♪ ♪ [mechanical churning] (Jones) Water resources are a-- that's a big issue around here because our water level is dropping so rapidly.

I had a farm once-- I still got-- it's set up.

It had two reservoirs on it and a tailwater recovery system.

I could catch nine out of every ten gallons I pumped.

It would go right back in my reservoirs.

The other thing with the issue of farming is the cost that it takes to pump the water.

And with the high price of fuel and everything of that nature, electric, that it's so much easier and cheaper to pump surface water such as a reservoir system or a tailwater recovery system as opposed to pumping it from 100 to 200 foot down in the ground.

It just takes a heck of a lot more diesel to do it when you're pumping it from the bottom of the Earth.

(Hood) Hi, I'm Cathy Hood.

I'm president of the Arkansas Rice Festival.

It's here in Weiner, Arkansas, in northeast Arkansas, and this is the 31st year for the Arkansas Rice Festival.

As you can see, we have got a beautiful day.

And the rice industry in this area is very, very important.

Basically, everyone in this town are rice producers or work at a rice mill or work at a bank.

It's--it's all rice-oriented here, so we started this rice festival to promote the rice industry, and it took off pretty good.

(all) Hello!

(Lynn) Hunting has went down the hill in the past probably five or six years because there's just-- it's not raining as much in the fall.

It's not raining that much in the spring.

And like I said, the water level-- the water table is way down.

We're digging wells that are deeper to pump water harder to get it up to the surface, and if we don't have any water, we have no ducks.

And if we got no ducks, I don't have-- you know, I can't make calls and sell them.

Guys can't come in from out of state to hunt because there's just not enough water around.

Few years we've-- our water levels have dropped.

We've warned people through the conservation effort, conserve water, but people laugh at you.

They don't-- until they get really hurting, they don't do nothing about it.

And most of them are small farmers that can't afford to do nothing except just do what they can do.

Well I've been farming now for about 60 years, I guess.

I'm retired right now.

My son is taking over my operation.

I still help him with the harvest and the planting.

And the water, it just takes more to get the water out of the ground.

I don't know how long we'll have water.

(male narrator) As the Sun rises over Arkansas, the first light crosses the Mississippi, which runs the length of our eastern border.

From there, it touches over 90,000 miles of rivers, over 300 lakes, and a landscape fed with 42 inches of annual rainfall.

To touch Arkansas is to touch water, which is why historically, Arkansas has always been considered a water-rich state.

Since statehood in 1836, Arkansans have used this abundant resource to grow the state's population, industry, agriculture, and economy.

But for all this growth, a price must be paid, and that burden is being borne by the state's lakes, rivers, and aquifers.

And those on the front lines of this looming crisis are the state's farmers.

One of those farmers is Gary Sitzer, a third generation farmer who is dealing with the problem by taking steps to use his water more efficiently.

It's expensive, but maybe it takes a farmer to really understand the importance of water.

(Sitzer) People want to know how much you think or worry about water.

You know, we do that.

That's pretty much all the time in rice culture in this area, you know, the drainage of getting it off or storing it in the reservoir or trying to conserve the water to get everything working better, what you can do to make the land drain better to make it irrigate more efficiently, what different things you can do.

You know, we rarely do things exactly the same way every year.

We'll learn a little different thing either from something we've done or from another farmer somewhere or from some research somewhere that we'll try to implement as quick as we can if it's any way it looks like it'll save us time and money.

And I think that's pretty much the mind-set of anybody in this part of the state when it comes-- even if they don't grow rice, most of the crops are irrigated, and how can they do it more efficiently and how they can do the things that need to be done.

(narrator) In 1850, the amount of harvested farmland in Arkansas was about 12,000 acres.

Back then, most farmers depended on the weather to water their crops, but as technology improved, they discovered they could harvest more product per acre if they irrigated the land with well water.

Since then, the amount of irrigated land has increased to over 4 million acres, which requires over 8 billion gallons of water a day.

It is withdrawals like this that are causing problems for the state's aquifers.

Aquifers are underground layers of rock, sand, or gravel that are saturated with water and conduct it easily enough that it is possible to remove it from the ground through a well.

In eastern Arkansas, farmers rely on the Sparta and Alluvial Aquifers, But after years of heavy use, these aquifers are in trouble.

Depletion of the Alluvial Aquifer has been documented since the 1920s, and by the 1980s, some wells started drying up.

