The entire Mississippi River basin is experiencing a record-setting drought that calls to mind the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The Mississippi River itself has reached historically low levels, revealing long-submerged shipwrecks as the once-mighty river shrinks to a bare trickle in many places.
Much of the news coverage has focused on how low flow conditions in the Mississippi River have impacted shipping, with commodities moved on the river prevented from reaching their destinations. This has the potential to further disrupt the global supply chain, particularly for America’s agricultural exports.
As policy-makers assess the situation, here are a few points they should keep in mind.
1. Climate change is here and we have to work within that new reality.
At this point in the planet’s history, it is nonsensical to talk about any solitary weather event as “caused by climate change.” The climate HAS changed. It is already baked into every day on planet Earth. You only have to look at temperature and precipitation trends over the past decades. Everything now is caused by, or a function of, climatic change stemming from increased greenhouse emissions. This is the new reality.
Part of the reality is increasingly unpredictable, variable, and extreme weather. In Yellowstone this year, it was historic flooding. Throughout the rest of the Mississippi River basin, it has meant extreme drought. This is the context from which we must decide the fate of our rivers. What is the Mississippi River’s purpose? Whom does it serve?
2. Rivers should no longer be managed primarily for the benefit of the shipping and agriculture industries.
For the past century, the US Army Corps of Engineers has (mis)managed, modified, and ultimately degraded America’s rivers by turning them into little more than highways for barge traffic. Rivers are dammed, channelized, cut off from their life-giving floodplains, and otherwise manipulated to serve the interest of the shipping industry, with little regard for ecological functioning or other public benefits. And the American public overwhelmingly pays the cost to run the system while the shipping industry reaps the benefits. Some years, the inland waterway system which the barge industry uses is subsidized up to 95%.
Much of what is moved on the inland waterway system has been petrochemicals and ag products such as animal feed bound for China. Ironically, the industries that control and benefit from the river system are the very industries that are responsible for wrecking the climate and creating this new reality of extreme droughts and floods which make it difficult to use the rivers for shipping.
Partnered with the shipping industry, industrial agriculture has also played a hand in reshaping our rivers for the worse. Levees cut off rivers from their floodplains. These floodplains should be wetlands that teem with life, that help recharge the river in times of drought, and provide much-needed flood storage in times of heavy rains. Instead floodplains are planted with corn and beans. Here too, the American public subsidizes this misbegotten project through crop insurance.
And it gets worse. Forty percent of the corn grown isn’t even food but is turned into ethanol for gas tanks. And gallon-for-gallon, ethanol is a bigger contributor to greenhouse emissions than straight gasoline. The ironies just keep piling up.
And we’re still not done. Manure and chemical fertilizer are over-applied to all those fields and then runs off and makes its way into the Mississippi River and ultimately to the Gulf, where it transforms a once-bountiful fishery into a biological wasteland where oxygen levels are too low to support aquatic life.
It is time to radically rethink how our rivers work and whom they serve. It’s time to end the river-destroying subsidies. End the subsidies to the barge industry. End the subsidies to farmers who plant in floodplains. End the ethanol mandate.
Rivers are meant to be communities of life. Not channelized highways. Not open air sewers. Rivers and their floodplains should be helping us fight climate change by storing carbon, not contributing to the climate chaos because they’ve been engineered to be something they’re not.
3. Irrigation would be a disaster.
In states west of the Mississippi, irrigation has been commonplace, but Illinois ag lands have not required or used much large-scale irrigation. This is threatening to change, however. In recent years, it is more common to see large irrigators out in Illinois fields. Sustained drought would only incentivize farmers to install more irrigation. But irrigation puts tremendous stress on ground and surface water. In the American west, irrigation has led to aquifers and rivers drying up. Irrigation would only exacerbate low river levels in the Mississippi River basin in a time of drought with catastrophic ecological consequences.
Again, we are currently farming more land—and farming it more intensively—than we need to. The first order of business is to stop growing corn destined for gas tanks. The federal government’s ethanol mandate creates a perverse incentive that leads to bad outcomes for water quality, water quantity, and the climate.
4. Manage rivers for public benefit.
These are public waters and should be managed for public benefit. Rather than growing corn ethanol in floodplains, we should be growing trees. Rivers should be migration routes for wildlife stressed by climate change. Rivers and floodplains could and should help mitigate extreme droughts and floods. Rivers and floodplains should act to preserve the climate, not to hasten its collapse.
A new reality has emerged. Policy makers must respond accordingly. This is an era of disruption. It’s uncomfortable and difficult to change course. But the actions and policies that got us into this mess will not be the ones that get us out of it.
Let rivers be rivers.
