SHAWNEETOWN, Mo. -- At the Apple Creek conservation area in the extreme northern fringe of Cape Girardeau County, progress is measured not by days or even weeks, but by years and decades.

The area where Apple Creek runs alongside river bluffs, flood-plain bottomlands and grassy fields on its way to the Mississippi River is the site of an ongoing battle to restore what centuries of human development have destroyed -- natural habitats.

"This was once flooded agriculture ground," says Mike Keeley, a resource forester with the conservation area, as he stands in a field near the creek filled with bright yellow flowering weeds and tree saplings. "The rich soil and abundance of water made it ideal farming ground. When European settlement came, there was so much of it that the perception was it would never run out."

That was how much of the 2,100 acres in the conservation area remained until the Missouri Department of Conservation started buying the land from private interests in 1985. Now Keeley and others are working to create diverse habitats out of the land -- trapping water and planting flood-resistant trees in bottomland areas to restore wetlands; establishing hardwood growths in hilly ground to restore forests; sowing natural grasses to create habitats for quail, rabbits and songbirds.

But Keeley and his colleagues have a big job ahead of them, as Missouri's natural habitat has been altered to a point where it would hardly be recognizable to those early settlers.

According to the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, a not-for-profit environmental group, of the 31 million acres of forest that thrived in Missouri when Europeans arrived, only 14 million acres are left. In addition, the state has lost about 87 percent of its wetland habitat, the group said.

But groups like the Missouri Department of Conservation are working hard to restore some of what was lost.

"Habitat change is something we're always going to have to struggle with," said A.J. Hendershott with the Cape Girardeau County conservation office. "It's just a matter of doing that wisely and in the right manner."

That's a delicate task in Southeast Missouri, with unique habitats like swamps in the Bootheel and sand prairies in Scott County.

But loss of habitat isn't the only problem that has jeopardized the environment in Southeast Missouri. Another seemingly inevitable part of development is air and water pollution.

Since the first Earth Day was held in 1970, government agencies at both the federal and state levels were created to help regulate and clean up the nation's air and water. The Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency soon followed.

So did the creation of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources in 1974, which is the agency tasked with making sure regulations protecting air and water are followed throughout the state.

Thirty years later, scientists and environmentalists in the United States and around the globe and have become concerned with changing climate trends, concerns that other scientists and the Bush administration downplay.

But Southeast Missouri has made great strides in protecting natural resources in that time frame, said Missouri Department of Natural Resources Southeast Region director Gary Gaines. Whereas before few controls existed to monitor industries and municipalities in terms of the pollutants they discharged, plenty of controls now exist and dumping and air emissions are closely monitored.

"I see continued improvement, probably not as much as in the past because the gross contamination has already been cleaned up," Gaines said. "In Southeast Missouri we're pretty lucky. We don't have health risks like air problems and big hazardous waste sites."

Regional concerns

Where air quality problems have been the major concern in urban areas like St. Louis and Kansas City, Gaines said the issues facing Southeast Missouri deal mainly with water contamination from aging sewer systems.

"There were a lot of stretches of streams that were contaminated with sewage because cities would dump untreated sewage into streams," Gaines said. "It kills aquatic life, it can leach down into groundwater and contaminate groundwater. Used to be there were a lot of places you couldn't swim and you wouldn't want to fish, but now we've cleaned up a lot of the streams."

Old landfills that seeped contaminants into groundwater and leaking underground storage tanks for chemicals and petroleum products have also been cleaned, Gaines said. However illegal dumping still jeopardizes groundwater and the environment's aesthetic quality.

And even though the Southeast Missouri region doesn't have the industry and high volume of motorists seen in urban areas, air quality has still been a priority for the Department of Natural Resources .

Improvement in air emissions can be seen right here in Cape Girardeau with the coal-burning power plant on the campus of Southeast Missouri State University. Gaines said the plant used to be in violation of emissions standards, but over the past several years has corrected the problem.

A control system put in place five years ago now allows the plant to monitor the condition of coal burning in the boilers for maximum efficiency. And the plant has switched to cleaner-burning, low-sulfur coal from a special vein in Southern Illinois that discharges fewer pollutants into the atmosphere, said Jim Daume, an associate director of facilities management at the university.

Where smoke from the plant's stacks used to be clearly visible, that's no longer the case.

"A lot of time you can't even see which boiler is running," Daume said. "The fact that you don't see it means these things are working."

While results from things like the improvements at the coal-burning plant can be easily seen, other processes don't produce results that appear overnight. The earth can be slow to change, especially in terms of habitat regeneration.

At the Apple Creek site where Keeley works, the results of the reforestation program come about at an agonizing pace. Getting past the first stage of establishing plant species can take 10 to 15 years, while maturation into a full-grown wetland or forest habitat can take from 70 to 100 years, he said. But that doesn't mean Keeley and others like him will give up easily.

As he checks his young trees, he finds many that have been broken by wildlife or injured by frost. He hoped by this time they might be starting to sprout leaves and reach waist-height. But he stays optimistic for the future of the restoration.

"Every time we try we get a percentage of success," Keeley said. "It's starting to build."

msanders@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182