Symbol of Controversy

The Mississippi certainly doesn't qualify as one of the country's natural and scenic rivers. There's not much left of the Mississippi that we can honestly call natural. Even in places where it may appear natural it's appearance is likely deceptive. The fact of the matter is that we have dredged and channelled and leveed and dammed and jettied and diked just about every inch of the Mississippi. The task not only of doing all this damming, dredging, diking and so forth, but of also determining what should be done and what effects it will have, has fallen to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Over the years, not everyone in the country has agreed with what the Corps have recommended and done, not only with the Mississippi but with other national resources as well. The people who most often and most forcefully object to the Corps' efforts are the various environmentalist groups such as The National Wildlife Federation, The Sierra Club, et cetera. Corps projects are most often criticized because of the effects they will have on the natural environment. Here's the opening sentence from the report Troubled Waters, which was prepared in part by The National Wildlife Federation: "No other federal agency has had - and continues to have - such a profound impact on the nation's environmentally sensitive floodplains, waterways and coastal areas as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers." Of all the Corps projects across the nation, the complex at Old River has become the symbol of this controversy. No other Corps project is so often cited by the Corps' detractors as example of their folly. The Old River Control Structure clearly lays bare the fundamental differences in philosophy and approach between the Corps and the environmental lobby that so frequently objects to their efforts.

At the root of the controversy is the very understanding of our relationship with nature. Here's another quote from Troubled Waters: "Although many of these [Corps] projects have been critical to the nation's economic development, numerous Corps projects have demonstrated an overreaching will to control nature, and a naive belief that engineering has the capacity to fundamentally replumb and reshape the nation's rivers, floodplains and coastlines." In The Control of Nature, John McPhee writes, "In time, people would come to suggest that there was about these enterprises [Old River Control] an element of hauteur. A professor of law at Tulane University, for example, would assign it third place in the annals of arrogance. . . . Bold it was indeed to dig a fresh conduit in the very ground where one river had prepared to trap another, bolder yet to build a structure there meant to be in charge of what might happen."

In recent decades, the environmental movements have popularized a perception of nature as good, life-giving, and benign. Indeed the images of nature as mother -- Mother Nature, Mother Earth -- are popular metaphors. Mother Nature left to her own devices knows what is best for us and will care for us so long as we don't meddle. We see this view of nature presented over and over in the popular media for example in the fallacious depiction of Native Americans as living "in harmony with their spirit gods of the earth." This view of our relationship with nature is a shift from our earlier (biblical) view of ourselves as stewards of the natural world. In part this shift is reactionary as our record in the role of stewards is certainly less than laudable. The complex at Old River best represents the older view of our relationship with nature as stewards rather than children, and the near failure of the Low Sill Structure in 1973 and the numerous predictions by critics that the entire complex is doomed to inevitable failure, make the complex at Old River a favorite example for the Corps' critics. It is the symbol of our failure to act as responsible stewards, and it is the symbol of our sinful pride that we believed we could control nature rather than live with her.

This is one of the most profoundly important and intriguing issues for all of us as we move forward ever more technologically capable of exerting our will upon nature. This is an issue worth the dedication of a lifetime. When we choose to reshape or modify natural processes, are we meddling such that we will most certainly reap tragic fruits for our interference or are we acting as stewards whose efforts will improve upon nature and enhance our quality of life. Today more than ever we must grapple with this question as we move into genetic engineering; as we struggle with global warming and damage to the ozone layer; as we harness the power of nuclear energy and produce nuclear waste. In China construction has begun on the largest human made structure ever conceived -- the Three Gorges Dam on the Chang Jiang river will dramatically reshape nature. If it succeeds China expects to reap great benefits for it's people, but if it fails, the ensuing loss of life and destruction to the environment could rank as history's single greatest human disaster.

When we raise the stakes so high we place ourselves in a moral quandary, do we have the right to take such extreme risks. Those participating in the Manhattan Project really didn't know what consequences would result from the first detonation of an atomic bomb. The scientists calculated that there was a very small risk, but a risk nonetheless that the detonation of such a device might cause a chain reaction that would ignite the atmosphere and destroy the earth in a single cataclysmic inferno. In the bunker at the test site, Enrico Fermi was jokingly taking bets on whether or not they were about to destroy the earth. How comfortable are you considering that your life -- all of our lives -- may now rest in the hands of a few who could be cracking jokes at the same time they're destroying the world.

Well, the Corps isn't holding the future of humankind in its hands at Old River, but the stakes are quite high. There are nearly three million people living in the Mississippi and Atchafalaya valleys below Old River and the Corps' actions and ultimate success or failure directly effects those people. I am not going to attempt to pronounce here that one side or the other is right or wrong. No such simple answer is possible. We must all carefully educate ourselves in order to discern the best course. Personally, I have strong tendencies to side with the environmentalists more often than not -- not because I believe as they do, but because I usually do not trust the competence or motivation of the other side. In this case however, I can say that I have spent many hours with members of the Corps -- their engineers and scientists and field workers -- and I will gladly vouch for their motivation. The Corps members I have met understand the seriousness of their role, they are sensitive to environmental concerns, and they have all of our best interests at heart. Philosophically the Corps see themselves as stewards of nature and so, with sleeves rolled up, they'd just as soon tackle a problem and build a solution. I won't always agree that's the best approach, but if that's the final decision, then I'm happy handing the job over to the Corps for competent implementation.