Recent measurements in Arkansas County indicate groundwater levels that were once less than 30 feet below the surface are now more than 105 feet below ground.

While an aquifer can be recharged by rivers and water seeping through the ground, the current rate of recharge in parts of eastern Arkansas cannot keep up with what is being used.

Some say a possible solution to this problem is the Grand Prairie Area Demonstration Project.

The Grand Prairie Area Demonstration Project, that is the fancy name for the White River Irrigation Project in eastern Arkansas, is an effort to take the abundant water out of the White River and pump some of that excess water to farms in the Grand Prairie region to replace the groundwater use or a good portion of the groundwater use that is causing the declines in the area in the aquifers.

This project...

This idea started back in the '30s.

The farmers on the Grand Prairie have known since the '20s that they were using more water than the aquifer would sustain.

And the first answer was, "Well, lets go grab more water."

So they turned to the White River, and they've been trying to get in it since the 1930s and '40s.

I have a letter signed by president Harry Truman to then Governor Sid McMath in the early 1950s telling him that he hoped that the Grand Prairie project would be completed soon.

And, of course, that was now well over 50 years ago...

So it has a long history.

It's under construction now.

The pump site has partially been built, the pumps and motors have been built, and a lot of the on-farm work has been done.

Millions and millions of dollars have been spent on this project.

We're just east of DeValls Bluff at the White River.

Just behind us is where the pumping plant is going to be constructed.

We've got the White River as the source of our water.

We've got a short canal that's being built from the White River that conveys water back to the pumping plant itself.

The pumping plant will pick the water up, move it through pipelines into open canals up on the prairie for distribution to farmers as far south as Stuttgart.

Behind me, you see the levy that will eventually be removed.

You can see the housing facility for the pumps.

There will be a total of six pumps, four large and two small.

Those pumps will lift water out of the canal, and it will move it back onto the prairie through two pipelines, and there'll be a canal system that distributes the water on further to the west and south.

From the canal, water is distributed across the prairie.

It is pumped into irrigation storage reservoirs like you see behind me.

This reservoir is about 40 acres.

Right now, it's dry.

It will store enough water to irrigate 300 to 400 acres of cropland, depending on the crops that are being grown.

We have got about 250 of these reservoirs that have already been installed and about another 250 of them to be installed in the future.

That, in a nutshell, is the Grand Prairie Irrigation Project.

(narrator) But the project isn't without controversy.

David Carruth is a lawyer in Clarendon and a board member for the Arkansas Wildlife Federation.

David is opposed to the project.

The plan is to address a water management problem with a water supply solution.

The problem generally on the Grand Prairie is that farmers have pumped too much water from the aquifer and they're overpumping it.

So the solution they propose is to put a siphon in the White River and pump water to the Grand Prairie and just bring more water.

The way I view it, and others who agree with me, is that, no, you need to use the water you have more efficiently.

You need to make better use of what you have before you start grabbing somebody else's water or water that's being used for another purpose.

(narrator) But that doesn't dissuade John Edwards, who serves as an attorney and governmental relations officer to the Arkansas Rural Water Association and White River Irrigation District, which supports the Grand Prairie project.

What the Grand Prairie project will do, it will actually give people in that region an opportunity to effectively manage the water.

At times when the river water-- the river levels are high, that is the only time that water can be pumped from the river into the system that farmers can take on their on-farm storage or directly let go into their fields to irrigate their crops.

But they only do that when the river is high and meets the environmentally set safeguards to preserve wildlife that depends upon the river.

When you start defining what is excess, you have to ask, "Well, what use is the water in the river being put to?"

When this river floods, it waters these bottomlands that are rich in timber.

So if you want vibrant timber growth, you need the floods.

You need the 27-foot river, the 28-foot river.

Flood stage is 26 feet.

When the proponent says, "We're only going to take excess water," they assume that the river is not putting that "excess water" to good use.

But these river bottoms are what they are because the water goes there to create this subtropical type of habitat.

My response back to that is, you know, it's-- anyone can say something, but this project has been looked at scientifically for years.

All of those studies have been open to the public.

I have never one time seen anyone successfully challenge the science behind the withdrawals from this project, not once.

If the Grand Prairie Irrigation Project is built, it's going to be the first volley in a series of significant water wars in Arkansas.

The biggest illustration of it is, it opens up the door for the Corps to open up the dams on the upper lakes, Beaver Lake, Table Rock Lake, Bull Shoals Lake, to send water down for irrigation on the lower end of the river.

