enforceable contracts with the farm- 

 ers about how they should change 

 their practices to reduce sediment 

 discharges, pesticide discharges or 

 clearing. It is a voluntary pro- 

 gram, and by and large, a lot of 

 them have a very short discount pe- 

 riod. Of course, a lot of farmers 

 are tenant farmers and are on year 

 to year leases. They are not in- 

 terested in spending any money to 

 try and take care of these problems. 

 But in a lot of cases, you are 

 talking about investments that may 

 not have a pay-off for ten years, 

 and there just aren't a lot of 

 farmers that want to wait that long, 

 and the agencies aren't making them 

 do it. 



QUESTION : Is the lack of tech- 

 nical data slowing down some of the 

 litigative initiatives that you 

 know about? 



REPLY : I think that is a pro- 

 blem. There is a tremendous amount 

 of technical data. I can think of 

 two examples: One is the effect of 

 changes in the use of riverine flood 

 plains on riverine hydrology and 

 therefore, estuarine hydrology. 

 You are talking about using some 

 really sophisticated state-of-the- 

 art models to try and predict what 

 is going on and it is difficult to 

 do. It becomes particularly diffi- 

 cult when one is dealing with a 

 large number of cumulative effects. 

 I know that the Corps, in the case 

 of the Cache River Basin said that 

 project would have an insignificant 

 effect on the levels of water on the 

 White River. The Yazoo River Basin 

 proposed pump project raised a 



of Agriculture. The Study is expect- 

 ed to make recommendations on changes 

 in Federal program and policies which 

 support such conversion. 



question and comments on some draft 

 EIS, as to how that would affect 

 flood stages in the Mississippi. The 

 response was that it would raise 

 flood stages in the Mississippi by 

 one foot at Vicksburg which struck me 

 as being quite a bit, but they said 

 downstream it would just disappear. 

 I find that hard to believe, but it 

 is very hard to find technical data 

 to show response to that. Another 

 example would be changes in inputs of 

 organic nutrients resulting from the 

 destruction of wetlands. It is just 

 literally impossible to get any 

 information on that because reduc- 

 tions on the amount of organic 

 nutrients which are of value to the 

 river and the estuary are not re- 

 flected in the water quality stand- 

 ards. Water quality standards deal 

 with BOD, or toxics. Introduction of 

 contaminants or removal of something 

 is a legal problem but also it is a 

 serious technical problem. 



I think, when you talk about 

 hydrology, you get into the driving 

 forces behind the systems. That is a 

 new and different world, the process 

 side of the ecosystem rather than the 

 structual side. I know a few years 

 back I was working on an EIS for a 

 highway crossing some wetlands on 

 Long Island. In the mitigation 

 recommendations, we suggested they 

 fix up a few wetlands, but we also 

 suggested that they open up some of 

 the culverts and improve the water 

 flow a little bit so as to improve 

 the energy flux and other processes 

 in the wetlands. 



That got down to Washington and 

 it got a lot of interest from the 

 folks in the Department of Transport- 

 ation environmental review session 

 because they thought it was really 

 innovative and different to be trying 

 to mitigate by adjusting the 

 processes rather than just the struc- 

 ture of the system. I think that 

 gets us into a very complicated world 



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