We’ve been studying the social dimensions of watershed planning in the Cache River Watershed in Southern Illinois. Our problem has been to determine whether a planning process undertaken between 1992 and 1995 was considered “legitimate” by the participants, and to assess its effectiveness in regional resource management.

The Cache River is an ancient channel of the Ohio River, running across the southern tip of Illinois. It’s a world-recognized wetland, based on its location on the Mississippi Flyway and the enormous diversity of its flora and fauna, based on the conjuncture of 4 ecological zones. Among other things, it’s the northernmost cypress-tupelo swamp in the country.

We interviewed people who had participated in the planning process and a few others whose activities were central to efforts to restore the swamp. We held three focus groups with different social groupings in the watershed, and undertook historical research.

The first drainage occurred in 1913-16, when a logging firm cut a channel from the Cache to the Ohio River several miles above its mouth. As the timber was cut and the land sold to aspiring farmers, they established drainage districts that drained more and more of the swamp. In 1978, with only a small remnant of the original swamp remaining, conflict flared. A few landowners who used the swamp for recreational and commercial hunting and fishing brought suit against the local drainage district that was rapidly channelizing the last reaches of the Cache.

Into this fraught arena came various NGOs and the State.

Southern Illinois has long been a poor area. The first state forests and parks were established in the 1920s; in the 1930s the Shawnee National Forest was created in the hills just north of the Cache, astride portions of its headwaters. In the 1970s The Nature Conservancy acquired 1,000 acres of swamp. In 1990, through a process too complex go into here, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service established the Cypress Creek Wildlife Refuge astride the lower Cache area. In 1993, the TNC acquired an EPA grant to do watershed planning. Using the NRCS 9-step plan, that planning process resulted, 3 years later, in a comprehensive Watershed Resource Plan.

Various government agencies then used this plan to bring funds into the area through the CRP, WRP, and a variety of other programs.

The conflict was variously interpreted as one between environmentalists and farmers, or between locals and outsiders, or between locals and the State, or some combination thereof. Certainly, the agency people and others from outside the area viewed these attribution as accurate.

While there was considerable truth to these oppositions, they glossed over the fact that the conflict arose locally, and that it arose out of a complex historical social ecology. To outsiders, the area looks as if it is primarily agricultural; it is fairly uniformly poor. Its history of manufacturing and timbering is largely gone, invisible to newcomers.

The proposition I make here is that class relations were fundamental both to the persistent divisions in the area, and to the relative weakness of the Plan to gain widespread support and authority. In any definition of class, whether Weberian or Marxist, ownership of property is fundamental, although it is by no means the only basis of power. In this region, race is as well.

The region is geographically diverse, despite its small scale. The two counties in the upland have historically been characterized by orcharding and mixed agriculture. Land ownership has been widely distributed and formed the basis for durable power only in specific localities, not at the county level.

The eastern lowlands were settled by “yeoman farmers” as the swamps were drained and the land tiled. After World War II, because of the flat, fertile land, these farms expanded as large commercial operations.

The southwestern lowlands, where the conflict was most intense, was of a significantly different order: It was historically in cotton production and, like the rest of the lower Mississippi Delta, early on developed a two-class system based on plantation agriculture with black croppers.

S explain charts: % tenant operated, % Negroes, 1950, % Black 1970

This description leaves out, of course, timbering. Timbering not only employed a great many timber cutters and haulers, but was the foundation for an active manufacturing complex, including sawmills, box and barrel factories, and, particularly in the only town of any size, Cairo, furniture, carriage, and other wood manufacturing plants.

Since much of the work was seasonal, many of the laborers also bought small plots of land. Notably, there were many very small farms in the lower Cache region.

This history has given the region, especially the lower Cache, a rather unique configuration. This was a region in which the natural resources had once been used in very different ways by different groups of people: many people relied on and had sentimental and recreational attachment to the forest and swamps; and others made their livelihoods by production agriculture.

This was a past that was gone, but it lived – and lives – on in the memories and daily interactions among the people of the region.

Why is this important? Because how one defines a problem determines to a considerable extent its outcome.

It appears that those who sought to resolve the local conflict, in which organized farmers held political trumps (this was around 1992, with the rage in the countryside), accepted the definition of the issues as one between “locals” and “outsiders”, and in which “farmers” were the quintessential “local” and environmentalists were prototypical “outsiders.” The effort was made to enlist the locals, therefore, in the process, thereby creating collaboration rather than collision.

Here the specifics of the planning process become significant. TNC wanted to use the NRCS 9-step process, but open membership widely, including environmentalists. NRCS argued that key farmers would not participate if environmentalists did. Compromising, they agreed to allow local landowners with environmental sympathies on the committee. Both agreed to exclude the most militant local opponents of drainage.

This created some practical problems: The plan, it turns out, was not widely known, except by farmers. Even local elected officials, who would be expected to be concerned with and knowledgeable about planning efforts in their counties, show little knowledge of the plan.

The plan is also, undoubtedly, incomplete, since so few voices were at the table. It has good geographical representation (and that is a key node of difference everyone acknowledges), but no townspeople, no blacks, no non-farming professionals, etc. participated.

Farmers, virtually to a person, view agriculture as the foundation of the local economy, and base their claims to legitimate representation and power on this. However, the truth is considerably different. While it contributes significantly, albeit erratically, to the local economy (this is Pulaski County), it rarely provides a majority of personal income. And most of that income is due to transfer payments in various forms of agricultural subsidies.

The problem is more than practical, however, for governance is not solely a utilitarian, technical exercise. It also goes to the root of how we believe we should operate as a democratic polity.

There is an old debate, still present in rural areas, about the relative merits of universal suffrage. Most farmers seem to take as an un-thought-through assumption that their status as property-owners confers on them the right to govern. This attitude was also shared by non-farmers who served on the planning committee. The blurring of the lines between property-ownership and citizenship was an ever-present trope in our interviews.

The other aspect has to do with the distribution of actual power. In the theory of an enfranchised citizenry, all citizens delegate the power to govern to elected representatives.

However, in the Cache, a new governing class has emerged—the government agencies that control large amounts of land and even larger amounts of financial resources.

The planning process had the effect of re-legitimating the apparent power of a propertied elite. However, actual power devolved on the administrative agencies and their personnel, who used the plan to gain greater resources for their missions, and to gain greater legitimacy for themselves within their agencies.

In an ideal world, this represents a true corruption of democracy. However, in a world in which farmers control the majority of land that presents the problems of run-off, probably contributing to hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico, they have the power, through their private actions, to make any plan inoperable.a

I have no prescription, at least at this time (we’re working on it), for a means to ameliorate these effects. I can only observe, from my ivory tower, that the planning process had the ironic outcome of reinforcing the disempowerment of the majority of this already severely disempowered citizenry, and the empowerment of government agencies whose primary responsibility is to their administrative hierarchy, lodged in Springfield, Illinois, and Washington, DC, and not to the local area.

The environment has won; the local people, I suspect, have not.