So now you have farmers on the Grand Prairie calling for water that people in northwest Arkansas want or need, and then the political power and who has the clout starts coming into play, and you have a political water war develop.

(narrator) While the Grand Prairie Irrigation Project is still being debated, a similar but smaller project has already been built.

In 1996, Union County was one of five Arkansas counties declared to be a Critical Groundwater Area by the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission.

A cone of depression was forming in the aquifer under Union County, which meant they had to drill deeper to get to the water, more than 420 feet deep in 1994.

I had a gentleman from El Dorado tell me one time, that the water crisis in El Dorado became real the day the mayor of the city told the country club that they could no longer use water to water the golf greens.

That's when it became real.

(narrator) Working with county stakeholders and large-volume industrial water users, Union County, with legislative authority, created the state's first water conservation board and authorized a fee for groundwater use from the Sparta Aquifer.

This money, along with a temporary sales tax, funded a project to pull water from the Ouachita River for the county's largest water users.

(Reynolds) Water comes in from the Ouachita River.

There's a screen that keeps logs and limbs out of it.

And behind you, there are four pumps which move the water to the clarification facility through a 48-inch pipeline.

This facility has a physical or hydraulic capacity of about 65 million gallons per day.

This is where it all begins.

Water is removed from the Ouachita River, pumped almost 1/2 mile to the clarification facility.

[upbeat jazzy music] ♪ ♪ In the far background behind me is the Lion Oil Company, a petroleum refiner and one of the end users of the industrial water that we make here in Union County.

Closer to me, right beside the road, you can see a silver-colored pipe coming up out of the ground and then going back in.

That's the water supply from the Ouachita river to Lion Oil Company.

Lion is one of four industrial users that will use between 10 and 20 million gallons a day depending on weather and depending on what their processes are.

We've been from beginning to end, beginning on the bank of the Ouachita River, here at the end where the water is actually used.

(narrator) By 2005, Lion Oil as well as two other industrial users had switched from aquifer water to river water.

Monitors indicate water levels in the Sparta are rising after years of decline.

But the aquifers are still in trouble.

Despite the success in Union County, some forecasts indicate groundwater in other Delta counties will be depleted by 2015 if nothing's done to prevent it.

But groundwater depletion is just one of the issues facing Arkansas.

In the northwest where the aquifers are difficult to reach, municipalities rely on Beaver Lake to meet their needs.

(Boss) Well, the lake itself was-- as Bob Morgan has already mentioned-- was an impoundment on the White River that was built in the 1960s, authorized through congressional legislation and built by the Army Corps of Engineers.

And the lake is still managed by the Army Corps of Engineers, primarily, and its primary motivation for constructing the lake was actually flood control on the White River and secondarily for hydroelectric power generation.

The third use at that time was for drinking water, and recreation was really kind of an afterthought all the way around.

As I think the lake has evolved in the last 45 years or so, recreation and tourism probably are the much bigger industry here now, and drinking water is becoming much more important.

Still, hydroelectric power, I think, dominates as the main purpose of the lake, and the reservoir itself and flood control is really a minor issue anymore.

(Matlock) Beaver Lake is the water supply for northwest Arkansas, among other things.

The reservoir is in the Upper White River, represents probably our strongest tourism and economic resource for the region, provides the basis for just about everything that happens in northwest Arkansas.

It is--as you look at ecological resources that are necessary to sustain an economy, this is it; this is the beginning.

Without this, none of the other economic processes that occur in northwest Arkansas would exist.

(Morgan) I think everybody understands that-- that Beaver Lake is really important to the health of our area, that it's the only water supply we have.

You know, if you look at Tulsa, they've got three different lakes, I think, that they can use for water supply.

We only have one.

And if this one goes bad, it's going to be really tough to find another resource like this that we can use to provide 300,000 people with water.

Yeah, it's entirely possible to kill a lake.

I mean, there are many, many examples of lakes, even very large lakes, that were killed by human activities, and I think the classic examples occurred in the 1960s in the Great Lakes.

Lake Erie itself was virtually dead along the much of the southern shore where we have large industrial areas, Cleveland and some other big cities, and it was only the result of the activity of environmentalists and legislation that was intended to clean up the lake that allowed it to come back.

Now, the remarkable thing is that as a result of those clean-up efforts, the lake has, in fact, come back, and it did take 20 or 30 years for it to recover, but it actually did recover, so it is possible to bring lakes back once they've been at the brink or even, you know, polluted to the point of being dead lakes altogether, but that's not really a desirable thing to have to do.

