No, We Haven't Stopped Being Angry
By Blake Hurst

Roger Stoles was annoyed. His ire was aimed at yokels from Missouri, and when a group of us yokels traveled to Washington recently to meet with him, he let us know exactly, and at some length, why we made him so upset. Stoles is the U.S. State Department official in charge of the U.N.’s Man in the Biosphere project (a giant environmental effort to designate special natural areas around the globe), and he felt wronged by the reluctance of Missouri landowners to embrace their prospective status as residents of a U.N.-chosen haven. Stoles left the distinct impression that he views us Missouri landowners as chewin’, spittin’, whittlin’ paranoids who spend too much of our time spinning conspiracy theories about the U.N. and black helicopters.

I was, to put it mildly, a little upset by his assumption that we Missouri farmers are a bunch of crazies. And we were all annoyed that he couldn’t seem to understand why landowners in the 1990s might be a little suspicious of government initiatives involving their property.

For the benefit of Mr. Stoles and others, let me offer from my own recent experience a little true-life story. It may help him fathom a little better those of us who seem (to Washingtonians) so cranky about the government. This is just one local example among thousands of such cases from around the country, but it offers a good illustration of why farmers and many other Americans now perk up their ears very sharply indeed any time government regulators brush up against their lives and property.

Locust Creek is a small waterway that bisects Pershing State Park, located in Linn County in northern Missouri. After the tremendous midwestern flood of 1993, a logjam formed in the creek in the middle of the state park. Growing until it is now several thousand feet in length, the jam has effectively dammed the creek. Much like a clogged basement drain, the accumulated trees have stopped normal drainage, and the backed up water has flooded thousands of acres of land, damaged internal drainage structures on nearby farms, ruined private landowners’ levees, and inundated a local hunting club.

In 1995, local farmers met with Missouri’s Department of Natural Resources, which administers state parklands, to ask that they clear the logjam. The law, after all, is clear: If a private landowner’s failure to keep a stream open causes his upstream neighbors’ fields to flood, the downstream owner is responsible for restoring drainage.

In the vain hope that an environmental agency would treat farmers with respect, or at least common sense, the affected growers tried to use simple persuasion rather than legal means to convince the dnr to restore the creek’s flow. But delay after delay followed. The U.S. Corps of Engineers required hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of studies. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service further delayed any dredging while researching the possible effects that clearing the creek would have on endangered species. They required that a number of trees on private property near the creek be left undisturbed, because the designated timber might serve as a possible habitat for the endangered Indiana bat. The State Highway Department and the State Natural Resource Conservation Service also had their say.

More trees were piling up all the while, but finally everyone was in agreement. The clearing was slated to begin in August of 1997. After losing the use of their ground for three years, landowners could look forward to farming again.

Then David Schorr, head of the Department of Natural Resources, announced that his agency would approve clearing only 60 percent of the logjam. This capricious reversal incensed landowners, because partial clearing will still leave slow drainage and allow a full log- jam to re-form. But Schorr announced that removing more than 60 percent of the blockage would cause too much environmental damage to the state park. In a blistering letter to the president of the Missouri Farm Bureau, Schorr said that the "best management practice to preserve and protect Pershing State Park and continue its ecosystem is the no-action alternative." He goes on to blame the logjam on the upstream landowners (since the debris came from upstream)—ignoring the natural disaster of the flood of 1993, and the fact that if his agency had acted responsibly and cleared the obstruction immediately, both environmental damage to the park and economic damage to the neighboring landowners would have been much less.

Mr. Schorr then revealed his alternative plan, stating quite frankly why he and his bureaucrats had allowed the inundation of neighboring farmland to continue. The state of Missouri, he wrote, had decided to buy out the landowners bordering on Pershing State Park.

Several of the farms in question have been owned by the same families for generations, and the individuals involved are understandably quite reluctant to sell. But if their land remains under water because the logjam stays in place, they will have no alternative. The old joke about the land-greedy farmer is that he "doesn’t want any more land except his neighbor’s." Much the same could be said of Mr. Schorr, the state natural resources regulators, and the whole environmental community.

Economists are now urging that we more carefully add up the costs of environmental regulations and measure them against the benefits. For the folks that farm upstream of Pershing State Park, the loss in crops is easy enough to count in the "millions of dollars." But there are other costs to this episode as well, costs that are much harder to quantify. Regulator Schorr and the federal agencies acting in concert with him have changed the rules of the game, without notice, and now nobody knows what to expect. Keeping drainage open for those above you in a watershed has always been part of being a good neighbor with proper respect for the rights of other property owners. It is in everybody’s best interest; and it is the law. On our farm, we have spent thousands of dollars running tile lines and dredging ditches to carry water that runs off of our neighbors’ fields. Our downstream neighbors have done the same to allow our fields to drain. Mr. Schorr has ignored several centuries of law with his action—and that is an example of government power grown out of control.

When conservatives talk about the overgrown scope of the government, they tend to focus on things like the deficit, the percentage of gdp that ends up in state pockets, and the transformation of self-reliant citizens into slaves of entitlement bureaus. But the power that David Schorr has over farmers in Missouri can’t be captured by the size of his budget, large as it may be. Far beyond the economic costs he can impose, he has an unenumerated power to destroy livelihoods and living patterns, to block men’s free actions and their use of their own property, to use his phalanx of agency employees and powers to intimidate, harass, and frighten private citizens into submission.

Much has been written about the collapse of the budget-cutting fervor of the Republican Congress after the debacle of the government shutdown and the re-election of Bill Clinton. But the retreat on regulatory reform has become an even worse rout. With Clinton in the White House and Republicans on Capitol Hill, legislation to compensate private owners for "takings" of their property, to reform the Endangered Species Act, or to introduce common sense into wetlands regulations seems as distant as the speck of a black helicopter fleeing over a far horizon.

Whether in a battle like Locust Creek, implementation of the Rails to Trails Act, or some historic preservation measure, governments from the municipal to the federal level are increasingly forcing individual property owners to pay for public goods. That it has become so easy to override property rights is a very bad sign. Instead of cavalierly ridiculing my neighbors, perhaps officials in Washington and our state capitols should ask themselves why locals who ought to be worrying about getting the hay up and the calves weaned are so concerned instead about defending their farms and homes against government action.

Blake Hurst is a Missouri farmer and frequent contributor to The American Enterprise