To the Victor Go the Spoiled
Trump claims poisoned ocean; GOATF awaits.
You may have noticed that incoming President Trump dragged his Tony Soprano persona out of the closet this week, threatening the country of Mexico and for good measure announcing that he’s going to rename the 620,000-square-mile water body off our southern coast the Gulf of America. Magnanimous madam and pillar of dignified discourse, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, beat her Republican colleagues to the punch by stepping away from the bench press long enough to howl about sponsoring such a bill that Trump could sign. Upon hearing this news, my eyes rolled a revolution or two before an epiphany came upon me like the stench of hogshit riding a cold north wind on a November night.
The epiphany? Trump’s renaming the Gulf is truly a genius idea—I’ll tell you why later.
You may have heard that cornbelt agriculture has been killing the near shore areas of the Gulf for 50 years because nutrient (Nitrogen-N and Phosphorus-P) pollution from the Mississippi River enables algae and cyanobacteria to explosively multiply in the warm water. Algae are single-celled plants and cyanobacteria are gram-negative bacteria. Both obtain their energy through photosynthesis, and nitrogen and phosphorus are essential in the production of chlorophyl which enables plants to absorb energy from light. A deficiency of N and P limits these processes; N is limiting in marine environments and while P is mostly limiting in freshwater systems, although both are important in each. Decomposition of the organic matter contained with the algal and cyanobacteria cells consumes oxygen in the water column, creating a ‘dead’ or ‘hypoxic’ zone where aerobic life can’t live.
Twenty-eight years ago (1997) EPA assembled the Gulf of (Mexico) Task force, a coalition of mainly Mississippi River Basin state agencies that have had no serious intention of solving the hypoxia problem because meaningful solutions will require cancelling Big Ag’s carte blanche when it comes to pollution. Politicians of both parties like sucking up to farmers and especially agribusiness because, you know, donations, and they don’t care much about the unswimmable beach at the lake near your town, or the tumor in your colon for that matter.
The task force set a goal of reducing the size of the hypoxic area to the 1981-1996 baseline by 2015. Lack of progress toward that goal inspired state governments and EPA to characteristically coddle Big Ag and extend the goal date to 2035. The NGO-academia-industrial complex and the rest of the cottage industry profiting from while pussyfooting around nutrient pollution could breathe a sigh of relief that government would not resort to (gulp) regulation to address the pollution, at least until 2035.
(Parody ensues)
This is where Trump’s genius enters, stage right. The renaming not only gives the naming rights to the country killing the Gulf with its pollution, but it also bestows a priceless gift to some of Trump’s most loyal devotees, that is, the men, women and corporations that comprise the bulk of Iowa agriculture. That gift: Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia solved with the stroke of a pen. No Gulf of Mexico, no Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia! Voila!
No doubt we’ll be hearing Kim Reynolds, Mike Naig and Tim “E15” Walz screaming for the ‘RESET’ button on solving the Dead Zone. America’s all about the green these days, and it will be no different for the Gulf of America—bring on those nutrients baby! As Johnny Cash sang so movingly toward the end of his song, Big River: “Go on, I've had enough, dump your hogshit down in the Gulf!” Sorta, anyway.
Key question: Will the hypoxia task force reassemble under Trump’s new Gulf of America nomenclature? One upside of doing so: a whole new jobs program to wipe Gulf of Mexico Task Force from government websites and the scientific literature.
Word on the street is that Iowa Farm Bureau favors dissolution of the Task Force altogether, but if it must go on, they demand Iowa’s representative be more to the right on Big Ag issues than our current designee, Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig. As such, they’re checking with Tom Vilsack to see if he can fit it into his future responsibilities.
Despite Farm Bureau’s misgivings, many in AgWorld strongly favor a continuance with a new and improved GOATF (interesting to think what you could do with that acronym, given three more letters). After all, those annual February meetings in Baton Rouge and New Orleans are a welcome wintertime respite for cornbelt commodity groups looking to crow about the scope and scale of their latest 4-acre success story. Nothing screams progress like washing down a crawfish cocktail with an expense account Manhattan on Canal Street.
The checkoff orgs and other agvocators need content for their glossy mags, and a repackaged GOATF can only help. Who doesn’t crave stories about Saint Harold of Sac City solving hypoxia with his new Y-drop implement that ‘spoons on’ 300 pounds of N per corn acre? Who cares if D.C. types remain bewildered that it’s easier to get a farmer to shell out $100k for an implement than it is to get them halve their fertilizer to a defensible amount? Hey beltway nerds, this is classic two-birds-onestonism, or as they say in AgWorld—win/win. Both the fertilizer wholesalers and the equipment manufacturers are happy. Add in the local Co-op retailing the fertilizer, and it’s a win/win/win!
Iowa State and the all the other Unis—they’re all in with a new GOATF. All those seminal journal papers about hypoxia from the 1980s? Just slice and dice and repackage those babies with some hip jargon and new models, publish them in a whole new generation of journals while splattering them on social media, and nobody will be the wiser. I mean c’mon, assistant professors need tenure like crops need the rain and who cares if any new science is generated. We all know this problem was characterized 50 years ago, wink wink. Furthermore, all those future generations of environmental studies majors will need jobs and a new GOATF framework to work within.
(Parody ends)
Trump’s bloviating did inspire me to investigate the origin of the name ‘Gulf of Mexico’ in the bible of such things, George R. Stewart’s classic tome of geographical scholarship, Names on the Land. Alas, Stewart did not see fit to address stupid questions like why the Gulf of Mexico was named for the country that has 1743 miles of adjacent shoreline (Mexico) instead of the one that has 1631 shoreline miles (U.S.).
Stewart did write some interesting things about Iowa, however, which I thought I would share here. We commonly hear that Iowa meant Beautiful Land in an indigenous language, but Stewart tells us it’s much more complicated than that. In 1673 Marquette and Joliet paddled down the Wisconsin River and then the Mississippi and encountered a tribe of the Illinois known as the Peouarea (Peoria). The Peouarea told them of another tribe living inland to the west known as the Moingouenes. Afterwards they came to a stream later to be named the Rivière des Moingouenas which was still later shortened to the Rivière Des Moings. Eventually, others thought it was the River of the Monks and it was written Des Moines.
At the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, Marquette and Joliet were told of more tribes and early maps were marked with the name of three: Maha, Kansa, and Ouaouiatonon. The Maha lived upstream on the Missouri and they came to be known as Omaha, the literal meaning of which is ‘upstream people.’ The Kansa had earlier been known to the Spaniards as the Escansaques, which was changed to Kansas by the French. Finally, the Ouaouiatonon became known as the Ouaouia as the French dropped the ending. This consonant-less name passed through many spellings before ultimately becoming Iowa. Mississippi can likely be sourced back to the Algonquin words for big (miss) and river (sipi).
If you have an interest in such things, I’m sure you will be fascinated by Stewart’s book, first published in 1945.
I wish it were all a parody. I'm like you: "My eyes rolled a revolution or two before an epiphany came upon me like the stench of hogshit riding a cold north wind on a November night."
Spot on again Chris! I was just sharing this concept with a few others, by renaming the Gulf, Trump confirms that this is AMERICA'S DEAD ZONE.