Old friend gone but his concern for lower White River remains

PLEASE CLICK ON IMAGE TO VIEW photo of Wayne Hampton at Big Island and to read the column from 1990.


Articles recently in newspapers and magazines have reminded us of the disastrous Army Corps of Engineers projects that threaten the lower White River's habitat and the wooded wetland along its shores — land that offers some of the world's most important and rare wildlife habitat as well as an area that sequesters an enormous amount of CO2 in the mid-south region.

Congress continues to provide money for the lock and dam where the combined flow of the White and Arkansas rivers enters the MIssissippi River at Big Island, which is the subject of this 17-year-old column. For more about the lower White River and this project, get a copy of The Last River, which was published by the University of Arkansas Press.

A second project is abuilding upstream. It willl pump water from the lower White River to agricultural land.

Wayne Hampton was the second-generation owner of a 4,000-acre Grand Prairie farm. His father had begun building reservoirs on his own land to collect rainwater to irrigate his own crops. Wayne continued that effort and spoke valiantly of the need for every owner of large tracts of land in the Mississippi River Delta and especially on Arkansas' Grand Prairie to conserve water, to keep it where it fell, and use it rather than asking the government to bring water from the environmentally sensitive White River to meet the need for agricultural irrigation.
Even today, Rick Hampton maintains his father's tradition and uses water over and over, irrigating and then flooding a big stand of hardwood timber and selected fields for waterfowl and then pumping the water back to the storage ponds if winter and spring rain doesn't refill the on-farm reservoirs.