No words minced 

Malcolm Cleaveland of Fayetteville holds bachelor's and master's degrees in forestry from Clemson University, and a Ph.D in geosciences from the University of Arizona, with a concentration in watershed management. He's spent his academic career teaching in the environmental sciences, and is an emeritus professor and associate of the members of the UA's Geosciences Department who are closely involved with watershed management professionals.

Cleaveland wrote recently to offer his scientifically informed and unabashed opinion about C&H Hog Farms, with some 6,500 swine, being misplaced in the watershed of our Buffalo National River. I'll share portions of Cleaveland's comments edited for space.

"The decision to put a CAFO in the Buffalo watershed on karst terrain was criminal, quite literally. The original plan did not call for impermeable liners for the waste ponds, but specified that there would be a certain amount of leakage from the holding ponds. Spraying waste on a few fields is inadequate. It guarantees continuing pollution of groundwater. So this CAFO has been polluting the watershed from day one. How do you explain the decision to allow that? Perhaps it was a product of corruption?

"It will take a long time for the pollution already introduced into the groundwater to clear, even if the pollution were stopped today. But it is continuing. What is the first maxim of policymaking? 'When you are in a hole stop digging.' Wastes should be trucked out of the watershed, beginning immediately, and the CAFO should be shut down. That would require the state to make the owners whole, but since it was the state that blundered in permitting the operation in the first place, the state should do the right thing. The continuing losses from impaired recreation in the national river when the [National Park Service] has to shut down access to the river because of contaminant loads will cost the state far more than getting rid of this CAFO.

"I urge the [Department of Environmental Quality] to contact the attorney general to start an investigation of the way the permitting process was conducted. I strongly suspect that there was collusion between private interests, [agency] personnel and federal employees to sneak the initial permit in under the radar."

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Mike Masterson is a longtime Arkansas journalist. Email him at mmasterson@arkansasonline.com.

Editorial on 10/23/2018