Last week, after our last trek in the Pascagoula WMA, Brian and I went for our usual lunch at the Benndale Super Stop before heading home. While paying for my meal, I noticed a headline on a stack of newspapers; the headline said something about a dam on the Pascagoula River. I made a mental note to look it up later.
I found out that there is a proposal to dam Big and Little Cedar Creeks, tributaries of the mighty Pascagoula, down in Jackson County, one of Mississippi's three Gulf Coast counties. Damming the tributaries will create a lake, purportedly to be called Lake George (since much of its backflow will be in George County). The official reasoning behind the push for the dams is that the "fake" lake will help alleviate the effects of drought on the Pascagoula River, which currently holds the title of longest undammed river by volume in the lower 48 (contiguous) United States.
There is strong pushback from local property owners whose homes would be flooded by this lake, and the Gulf Coast chapter of the Sierra Club has come out publicly as strongly opposed. As of today, I do not know the status of the proposal; hearings for or against the dam were supposed to be held this week.
My heart breaks for the river. It is all I can do to control my anger at my species, which yet again seeks to strike a blow at the Pascagoula River and the lands round about. Only now are its forests beginning to reassert themselves since the destructive logging operations of the last century left it a mournful land of stumps and ghosts. In my walks among the great trees growing there again, I can feel the presence of those ghosts. They do not judge. They do not have to.
What is to become of a species which cannot help but think it can manage Nature better than she can manage herself?
I found out that there is a proposal to dam Big and Little Cedar Creeks, tributaries of the mighty Pascagoula, down in Jackson County, one of Mississippi's three Gulf Coast counties. Damming the tributaries will create a lake, purportedly to be called Lake George (since much of its backflow will be in George County). The official reasoning behind the push for the dams is that the "fake" lake will help alleviate the effects of drought on the Pascagoula River, which currently holds the title of longest undammed river by volume in the lower 48 (contiguous) United States.
There is strong pushback from local property owners whose homes would be flooded by this lake, and the Gulf Coast chapter of the Sierra Club has come out publicly as strongly opposed. As of today, I do not know the status of the proposal; hearings for or against the dam were supposed to be held this week.
My heart breaks for the river. It is all I can do to control my anger at my species, which yet again seeks to strike a blow at the Pascagoula River and the lands round about. Only now are its forests beginning to reassert themselves since the destructive logging operations of the last century left it a mournful land of stumps and ghosts. In my walks among the great trees growing there again, I can feel the presence of those ghosts. They do not judge. They do not have to.
What is to become of a species which cannot help but think it can manage Nature better than she can manage herself?
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