--- Chad Smith <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> From: "Chad Smith" <[log in to unmask]>
> > Subject: FW: Mike Grunwald piece on Missouri River
> Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2003 08:46:28 -0500
>
> Thought you would all be interested in the Missouri
> River piece below.
>
> No real update on the litigation at this point.
> Things are quiet now as we
> wait to see what the Corps and the FWS come up with.
>  From all indications,
> the Corps is prepared to issue a new Master Manual
> with no flow changes,
> which will mean we will be back in court again early
> next spring, if not
> sooner.
>
> Let me know if you have any questions.
>
> Chad Smith, Director
> Nebraska Field Office - American Rivers
> Mill Towne Building
> 650 J Street, Suite 400
> Lincoln, Nebraska 68508
> 402-477-7910
> 402-477-2565 (FAX)
> 402-730-5593 (CELLULAR)
> [log in to unmask]
>
>  -----Original Message-----
> From:         Chad Smith [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Tuesday, October 21, 2003 8:33 AM
> To:   River Team Missouri (E-mail)
> Cc:   Rebecca Wodder (E-mail)
> Subject:      Mike Grunwald piece on Missouri River
> Importance:   High
>
> Washed Away
> Bush vs. the Missouri River
>
> By Michael Grunwald
> The New Republic
> October 27, 2003
>
> 'Sound science" is the Bush administration's
> environmental mantra, its
> hardheaded response to fuzzy-minded ecoradicalism.
> "When we make decisions,
> we want to make sure we do so on sound science--not
> what sounds good, but
> what is real," President Bush declared last year.
> Interior Secretary Gale
> Norton--a former adviser to the corporate-sponsored
> Advancement of Sound
> Science Coalition--actually appointed a "high-level
> team" this spring to
> make sure her department's decisions are "based on
> the best available
> science."
>
> That team might want to sneak a peek at the Missouri
> River, where the Bush
> administration is about to decide one of the most
> explosive environmental
> issues facing the middle of the country. The team
> would find that the
> administration is angling to do the exact opposite
> of what the best
> available science says it must in order to save the
> river's endangered
> species--and that Assistant Interior Secretary Craig
> Manson has scrapped a
> plan to have independent scientists review the
> administration's decision in
> advance. Then again, the "sound science" team
> probably knows that--because
> Manson is its leader.
>
> In recent years, the science of the Big Muddy has
> become increasingly clear:
> The Fish and Wildlife Service, which is part of the
> Interior Department, has
> concluded that more natural ebbs and flows are
> needed on the dammed,
> ditched, and diked Missouri to prevent the
> extinction of two endangered
> shorebirds as well as a Jurassic-era fish, and the
> independent National
> Academy of Sciences has found that the Service is
> right. The legalities of
> the Missouri are also clear: A federal judge
> demanded more natural flow
> patterns this summer, citing the Endangered Species
> Act, and held the Bush
> administration in contempt when it tried to wriggle
> out of compliance in
> order to protect the river's barge industry. Even
> the economics of the
> Missouri are clear: The Army Corps of Engineers,
> longtime manager of the
> river and perennial shill for the barge industry,
> admits that the upstream
> recreation interests that would benefit from more
> natural hydropatterns
> already generate at least twelve times more economic
> activity than the
> downstream navigation interests that would suffer.
>
> It's just the politics of the Missouri that are
> murky. Bush and Vice
> President Dick Cheney both promised during the 2000
> campaign to protect the
> status quo on the Missouri, and their administration
> has consistently
> resisted the scientific, legal, and economic
> arguments for more natural
> flows. The Army Corps is now under orders to produce
> a new plan for the
> river that will not change flows, and the Fish and
> Wildlife Service is under
> pressure to approve it. In an interview, Manson
> pledged that science will
> ultimately guide the Service's decision, but he also
> warned that the
> Service's biologists should not feel bound by their
> "preconceived notions"
> and should stop talking publicly about their
> science. Complains one federal
> biologist, "The pressure on this issue is just
> unreal."
