Cities in the wilderness
By Shawn Davis, posted 5/3/06

Bruce Babbitt, former secretary of the interior for President Bill Clinton, visited MU during Earth Week to discuss his new book, “Cities in the Wilderness,” and to promote his plan to turn the lower Missouri River floodplain into a national park.

“I’m out of public life now, and I’ve become acquainted with the river and it got into my system and now I can’t get it out,” Babbitt said. “It would make a great national park.”

Babbitt envisions turning the Missouri River bottoms, which are used primarily for farmland, into a refuge area and restoring them to the way Lewis and Clark saw them 200 years ago. He would start in the Independence, Mo., area and extend the conservation area 350 miles to St. Louis.

“This is the most beautiful and under-appreciated river in the country,” Babbitt said. “We want to break the levees and let them run into their natural boundaries.”

Babbitt argues that when the Army Corps of Engineers took over the river about 30 years ago, they built levies to turn the river into a barge channel, which to this day is not used the way it was intended. The barge traffic on the Missouri is 1 percent of the barge traffic on the Mississippi River.

“There is no longer any barge traffic out there, the design set up by the Corps has failed,” Babbitt said. “It is now time that we let nature take its course.”

Some argue that by taking land in the Missouri River bottoms and preserving it, Missouri will lose money from agriculture. If the levies are indeed broken, the fertile farmland located in the bottoms will no longer be available to farmers. Babbitt argues that the $25 billion dollars set aside for farmer subsidies is just wasted tax money. He claims it pays farmers to overproduce, creating an excess of cheap grain on the world market that prevents farmers in developing nations to compete.

“We don’t need to eliminate agriculture in this area,” Babbitt said. “In this country, farm programs have been tied to production. Your paycheck is determined by how much you produce.”

Babbitt is a strong enthusiast of restoring the area and turning it into a national park, one that could rival Yellowstone, the Everglades and the Grand Canyon. Although no changes are expected immediately, Babbitt sees an opportunity with renewal of the Farm Bill.

“The Farm Bill is authorized every five years,” Babbitt explained. “It is up for renewal in 2007, and if we can get them to change it, we could see some changes to the Missouri River.”

“There are millions of people that drive down I-70 every year,” he said. “They have no idea that there is even a hint of anything here, we want to build something that people will stop and admire on their way through, one rich with limestone bluffs, birds, fish and wildlife. This is truly restoration in its most vigorous mode.”

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