In the 1930s, there was the Tennessee Valley
Authority. Its main job was to control floods and bring
electricity to a seven-state region. Today a watershed
trust’s missions would be different: to protect
rivers and fish, and to promote sustainable agriculture.
Consider our largest watershed, the
Missouri-Mississippi-Ohio, which drains water and waste
from twenty-five states into the Gulf of Mexico. In the
mid-1980s, fishers in the Gulf noticed a growing
“dead zone” during summer months, when fish
and crustacean populations plummeted. According to the
EPA, the dead zone has now swelled to some five thousand
square miles. The problem is hypoxia, or absence of
dissolved oxygen. The proximate cause is overabundant
algae growth that triggers a cascade of effects that
ultimately sucks oxygen out of the water.
What causes aquatic plants to grow so fast they
overwhelm an entire ecosystem? In a word, nutrients
— the same nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorous)
that farmers feed to their terrestrial crops. Excess
nutrients run off the soil and are washed down the
Mississippi. In 1997, an interagency task force was
created to study the problem and recommend solutions. In
2001 it called for “voluntary, practical, and
cost-effective” actions by industry and government.
Unfortunately, so far not much has happened.
What if we considered the topsoil and flowing waters
of the Mississippi basin as a commons to be preserved for
future generations? We might, then, create a Mississippi
Soil and Water Trust. The trust would hold all rights to
introduce fertilizers (and perhaps pesticides and
herbicides) within the basin. Its job would be to reduce
chemical inputs to safe levels and to reward farmers (and
others) for proper stewardship of their land.
Each year the trust would sell a declining number of
tradeable soil input permits; manufacturers would bid for
these. It would then recycle revenue from permit sales to
landowners who meet stewardship guidelines. This would
raise the cost of chemical-intensive agriculture while
rewarding farmers for being good land stewards.
Farmers’ crop yields might decline for a while,
but their incomes wouldn’t. In a decade or two, the
Gulf would come back to life, and farming in
America’s heartland would be a lot more organic.
The transition time would depend on the rate at which the
trust decreases the number of permits it issues. ...
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