Arrrs and Dminusers
The politics of dirty water
As sure as eggs is eggs I will get asked a question about the politics of water pollution in the Q/A following my programs. That fact alone forces me to think about politics more than I’d like to, which, considering this IS modern-day America, is about as often as I’d like to step in fresh dog crap while carrying wet laundry to the clothesline barefoot. But here we are.
I sense that people think I have some insider information about the topic because some politicians hate me. I don’t. I do talk to a couple or three politicians occasionally, but all kinds of people do that. And I have been asked to speak at local or county Democratic meetings from time to time, where I usually manage to upset about half the audience. When approached now by one of these groups to speak at their meetings, I suggest they first ask around a little and then get back to me if they’re still interested.
What I do have to offer here today are my observations on the subject, and you are free to downgrade ‘observations’ to ‘opinions’ if you like. Here goes.
I respect Republicans (Arrrs, from here on) if only because you know what to expect: brazen dishonesty, obfuscation, and on their good days, willful ignorance. This three-trick pony was never more perfectly transformed into human form when Iowa’s Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig (Arrr) recently said Iowa’s nutrient reduction strategy was working “because it is voluntary.” Of course, the reader is first led to believe the strategy *is* working (dishonesty) so the regulation of the pollution can be pushed further into the future (obfuscation) with no discussion of actual water quality data (willful ignorance).
Naig, who’s slicker than a boiled onion when it comes to this stuff, reveals to us time and again that process is more important than outcome for Arrrs. Curiously, this is something for which conservatives harshly criticized liberals in generations gone by. But it appears that clown shoe is on the Right foot these days, at least when it comes to water quality.
Naig and others in the Ag and political establishment are basing their improvement claims on farm practice adoption. But a recent paper in the Journal of The American Water Resources Association (1) shows the folly of this approach. The researchers state that farmers and technical service providers at the agencies are rewarded for practice adoption, whether it improves the water or not. From the paper: “The use of conventional BMPs (best management practices), most of which do not address significant nutrient imbalances, offers limited potential to reduce non-point (i.e., agricultural) source loads.” A reasonable person might find it curious that Iowa’s and other cornbelt states’ nutrient strategies are based on this approach. Yes, curious indeed.
Another example of Naig’s communication style can be seen from Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley (Arrr). Below he leads the reader into the idea that he’s practicing good conservation on his farm with “minimum tillage”. If you didn’t know any better (and most people don’t) you might think what you see here is good conservation. In truth, it’s terrible. Conservation tillage is defined as leaving at least 30% of the soil surface covered with crop residue.
It's not hard to find leaders in agriculture that decry the public’s ignorance of farming and food production in general, what they call ‘ag literacy’. But time after time after maddening time, Arrr politicians, like we see here with Grassley, take advantage of the public’s ignorance on issues related to degraded water and its drivers.
It’s no secret that Iowa Arrrs are insisting that water quality improvements come sans reductions in crop and livestock production, and especially, that farmers must have unfettered access to farmable land. Iowa farmer and state representative Mike Sexton (Arrr-Calhoun County) perhaps stated this best a few years ago in the public lands debate in the legislature when he said “I’m not opposed to conservation. I’m not opposed to clean water.” I know what you’re thinking. Bold guy, this Sexton.
Obviously being “not opposed’ to something and being ‘for’ something are entirely different things. If the hand of God comes down and restores Iowa water to something resembling a pre-1900 condition, then it's good to know Sexton and his bros won’t shake their fists at Him. But if the hand of man is to intervene, then by god it better leave the sacred cows (and sacred corn, soy and swine) untouched. And yes Arrrs, we know, God isn’t making any more land so we better not touch that either.
So let’s give equal time to Iowa Democrats (D-’s or Dminusers from here on). Unlike Arrrs, they can at least form a consensus that agrees *in the abstract* that our water should be better. Yes, they can at least agree in the abstract that our water should be better. I typed that one twice to give myself time to come up with a second thing. Oh well. They want clean water sorta like I want my garage to be organized and my garden to be weeded. Both great concepts but hey, not gonna lay awake at night thinking about it.
As I see it, the D-’s are plagued by three issues when it comes to water quality. One, they crave farmer votes like a wild boar craves an acorn. D-’s are going to spend the next few months at Theisen’s and Fleet Farm trying on Carhartts for their fall ’24 TV commercials to be filmed in the barnyard of one of the six Iowa farmers that still belong to the D- party. Three are named Harold and then there’s one each of Arnold, Arlen, and Dusty, the last one married to a school librarian in Sioux County, so, you know. Combined they’ve been on TV more times than Bob Barker. When bidding for rural voters, Dminusers seem to think rural=farmer, which is an idea dumber than anything Naig could come up with, and that’s saying something.
