U.S. Water News Online
TULSA, Okla. -- Farmers fear the possibility of growing restrictions on private land along more than 1,000 miles of southwestern rivers newly declared a critical habitat for an endangered minnow.
Recently, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service moved to further protect the habitat of the Arkansas River shiner in portions of the Arkansas, Cimarron, and North and South Canadian rivers.
Most of the protected land is in Oklahoma, although the affected streams flow through portions of Kansas, New Mexico, and Texas.
Proposed regulations were published in the Federal Register and take affect early this month. Federal permit applications for road and bridge construction, channel work, flood control and other activities in the affected areas would be reviewed for any detrimental consequences on the habitat.
The move could also affect federally funded programs that impact the areas, which include sections of the rivers as well as land 300 feet on either side of the streams.
Ray Wulf, president of the Oklahoma Farmers Union, said farmers fear potential prohibitions against using fertilizers or pesticides on their own land.
They estimate that 97 percent of land in the zones is privately owned and say regulations could effectively convert private land to public property without just compensation.
``The ruling in and of itself represents a real hardship and potential loss of income for those of us in agriculture,'' Wulf said.
Federal and conservation biologists say farmers have little to fear.
``It won't affect private land at all unless they are getting federal funding or permitting,'' said Ken Collins, a Fish and Wildlife biologist in Tulsa.
Collins said needs of the habitat would be taken into consideration before new federal programs become effective for farmers or others.
The regulations could affect large-scale livestock feeding operations now required to get EPA permits for discharging waste, said Peter Galvin, a conservation biologist for the Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson, Ariz.
The designation resulted from a settlement agreement in a lawsuit brought by the center against the Fish and Wildlife Service.
The minnow was declared a protected species in 1998 because dams, water diversions, and pumping reduced its population and range over the years by 70 percent, Galvin said.
But he said the declaration did little to reverse the minnow's fortunes, used as a key indicator of the overall ecological health of the Arkansas River system, which includes the Cimarron and Canadian rivers.
The wildlife service declared that further protections of the shiner's habitat were unwarranted, which provoked the lawsuit.
``The idea behind the critical habitat designation is for it provide a road map for federal agencies to make sure they're not permitting or funding operations that are making the habitat worse,'' Galvin said.
Wulf said farmers are the traditional environmentalists and want to protect their lands and water more than anybody.
``The farmer is not going to be putting chemicals on his land and fertilizing more than is necessary, than what is safe for the land,'' he said.
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