>
> The natural Missouri River was described by an early
> observer as "a tawny,
> restless, brawling flood," constantly mutinying its
> banks, rambling and
> meandering across its valleys, building thousands of
> sandbars, islands, and
> oxbows along its 2,400-mile journey west. "No other
> river was ever so
> dead-set against being navigated," another
> Missouri-watcher wrote. Still,
> the unruly braided river carried Lewis and Clark
> west along their journey of
> discovery 200 years ago next year; William Clark,
> who was much better at
> adventuring than spelling, was enraptured by the
> oak, ash, and cottonwood
> forests of the Missouri Valley, "one of the most
> butifill Plains I ever Saw,
> open & butifully diversified."
>
> But Congress didn't want a free-flowing Missouri
> River; it wanted an orderly
> liquid highway. So, in 1882, it ordered the Army
> Corps to start throttling
> the lower Missouri with wing-dikes; it then approved
> a series of massive
> dams on the upper Missouri in 1943--shortly after a
> Corps official,
> infuriated about flooding in Omaha, famously
> shouted, "I want control of the
> Missouri River!" Over the years, the Corps has
> squeezed the water that used
> to spread all across the Missouri's floodplain into
> a deep and narrow
> channel, reducing the river's width by two-thirds.
> To ease barge travel, it
> has sliced off hairpin turns that once confounded
> steamboats, reducing the
> river's length by 127 miles. And it has managed the
> river to maintain a
> reliable nine-foot-deep barge channel at all times,
> eliminating the ebbs and
> flows and shoals and shifts that used to make
> navigation so treacherous and
> uncertain. Muddy banks that used to erode and shift
> by the hour were armored
> with unyielding rock revetments. Shallow backwaters
> and chutes filled with
> silt. Wetlands were gradually converted into
> farmland.
>
> The manhandling of the Missouri produced reservoirs,
> hydropower, and flood
> control for millions of Midwesterners. But, as a
> navigation canal, the river
> has been a bust. In the 1930s, the Corps justified
> taming the Missouri by
> predicting twelve million annual tons of freight;
> today, the Corps still
> manages the Missouri primarily for navigation, but
> the river's barges float
> less than 1.5 million tons per year between St.
> Louis and Sioux City. A
> Corps booklet celebrating "100 Years of the Missouri
> River Navigation
> Project" admitted that, "from a point of view of
> commercial traffic, the
> engineering accomplishment has been wasted effort."
>
> From a point of view of the Missouri's ecology, the
> engineering
> accomplishment has been an utter disaster. It has
> eliminated nine-tenths of
> the river's sandbars and islands, four-fifths of its
> aquatic food, and
> two-thirds of its catfish. In 1990, the Fish and
> Wildlife Service first
> warned that manipulation of the river was
> jeopardizing the survival of three
> endangered species: the least tern, the piping
> plover, and the pallid
> sturgeon--an ugly behemoth that had done just fine
> for 150 million years
> before the Corps started messing with the Missouri.
> The Service pointed out
> that, during the spring, when the river would
> naturally swell, triggering
> mysterious reproductive impulses for sturgeon and
> other fish, the Corps was
> holding back water behind the upstream dams. In the
> summer, when the river
> would naturally dwindle, exposing the sandbars and
> islands where shorebirds
> build nests, the Corps was releasing the extra water
> to float barges--even
> though, according to the Corps, barges produce less
> than 1 percent of the
> river's annual economic benefits.
>
> The Service was still a long way from completing its
> official "biological
> opinion" analyzing the threat to the three river
> creatures, as demanded by
> the Endangered Species Act, but the mere possibility
> of a "jeopardy finding"
> that would require the Corps to restore the river's
> natural rhythms stirred
> powerful interests in the lower basin. The barge
> industry--controlled by
> conglomerates like ConAgra, Cargill, and Archer
> Daniels Midland--protested
> that low flows would disrupt summer navigation on
> the lower Missouri.
> (That's true, but the river's barges carry so little
> cargo that it would
> almost be cheaper for farmers to ship their grain by
> FedEx.) The industry
> also claimed that low Missouri flows would harm
> navigation on the far busier
> Mississippi. (Not true, even according to the
> barge-friendly Corps.)
> Meanwhile, the farm lobby took advantage of the
> Midwest floods of 1993 to
> claim that a spring rise would drown fields in the
> lower basin. (The Corps
> disproved that one, too.) The farmers also warned
> that railroads would jack
> up freight rates if they didn't have to compete with
> summertime barges.
