Rex Nelson

Improvement Association. Public opinion turned through the years, and popular Gov. Orval Faubus announced in December 1965 that he opposed damming the Buffalo. In 1966, Republican John Paul Hammerschmidt defeated Trimble, a Democrat. Hammerschmidt came out in favor of a national park along the river. The state’s two Democratic U.S. senators, J. William Fulbright and John L. McClellan, introduced park legislation in 1967. President Richard M. Nixon signed the legislation creating the Buffalo National River on March 1, 1972.

Now, 46 years later, the Buffalo is again imperiled. A tipping point came last month when the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality listed about 14 miles of the Buffalo as impaired. That listing was based on water samples that showed high E. coli levels in the river and about 15 miles of its Big Creek tributary. The flash point in recent years has been C&H Hog Farms, a facility where more than 6,500 hogs are raised along Big Creek, about six miles from where the creek runs into the Buffalo. The farm was established almost six years ago near Mount Judea in Newton County. I have friends on both sides of this issue. Some believe that waste runoff from the hog farm has polluted Big Creek and the Buffalo. Others believe the farm has been unfairly singled out by environmentalists.

In April 2017, the American Rivers advocacy group ranked the Buffalo as one of the country’s 10 most endangered streams. Since the hog farm was established, there have been several significant algal bloom events in the river, including toxic blue-green algae this summer. I attended an event a couple of years ago at the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute atop Petit Jean Mountain during which former Gov. Mike Beebe was asked to name his biggest regret during his eight years as governor. Without a second’s hesitation, he replied: “I wish we had never approved that damn hog farm.”