Saving the mighty miss: years of tinkering by the Army Corps of Engineers has inexorably harmed the fragile ecosystem of the Lower Mississippi River. Six states have banded together to reverse the damage.

• Author: Charlier, Thomas
• Position: Mississippi River Conservation Initiative

The place they call Island 63 could be one of the Mississippi River's richest natural gems if only it were still an island. As it is, this three-mile-long spit of sand and willows no longer provides isolation for shore birds, refuge for small fish, and easy meals for otters and eagles. That's because it's usually high and dry, connected to the mainland by eerie, desolate land bridges. Huck Finn wouldn't know what to make of it.

Like the 62 mosquito-infested spots mapped before it, Island 63 in northwest Mississippi is a testament to the no-nonsense, utilitarian river the Lower Mississippi has become, thanks to decades of tinkering by the Army Corps of Engineers. Although the river flows unimpeded by dams along the final 1,000 miles to the Gulf of Mexico, it is hardly the meandering, impetuous stream Mark Twain knew. With levees constricting its overflows and thousands of dikes funneling its water into the narrow navigation channel, the Lower Mississippi has been retooled to perform two functions: float barges and expel floods. Islands and the verdant floodplain areas fed by secondary channels have gone the way of flatboats.

With them, America's greatest river has lost more than just some of its romance. The changes have produced subtle but inexorable harm to the ecosystem of the Lower Mississippi, making the river less hospitable to a wide range of fish and wildlife and probably impairing water quality.

"There's been such a slow state of degradation that people don't get up in arms," says Robert Delaney, a retired U.S. Geological Survey program manager who has studied the river's decline. "Given time," he warns, "it'll be nothing but a big canal."

STATES FIGHT BACK

They may not be up in arms, but six states along the Lower Mississippi have banded together to make sure that doesn't happen. With help from some federal agencies, they formed the Lower Mississippi River Conservation Committee, a 12-year-old group made up of environmental regulators and wildlife officials from Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee.

After years of work, the committee recently completed a plan called the Mississippi River Conservation Initiative. It identifies more than 250 modest projects--efforts such as cutting small notches in dikes to allow water back into now-dry side channels. All are designed to help restore some of the river's natural functions and enhance recreation and tourism opportunities while not harming flood-control and navigation. And it starts at Island 63, where work to reopen a secondary channel got under way this winter.

In a region still reeling from Hurricane Katrina and facing countless other needs, the task of conjuring support and funds for a major environmental...