Excerpt
The US government made significant investments in building reservoirs in the 1950s and 1960s, changing much of the rural environment of the United States. The primary authorized use was flood control, but other uses were authorized as well, including irrigation, public water supplies, navigation, hydropower, and recreation. While many of these larger reservoirs were built for a projected life of 150 to 200 years, it is now projected that, for many, that life will be cut short by 50 to 100 years due to sedimentation, nutrient loading, and associated eutrophication. Additionally, over 11,000 smaller flood control reservoirs were designed and constructed with lives of 50 to 100 years by the PL-566 program. For many of these reservoirs, the volume of water storage for public water supplies and other uses has been sharply reduced by sedimentation and accelerated eutrophication, and water quality has been negatively impacted by total suspended solids, nutrients, pesticides, trace metals, and/or endocrine disrupting compounds.
Just as the Dust Bowl of the early 1900s had dramatic social, biological, and physical consequences in the Great Plains of the United States and resulted in dramatic changes in land management, the “Mud Bowl” resulting from the sedimentation and eutrophication of our…
Footnotes
William L. Hargrove is director of Center for Environmental Resource Management, University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, Texas. Dewayne Johnson is professional development director at the Soil and Water Conservation Society, Ankeny, Iowa. Don Snethen is special projects assistant at the Kansas Center for Agricultural Resources and the Environment, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas. Jan Middendorf is director of Office for Educational Innovation and Evaluation, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas.
- © 2009 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society