DAMN THE DAMS!

Everyone wants a private lake on their property but what about when the creation of that private lake impacts the ecological services that benefit the public? Impoundments on our streams and rivers and in our bottomland forested wetlands create negative impacts to surface water and ground water. Man-made lakes destroy the wetlands that they cover and greatly impact the sediment budgets of our rivers and streams, destroying the biological and geomorphologic integrity of our watersheds.

Yep. I innocently turned on my computer yesterday morning only to be assaulted by a permit request posted by the Mobile Corps of Engineers: a request to build a 17-acre recreational lake for private use on private property at the headwaters of the Pascagoula River.

That’s right. A request to build a lake along side the largest “hydrologically unimpeded river in the lower 48 states,” a request to build an impoundment adjacent to a 5,000 acre wetland private conservation preserve, a request to build a lake adjacent to 55,000 acre wildlife management area teeming with naturally formed oxbow lakes.

In exchange for permission to build a 17 acre lake and impounding headwater streams and wetlands, the applicant proposes to enhance 5 acres of bottomland hardwood forest by removing invasive species. That’s it! The private property owner wants to further degrade a nationally recognized ecological gem so they can have a private lake – that’s at your expense and mine – and all they propose to give us in return is five acres of invasive-species free private property. What a scam! Death by a thousand cuts!

This leads me to consider other reservoir proposals that have been on the table in recent history and those being discussed today as a means of achieving better conservation measures or even as recovery from Hurricane Katrina.

Whether it be a 17 acre lake at the headwaters of the Pascagoula in George County or a 1,000 acre lake on the Boley Creek in Pearl River County or … somehow the public in south Mississippi needs to look around at the rest of the world and learn from their mistakes. In Mississippi, we still have a lot of healthy, natural resources to screw up. The rest of the country is looking for ways to remove dams and restore our rivers and streams and we are seriously considering building those same kind of projects?

Mississippians can’t afford to make the same old mistakes – we can’t afford the economic or the natural resource mismanagement.

What private or public reservoir project is cooking in your watershed?

Cynthia Ramseur is GRN's Mississippi Field Consultant