11,000 Acres to See Return to Wetlands
Turning marginal farmland back into its natural habitat in Arkansas.
Lile Real Estate
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE: by Austin Gelder, Saturday, October 30, 2004
More than 11,000 acres of central Arkansas farm fields will be converted into wetlands and hardwood stands through a $7 million project to return the land to its natural state. Mark Rey, the undersecretary for natural resources at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, visited Little Rock on Friday to announce Arkansas’ latest addition to the Wetlands Reserve Program.
Under the program, property owners in parts of Pulaski, Lonoke and Jefferson counties will receive roughly $700 per acre in exchange for agreeing to stop farming their land. Once the easements are finalized, restoration crews will move in to plant trees, dig sloughs and create shallow wetlands like the ones that existed before the soil was tapped for agriculture.
Although the project is being lauded because it will restore degraded habitat critical to ducks and other wildlife, critics of the Bush administration’s environmental policies say more wetlands are being destroyed than are being saved.
Most of the land intended for restoration was tilled up and leveled out within the past 50 years. “In the ’60s and ’70s when soybean prices were so high, people in Arkansas cleared every acre they could to plant and make profit,” Terry Horton of the Arkansas Wildlife Federation said. Since then, the flood-prone fields have often washed out, and bean prices have dropped.
Restoring wetlands can be lucrative for property owners, who can sell timber from the restored areas or charge sportsmen to hunt on it. “It’s truly an effort to go back in history,” said Gar Lile, a real estate broker who represents the 18 property owners whose land will be restored. Lile owns property that was restored to wetlands under a similar project covering roughly 7,200 acres in 1999.
Sportsmen support the Wetlands Reserve Program because it increases and improves waterfowl habitat in the Natural State, Lt. Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller said. “As we near November, everybody’s mind is focused on one thing: duck season,” he said. Keeping wetlands along the Mississippi River corridor healthy will ensure robust populations of waterfowl continue to visit the area each year.
Central and eastern Arkansas have valuable and rare tracts of contiguous wetlands that make them worth the multimillion dollar investment, Rey said. “It will materially improve duck season, if not this November, then every November thereafter,” he said. The Wetlands Reserve Program enjoys almost universal support from conservationist
groups, but some say restoring wetlands still isn’t as good as protecting the ones that already exist.
Last year, the Bush administration proposed cutting federal protections for many wetlands and streams, leaving preservation efforts up to local authorities. The proposal was never enacted. Still, Sierra Club conservation organizer Glen Hooks said he worries wetland protection provisions in the federal the Clean Water Act aren’t being enforced.
“The Bush administration’s wetlands announcement today is just the latest attempt to greenwash a disastrous record that has left both Arkansas’ and America’s wetlands at risk,” he said. “While protecting a few thousand acres here and there sounds good, this is just a drop in the bucket compared to the millions of acres of wetlands and other waters the Bush administration has left at risk.”
Audubon Arkansas Executive Director Ken Smith was less critical of Bush’s wetland policies, but said greater protections are needed to preserve wetlands that already exist. The policy enacted under the first Bush administration of maintaining no net loss of wetlands doesn’t go far enough when established wetlands are replaced with manufactured ones. “There are so many biological, ecological, hydrological factors associated with a healthy, functioning wetland,” Smith said. “A recreated wetland cannot offset those losses.”
