Saving the Driftless Region from Itself: Old approaches could help lessen the impacts of our climate crisis.

• Author: Hundt, Tim

Many conservation practices we take for granted today were born in the 1930s in a part of western Wisconsin known as the Driftless Region, an area that was missed by the glaciers, resulting in striking geological features. Here the Coon Creek Watershed Project became the first of many conservation projects that would spread across the country under President Franklin D. Roosevelt's newly created Soil Erosion Service.

The Coon Creek pilot project, led by Hugh Hammond Bennett, who is known as "the father of soil conservation," devised techniques to stop the Dust Bowl, a human-caused ecological disaster that devastated much of the country in the 1930s. In the Driftless Region, the enemy was not so much wind, but water, and the techniques developed here would be effective against both.

Bennett pioneered conservation practices including contour stripcropping, terracing, and crop rotation that were incredibly successful, spreading to other watershed projects and eventually the whole country. Those practices were also instrumental in reversing the Dust Bowl and saving vital crops.

Today, the same watershed that led us out of that disaster more than eighty years ago is once again showing us signs that we are on the brink of another--mostly human-made--ecological disaster. And just as before, this literal watershed has the chance to become a watershed moment in pioneering new ways to handle the extreme environmental impacts of climate change and perhaps even reverse its damages.

In 2018, the Driftless Region was hit by a weather event so unusual that it drew the attention of agencies at the national level. Between August 26 and September 5 of that year, parts of southwestern Wisconsin received up to an unprecedented 23.42 inches of rain. This included twelve to fourteen inches of rain during a single twenty-four-hour period. The flooding impacted communities along Coon Creek, the Kickapoo River, and the Little La Crosse River and passed record flood levels, in some places by feet, that had been set just ten years earlier in 2008.

Five earthen dams built in the 1950s and 1960s for flood control either failed or "overtopped," meaning that the main outlet pipe that allows a stream to flow through the dam was full, the auxiliary spillway designed to handle extreme events was full, and the water was now flowing over the main part of the dam from one hill to the other. This was the first time experts had ever seen this happen to any of the more than...