Seven decades of hydroengineering have transformed the lower Mississippi Delta from wetlands to dry fields of cotton and soybeans. Levees and canals funnel runoff from hundreds of thousands of acres here to a huge set of metal gates that sit across Steele Bayou.
The debate over whether the Delta's transformation was an engineering feat or environmental folly winds up here, too.
For the farmers of south-central Mississippi, who see the changes as a triumph over nature, one job remains for the US Army Corps of Engineers: building two huge pumps near the Steele Bayou gates. They believe the US$220 million flood-control project could increase their crop yield on marginal land. That, in turn, would increase their federal subsidies.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has notified the corps that it intends to veto the pumps - the first time in more than a decade that the agency has used this unilateral power.
The project's opponents and supporters agree it would destroy or degrade at least 67,000 acres of wetlands, four times the size of Manhattan. The area affected, an EPA official wrote to the corps earlier this year, represents "some of the richest wetland and aquatic resources in the nation -- a breeding and spawning ground for fish and a haven for migratory fowl."
But supporters of the pumps have not given up.
"The pumps are part of the cultural fabric here," said Ray Mosby, the editor of the Deer Creek Pilot, a weekly paper in Rolling Fork.
COMBATING FLOODS
The project, to be built between the Mississippi River and slow-flowing Yazoo River near the hamlet of Redwood, is one most farmers in the area have counted on since the Army Corps of Engineers first proposed it in 1941, when the impact of the destructive Mississippi flood of 1927 still resonated and Congress made flood control the corps' main job. Even in their absence, the pumps are a palpable presence in this empty landscape, which is so flat that elevations are measured to the centimeter.
"The pumps here have an almost mythic quality," Mosby said.
"People here have been led to believe that if we get the pumps this is suddenly going to become a land of milk and honey," he said. "They don't exactly know how that is, mind you, but they just know it's true."
Underneath the pumps argument is a more basic question: What is the best use for this land? How much should be farmed? How much should revert to woodlands?
One of the staunchest opponents of the pumps is T. Logan Russell, the executive director of the Delta Land Trust. Russell argues that too much woodland and wetland was sacrificed to agriculture four decades ago and that the pumps would only protect land that never should have been cleared.
With federal encouragement, farms spread eastward from the rich soils close to the Mississippi River when soybean prices rose sharply in the 1960s.
"The low-lying, clay-ey soil there is prone to flooding," Russell said.
But increasing farmland increases the opportunity for federal price supports. Some of the nation's biggest recipients of the supports are in the lower Delta.
Phillips Farms, with offices in Holly Bluff, about 64km north of Vicksburg, took in US$8.6 million in federal farm subsidies from 2003 to 2006 - mostly related to cotton, data from the US Department of Agriculture compiled by the Environmental Working Group shows.
John Phillips III, the proprietor, said that from 2001 through 2006, his farm operations lost more than US$2 million despite the subsidies.
Not all the farmers are in that league, however, and not all residents are farmers. The two counties of the lower Delta, Issaquena and Sharkey, are losing population because of the difficulty in making ends meet.
Issaquena County's population has fallen by 26 percent since 2000, and now stands at 1,675, with most residents living north of the flood-prone areas. Neighboring Sharkey County has 5,571 people, down 16 percent in the last seven years. Farms are consolidating. But large or small, farmers still want to farm as much land as is profitable.
FARMING FIRST
Sitting in the county office building in Mayersville, Larry White, an Issaquena County supervisor, said emphatically: "They are saying these are wetlands we are pumping water out of. They are not wetlands. These are farmlands."
Allowing acres to revert to marshy forests, White said, "takes a toll on the farms, on the people who work on farm or depend on it - the seed company, the equipment company, even down to the grocery."
With some anger, he concluded, "I know the environment has to be protected, but it's senseless to let the county suffer and fall because of other people's environmental agendas."
Phillips said a failure to build the pumps, after all the other hydro-engineering, would be "like building a bridge 90 percent of the way across the river, but they won't let you get it on to the ground."
The talk of broken promises goes against the facts, said Melissa Samet of the environmental group American Rivers.
"The fact that the farm economy hasn't raised the Delta out of poverty in so many years is telling," Samet said.
Farming, particularly on the more marginal land, is profitable in the Delta because of federal price supports.
The US$220 million price tag of the pumps, she said, is "a whole lot of money to spend on a project that's going to destroy the environment."
This area of the lower Delta is like the end of a bathtub near the drain. When the waters of the Mississippi River reach flood stage, which they are now, they back up into the Yazoo River. As the Yazoo reverses its flow, the gates in the large drainage structure here close, plugging the bathtub and keeping out the Yazoo backwater.
But when the gates are closed, runoff from the upper Delta does not drain into the Mississippi. The water trapped behind these big gates is what the proposed pumps are supposed to remove, sending it over the levee and into the Mississippi watershed.
HOPE LINGERS
Opponents of the pumps argue that the flooding problem has already been solved by the construction of new levees. Several administrations in Washington, Democratic and Republican, have been cool, if not hostile, to the pumps. But they were backed by the powerful Mississippi congressional delegation, including the recently retired senator Trent Lott and governor Haley Barbour, a former Republican national chairman.
The Mississippi Board of Levee Commissioners is now seeking to preserve the option of building the pumps. It wants the Vicksburg office of the Army Corps of Engineers to withdraw its pump proposal, so there may be nothing for EPA to veto.
But the sense that the pumps are not going to be built is evident in the tone, if not the words, of supporters like West Higginbotham, an aide to Senator Thad Cochran, a Republican.
Higginbotham said that news of the veto "came as a little bit of a shock to us," adding that the veto process was now "well under way."
Trudy Fisher, the executive director of the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, has written the EPA seeking formation of an interagency task force to find another solution for flooding in the lower Delta.
Peter Nimrod, the chief engineer of the Mississippi Levee Board, still has hope. He says the corps' current proposal represents 25 years of compromises, including plans to start pumping only after floodwaters reach 26.5m, or 2.1m higher than originally planned. On Tuesday, the floodwaters behind the gates reached 27m.
Such compromises are not enough for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which is concerned about protecting the habitat of an endangered species, like the pondberry plant, and of spawning fish and migrating birds.
Clarke Reed, a leading Republican who now questions the pumps, said the economic future of the lower Delta could be built around hunting and tourism. But time must pass. Fighting for the pumps, Reed said, has become second nature.
"Right now," he said, "it's a fight about the fight."
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