You like preferably not to kill them in the first place.

(Matlock) There are two fundamental principles in ecological engineering and ecological processes.

One is that everything's connected.

The other is that everything's changing.

That applies for Beaver Lake as well.

Everything's connected.

Everything that happens in the Upper White River watershed--everything-- ultimately affects Beaver Lake, sometimes imperceptibly, sometimes obviously.

And so all the things that we see occurring and changing in our landscape will have an impact on Beaver Lake.

Most of them, unfortunately, are not particularly good.

If you come in here about the end of August, about Labor Day every year, the water starts tasting kind of like-- it smells kind of like you're sitting down and playing in the dirt in your garden and has kind of a musty flavor.

That is a metabolite of algae, of blue-green algae, that are dying.

So when they die, they release fluids, and one of those fluids is called MIB, and that is what causes the taste.

You or I could probably taste MIB at a rate of about ten parts of MIB per trillion parts of water.

Okay, so we only have about 2/3 of a trillion gallons of water in the lake here.

So you can see that just a couple gallons of MIB can a pretty severe taste and odor problem.

Well, in any lake, when you build-- when you build a reservoir or even natural lakes, over time, the water actually ages; the lake itself actually ages.

And I think Dr. Matlock has already talked about this.

You develop biological communities in this lake.

There are lots of physical and chemical processes going on in the lake all the time, and that natural process is something we call eutrophication.

And all lakes will age over time, and the water quality will slowly deteriorate over time as a result of eutrophication.

What we find, though, is that human activities around the lakeshore and in the broader watershed around the lake tend to greatly accelerate the rates of eutrophication of reservoirs.

And so what you find as you've greatly develop a place and start to put lots of development pressures around the watershed, the water quality begins to decline at an ever-increasing rate.

If you have a buffer zone around the edge of the lake, around the edge of the streams feeding into the lake, it will reduce significantly the amount of pollutant loads to the reservoir.

If we reduce their load to the reservoir, we increase the life of the reservoir.

We decrease the cost of water treatment.

Decreasing the cost of water treatment, of course, means a lower water bills and higher-quality water.

Beaver Water District, which is one of three water districts on the lake-- we're the biggest; we produce about 45 million gallons of water a day, but we have what's called conventional treatment of the water, which is fairly standard.

We add some chemicals to make the sediment clump together.

We allow it to settle.

Then we filter it, and then we disinfect it.

If pollution gets worse, we may have to go to more advanced treatment.

(narrator) There is one method of treating water that has proven successful and is completely free.

It's the treatment water receives from the surrounding watershed.

A watershed is an area of land that drains water to a common receiving body of water or outlet such as a lake.

Watersheds vary in size and proportion.

The Beaver Lake Watershed is over 1,000 square miles and falls into parts of five counties.

It's about 71% forest, 22% pasture, around 3% urban development, and the rest is water.

Watersheds are important because they remove sediments and dissolved materials from the water as it passes through the forest streams and lakes.

[pensive piano music] ♪ ♪ (Lloyd) Well, certainly some of the best water supply systems in the country are those that are in totally protected watersheds.

One of the ideal ones is the one that Portland, Oregon, has.

They literally-- through some work with the federal government, the entire watershed, every drop of water that falls and goes into their water supply source, is controlled or owned by the government.

So there's absolutely no development.

There's no hikers; there's no camping; there's no anything on that watershed.

Because that watershed is so protected, they are one of the few systems in the country-- literally, it's a handful of systems-- that do not even have to filter their water.

They have a filtration waiver.

So that's one extreme, from water that's totally, completely protected, and then you can go to the other extremes, whether it's the Ohio River or the Mississippi River that drains a significant portion of the United States.

Obviously the folks in New Orleans, their water supply is the Mississippi, and their watershed is literally about 40% of the United States, and so that makes it a much more challenging water supply.

And even when you do a really good job of treating that water, the risks are greater because there are more contaminants to start with.

(narrator) The Bull Run watershed in Portland, Oregon, is well-protected since the land is federally owned.

It's safe from urban, industrial, and agricultural pollution.

But it's a different story in Arkansas.

Most of the land in our watersheds is held privately.

Landowners feel attempts to tell them what to do with their property infringes on their rights.

Others feel differently.

