As rocks go, this one was prettier than most of the pebbles you find on Buffalo River gravel bars.
Its color was cloudy green, like a deeply occluded emerald remnant sold in rock shops in east Tennessee and western North Carolina near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It was oval shaped, with rounded edges, like the rest of the sandstone chunks glistening in the soft light of a mid-May evening.
Bill Eldridge turned it over and over as he examined it. “It’s a piece of glass, probably from a broken bottle,” he said. “No telling how much stuff like this there is along the bottom, covered up by the river’s shifting bottom. The river has worn it smooth, and someday it’ll finish the job and grind it into dust.”
A state law that bans glass containers on navigable waterways has largely eliminated the supply of fresh broken glass on the Buffalo. In time, the interaction between water and rock will grind it all into dust. It’s like an ecological immune system. The river will cleanse itself, just as microbes in water and soil will decompose and consume spilled oil.
A constant influx of contaminants or a massive flood of contaminants, however, overwhelms a biome’s ability to heal itself. Protecting a biome’s integrity is far preferable and cheaper than restoring its integrity.
These things come to mind as we discuss a big hog farm that is coming to the Buffalo River watershed.
The owners have doubtless satisfied all the legal and regulatory requirements to contain waste generated by as many as 6,500 hogs, but the containment facilities aren’t the problem.
Mike Armstrong, assistant director of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, said the major threat is spreading pig waste on fields. It will be a significant amount, with no mechanism to keep it from either seeping into groundwater or flushing directly into the watershed. The National Parks Conservation Association says the owners of C&H Farms have been put in a bad position by the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality’s faulty permitting process.
Caught in the crossfire is the Buffalo River, the only major undammed river left in Arkansas. It is the only place that we can truly call wild, natural and free. For all our boasting about being the “Natural State,” Arkansas’ landscapes and waterscapes are so thoroughly manipulated and altered that they are practically artificial.
Of our many “natural” treasures, the Buffalo River is the only one that remains more or less in its original condition. Anything that threatens to screw it up deserves greater than usual scrutiny and invites greater than usual skepticism.
In fairness, potential pollution from a hog farm might be the least of the Buffalo’s troubles. Anyone who reads this page regularly has probably noticed that I spend more time there, and write about it more, than any other place in the state. It is more than a playground for me. It’s where I go to relax, to recharge and try to get right with my creator. I’m there a lot, and I observe.
Erosion has a glaring and continuous impact on the Buffalo. In a relatively short time, deep holes have filled in with gravel, as have long, straight stretches. Every flood carves new sections of bank into the river. Sections of the river get wider and shallower every year. Many sections are devoid of smallmouth bass and catfish. Only suckers and gar inhabit them now.
In the sections I frequent from Baker Ford to Rush, stretches of healthy water seem to compress a little bit more every year and stretches of unhealthy water expand.
In the Ozarks, everything on the ridgetop eventually ends up in the holler.
Whether it’s an old tire, washed out gravel or hog manure, it’s destined for a river.
We don’t have many places like this left in the lower 48, and the rush to degrade them mystifies me. Is it really necessary to run a tar sands pipeline through Nebraska’s Sandhills? Is it really necessary to build wind farms on the last vestiges of prairie chicken habitat in the lower Great Plains? Is it really necessary for the natural gas industry to fragment the last vestiges of sharptail grouse habitat and sage grouse habitat in the western Great Plains? These places are unique in their rarity, and the deserve respect.
The Buffalo River is Arkansas’ lone contribution to America’s vanishing natural heritage. It’s all we have left.
Its self-healing powers are prodigious, but they are not infinite.
Sports, Pages 34 on 05/26/2013