Editorial: Corps Bashed For Living Up To Agreement

A front-page story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on July 11 is a spin-off of the pseudoscience (bad science) approach started by Rachel Carson and the environmental movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She is now being criticized, even by some liberals.

Carson, author of Silent Spring, based her book on bad science, critics say. Thus was born the environmental movement, which on many occasions has been a curse on the river industry. It has kept the Missouri River highway tied up in legal knots for years. It has delayed or blocked business expansion.

The newspaper’s Washington bureau chief wrote the Post-Dispatch article, titled “U.S. Kills Birds It Is Trying To Protect”. His basic argument is that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released Missouri River water to allow one towboat to move upriver and in doing so killed some of the federally protected birds along the river.

It could have very well been headlined: “Raising Of Missouri River Levels In Keeping With Corps/Wildlife Service Agreement.” Let us not forget that while the Corps does have a federal responsibility to protect endangered birds, it also has, by statute, a federal responsibility to provide navigation water on the lower Missouri.

According to writer Bill Lambrecht, federal biologists warned that 200 chicks and eggs of piping plovers and least terns could perish in the rising water. A single Missouri or Nebraska farmyard could easly accommodate 200 chicks. It is a minute number, and in the scheme of things, the Corps is merely trying to balance needs. Lambrecht wrote that as of July 11, the Corps already acknowledged, “at least 19 eggs already have been lost.” We wonder if those lost included eggs eaten by raccoons, badgers, skunks and other animals known to prey on chicks and eggs.

Raising the river’s level was intended to enable the mv. Omaha to reach Blair, Neb., to pick up four bargeloads of alfalfa pellets. The cargo will end up in Arkansas, where it will be used to feed horses, rabbits, goats and sheep. Lambrecht correctly reported, “The bird mortality underscores the tradeoffs the government is making while attempting to preserve species along the Missouri and still allow for barge traffic.”

The problem with the Post story is its headline tries to put the release of the water in the worst possible light. Corps spokesman Paul Johnston explained to the newspaper that “Army engineers have been working to balance competing interests on the river and move nests and chicks to safety when possible.” Isn’t that what we would expect of them?

We don’t see the problem. The Corps is operating according to agreements with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Missouri River coordinator. Together they calculated that it would be acceptable, in administering this agreement, to kill up to 340 birds, a level the Corps has not reached.

Because so much emphasis has been put on the preservation of endangered species, the Corps spends some $45 million annually to build high-elevation sandbar habitat for the birds. Some still choose to nest on low-elevation sandbars and thus are vulnerable. The sum of $45 million annually seems highly impractical. Good investment? You decide.

We see nothing wrong with how the Corps/Wildlife agreement is being carried out. When you think about it realistically, the Post story deserved to be only several paragraphs long. But by making the Corps appear to be doing something stupid or in violation of the law, or wasting money, it gained front-page status.

“U.S. kills birds it is trying to protect”: Every year across the nation thousands of deer and other wild animals are legally hunted in numbers determined by wildlife experts to keep the population healthy and propagating. The same is true with hunting waterfowl and fishing. It’s called harvesting.

“…tradeoffs the government is making…” What do congressmen do every day in Washington? They juggle and cajole and make tradeoffs.

When too little money is available to do all projects on the drawing boards, planners have to make tradeoffs. When employees can’t get all they want at the bargaining table, they compromise—make tradeoffs.

When The Waterways Journal has more news than it has space, it must compromise by shortening stories or leaving some out. Tradeoffs are a vital tool in today’s world.

Carson’s writings lent impetus to the growing environmental movement in the late ’60s and ’70s and helped to bring about the Endangered Species Act and the Environmental Protection Agency. Critics now claim she used bad science to bring about a government ban on DDT, considered by scientists to be the first, the best and most remarkable of modern pesticides. That ban resulted in millions of deaths around the globe, the critics say.

The heart of the matter is bad science, which has caused billions in expense to the maritime industry over the past 35 years. It fostered the snail darter and spotted owl issues. Expensive federally required environmental studies have eaten up huge portions of project budgets and in some cases made company growth impossible—much of this because we don’t check the science for accuracy.

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