Trees Help Streams
Buffers Make A Difference

The state of Washington includes rugged outdoor beauty and groups of organized citizens working to protect that state's natural environment. So when C. Rhett Jackson, Assistant Professor of Hydrology, compares Georgia to the Washington of 25 years ago, it sounds at first like a compliment. It is not.

Jackson, of UGA's School of Forest Resources, describes why riparian buffers - the trees and vegetation growing along streambanks - are crucial to protecting our streams and our wildlife.

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Stream protection is on the minds of many Athens residents these days as they've seen silt and sediment flowing into our waterways from the onslaught of development involving mass tree clearing and grading of the soil.

Jackson explains how, in the past, Washington developers didn't worry much about regulations or public concerns, similar to the current situation in Georgia. Then in 1972, the Clean Water Act was passed. Of course, this was after the laissez faire approach - hands off by any government regulations - was shown to be an utter failure. This Act became so successful that many American streams are documented as cleaner today than before that time. Meanwhile, public relations began to matter to developers as more citizens organized and spoke out against environmental degradation. The industry began learning the new rules and found they could work with them. Moreover, it was to their advantage to comply with better management practices; projects went faster with less opposition from angry residents over environmentally destructive methods.

However, back home in Georgia, sedimentation and silt remain as major sources of our water pollution. Mass grading of soil down to red clay, often to the edges of streams, continues unabated. The piping and burial of streams are common practices. Soil washes into our streams, killing the wildlife and fouling our drinking water each time it rains.

Fortunately, public concern is growing in this state, too, although environmental protection and regulation are hampered by the small size of our counties as well as a historically flawed view of property rights.

Jackson asserts, "Sure, landowners have property rights, but along with those rights come responsibilities. It is the landowner's responsibility to provide clean water to downstream residents. Today, residents are not buying the 'property rights' outcry as our area waters are filled with silt by poor development practices. When a developer demands 'property rights' it now is equated with abdicating property responsibilities. Water running through any property ought to be as good leaving that property as when it entered. That's where the importance of stream buffers occurs. That's where the mayor and commission are moving in the right direction with the increase in stream buffers to 75 feet."

Currently, the state-mandated 25-foot buffer is "a joke" in the view of this hydrologist.

Jackson maintains, "What you end up with is all edge growth. It lets in so much light that our streams end up surrounded by such dense shrubby growth and become 'human exclusion' zones. People and wildlife cannot get to the streams easily. People can't wade or fish or enjoy the water. It's also ugly. If all you want is to stabilize the banks somewhat, then the 25-foot buffer helps. But it fails in all the other benefits that the wider riparian zones provide."

If someone asks why the 75-foot buffer creates higher quality conditions for the stream, Jackson can immediately list the various functions which increase as the buffer area increases: wider streambanks with large trees benefit from the sturdy root structure of those trees holding the soil and preventing erosion. The water temperature is cooler within smaller streams near large trees, which is crucial to certain aquatic species such as trout. Trees drop leaves and other organic debris into the water which become an important part of the stream's ecology. Large woody debris, such as branches, improves aquatic habitat and helps fish productivity. Riparian buffers provide wildlife habitat and travel corridors as well as places for children to play. Along with the coolness provided by more trees growing on wider streambanks, the aesthetics of the area is improved by greater vegetation and less scrub growth.

Jackson is also quick to explain how the 75-foot buffer helps minimize the amount of sediments and other pollutants entering our streams. Stream buffers are particularly important during actual construction, especially during the excavating and grading of area soil to filter out the silt as it erodes from the building site during rainstorms. Stream buffers help to filter out lawn chemicals (herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers) before these pollutants also wash into our waterways. The greater the slope of the stream banks, the more important the width of the riparian buffer.

Jackson sums it all up by noting that he and other scientists could continue to tell planners and officials in government results of studies on the qualities related to the different widths of stream buffers. However, the value of the 75-foot stream buffer on a scientific basis is already widely established. "It's now really a social and political decision," Jackson concludes, "What do we as Georgians value? Do we care enough about our water to ensure stream corridor protection into perpetuity?"

Liz Conroy
Liz Conroy is a local freelance writer, among other things.

He Lied
Finally, Bush Admits It

Once again George W. Bush and his top officials are responsible for an outrageous scandal whose monumental scale and grotesquely terrifying implications for our democracy make Watergate look like a fraternity prank. Yet the miscreants are getting away scot-free.

As usual.

The Bush Administration, reported The New York Times on January 8, "has quietly withdrawn from Iraq a 400-member military team whose job was to scour the country for military equipment. The step was described by some military officials as a sign that the administration might have lowered its sights and no longer expected to uncover the caches of chemical and biological weapons that the White House cited as a principal reason for going to war last March."

The Bushies have good reason to think they won't find any weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq. They knew full well that the flimsy reports they used to sell their sleazy oil war were more than four years out of date - ancient history by intelligence standards. And, as The Washington Post reports, a newly discovered memo to Saddam Hussein indicates that Mr. Worse Than Hitler got rid of his WMDs in 1991. Unlike the United States, which unilaterally partitioned Iraq into no-fly zones and created a new Kurdish state, Saddam appears to have complied with the cease-fire agreement that ended the Gulf War.

Fourteen-hundred members of the Iraq Survey Group have been searching for WMDs during the last seven months. They've spent hundreds of millions of dollars. They've been to every government installation in the country. They've come up empty-handed.

All we've gotten are numerous false alarms, each trumpeted as vindication of the Bushies' claim that Saddam would have nuked or gassed or poisoned us if we hadn't taken him out first. On May 31, Bush said: "You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons... we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong. We found them."

Actually, we didn't find anything. Both "mobile labs" turned out to be rusted trailers used for filling weather balloons. But Bush's lies got so much more media coverage than subsequent attempts to set the record straight that all but the most press-obsessed were misled. By June 18, 35 percent of Americans told a Harris poll that they believed that we had already found WMDs in Iraq. And 48 percent thought that Bush's fictional link between Iraq and Al Qaeda had been "proven."

Iraq's WMDs were probably destroyed at least 13 years ago. Fortunately for Bush, they exist only in the one place he cares about: the deluded minds of a frighteningly ignorant American electorate.

Which is why our troops in Iraq are no longer bothering to go through the motions of searching for them. And why Bush yanked the Joint Captured Matériel Exploitation Group that was supposed to destroy WMDs if and when they had been discovered. "Its work was essentially done," a Defense Department official told The Times, because it was tired of "waiting for something to dispose of."

Nearly 500 American servicemen have been killed in the war against Iraq. At least 2,400 more have been wounded. We've killed so many Iraqis - tens of thousands, certainly - that the Pentagon can't keep count. We've borrowed more than $160 billion to pay for this extravaganza, with many more hundreds of billions to follow. And what was the point of this waste of life and treasure? "To disarm Iraq," Bush told us.

But Iraq, as everyone from the CIA to Hans Blix to Saddam told us beforehand, didn't have any arms to dis.

Calling off the WMD hunt is Bush's tacit admission that he lied about the reasons for war. It's hard to think of anything worse that a president can do. It's even harder to imagine the American people, so cynically accepting of deception, holding him accountable.

Ted Rall

Ted Rall is the editor of the new anthology of alternative cartoons Attitude 2: The New Subversive Social Commentary Cartoonists.