Update on MRRRI, Water Law, and new Soil Carbon Report

It's time to send a note to your federal elected officials, urging them to support the Mississippi River Restoration and Resilience Initiative.  This Act, now working its way through Congress, has promise to be very important to protecting and restoring our Mississippi River.  We learned about this at our Annual Meeting this spring; you can see a video of that meeting to learn more about the Initiative.  Here's a link to an Action Request from our sister organization, Friends of the Mississippi River, that will make contacting your legislators easy.

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This blog has provided information lots of things, including the flip-flop changes that US Water Law has undergone in since the Obama administration adopted the  Waters of the US Rule.   You can check these out (going back in time) in these posts: 

• Changes to the Waters of the US Rule will reduce protections -  February 2020
• WOTUS and the Clean Water Rule open for public comment - February 2019
• LWV UMRR Advocacy Update - December 2018
• EPA's Clean Water Rule - what would repeal mean?  - August 2017

​Well, good news for the environment came on October 21, as describe here in a post from the Western Environmental Law Center - here's the highlights - (read the article at this link for the full story)- "Late last night, fishing and recreation advocates won a significant victory for clean water when a federal district court threw out (vacated) a critical Trump Clean Water Act rule. Today’s order from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California restores state and Tribal authority to ensure federally permitted activities in rivers and lakes comply fully with state and Tribal law. The Biden administration had planned to revise the rule to an unknown degree through a years-long public process. This court decision erases the Trump rule completely and immediately."

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On to Soil Health News:  The Izaac Walton League has published a new comprehensive review of existing research on soil health and carbon sequestration.  This research comes from a University of Maryland scientist, Dr. Sara Via, and shows that increasing the use of common agricultural practices that improve soil health will slow climate change while producing multiple other environmental and economic benefits. In the report, “Increasing Soil Health and Carbon Sequestration in Agriculture: A Natural Climate Solution,” Dr. Sara Via discusses how rebuilding our degraded agricultural soils and acting on climate change are related problems that require urgent action.  
Dr. Via writes, “the practices recommended in this report provide a low-cost and immediately available way to reduce atmospheric carbon. Given the wide array of co-benefits associated with these practices, increasing their use is an investment in U.S. agriculture that will pay economic and environmental dividends for years to come.”
The report was published in collaboration with the Izaak Walton League of America and the National Wildlife Federation, and is available at this link: www.iwla.org/publications/news/press-release/2021/10/13/viareport 

If you have questions or would like to discuss the report, contact: Duane Hovorka, Agriculture Program Director, Izaak Walton League of America, [email protected], (402) 804-0033 (cell).