Kate Althoff lives in Little Rock and has been fighting proposed developments by Deltic Timber and others for the past three years.

Her group, Citizens Protecting Maumelle Watershed, is afraid the type of development seen around Beaver Lake will spread to Lake Maumelle, which provides drinking water to almost 400,000 people.

What Kate and others wanted was a comprehensive plan to protect the lake and the watershed.

It took months of negotiating and cost $1.2 million, but in early 2007, Central Arkansas Water published the Lake Maumelle Watershed Management Plan.

Here's this plan that we-- we went through this very contentious process.

They spent $1.2 million of the rate payer's money.

They pass the plan in February, and then in July, they tell the Waterview Estates investors that you can build in Critical Area A after we spent all this time.

We went to bat for the water department to have the right to condemn the land.

We stood up and we told them repeatedly that we want to follow this watershed management plan.

And before the ink is dry, seriously, they let Waterview Estates build in Critical Area A.

After this long process, they told Deltic Timber, "Our policy is no development in Critical Area A."

They go on to courts, and they buy that land, the Nowlin Ridges.

What a day to celebrate.

What a day to celebrate.

And then they turn around and tell these folks that they can build in Critical Area A.

(narrator) In the plan, the watershed was divided into three areas.

The upper watershed lies west of the lake and surrounds the Maumelle River.

Critical Area B encompasses most of the lake and land immediately around it.

Critical Area A is on the eastern side of the lake and is considered to be the most sensitive area since it is closest to the intake.

If contaminants are introduced into the upper watershed or Critical Area B, there's enough forested land to clean and assimilate those contaminants.

However, in Critical Area A, the watershed is so narrow that neither the land nor the water could adequately clean new pollutants.

The basic fact is that Lake Maumelle is so shallow.

It's only 26 feet deep.

As I've gone through this process and I've gotten to know people and I've talked and talked and talked, what I have learned is that the general population does not understand that each body of water has its own unique characteristics.

And when you are trying to assess the impact of one variable on the water quality, you've got to consider that whole micro system there.

And they say, "Well, if you can build on Lake Hamilton; "you can build on Greers Ferry Lake, "you know, why not-- why not Lake Maumelle?"

And they don't understand that it is such a small, little lake and that the slopes are high and that the soils are of a certain kind of content, you know, all these little elements.

(narrator) Pollution in watersheds come from two sources.

Point pollution comes from a single source, like a pipe from a factory draining contaminated water directly into a stream, river, or lake.

Non-point pollution can come from many different sources.

Non-point pollution is the oil and other fluids that drip from cars and runs down the gutters and into the streams.

It's leftover paint that's poured down the drain, old prescriptions that are flushed down the toilet, and chemicals and fertilizers used on lawns that drain into the street.

Basically, anything that's been dumped in a gutter or down a drain eventually finds its way into the lakes and streams as non-point pollution.

That's why watersheds are so amazing and so important.

They take all those chemicals and waste and manage to clean it so the water is drinkable.

The water in Lake Maumelle is monitored by the U.S. Geological Survey.

(Heavener) This is a watershed, so we want to be really sure of what's going on, what's coming in, and anytime you have growth and development around a lake or a watershed, it's really a good idea to keep an eye on what's-- what kind of changes are happening or could possibly be happening, and that's what we're doing today.

Anytime people are taking trees away, they're taking the filtration systems.

You have chances for more sediment to run into your rivers or streams.

It's just any change that can happen with taking the natural trees or rocks or anything that was put here naturally away, it will make a change in your water, so that's what we need to watch for.

Each month, we come out here-- let me get this thing going.

Each month, we come out here and we go to six different locations on the lake, and we take samples.

We take a profile, which is a sample with this meter right here.

We will take readings every five feet or one-degree temperature change, and we go from the surface to the bottom of the water column.

And from there, we'll take three different readings in the summertime.

We'll take one three feet from the surface, a midsection, and then three feet from the bottom.

At the same time, we'll take a water sample from those areas, and that sample is sent to our national water quality lab at the USGS to be analyzed for different constituents or whatever the water department or our agency chooses for us to sample for.

It changes from time to time, from season to season.

Our water quality specialists and the water department, they work that out, and we just collect the sample.

[brooding synthesizer music] ♪ ♪ (narrator) Beyond Lake Maumelle, the USGS conducts surveys around the state checking on the health of our waterways.

Oh, yeah?

