Floodwaters don’t discriminate. They conquer.
Just ask some of the good people who make their homes in the Upper Midwest.
Throughout the Upper Mississippi River watershed, the floodwaters of late spring and early summer became a massive watery broadside that pulsed and roiled with human waste, sediment, farm chemicals, houses, vehicles, livestock and God knows what else.
Parts of southeast Minnesota and western Wisconsin, as well as large portions of Iowa and Missouri, were hit—and hit hard. Homes were destroyed. Businesses were drowned. Entire towns were swallowed, engulfed by the deluge.
One can only imagine the clean-up costs, how entire communities have been torn apart.
A cable TV personality likened the “natural disaster” as the Midwestern incarnation of hurricane Katrina. In Janesville, Wisc., to steal one of many otherworldly anecdotes, carp—hundreds upon hundreds of carp—invaded the streets, their gills expanding and contracting in full view as flood waters began to recede. Several private wells were contaminated, and, according to one story, the eye of the city’s utility director swelled shut, infected, he said, by one drop of the nasty cocktail.
And the levees that our political “leaders” said were insurmountable and would tame the Big River, in effect protecting we the people, failed in spectacular fashion. Our policymakers should have known better. We should have known better.
Mark Twain did. In one of his many dispatches on the ways and means of river life, he wrote: “The Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise.”
Twain wrote that a long, long time ago. Thanks to Congress, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers today continues to build levees higher and higher, in hopes that they will work and abate another great flood. History ­– a tough arbitrator ­– has proven otherwise.
As the floodwaters recede, and the summer sun beats down ever hotter, many in the Upper Mississippi watershed are starting to ask questions, wondering how such a thing could happen.
I don’t blame them. Not in the least. And they deserve answers. But will they get them?
Here’s hoping they harness their collective anger and put their policymakers through the ringer, because the spring floods, many in conservation circles say, were the direct result of short-sighted public policy ­– policy that defiles the land and, by extension, the waters that meander through it; policy that continues unabated and hurts river watersheds and people who live near them, including anglers; policy that costs taxpayers billions and benefits but a few politically sacred industries. 
A question: Were the floods of this spring and early summer a natural or manmade disaster?
Contrary to what some politicians and other public officials have suggested, the flood was not a 500-year calamity that couldn’t possibly happen again. Our public servants were pounding those same lines in 1993, when floodwaters nearly turned Iowa into a permanent Mississippi backwater.
Many conservation officials say the flood of 2008 was largely manmade and, with proper foresight and learned public policy, could have been prevented. They place much of the blame on federal farm policy, which, they say, has encouraged ­– and even subsidized ­– the destruction of the natural world of the Upper Midwest, the Upper Mississippi River included.
But can we prevent this from happening in the future, floods that conquer and destroy across such a vast scale?
We can’t prevent floods, nor should we. They are a natural part of a river’s annual cycle that, historically speaking, have provided numerous benefits to fish and wildlife and the watershed’s overall ecological heath.
But what we should do is mitigate their intensity and breadth of destruction, and that starts by engineering policy that uses nature to fix the problems. 
The problem is, rivers throughout the Midwest ­– and elsewhere ­– have been stripped of their ecological integrity.
Policy decisions have altered their natural flow and eliminated their floodplains. Levees have been erected for agriculture and industry. Dams have been built to generate power. Wetlands have been drained. Forests and grasslands have been axed and/or plowed, replaced by farm fields and towns. In other words, Mother Nature has been cut off at her knees, and the result is what we’ve seen this spring and early summer across the Upper Midwest.
When heavy spring rains begin to fall, water has to go somewhere, and it does: It drains from the land and into a watershed, rushing downstream.
Confined and picking up speed, it breaches its banks and levees and destroys farm fields, housing editions and everything else in its wake.
In many watersheds, gone is the natural vegetation that slows these rushing waters. Gone, too, are the wetlands that absorb this water and usher it, ever so slowly, back into the water table.
Some say the recently passed $300 billion federal farm bill will help play a “role in taking care of nature so nature takes care of us.”
It’s the opinion here, and of many others, that the current farm bill is devoid of large-scale conservation provisions to protect land and waters.
While there’s plenty of money in the conservation title, too much of it is being funneled into programs that have no history of meaningful on-the-ground land and water stewardship.
All of which makes you wonder when the next great flood is going to happen. As the good folks in the upper Midwest can tell you, floodwaters don’t discriminate. They conquer.
Babe Winkelman is a nationally-known outdoorsman who has taught people to fish and hunt for more than 25 years. Watch the award-winning “Good Fishing” and “Outdoor Secrets” television shows on Versus (formerly OLN), Fox Sports Net, Comcast Southeast, WILD TV and many local networks. Visit www.winkelman.com for air times where you live.