"In all of our reading about the floods and rebuilding Iowa, there is no mention of the role of agriculture in these recent events. Out of this catastrophe needs to come some understanding that industrial agriculture has caused many of the issues that happen downriver from cultivated land. A deterioration of good conservation and resource-management practices over the last 50 years has helped make these "rain events" even more catastrophic.
There was some discussion about this after the floods of '93, but agriculture policy continued to ignore the environment and implemented more policies that allowed Iowa to become the sacrifice area for agribusiness corporations, putting profit before stewardship.
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Sen. Tom Harkin worked hard to get the Conservation Security Program in place but has had to continually fight for appropriations for this project. A good many Iowans understand the importance of agriculture in this state, but few understand that while Mother Nature may send us gully washers, human beings have added to the devastation by draining wetlands, plowing up waterways and planting only corn and soybeans..."
Full story here: Flooding
This one from the Washington Post:"As the Cedar River rose higher and higher, and as he stacked sandbags along the levee protecting downtown Cedar Falls, Kamyar Enshayan, a college professor and City Council member, kept asking himself the same question: "What is going on?"
The river would eventually rise six feet higher than any flood on record. Farther downstream, in Cedar Rapids, the river would break the record by more than 11 feet.
Enshayan, director of an environmental center at the University of Northern Iowa, suspects that this natural disaster wasn't really all that natural. He points out that the heavy rains fell on a landscape radically reengineered by humans. Plowed fields have replaced tallgrass prairies. Fields have been meticulously drained with underground pipes. Streams and creeks have been straightened. Most of the wetlands are gone. Flood plains have been filled and developed..."
That one is here: Act of Man
How can something that is so obvious to so many people be beyond the understanding of policymakers and farmers alike?
Between corporate farms, greed, ethanol and the USDA, things are a real mess.
Then there is no less a personage than Jerry DeWitt who says (in the Post article):
"I sense that the flooding is not the result of a 500-year event," said Jerry DeWitt, director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University. "We're farming closer to creeks, farming closer to rivers. Without adequate buffer strips, the water moves rapidly from the field directly to the surface water."But officials are puzzled. Of course they're puzzled. They're officials and they aren't supposed to be smart. They are slogging around in a bog of presuppositions that will likely lead to nothing whatsoever but more of the same denial and head-in-sand outlook.
There are numerous bad things going on. Ethanol is a real BIG bad thing. This isn't just my opinion, either. Experts, not officials but real experts, have documented high levels of greenhouse gases produced by ethanol production. Then there is the issue of corn being planted on the same ground year after year after year. To do that and force the corn to grow, massive application of herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers are necessary. Corn doesn't stop run off and all that chemical crap will end up in already polluted river, lakes and streams.* Many farmers know that. They are in a financial bid because they are squeezed between making a living and the damned federal government, namely the USDA.
Since agriculture is no longer localized, farmers can't afford to diversify in the manner necessary to preserve the land. They rely on federal subsidies, futures contracts and other fraudulent money-making ideas to keep their heads above water. This has all happened in the last 25 years and it's killing our land.
Listen to the experts, officials, would you? You're a bunch of paper pushers and plutocrats who don't know anything more than who to schmooze with and the best place for a power lunch. Morons. Short-sighted and foolish is what you are.
* A sidelight on this issue: When the levee here broke in June and drained the milpond a perfect opportunity was opened to dredge the area. This can't be done without a special hazmat company doing it. Why? 20+ years of chemicals washed downriver from fields. Thanks, guys, I know you're trying to make a living but you are killing the land you count on the survive.
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