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| January 2006 Uneasy Along the River - TNC Floods Farmsby Joyce Morrison (This article is reprinted from RANGE magazine, Winter 2006, with permission. To subscribe to Range, call 1-800-RANGE-4-U.) Along the upper reaches of the Mississippi, where the powerful arms of the Illinois and Ohio rivers once pumped with the vital strength of American agriculture, The Nature Conservancy and its minions have already begun the process to scatter the population of farmers and create an imagined realm of nature in sole control of resources. Under the accountable-to-none partnership announced this year between The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), thousands of acres of rich farmland are being absorbed to become wetlands suitable to lazy dreams, but no longer to agricultural production. Emiquon [a wetland restoration project in Central Illinois] was once the most productive floodplain in Illinois, acknowledged TNC chief executive officer Steve McCormick. When the area was leveed 80 years ago it became productive farmland. Now, through the partnership with the NRCS, we have the opportunity to make Emiquon more productive for fish, birds and all forms of wildlife, as well as hikers, fishers, bird-watchers, hunters, photographers, historians, scientists and students. But not for farmers like John Morine and his family. The pumps that made farming viable would no longer be available for the drainage district. So they had no choice, according to Mrs. Morine, but to sell and relocate to another county - uprooted from family, friends, and involvement in local organizations. They made the move away from Putnam County unwillingly, forced out by pressures of the TNC buying out areas protected by the levees and denying the use of pumps for other areas. Sellers were offered prices in the neighborhood of $2,100 an acre and each was pressured to sign for a Conservation Reserve Payment before turning their property over to The Wetlands Initiative, co-founded by a former director of the Illinois chapter of TNC. After that, The Wetlands Initiative sought payments of $50,000 in federal money for each of the conserved properties. TNC is expected to receive more than $10.7 million in payments for its 30-year wetlands reserve program in the area. Corporate-directed, legally nonprofit TNC, known as Nature’s Landlord, declared its goal to eliminate levees that have stood along the Illinois for 80 years and more, in order to revive some semblance of the rhythm of flooding and recession that nature uses to control rivers more efficiently than any levee ever built. Comment from Family Water Alliance: Flood control
compromised; privately owned farms being purchased for environmental
restoration by TNC; the use of taxpayer dollars to fund the program;
the creation of willing sellers by altering the landscape to make
farming an unstable and unattractive proposal; the destruction of
an agricultural community. Does this sound at all familiar here
in the Sacramento Valley? |
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