Yeah, so it's... (Petersen) So this is part of a national program that we're participating in, and specifically here, we're looking at the water quality in Ozark streams, and we're looking at various land uses.

Some of our sites are almost all forested in the basin.

Some of the sites are in basins where you've got more agriculture.

So we're looking at the differences in the nutrients and then how that affects the biological communities, whether we're talking about algae that grows in the water or aquatic insects and fish communities.

And having more nutrients in the water typically grows more algae which then some of the insects that graze on algae, we get more of those and more fish that graze on algae.

Pretty much all across the country, the two things that have the biggest detrimental effects on streams are sediment and nutrients, and the amount of sediment washing off of roads, for example, and nutrients coming from agriculture, washing off people's lawns, wastewater treatment plants.

So it's not something that comes from one source typically.

There's a lot of things that people do, and we all live downstream.

(Davis) This is an instrument that we use to measure several parameters in the field.

Those include dissolved oxygen, temperature, pH, which is how basic or acidic a stream is, and also the conductance, which is the mineral content.

And we're particularly interested in the dissolved oxygen content of the stream because of the effect dissolved oxygen has on fish and also algae.

(Lasker) We're going to do some basic field parameters to measure the water quality.

This right here is called a grab sample because it's basically determined by how much flow you have, how much discharge you have coming through the-- through the creek bed here.

We'll learn basic constituents like-- this is like a nutrient enrichment program, so we'll learn about the basic nutrients in the water sample.

We'll also learn basic parameters like dissolved oxygen and pH content, conductance, stuff like that.

(Brady) I'm doing a discharge measurement.

Basically, I'm measuring the amount of flow of the water that's going downstream through here at this particular time.

We need the discharge data to correlate with our water quality data.

If you think about the samples that they collect and have them analyzed, say, for nutrients or metals, it tells you how much is in that one bottle, but that only tells you how much is in the bottle.

And if you compare how much is in the bottle to how much water is actually going down the river, you get a better idea of how much of these constituents are actually flowing downstream at any given time.

[high-pitched beeping] (Petersen) Well, I think that the changes that we are seeing at this point in time are, you know, fairly subtle.

It's not like that we're seeing-- you know, we're not even approaching extinctions or that sort of thing or even elimination, in many cases, but we are seeing, for example, decreases in the abundance of some of the more sensitive species, and we're seeing that shift from more insect-eating fish to more of the algae-eating fish.

And I think that's just-- you know, that's something that is-- you know, something for us to be aware of and to consider and to try to make changes in our practices at early stages.

[upbeat electronic music] ♪ ♪ Something that would surprise a number of people is just how unique Ozark streams are.

They've got 20 species of fish found only in the Ozarks.

It's one of the most diverse areas for fish communities in the whole country, and I think people just don't realize how unique these streams are.

(narrator) In 1973, under the guidance of the Clean Water Act, the state of Arkansas created a list of steams now identified as Extraordinary Water Resources.

The list represents water resources that are unique, extraordinary, and have a variety of uses.

To be on this list means the body of water is a priority for protection from pollution.

Included on this list is the Illinois River, which flows downstream to Oklahoma.

On this particular day in Tahlequah, officials and environmentalists are commemorating the signing of a contract that will create a 9,000-acre buffer zone along the Illinois River that will filter nutrients from the stream.

While efforts are being pursued on both sides of the border to protect the Illinois River, it provides an example of the type of conflict that can arise when a single water source is needed for two purposes.

The relationship between Oklahoma and Arkansas is basically a legal one, and the law is the law of gravity.

The river flows downhill from Arkansas to Oklahoma, and that's really the source of our problems is that-- is that decisions made in Arkansas affect what goes on in Oklahoma.

There's been a lot of litigation between entities in Oklahoma, including the city of Tulsa and now the state of Oklahoma, with poultry-producing companies that a lot of them are based in Arkansas.

Of course, their chicken houses and processing plants are in both Arkansas and Oklahoma.

But in the northeastern part of Oklahoma, there are several rivers that have watersheds that are shared with Arkansas.

And the Oklahoma attorney general has decided that some of the environmental problems in Oklahoma are the fault of people in Arkansas, and he has sued some of our larger poultry companies.

And some are, of course, based in Oklahoma as well.

In the '80s when we were attempting to protect this river and Lake Tenkiller from a new source of pollution from Fayetteville, Arkansas, we had to sue, and that lawsuit went to the United States Supreme Court.

