Want young Iowans to stay? Restore our resources. Punish polluters.
- Chris Jones of Iowa City is president of Driftless Water Defenders.
- Before retirement, he was a research engineer at the University of Iowa.
I’m happy to see the Register continue to highlight Iowa’s degraded water quality (Sept. 1 editorial) and call out the mendacity of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources in contributing to it. I’ve observed both firsthand. I speak regularly to groups interested in water quality and regularly call for more regulation of the corn/soy/CAFO production system that continues to trample the natural resources of Iowa.
Abundant are the naysayers when it comes to the potential of regulation to produce better water. The Iowa livestock industry especially has been allowed to expand into a menacing behemoth so large that the challenge of reining it in seems monstrous. But this is hardly an excuse to not try.
More:Opinion: Suppression of Iowa water quality data is an attempt to control you
It’s a certainty that zealous enforcement of existing regulations will need to accompanied by a reworking of the existing frameworks that inevitably produce the pollution in the first place. I was at Backbone Lake on Labor Day weekend, one of a few times this summer that the beach was not posted for unsafe swimming. I never saw more than five swimmers and bathers on the beach at any one time (Saturday), this after a week of stifling heat. The park is less than one hour from the population centers of Cedar Rapids, Waterloo-Cedar Falls, and Dubuque. Decades of polluted water postings at Backbone have taken their toll with the public. About 70,000 acres of farmland receiving manure from dozens of CAFOs and many thousands of hogs drain to Backbone Lake.
It’s absurd to think the lake will ever be unpolluted until we rethink how many livestock the landscape can endure while allowing tolerable water quality. The same goes for Lake Darling, Big Creek Lake, and many others that have been constructed and repeatedly restored at taxpayer expense.
A recent Register piece also highlighted Iowa’s continuing brain drain. So few in Iowa’s establishment connect the dots between the loss of our young people, the depopulation of rural Iowa, and the Big Ag rampage on Iowa’s human and natural resources. Schools, hospitals and medical clinics, auto mechanics, grocery stores, hairdressers, and entertainment are now many miles away from many thousands of Iowans. Iowa currently has 328 school districts, down from almost 700 in 1959. Eight counties — Polk, Linn, Dallas, Scott, Woodbury, Black Hawk, Johnson and Story — are home to 62 of those school districts, leaving 266 for the other 91 counties. Meanwhile, the Register reported on Aug. 22 a net loss of 250 health care facilities across Iowa since 2008.
I’m convinced that restoring the integrity of our natural environment, and especially, cleaning up our polluted water, could be a powerful lever for rural revitalization. Lord knows we’ve tried the opposite: continued exploitation of natural resources for more hogs, more chickens, more ethanol, and, more pollution. That approach has failed rural Iowa, except for a tiny minority of landed gentry, multi-millionaire agribusiness people and political cowards of both parties, many of whom live in the city.
It’s beyond shameful that we’ve razed the best place on earth to grow things for what amounts to luxury economic activity.
More:Opinion: ‘Swine Republic’ proves Iowa’s water is contaminated. Can it help force change?
How do we build that lever? We need diversity in rural Iowa — diversity of crops, diversity of people, diversity of economy. We need a USDA secretary not married to Big Agribusiness. We need land reform — $25,000 per acre for farm ground to produce fuel ethanol is perverse. We need onerous tax and conservation policy that forces crop landlords sitting in offices in Minneapolis, Des Moines and Chicago to divest, making land available for people that want to work it sustainably. We need to get crops off marginal land — steep slopes, floodplains, poor soils, and put some in natural cover and some in pasture. We need more parks and tranquil places that offer refuge from the sights and smells of people and pigs.
And until we get there, we need zealous regulation of the existing pollution such that practitioners of agriculture are inspired to adopt alternative and less polluting systems.
Chris Jones of Iowa City is president of Driftless Water Defenders. Before retirement, he was a research engineer at the University of Iowa.
link
