured for generations that they are safe -- and much of the time, that's true. In many locations, they are not expected to build differently to account for the (arguably) rare one-in-a-hundred flood. However, it's the exceptions -- violent, life-altering exceptions -- that prove the inherent risks of setting up life behind a levee.

Isn't it time for residents and their representatives to change their ways to account for these periodic, and largely predictable, weather events? In some places, that's happening. When residents of Biloxi, Miss., climb the stairs of rebuilt homes set on nine-foot pilings above the ground, they likely won't forget that they're living in the path of future Hurricane Katrinas.

2. Who's Mitigating Whom?
Should the same federal agency -- the Army Corps of Engineers -- be responsible for not only planning and building Mississippi Basin flood protections, but assessing how much environmental damage those projects will cause, fixing up that damage, and reporting back to Congress on how well all that went? And all from the same budget? "The Corps' goal is to actually build projects," says Melissa Samet of American Rivers. "If you highlight the fact that there are big environmental impacts, that usually hurts that effort. The cost of mitigation is a project cost, so it adds to the cost of the project. And then there's this whole other layer of getting it implemented, getting it monitored, getting it done, that the Corps has historically had problems with." Conflict of interest-o-rama!

3. Zebra Musseling In
Invasive species -- a known and serious problem in the Great Lakes -- have also worked their way into the Mississippi Basin, where they are posing dangerous threats to native species and ecologies. Asian carp are pushing native buffalo carp out of the Illinois River. Retiring Higgins' Eye mussels on the Upper Mississippi -- already hurt by ecological changes brought on by the lock-and-dam system -- are being ousted by resource-hogging non-native zebra mussels, which alter the quality of the water and the riverbed for the worse in the process.

The Mississippi River has been so thoroughly engineered over the past two centuries -- and those changes so vociferously defended in the name of perpetuating the nation's economic growth -- that without deeper reflection, it would be tempting to call it a loss as far as "wild nature" is concerned. But the native ecological qualities and processes of the Mississippi and its wildlife -- its "ecosystem services" -- likely have at least as much value as the goods on the barges traversing the locks and dams. Who's quantifying that value, and what's the cost to us if it becomes impossible to recover? And hey -- what responsibilities do we have to the well being of other species, even if they don't rate directly on our profit and loss statements? The Mississippi's going to be a proving ground for that debate in coming decades.

4. It's Not Easy Being Amphibian
The likelihood that climate change will bring more moisture to the mid-Mississippi River region might sound like a boon for amphibians and fish. But the way that rain is likely to fall -- in less frequent but heavier bursts -- could mean disaster for aquatic species dependent upon more even water flows. "If you're getting very intense episodes of precipitation, it means in other parts of the year you're getting intense drying episodes," says St. Louis University biologist Jason Knouft. "And the majority of aquatic diversity occurs in smaller streams, say across the entire Mississippi Basin," that are more susceptible to drying out. "You're altering these flow regimes," Knouft says, "which then has cascading effects on the habitat quality for aquatic taxa, and it sort of cascades down." Who speaks for the climate-challenged fishes?

5. Ruler of All the River
In a 2007 report on Mississippi River water quality, the National Academy of Sciences opined that, "Too little coordination among the 10 states along the river has left the Mississippi River an 'orphan' from a water quality monitoring and assessment perspective. Stronger leadership from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, along with better interstate coordination, is needed to address these problems."

And why stop at water quality? There are plenty of cross-border crises to choose from: Higher flood levels, threats to local and national economies if New Orleans washes away, climate change impacts, native species protection, disintegrating stormwater systems, sewer overflows, etc. And then there's the hypoxic "dead zone" radiating from the mouth of the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico -- created in large part by runoff from agricultural operations throughout the basin.

Kudos are due to the growing collaborations along the Mississippi corridor that are working to protect the river, such as those that Grist's Sarah van Schagen noted in her account from Dubuque, Iowa, last fall; the organizers of and participants in February's Levee Safety Summit in St. Louis; and the environmental groups behind the Corps Reform Network. They're pointing the way to the future. More is needed.

6. Everything's Rhine
The Army Corps dredges, diverts, locks, dams, dikes, and channelizes the Mississippi and its tributaries largely in the name of facilitating navigation -- remember, it was the federal government's right to regulate commerce that led Congress to set the Corps loose on the river back in the 1820s.

But commerce can coexist with a Mississippi River that's also being managed for higher ecological values, flood safety, and the onset of climate change. Southern Illinois University geologist Nicholas Pinter, who has studied rising flood levels on the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, points to cross-border initiatives in Europe that are aiming to decrease damage from river flooding by maintaining low usage of the floodplains, and removing navigational structures that impede flowing water and raise flood levels. "It's not even a question for them of increasing development in the floodplain," says Pinter.

In low-lying Holland, this "Room for the River" policy has included lowering dozens of dikes along the Rhine and Meuse rivers; they'll be overtopped in floods and thus relieve pressure on dikes further downriver. "It's very clear in the literature over there that this was driven by late 20th century climate change," says Pinter. "The Dutch government saw increasing amounts of water coming down the river. The consequences of doing nothing would have been horrific."

Barge traffic on the Rhine is managed with significantly less intrusive engineering, he says, using single-hulled barges with a maximum draft of four to five feet -- whereas the double-hulled barges on the Mississippi draft twice as much, and sometimes move in huge rafts of 40 or more. "Navigation could continue completely but perhaps differently" on the Mississippi, says Pinter, "with a new strategy for engineering the river."

----

There are many, many smart, creative minds set on solving the problems of the Mississippi and its communities -- but also a legacy stretching back two centuries of powerful but shortsighted, self-interested river management to overcome. In the case of the Army Corps of Engineers, I wonder if this transformation will have to arise from changes within -- as much as pressure from without -- to really ensure a bright future for the Mississippi River.

I don't have a prescription in my pocket for how that will happen -- but I am looking forward to covering it.

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