Under that Supreme Court ruling, it was determined that under the Clean Water Act, a upstream state had to meet the water quality standards of a downstream state, and this was a precedent-setting decision.

And, ultimately, it did work out satisfactorily because Fayetteville, Arkansas, wanting to discharge half of its treated waste into the Illinois River, did opt to build a very modern treatment plant that removes quite a bit of phosphorous, which is the problem nutrient for this river and for the lake.

So it was--all in all, although we didn't win a complete verdict at the Supreme Court, we did win that precedent-setting opinion from the Court.

I think what I'd love people in Arkansas to know is that the Illinois River matters to us the way that the White River matters to Arkansans.

And if they would treat it the same way they would treat the White, we would have a lot less to fight about.

(Brocksmith) In Oklahoma, the Illinois River is a legally designated state scenic river, and we haven't got very many rivers like this.

Anybody who's familiar with western Oklahoma knows that.

But in Arkansas, it's-- the Illinois River isn't anything very special, you know?

It's not a scenic river in Arkansas, and I really wonder if it has occurred to most people in northwest Arkansas that it's vital to us.

Tourism is a major element of our economy here.

Clean water is important to us.

Our scenic rivers are important to us.

This river and this lake, Tenkiller Lake, are the apples of Oklahoma's eye.

(narrator) The problem with the Illinois River is that neither Arkansas nor Oklahoma owns it.

They have to share it, an idea which is also the basis of Arkansas' water laws.

Up until the mid-1950s, we didn't have a whole lot of water law in Arkansas.

And as the population became more dense in the state of Arkansas, then people started bumping into each other with uses--with land uses, water uses, etcetera.

In the 1950s, there was a dry period that caused a lot of water problems, and we see a lot of case law develop in the '50s.

One significant case was decided in 1955 by the Arkansas Supreme Court.

It's called Harris vs. Brooks.

And in that case, the Arkansas Supreme Court decided that Arkansas would follow what's called the reasonable use doctrine for riparian rights.

In a riparian system, a landowner whose property touches a body of water on the surface of the ground is able to use that water on that piece of property for lawful uses.

Then the court said if a legal use somehow infringes on someone else's legal use, you have to adjust that.

You have to-- other uses have to yield a bit until you balance those uses.

(narrator) One person struggling with his riparian rights is Jack White, who lives in Hartford, Arkansas.

He moved here 30 years ago, but about 4 years ago, he noticed a change in his well water.

(White) When we moved here, this water was-- pH, everything was just perfect.

Tests, everything was good, flow rate.

After they drilled this, within 2 or 3 weeks or so, or less, we noticed that every time we'd fill up the birdbath that the water would just foam like you'd put soap suds in it.

I know they use a lot of chemicals, and our water changed, and the odor of the water changed.

The quality's changed.

I know other people that said that they couldn't drink their water for eight months after they drilled over near their home.

Our water has cleared up a little bit, but it is not near the water it was before.

The quality is gone.

The recent developments in the Fayetteville shale gas drilling have brought a lot of water issues up for all state agencies.

The two primary questions that we've seen are what about effects that actual drilling might have on neighbors' use of groundwater, and then also when the water is acquired for gas drilling and a lot of water is needed for, essentially, a short period of time, where can that water be acquired, and then what do you do with the wastewater that comes out of the system?

In the case of someone who might have a well near a gas well and they claim there's some type of interference, really there's not a whole lot of law developed there yet that we've dealt with from the Natural Resources Commission.

I know that water quality questions are primarily within the jurisdiction of the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality, but then gas drilling operations themselves are with the Oil and Gas Commission.

And what we've dealt with are those issues of acquiring the water for use during the drilling and hydrofracturing process.

When the water comes back out of the well, that is managed by questions that go to the Department of Environmental Quality and the Oil and Gas Commission.

(White) It's any place that you have undesirable water.

It's left over from drilling gas wells or anything else that they do where the water is polluted or bad, they bring it here and dump it here on the surface.

Comes right out here and goes right into this bed here.

It goes into the ground, and what's overflow goes into Sugarloaf Creek right here.

Well, the creek was the same to me consistently.

Of course, the clear-cutting and burning off did have some effect on it and things like that, but the creek was in good shape until they started this drilling operation throughout here.

(narrator) Over the years, water resources around Hartford have supported several industries, including timber, poultry, and agriculture.

But in Jack's eyes, the recent addition of natural gas is proving too much for the environment to sustain.