The second big issue with the D-’s is they have a harder time shaking fuel ethanol than George Jones had shaking Tammy Wynette. D-’s have always been ethanol fans going back decades and they still are. They congratulate themselves for supporting a policy that provides little or no environmental benefit in terms of greenhouse gas emissions (2), consumes 20% of Iowa’s land area, pollutes our water here and 1500 miles away in the Gulf of Mexico, and keeps the state shackled to the current polluting production system. Legislators in the safest of D- seats, such as Johnson County legislators Zach Wahls (former Senate Minority Leader) and Dave Jacoby are big ethanol supporters and State D- Party Chair Rita Hart harshly criticized Donald Trump multiple times for his mild support of biofuels. The supposed future of the party, Rob Sand, likes himself a little corn ethanol too. This D- allegiance to ethanol has caused plenty of perversion at the national level of politics, as their candidates wanting to win the Iowa Caucus have had to kneel at the corn ethanol altar.
The third problem Iowa Dminusers have is maybe the worst of the three and that’s USDA Secretary and former governor Tom Vilsack. It’s impossible to overstate the amount of cover Vilsack gives Iowa Arrrs when it comes to being against regulating ag pollution. He has gone on the record as being against ‘regulating’ and for ‘voluntary’ so many times that I don’t even feel obligated to look up the links. Without Vilsack, windup dolls like Naig couldn’t spend their days exclaiming “The Nutrient Strategy is Working!” to every ag friendly reporter from Waukon to Woodbine, and Mike could spend Friday nights with his wife and kids instead of vomiting up ‘exciting momentum’ on IPTV’s Market to Market for the 127th time. Vilsack is an unapologetic supporter of most everything Big Ag, and why wouldn’t he be? They paid him a million-dollar salary while Trump was president. And he’s as down as down can be with biofuel. And by that, I mean ‘he’s down with it,’ as in, he loves it. To top it off, his son is helping Iowa megamillionaire Arrr and the Titanic of Ag Titans, Bruce Rastetter, get some of those sweet, sweet $85/ton carbon credits the feds are offering up. I’ve really come to feel like there’s something sinister about Vilsack; he’s done more to stall progress on water quality than his predecessor Sonny Perdue, or Arrrs like Kim Reynolds and Mike Naig, could ever do in an entire political career.
The bipartisan stench of polluted water leaves the rest of us wondering if Big Ag and their politicians will ever let the state retreat from the environmental disaster they’ve created. As you might imagine, my views generally lean left but I have zero faith the D- party has the stomach for this. Clearly the party sees itself as an advocate for marginalized minorities but seems incapable of addressing a problem like water quality that affects 100% of all Iowans and repeatedly, and I do mean repeatedly, polls very well across wide swaths of the population. Why don’t they run on it? I DO NOT KNOW and I wish people would stop asking me that question and instead ask it of their elected representatives.
In his book, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, Frederik DeBoer said this about liberal political success: “You have to have something to rally people around—an idea, a symbol, a code—and the left has proven consistently incapable of coalescing around such a vision. This is especially problematic if you have already divided up your coalition into an endless number of identity groups and put them on a hierarchy of suffering.” This makes some sense to me, and it seems to me that when it comes to vision, the lowest of the low hanging fruit in Iowa is environment—mainly parks, clean air, clean water. Anybody that thinks we have enough of each is a lost cause and it’s not worth the oxygen to engage them. You could rattle off the names of several Iowa legislators in that group. As Dminusers struggle for rural votes, they should recognize that the heaviest burden of environmental degradation falls upon Iowa’s rural residents; they are closest to it, after all.
I’ll finish this by saying that polluted water here in Iowa (and the rest of the Cornbelt) is not a matter of putting a band-aid here and a diaper there and getting farmers to nip and tuck and tweak and we’ll get the water we want. So, so many people working on these things have irresponsibly allowed both farmers and the public to believe this. This has been a disgrace and has probably set us back decades. I’m here to tell you we cannot achieve our environmental objectives with 70% of the state in corn and soy while also raising 25 million hogs, 80 million chickens, 4 million beef cattle, 5 million turkeys, and a quarter million dairy cattle. These things are incongruent, and A LOT of people know it but won’t say it because the political power in the state lies within the hands of agribusiness and farmers. This is a problem of POWER. The Aggies have it, you don’t. And as Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.”
Those of us that want nature and a clean Iowa are not going to get them by walking into the voting booth and checking a box. We need to organize and communicate and agitate and demand what we want and make the polluters defend the indefensible until they can no longer ignore the vast majority of Iowans that want something better.
Stephenson, K., Shabman, L., Shortle, J. and Easton, Z., 2022. Confronting our agricultural nonpoint source control policy problem. JAWRA Journal of the American Water Resources Association, 58(4), pp.496-501.
Lark, T.J., Hendricks, N.P., Smith, A., Pates, N., Spawn-Lee, S.A., Bougie, M., Booth, E.G., Kucharik, C.J. and Gibbs, H.K., 2022. Environmental outcomes of the US renewable fuel standard. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(9), p.e2101084119.
About my book: The Swine Republic is a collection of essays about the intersection of Iowa politics, agriculture and environment, and the struggle for truth about Iowa’s water quality. Longer chapters that examine ‘how we got here’ and ‘the path forward’ bookend the essays. Foreword was beautifully written by Tom Philpott, author of Perilous Bounty.
What nobody wants to hear - which is why it needs to be said! Repeatedly . . .
Don't know whether to laugh or cry, Chris. You are so funny I find myself grinning through tears. Yeah, tears of rage. The Douglas quote is perfect. Plus ca change.