> (True in theory, but how much competition do
> railroads really face from the
> seven towboats that work the Missouri?) The fiery
> Senator Christopher "Kit"
> Bond, a Missouri Republican, began crusading for the
> status quo on Capitol
> Hill. The laconic Senate Minority Leader Thomas
> Daschle, a South Dakota
> Democrat, fought back on behalf of upper-basin
> states that support flow
> changes to keep their lakes full for fishing,
> boating, and tourism
> interests. Their battles were fun to watch, with
> both men occasionally
> threatening to shut down the entire Senate if they
> didn't get their way, but
> they basically fought to a stalemate throughout the
> '90s.
>
> It's worth noting--especially now that David Hayes,
> former President Bill
> Clinton's deputy Interior secretary, is representing
> an environmental group
> suing the Bush administration for dragging its feet
> for three years on the
> Missouri--that the Clinton administration dragged
> its feet for almost eight
> years. It was only after enviros threatened to sue
> in 2000 to force
> compliance with the Endangered Species Act that the
> Fish and Wildlife
> Service delivered its biological opinion, and it was
> only after Election Day
> that Corps generals agreed to obey it. But, when
> Bond managed in that year
> to slip language into a $23.6 billion energy and
> water appropriations bill
> that would have barred the Corps from spending any
> federal money on flow
> changes, Clinton (under pressure from Daschle)
> vetoed the entire bill. And,
> by the end of the Clinton years, sound science did
> have its day: The Service
> delivered an exhaustive jeopardy finding directing
> the Corps to implement
> flow changes by 2003, and the Corps finally promised
> to devise a plan that
> would restore a seasonal rise and fall to the river.
>
> But that promise no longer seems to matter. The
> promises that matter now
> were made in the heat of the 2000 campaign, when
> Bush and Cheney both
> visited the swing state of Missouri and pledged to
> oppose flow changes.
> Their commitment to the status quo was hailed by
> Bond, the Missouri Farm
> Bureau, the barge industry, and even then-House
> Minority Leader Richard
> Gephardt, a Missouri Democrat. And their
> administration has maneuvered to
> keep the Missouri as is, even though the National
> Academy of Sciences,
> America's paragon of sound science, endorsed the
> Service's demand for flow
> changes last year, calling for "immediate and
> decisive" action to implement
> "flow pulses that emulate the river's natural
> hydrograph."
>
> The Bush administration, however, took immediate and
> decisive action to
> oppose those pulses. It could have easily ordered
> the Corps to release water
> for a "spring rise," then hold back water for lower
> summertime flows.
> Instead, the administration's Service agreed to a
> yearlong delay while the
> Corps devised a new long-term plan for the Missouri.
> Enviros went to court
> this summer and won an injunction requiring the
> Corps to start lowering the
> river immediately, but the administration simply
> defied the order. Even
> after the judge issued a contempt finding, the Corps
> still refused to reduce
> flows until there were only three days left in the
> summer navigation season.
> And, now that the summer battle is over, the Corps
> is about to float its new
> long-term plan to revive the river, which is equally
> defiant of the best
> available science and the Endangered Species Act.
>
> Army Corps officials in the Omaha district say they
> have strict orders from
> General William Grisoli, the commander of the
> agency's northwest division:
> Devise a plan that avoids a jeopardy finding for the
> three species but
> doesn't include a spring rise or low summer flows.
> Those are difficult
> orders to follow, since the Fish and Wildlife
> Service has already ruled that
> a spring rise and low summer flows are needed to
> escape jeopardy, and the
> Service, which must approve any Corps plan in a new
> biological opinion, is
> the final arbiter of the Endangered Species Act. It
> is as if Grisoli has
> ordered his underlings to avoid speeding
> tickets--but has simultaneously
> ordered them to drive no slower than 90 miles per
> hour.
