Big Muddy Speaker Series presents:

Restoration efforts along the Missouri River, which gained steam in response to the 1993 flood 21 years ago, have recently run into political pressures in the wake of the 2011 flood. Restrictions in funding to restoration efforts have slowed down the public purchase of vulnerable lands from willing sellers, which has been the main tool for creating restoration opportunities.

Brad Walker, Rivers Director at the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, says that management of the Missouri River has largely been driven by the local needs of floodplain agriculture and the transportation needs of navigation. Brad will discuss the damaging relationships between agriculture and navigation on our major rivers and the limited efforts to fix them.

The current Missouri River restoration plan of Congress and the Corps of Engineers, if completed, would span over 60 years and result in restoring only a third of the lost ecosystems area. Mr. Walker will present on the 4 part-series he wrote recently to open up a bigger conversation on generating and implementing ideas to improve the current marginal river restoration efforts on the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers.