Washington Post article connecting flooding with wetland destruction 
forwarded by Jane Clark



An article from today's Washington Post that suggests that human destruction 
of wetlands might have played a role in current Mississippi flooding.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/18/AR2008061803371.html

Iowa Flooding Could Be An Act of Man, Experts Say
Flooding Overwhelms The Midwest
Residents along the Mississippi River are experiencing the worst flooding in 
15 years.


By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 19, 2008; Page A01

As the Cedar River rose higher and higher, and as he stacked sandbags along 
the levee protecting downtown Cedar Falls, Kamyar Enshayan, a college 
professor and City Council member, kept asking himself the same question: 
"What is going on?"

The river would eventually rise six feet higher than any flood on record. 
Farther downstream, in Cedar Rapids, the river would break the record by 
more than 11 feet.
Enshayan, director of an environmental center at the University of Northern 
Iowa, suspects that this natural disaster wasn't really all that natural. He 
points out that the heavy rains fell on a landscape radically reengineered 
by humans. Plowed fields have replaced tallgrass prairies. Fields have been 
meticulously drained with underground pipes. Streams and creeks have been 
straightened. Most of the wetlands are gone. Flood plains have been filled 
and developed.

"We've done numerous things to the landscape that took away these 
water-absorbing functions," he said. "Agriculture must respect the limits of 
nature."

Officials are still trying to understand all the factors that contributed to 
Iowa's flooding, and not everyone has the same suspicions as Enshayan. For 
them, the cause was obvious: It rained buckets and buckets for days on end. 
They say the changes in land use were lesser factors in what was really just 
a case of meteorological bad luck.

But some Iowans who study the environment suspect that changes in the land, 
both recently and over the past century or so, have made Iowa's terrain not 
only highly profitable but also highly vulnerable to flooding. They know 
it's a hard case to prove, but they hope to get Iowans thinking about how to 
reduce the chances of a repeat calamity.

"I sense that the flooding is not the result of a 500-year event," said 
Jerry DeWitt, director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at 
Iowa State University. "We're farming closer to creeks, farming closer to 
rivers. Without adequate buffer strips, the water moves rapidly from the 
field directly to the surface water."

Corn alone will cover more than a third of the state's land surface this 
year. The ethanol boom that began two years ago encouraged still more 
cultivation.

Between 2007 and 2008, farmers took 106,000 acres of Iowa land out of the 
Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to keep farmland 
uncultivated, according to Lyle Asell, a special assistant for agriculture 
and environment with the state's Department of Natural Resources (DNR). That 
land, if left untouched, probably would have been covered with perennial 
grasses with deep roots that help absorb water.

The basic hydrology of Iowa has been changed since the coming of the plow. 
By the early 20th century, farmers had installed drainage pipes under the 
surface to lower the water table and keep water from pooling in what 
otherwise could be valuable farmland. More of this drainage "tiling" has 
been added in recent years. The direct effect is that water moves quickly 
from the farmland to the streams and rivers.

"We've lost 90 percent of our wetlands," said Mary Skopec, who monitors 
water quality for the Iowa DNR.

Crop rotation may also play a subtle role in the flooding. Farmers who may 
have once grown a number of crops are now likely to stick to just corn and 
soybeans -- annual plants that don't put down deep roots.

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