>
> So the Corps is choosing to drive like hell and hope
> the cops look the other
> way. Corps officials say their new plan, supposedly
> based on mysterious "new
> information," will not manipulate the Missouri's
> flows in any way. Instead,
> the Corps hopes to "reshape the river" by recreating
> the fish and bird
> habitats it has destroyed with its barge-oriented
> water management. The
> Corps intends to spend at least $42 million of the
> public's money per year
> to rebuild sandbars and remove vegetation on the
> Missouri--tasks the river
> used to manage on its own before the Corps came
> along--in order to preserve
> four to six weeks of summer navigation for an
> industry that only generates
> $7 million in private economic benefits during the
> entire year. Recreation
> produces about $90 million in annual benefits, and
> the Corps has
> acknowledged in the past that flow changes designed
> to protect endangered
> species would also boost hydropower, increasing the
> river's overall economic
> benefits. Still, Corps officials say they have high
> hopes that the Service
> will allow them to pursue their new plan without a
> new jeopardy finding.
> "We're just following the general's instructions,"
> says Larry Cieslik, the
> Corps' chief of water management along the Missouri
> Basin in Omaha. "We'll
> see what the Service says."
>
> It's already clear the Service's biologists think
> the plan will leave the
> three species in jeopardy. The question is whether
> they'll be allowed to say
> so in their biological opinion of the Corps plan. At
> a meeting of Missouri
> Basin governors last month in South Dakota, John
> Blankenship, a regional
> Fish and Wildlife Service official, spoke way out of
> school, saying the only
> "new information" the Service has seen indicates
> that the three endangered
> species are even worse off than they were in 2000.
> The pallid sturgeon, he
> said, is likely to become functionally extinct by
> 2008 without a significant
> spring rise that would somehow cue its pallid
> passions. The case for flow
> changes, Blankenship said, is now stronger than
> ever.
>
> But that burst of uncensored science did not jibe
> with the Bush
> administration's political message. George Dunlop,
> the top administration
> official at the South Dakota conference, denounced
> flow changes as
> "destructive," and Grisoli made it clear that his
> order to resist them had
> originated with Bush political appointees.
> Meanwhile, although the Service
> had proposed to send its biological opinion, or
> "B.O.," of the new Corps
> plan out for peer review before it is finalized,
> Manson, the assistant
> Interior secretary, recently sent an internal
> e-mail, a copy of which was
> obtained by The New Republic, announcing that any
> "peer review, if
> requested, will be done after the B.O. is
> completed." Manson's e-mail also
> warned Service employees not to speak out about the
> Missouri or even to meet
> with other agencies about their science, announcing
> that Interior political
> appointees would take over those tasks: "While the
> B.O. is being prepared,
> it is not appropriate for those engaged in that
> effort to comment publicly
> or to agencies other than the Corps about the
> issues." "We've been gagged,"
> one Service official says.
>
> Manson, a former Superior Court judge in California,
> pledges that sound
> science will ultimately guide the administration's
> decision. He says it's
> simply inappropriate for biologists to blab publicly
> before their work is
> complete, just as it would be inappropriate for a
> judge to comment on a
> defendant's guilt before a trial was over. "I've
> instructed the Fish and
> Wildlife Service to let the science take them where
> it will," Manson told
> me. "I haven't instructed them to take any
> particular path." But, given the
> Service's earlier position that flow changes are
> needed to avoid jeopardy,
> Manson dropped some pretty strong hints about where
> he thinks that path
> ought to lead: "The president has said the species
> can co-exist with
> agriculture and navigation on the Missouri. I happen
> to believe that's
> probably true."
>
> Manson kept saying that the Service needs to "ferret
> out the facts" and
> "think creatively," but it's not clear what new
> facts there are to ferret
> out or why there's any need to get creative with
> science that has been
> endorsed by the National Academy. He cautioned that
> Interior's final
> decision should not be prejudged, but it's hard not
> to prejudge at least a
> bit after the Bush administration spent the summer
> defying a court order for
> flow changes and then ordered up a plan specifically
> designed to exclude
> them--especially since, this August, at a
> $1,000-per-plate fund-raising
> dinner that raked in more than $1 million for Bond's
> reelection campaign,
> the president declared that he still agreed with
> Bond about the Missouri
> River and emphatically disagreed with the judge.
> "I'm going to tell the
> president 'thank you' several times today," Bond
> said.
>
> Missouri, after all, is still a swing state. And the
> president did make a
> promise.
>
>


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