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AVANA, Ill, Sept. 20 - Every autumn for more than 80 years, a sprawling farm beside the Illinois River has yielded a rich bounty of corn and other crops. Now it is being turned back into a swamp.
Four years ago an environmental group bought the 7,000-acre farm, which for generations has been one of the largest in Illinois. Over the next few months, ecologists will begin allowing it to flood.
Based on their experience in smaller projects, the ecologists think that within just a year or two, they can return this farm to its natural state as a thriving wetland. And they believe they can do it without planting a single seed. All they need to do, they say, is to stop sowing corn and to allow water levels to rise, and soon the seeds of wetland plants that have lain dormant in the soil for 80 years will spring to life.
This suggests that the century during which food was grown along the banks of America's great rivers may one day be seen as an aberration, a brief parenthesis in the life of rich swamps that thrived along these rivers for thousands of years...
..."There was a time when the country was growing so fast and we were so dependent on our own farming that it may have made sense to use land like this to grow crops," he said. "We don't need these flood plains for farming anymore, and in fact, keeping them in use as farms causes a whole range of negative environmental effects."
Waters around the Illinois River towns of Havana and Liverpool were once among the most productive freshwater fishing grounds in North America, producing a reported 24 million pounds of fish in 1908 alone. The region was also teeming with waterfowl...
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/27/national/27wetland.html
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