Trine University's SPEAK for the Earth brings awareness to Mounds Lake reservoir proposal

On Thursday at 7 p.m., there will be a public discussion in Room 229 in Best Hall about a proposal to dam the White River in Madison County. The awareness event is hosted by SPEAK for the Earth.

Speakers include Tom Hohman, past president of the Indiana Native Plant and Wildflower Society; naturalist Sheryl Meyers of Heart of the River; Tammeron Jonesfrancis, a Steuben County based researcher and designer; and by way of Skype, a representative from the Hoosier Environmental Council.

The proposed damming of White River’s West Branch would create a 7-mile-long reservoir. Named by its developers after the ancient architectural monuments of Mounds State Park, Mounds Lake will stretch between the east side of Anderson to just north of Danville and flood an estimated 3 1/8 square miles of natural and developed lands.

Proponents offer the dam as a solution to Madison county’s long suffering economy and a fix for central Indiana’s projected water resource problem.

Jonesfrancis will talk about the threat to 2,000-year-old Adena-Hopewell architecture at Mounds State Park. The Hoosier Environmental Council will present an alternate development called Mounds Greenway.

While the planned reservoir occurs 100 miles south of Steuben County, Jonesfrancis said there are important reasons all Hoosiers should care about what happens there.

“The designers of the Mounds Lake proposal offer a grand industrial works project that would engineer the present water course into a stockpile. It is representative of an approach that, since the industrial revolution, has been the engine of capital economies,” said Jonesfrancis. “Opposition to the dam asks us to take pause and to consider wealth of another sort that pays its dividends at a more gradual and sustained rate.”

Heart of the River and the Hoosier Environmental Council will present their standpoints on natural conservation.

“Heart of the River and their allies ask us to care for what is already available within the river as a river,” said Jonesfrancis. “They argue that the projected dam will obliterate long established natural landscapes that are thousands of years in the making — the result being a body of water and its shore manicured to the sensibilities of only one species.”

The Native American created mounds could be threatened.

“Not only will the mounds themselves be threatened by the erosion at its new lake shore, the context — which allows us to properly read and interpret the mounds — will change. The mounds at Anderson are a unique architectural complex and the best preserved in Indiana. Earthworks having a similar state of preservation, the Mississipian Angel Mounds of southern Indiana, were built nearly a thousand years later,” said Jonesfrancis.