Water runs downhill, much to the disgruntlement of some civil engineers who are born, it seems, to the mission of making water behave as humans want it to.
Supposedly engineering designs, along with construction and nutrient management plans, were involved in the decisionmaking and permitting process of putting 6,500 hogs on 630 acres of the hilly watershed near Arkansas’ beloved Buffalo River, the nation’s first national river. The Arkansas Department of Pollution Control and Ecology granted a permit for this massive concentrated animal feeding operation, as the state calls it, because it met their permitting requirements.
The way our laws are written is at the core of what is so diff cult in environmental issues of this type. Presented with situations that beg and scream for logic and common sense, time and again we learn when applicants meet what is required of them, later arguments sometimes become exercises in futility.
The public rarely knows what the actual laws are, and we tend to forget all thethings we expect regulations to do for us in the way of protections were politically negotiated before words ever got on paper.
When politics makes the rules, there’s a virtual certainty a whole lot of logic and common sense have been compromised along the way.
One might wonder if Otto van Bismarck was smelling a hog farm when he said, “Laws are like sausages. It is better not to see them being made.” However, not watching this sausage closely is what has landed us in this mess that allows for huge hog waste holding ponds and manure application upon 17 fi elds.
This particular hog factory predicts more than 2 million gallons of waste per year, about the equivalent of the city of Harrison’s output.
In the Ozarks, fi elds are most likely on thin rocky soil and sloping terrain that Mother Nature, a formidable and competitive designer, engineered for runoft .
Our “mountains” were, and continue to be, formed not from geologic up-thrust, but from erosion and are composed of the tougher rocks and soil still resistingtheir eventual wash into the river valleys. Tiny particles of rotting manure and urine washing oft fi elds and seeping through soil make their way to the tributaries of watersheds. Excess nutrients and particulates alter the water chemistry aquatic life depends upon, increase algae growth and change the water’s oxygen levels. As with almost everything involving the environment’s capacity to absorb assault, the question of how much is too much plays into decisions on contamination and consequently on human and environmental health. Those equations can be based on conflicting factors, many of which are far from scientifi c but are economically sweet for some individual or industry.
As an example, the Audubon Society posted this last week: “On March 28, the Arkansas Senate passed House Bill 1929, a bill that allows increased pollution to our waters, conflicts with the federal Clean Water Act, does not fully protect existing drinking water supplies, jeopardizes the state’s future drinking water supply, and is not based on sound science. Some of Arkansas’s biggest polluting industries pushed House Bill 1929, which will dramaticallyweaken our state’s drinking water standards.” People are urged to call Gov. Beebe (501-682-2345) to request he veto this bill, but we should be ready for this Legislature to override any veto he signs as they have done with several other bills this session. Remember, this bill will guide the Department of Environmental Quality.
Even if the unpleasantness that hogs do, when hogs do what they do, was possible to contain on site through miraculous engineering stunts, which corked all avenues of escapeinto water, hogs in these numbers are still going to send up a stink for miles across Newton County, perhaps our state’s most beautiful and dramatic area. The odor will permeate the nearby school and community of Mount Judea and waft over the tourism jewel that is the Buft alo River.
A lot of things were ignored in this permitting process, not the least being the lack of public notification in the aft ected county and to the National Park Service, whose chiefadministrator for the Buft alo River has compiled a list of 45 discrepancies in the Farm Service Agency’s assessment of this hog farm, calling it “exceptionally fl awed.”
There is a great deal at stake both for the farmers, who have invested in this project, and for the people of Arkansas and the nation.
We need to get this right.
FRAN ALEXANDER IS A FAYETTEVILLE RESIDENT WITH A LONGSTANDING INTEREST IN THE ENVIRONMENT AND AN OPINION ON ALMOST ANYTHING ELSE.
Opinion, Pages 13 on 04/07/2013