Jack remembers how clear the water used to be and what life was like before pollution killed Sugarloaf Creek.

(White) Before they came here, this creek, whenever it flowed, was always a real pretty stream, and the people swam in it, waded in it.

I seen people catch bream out of it and everything else, and it's--the old bluff hole has been there, and people's been using it for baptism, swimming holes, parties, picnics ever since 1850 or longer.

People used that water out of that creek to drinking in their homes and bathed in it.

But now if you took a drink of that water, you'd get sick, one drink.

I mean it's-- there's nothing alive in it anymore, and it's just-- it looks pitiful.

You'd come up here any summer day nearly when school was out, and there'd be oodles and gobs of kids playing and people, families, picnics.

Nobody cares no more.

(narrator) But people are trying.

People who see themselves as stewards of the land they occupy and want to be a positive influence on the environment and the community.

These people are exploring new ideas, new technologies, and new ways of thinking.

(Swindle) When we started this process in 2001, it was a pie-in-the-sky dream.

We teach sustainable practices worldwide, specifically water focus in a lot of areas that have-- don't have the abundance of water like we have here.

And we wanted to show that you can easily and effortlessly collect rainwater, a natural resource, something that might just go to city sewage, that you can collect the stuff naturally and really effortlessly and reuse it in functions that run your air conditioner, that flush your toilets.

It's a simple piece, yet it's a very important piece, because we may be surrounded-- this world may be surrounded with water, but there's only a very small percentage of potable water that's used worldwide, and we want to show that this natural rainfall, something that comes naturally, we can use it for many functions that we would use potable water for.

The water, rainwater, is collected off our roof, 28 drain points on our roof, gravity fed through pipes to our water tower.

Then at the water tower, we collect 30,000 gallons in that water tower, naturally filtrated, And then it goes into our system that's used to flush our toilets, use for our heat and air system.

That's the rainwater from the roof.

Our parking lot itself, it's a concrete base, and then your parking stalls are gravel pave application.

This gravel pave is 100% porous.

It's a plastic honeycomb application, terry cloth bottom, and then you compact gravel on top of it.

Then when a car parks on top of it and say it drips oil or anything like that, it will naturally seep through.

That terry cloth will catch the contaminants and filter it.

And then also rainwater can filter straight through.

And how everything is on a certain elevation slope, it will all go to what's a bioswell, which is the vegetation between the parking stalls.

Water goes there, and then the vegetation that was chosen in these bioswells helps break up these contaminants.

That water is collected there, and then it goes to our retention basin.

At any given point, we can manage up to 3 to 8 million gallons of rainwater before it hits any kind of city sewage.

So we also take that impact off our local community, but also we get to store this water and reuse it during the drier months, say June until August.

What we pay monthly is 80% less than what a building of this size would pay for water usage from the city.

Historically, there was a large watershed at one point 130 years ago that was here, so we wanted to recreate that watershed again.

We collect the water from the parking lot and etcetera, but this water that's around this building is used to irrigate the aquatics around it and also we pull from this wetlands to irrigate the sod that's around the building and also the rest of the trees and plants on site.

(Lebbie) Water is life.

If you take our bodies, without water, our blood, our cells would just dehydrate and die.

So water is essence to our life.

And it's not only us.

The planet itself, our animals, 80%, 70% water.

If we don't have water, we won't have animals.

If we don't have water, we won't grow crops, and, therefore, there'll be no food.

The plants will die, the forests will disappear, and there will be a massive erosion of our landscape, and that is going to kill us.

(Petersen) Timewise, we're at a critical period because Arkansas has been a very rural state, but we're seeing some rapid growth in some parts of the state, and that's having effects on water quality.

(Matlock) How do we maintain prosperity and not destroy the resources upon which that prosperity is dependent?

(Carruth) If our regulators don't look at watersheds and manage them as whole watersheds, it can lead to far more problems than they'll ever solve.

(Lloyd) And if we're not careful in how we manage these really great resources we have, we could see ourselves with some of the same problems some of the western states have experienced.

(Edwards) I think there's a great deal of apathy about water in the state of Arkansas and elsewhere.

We take it for granted that when we get up in the morning and you turn on the tap, that water is going to be there.

(Swaim) We hope to further develop Arkansas water policy, move it forward so that we can work together and formulate a really good Arkansas water plan for the future.

(Althoff) To me, stewardship means being thoughtful in considering, in making deliberate decisions.

It takes a community working together.