The Illinois River Project and Oklahoma's Quest for Environmental Quality

The Illinois River is a popular tourist and recreation attraction that flows from northwestern Arkansas through northeastern Oklahoma, and holds the distinction of being the first river designated wild and scenic by the State of Oklahoma. Each year more than 180,000 persons float the Illinois River by canoe, raft, or kayak. An estimated 350,000 enjoy swimming, fishing, camping, hiking, birding, and hunting opportunities. The river provides drinking water for Tahlequah and Watts, irrigates farms and nurseries, and is the habitat for several state and federal threatened and endangered species (Bality et al. 1998). Though the economy is based primarily on tourism, a substantial amount derives from agriculture, especially from poultry farming and cattle ranching, and from plant nurseries, forestry, gravel and limestone mining. The city of Tahlequah, which hosts Northeastern State University and the Cherokee Nation tribal government, also helps anchor the regional economy (Bality et al. 1998). Since the late 1980s Arkansas and Oklahoma have been joined in various disputes over the environmental quality of the boundary-traversing river and its wider watershed. Controversy first arose from the discharge of municipal wastewater into the Illinois River by the city of Fayetteville, Arkansas. Since the river is state-designated as wild and scenic in Oklahoma, increased wastewater discharges by Arkansas created significant controversy, which, in turn triggered a lawsuit by Oklahoma. This legal action culminated in a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1992 that resolved the conflict in Arkansas’ favor. Heightened interest in the welfare of the watershed has continued since then. A comprehensive river basin management plan was approved by the Oklahoma Scenic River Commission in 1998, but concerns over municipal discharges and uncontrolled nutrient loading, particularly phosphorus, from poultry litter (waste) into the Illinois River continued to grow. In 1997, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in cooperation with the National Science Foundation, awarded a Water and Watersheds research grant to a team of researchers at the University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University, and the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. Since the research orientation was defined by the granting agencies to be on stakeholderbased decision making, a team was recruited and organized that could analyze the views and values of various watershed stakeholders within a context of management alternatives for the basin’s land and water resources. The research award funded an initial three-year study (subsequently extended) of development impacts in the Illinois River watershed to test a protocol designed to foster watershed management policy that was effective, efficient, implementable, feasible, and acceptable. The project’s goal was to provide agency decision makers and managers with a stakeholder-based perspective of what issues were believed to be important, and how those issues could be addressed through a negotiated management protocol. In the sections below, I discuss the organization of the Illinois River project, what its research methods and findings were, and how they were used by decision makers and educators after the project ended. A more detailed discussion can be found in Meo et al. (2002) and the literature cited below.