Mississippi River Environmentalist Destruction in The Name of Folly.

The Great Mississippi River Floods of 2011: How Environmentalists Sabotaged River Flood Control Management that Could Have Mitigated Damage Lex Loeb Contributor Network . There is propaganda flowing down America's rivers. Every day you hear about problems with America's rivers and these are always framed by environmentalists in the mass media. The problems include flood control with an ongoing effort to remove homes and businesses from the so called flood plains and this gets coupled with federal flood insurance and FEMA Issues. If you don't hear about flood control planning issues you hear about fish runs and the ever present need to "restore" fish populations to historic levels that actually were never counted by the same means we do the counting today because historic fish run counts came from the number of cans of fish the government put a tax on not and were not based on modern counting methodology. You always hear about the need for rivers to run wild and free until there is a flood and government authorities are forced to panic and might decide to blow up protective levies and sacrifice some property for the benefit of other more politically connected property owners. In every case urban community areas have more political clout than rural ones when it comes to diverting flood waters which of course probably makes sense in an emergency due to the probability of less property being subjected to the adverse conditions of flooding. When it was announced that the Army Corp of engineers had to blow up levies on the Mississippi river and tributaries to divert flood waters it should have become abundantly clear that that flood management planning has been badly mismanaged and even intentionally so because the so called "environmental concern" considerations have traditionally trumped engineered planning. One has to go back to the great dust bowl conditions that were caused by a major drought that led to a major government reaction that resulted in major government intervention in private agriculture. Government made itself the purveyor of environmental balance with the mission to prevent top soil loss and to promote what was originally called conservation of resources. Resources was a word with the meaning of a sort of national ownership of all resources in exchange for the conservatorship of the government. This mission fit in perfectly with the progressive movement's nationalization plans and almost led to Stalin like communal farming in the USA. The progressives have consistently looked for ways and means of diving property ownership into government ownership as they wrecked major cities building low cost housing projects over many years that turned out to have less long term property value than the soviet counterparts. One only has to think of the disasters of public housing in many major American cities to see what cause and effect yielded in the urban equivalent of government controlled resource economic planning. Farm and field was subjected to the same government intent of transferring ownership to a vast sovereign wealth fund controlled by the central federal government or in some cases at state levels. The dust bowl and flooding gave them an excuse especially when the government found people in distress and property values excessively reduced in value due to calamities. Progressive government saw a means of acquiring property at distressed values. Government agencies using eminent domain or just basic wheeling dealing always attempt to acquire property from private citizens at distressed prices and in fact they sometimes try to create conditions for distressed properties by down zoning property prior to making any offer or coming in with an eminent domain purchase program. Floods on rivers offer them the opportunity to do this sort of thing with impunity. The great lie of the dust bowl was that farming practices were universally responsible for the need for government top down control of farm management. The fact of the mater is there was a multi-year drought that can and probably will happen again with or without any government policy in place and there has to be a footnote that irrigation such as we have today did not exist back then. Irrigation planning has been quite similar to river flood control planning since the dust bowl too. Government has sought to nationalize underground water aquifer resources rather than to enhance them and protect the private ownership of water resources. No they want to nationalize those too as a common community communist resource. Farmers know it only too well that any government meddling on the behalf of their water "quality " or other environmental concerns is really about nationalization and taking of private property with the lowest possible compensation the government can afford to allocate to pay. Farmers long have realized that big progressive government's real purpose is to pay contractors like defence contractors very well including huge profit margins but when it comes to the bed rock farmers just to try to rob them blind. What is so messed up in the rivers full of propaganda we are all subjected to is that there is a direct connection between river flooding, underground aquifers, irrigation , private water rights, drought conditions soil conservation and as it happens the subsidence of land mass in the Mississippi delta area. Yes the real reason the Mississippi river delta coastal lands are being washed away and not being replaced is not because the river is dammed and controlled but because policies preventing erosion were put in place after the dust bowl drought. River flooding can re-deposit some of that eroded material but if you think about it the policy of preventing soil erosion with soil conservation programs also has to be part of the problem. It is pretty much a fallacy like the fish counting nonsense where contemporary scientific fish counting is compared to fish counting of the same manner of which there is no directly convertible historic record. The whole policy regime is then based on politics no mater how much the environmentalists scream that they have science backing them up. Government has long planned to remove the human foot print from the banks of the river and relocate it beyond what is called the flood plane. This flood plane lingo became a cornerstone of progressive thinking and at first they used it to designate areas for levies and dams to go to control flood surges and to protect both private and public property. The Environmentalists gained power and they subverted the whole system looking at untaming the rivers and removing all aspects of the human foot print not just from what is called the 100 year flood plain but to the beyond the 500 year flood plain which would necessarily remove major cities from the landscape as well as farms and industrial uses. The one hundred year flood plan marks the area that will likely be flooded at least once every 100 years and the 500 year flood plane marks areas that will probably flood at least once every 500 years. The environmentalists saw this as an opportunity to reconnect nature to their romantic pre-human and even pre-Columibian Indian vision for it. In many flood plain management districts the idea is to eventually remove all structures, industries and urban areas from with in the flood plain boundaries and thus restore the river to wild and free natural areas . Coupled with removing dams and levies that creates a huge area that has no benefit to mankind whatsoever.. That has been the operating plan used by the army corp of engineers and fema for a number of years where anything "unnatural" would be best removed along the banks of all rivers in the country or for that mater within the rivers. That kind of policy directive is in part a reason we see record flooding in 2011 on the Mississippi. It is because river management engineering virtually stopped and green management with an eye to progressive politics nationalization of all resources took over. The results are massive property damage including damage to urban areas. Future irrigation benefits are also being lost because of poor management planning which may come back to haunt us when the next major drought hits and becomes the next dust bowl. River flooding recharges aquifers especially river basin aquifers. Floods do not come every year nor great floods so if water is not reserved when it when it is conspicuously overly available it cannot be done later without planning and development. In the great Mississippi flood of 2010 water resources could have been diverted to lakes created expressly for that purpose in times of floods or fed into canals that would directly recharge underground water aquifers natural and man made a great distance away where irrigation productivity can not only just be salvaged from draw down but made as an improvement to agricultural productivity and even for urban water use needs in the future. We always hear about how we are running out of water in urban areas or from greedy farmers pumping too much out from underground "resources" that don't really belong to them while we watch a great flood completely going to waste when it could have been a great engineered benefit. The great secret of ancient Egypt is that the Pharaohs learned how to control the Nile river by diverting water to storage containment lakes when it flooded. Few people other than egyptologists are aware of just how extensive ancient Egyptian water works were including canals, levies , dams, lakes and storage facilities. The tourists know archaeological sites like Luxor and Karnak and the great pyramids but don't go to see the remains of the stone works that helped contain river flood stage Nile water and divert it when necessary from flood season to dry season when the river would shrink to a faction of it's flood stage size. The great temples of ancient Egypt even have dam construction techniques, designs and emblems visible in the architectural design commemorating their gods and the power of the Pharaohs. You compare this ancient celebration of control over the environment to our environmentalist controlled flood control management programs and it is immediately clear that we are on a collision course with disaster. With all the funds wasted on buying up houses on the banks to produce green areas we could have installed canals and dug out flood control lake to get water directly into aquifers along the Mississippi instead of the complete chaos of the great flood of 2011 on the Mississippi where protected areas along the river had to be physically sacrificed to save others . Everyone in the government flood control management business knew that this flood in 2011 could have been expected in advance just the way they knew in advance that New Orleans would be decimated by a katrina size hurricane in advance because they knew the existing flood control infrastructure was either neglected or was just inadequate. Yet another preventable disaster and progressive politicians looking to cash in on more cheap land they can buy along river banks which excites their environmental constituents who pay them funds for relocation purposes. The whole national river management system is a mess. Dams and levies are neglected. Money is wasted on fish run programs based on anti-science and that is just how the greenies want it to be. The way to recharge aquifers to keep American Agriculture first in the world by not depleting underground water reserves is never considered feasible even though it has been for 7000 years of historic records form Ancient Cambodia to Ancient Egypt. The fish have suffered as much as they have been helped by government central control efforts when you see how idiots called fish biologist start discriminating against hatchery fish at the expense of wild born ones. The nonsense goes on and on and gets more and more expensive with bureaucracies a constant upward growth trend in terms of expenses and number of employees but the results are abysmal. The nation should be damming the river of progressive environmental propaganda programs jamming the rivers and stopping the expensive and unnecessary wild and scenic river programs that have a net result many times of just transferring the commercial rights to use the river form farmers to rubber rafting / recreation enterprises, The way to go the rivers is to see flooding as an opportunity to be ready to take advantage of with the use of technology and to put an effort in making existing dams work more efficiently and add more as required to make benefits out of what will otherwise be a flooding disaster. Instead of removing homes form river basins and so called flood plans maybe changing design codes favoring building on raised concrete platforms is a better answer because it just happens that some of the most fertile farming land is immediately next to rivers and the flooding can be beneficial.. A more human approach is the way to go because nature is perfectly able to adapt all on it's own to what ever humans seem to do to counter act it. The great flood of 2011 should have been a great opportunity for America instead of becoming the property casualty disaster the government helped turn it into. The excess water lost as the floods recede is worth a fortune in future productivity and would have made for better crop growing or might have even been possible to divert in some manner to the SW US that badly need extra water. It is possible to divert water with minimal energy input and virtually no pumping by building pipe lines and diversions once it can be retain in holding areas and lakes. That means the water works start at higher elevations and a lower elevations near the end of the river just before the water hits the sea because water can easily be pumped or will flow down hill just a couple of inches in a pipeline along the coast to regions where it is needed. That would be a better idea for water management but one that really will make environmentalist seeking to restore the earth to prehistoric pre-human times unhappy. The Environmentalists all say such solutions to the problem are just science fiction the problem is we know from the oil industry that pipelines really do work and we know that the ancients had no trouble creating all sorts of successful aqueducts. Recently underground siphon gravity drawn pipelines were discovered that provided water to the high ground of the temple mount in ancient Jerusalem and that technology was not thought to have existed that long ago. We already waste enough money on legions of so called wildlife biologists and on assembling river buffer resource land that we can install all the technological means of turning disasters into to a bounty of opportunities if we want to. . .