The Missouri Natural Streams Act : How an Environmental Campaign Was Waged and Lost

Journal of Southern History, August, 2009 by John Herron

The Missouri Natural Streams Act (1990): How an Environmental Campaign Was Waged and Lost. By Karen A. Bradley. Foreword by J. Sanford Rikoon. (Lewiston, N.Y., and other cities: Edwin Mellen Press, c. 2007. Pp. [xviii], 221. $109.95, ISBN 978-0-7734-5344-9.)

In this volume sociologist Karen A. Bradley examines the origin of and eventual controversy surrounding Missouri's Natural Streams Act. This account is an intensely local story, but embedded within the life history of this regional political episode, Bradley insists, are clues to understanding the larger human dimension inherent to ecological conflicts. Influenced by theorists such as Michel Foucault and Karl Mannheim, Bradley investigates the internal struggle of concerned environmental citizens to effect social change and enhance community well-being within a swirl of competing interests and ideals.

The original intent of the Natural Streams legislation was to protect the cultural, recreational, and scenic value of the state's riverways from threats posed by development. Such legislative action is not unique; most states have either passed or proposed similar measures. But the "central mechanism" behind the Missouri act was a required fiver and watershed management plan developed by local organizations (p. 3). It was this emphasis on local control that became problematic. The campaign for riverine protection was organized and funded by well-known environmental groups, like the Sierra Club and Audubon Society, based largely in metropolitan St. Louis. The heart of the preservation effort, however, was carried forward by grassroots activists whose localized concerns frequently clashed with the protection plans proposed by environmental leaders from Missouri's urban centers. More significant still, in difficult economic times, environmental activists were never able to convince their rural neighbors of the justness of the cause. The Natural Streams Act, then, serves as an appropriate case study to understand the class conflict and rural-urban divide that has plagued American environmentalism for more than four decades.

Bradley's study opens with an overview of twentieth-century fiver control efforts. Sportsmen, farmers, conservationists, and engineers all show up in the narrative as evidence of a deep environmental past that is equal parts biology and social history. The heart of the book, however, is a reconstruction of the fiver protection campaign of the 1980s. But there is no feel-good ending here. The Natural Streams Act was a colossal failure, and Bradley unearths environmental advocates' self-doubt and forced introspection that resulted from their high-profile defeat. In the ensuing discussion, ideas about property rights, social responsibility, and progressive development crash against notions of elitism, self-interest, and moral correctness. The result is an examination of the various meanings and uses of public culture and collective action in American society.

Even as Americans experience a wave of interest in all things green, environmentalism as a political movement has yet to become fully mainstream. In chronicling the defeat of fiver protection in one midwestern locale, Bradley offers one perspective on why.

JOHN HERRON

University of Missouri, Kansas City