giving a damn about the grand canyons

The Bush Administration and Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne's attempts at multi-purpose management of our great environmental resources are like SUVs - neither sport, nor utilitarian. It's a bloated, out-dated, and wasteful approach to environmental management. But that's never kept them from celebrating a brief tap-turning by holding press conferences and calling it a good day. Pass the cigars and the lite beer. Now eat my cake.

This same approach is played out all over the country, notably on the Missouri River, where a handful of powerful farm and barge lobbyists continue to extort millions of tax dollars annually from citizens using hijinks and buzz words about feeding the world and homeland security. It's bunk.

The science has, and continues to prove that alluvial farmland created and nourished by a riverine system isn't harmed by more natural-like flows. Even a middle-school science student understands this connection. As do farmers. Businesses masquerading as farmers, choose to ignore this function, because they want the taxpayer to continue to support them. The irony of the laissez-faire approach touted by Republicans is that it's just the opposite, it's completely hands-on, and leveraged on the side of the money-changers.

Eliminating the natural flows on the Missouri River have set in place an unsustainable agricultural economy, especially where twice-subsidized corn is grown for ethanol production which uses more foreign oil to produce than it offsets and serves to toxify another vital resource, the Gulf of Mexico, in the process. There are more canoes now on the river than barges but recreational users don't have the myopia or checkbooks of greedy corporations.

But when confronted by the facts, lobbyists cry science foul and distort the facts to line their pocketbooks as well as the campaign coffers of Republican Senators like Kit Bond who push millions in earmarks through Congress every year to keep themselves and the system bloated. Everyone profits but the American people.

When will it end? When the public says "Enough. Stop. You're out, this is the nation's resource, not that of the special interests."