Navigable Waterway

[Al Agnew]

Technology and more people is the REASON we needed more government regulations, at least when it comes to environmental issues.

Let's take just one stream environmental issue as an example of what I'm talking about. Excessive siltation in waterways...

Back in the old days...let's say around 1900, there were 10 landowners along Bear Creek from its source to its mouth. A couple of them on the lower end plowed their bottom fields (horse drawn plow) and planted row crops, the others had small plots of land, a few cows, pigs, and chickens (just enough to feed themselves) and grew some corn and other vegetables in their small cleared bottom fields. Much of the creek valley was still wooded and covered with natural vegetation. With no gas-powered machinery, it wasn't feasible to clear a lot more land. The creek was in pretty good shape. There were no regulations on land use...and none were even dreamed of because the creek was okay.

But as the years went by, and internal combustion engine machinery became widespread, the landowners on the lower creek decided to expand their operations. They used chain saws and bulldozers to clear the valley sides, plowed on the hillsides, cleared the thick low-lying bottom trees and expanded those fields as well. The landowners up the creek had kids and grandkids, and began to subdivide their holdings. Everybody saw how well the landowners down on the lower creek were doing, and realized they could do it, too--even though there was less flat bottomland farther up the creek. More hillsides were cleared, something that wouldn't have been feasible when it had to be done by hand. Row crops didn't do as well up there, so eventually those landowners (more of them and using more of the watershed) turned to cattle and other livestock. More land was cleared for pasture. The creek began to flood a lot more as the trees that slowed run-off were mostly gone. It wasn't just a few landowners doing it, there were more of them and they were all doing it. As the creek floods became a more common problem, the landowners decided the creek needed to be straightened and bulldozed out to remove all the logs and other stuff that was holding back the water, so that it would run off quicker. It would have been impossible to do this by hand; it was easy with a bulldozer.

Now the creek is in terrible shape, due not to any malicious intent on the part of one landower, whom the other landowners could have confronted and at least asked to do things differently if he was the problem. EVERYBODY was the problem. Too many people using the creek, too much technology making it too easy for them to really screw up the creek. Back in 1900, anybody could do anything they wanted to the creek, but they were physically limited in how much harm they could do and there weren't that many of them doing it, so no regulations were necessary. By 1970, there were more people doing harm and they each had a lot more ability to do harm. And science had figured out just HOW they were doing harm, and how to do things better.

So the choice became, do you just give them the facts and ask them to voluntarily do things better, or do you make some rules they ALL have to follow? Well, they had mostly grown up doing it the same way their fathers and grandfathers did it, and a lot of them weren't very willing to listen to anybody telling them they ought to do it differently, especially since the things they were doing were affecting all the downstream landowners a lot worse than what they themselves were experiencing. When they bulldozed out the creek to lessen the flooding, it DID move the water through their portion of the creek faster, but all that water then did more damage downstream. The creek was a great source for the upstream landowners to water their cattle by giving them ulimited access to the creek, but even though it beat down the creek banks and caused erosion on their land, it was the downstream landowners that suffered a lot more as the effects built up going downstream.

It was a matter of each individual landowner making choices for themselves that seemed to work well for them, but had adverse effects on downstream landowners and cumulative effects on the stream itself.

The only way to insure that the creek got better was to give all the landowners regulations to follow.