Eulogy for Iowa

It is time to face reality.

Iowa was beautiful, once.

The first European-descended colonists exploring the land west of the Mississippi used that word often. Beautiful. We must imagine they were not exaggerating. The land they saw was an untouched wilderness, the inheritor of ecological cycles uninterrupted for tens of thousands of years.

They saw ‘oak savannas’ - endless hybrid forest-prairies made of tall, ancient oaks widely spaced with open low-laying flower-prairies, alive in animal and plant diversity. Clear streams lined with denser forests of elm, birch, and maples gave shade to those seeking a drink. Cranes and swans nested, while the call of the Carolina Parakeet was lost in the endless flocks of the Passenger Pigeon passed overhead, so numerous they blocked out the sky for days at a time. Wider tallgrass prairies flowed over hills, while wetlands were thick with birds, frogs, turtles, salamanders, and beavers. Prowling wolves, chubby bears, and silent cougars snatched meals from the bounty of the living natural world. Massive herds of bison and elk grazed the thick, ancient tallgrass anchored in deep topsoil, growing roots up to twenty feet deep. To stand on Iowa soil in 1832 was to see a wilderness of unmatched living beauty.

In 1833 a dam burst. The end of the Black Hawk War in 1832 and the resulting Purchase secured the removal of native peoples, clearing the way for the European-descended colonists’ civilization. This was a flood of surveys, plows, of wide-scale agriculture, of wages and profits. Gunter’s Chain and Jefferson’s Surveys consumed the land, square by square. It carried a wave of environmental genocide so powerful that destruction would continue to find new ways to poison and destroy both the land and its people for nearly two hundred uninterrupted years.

Today, no sane person would describe the Iowan landscape as “beautiful.” Iowa, as a whole, has been stripped of all life, save for the five or six species that generate profit for the mega-corps. The long, low hills of flowers and oaks are squared plots of bare, dead soil, brown and gross for half the year. The rare strip of timber is unmanaged, thick with invasive species, and dangerous to explore without an abundance of hi-vis gear, so packed they are with hunters desperate to engage with the remaining bits of nature in the only way they’re allowed to: managing the deer herd.

The smell of pig shit, ammonia, tractor dust, and CAFO’s guts-emptying stink fills the air in turns, ensuring there is no season where the Iowan air might provide some relief. Driving into any given town or city is an olfactory offense, as you are greeted by slaughterhouses churning wastewater or factories spewing their wastes unrestricted into their communities.

Our once-clear streams are now mud-thick cesspools of hog manure and nitrates so saturated that drinking it, even filtered, could lead to cancer or infant mortality. Iowa leads the nation in new cancer rates. The Des Moines Waterworks houses the largest nitrate removal system in the world, which is now forced to run year-round and is still insufficient to keep the water safe during peak season. Even our lakes are poisonous, as each summer we are forbidden from swimming in the facilities we paid for due to blooms of toxic lifeforms feeding on agricultural runoff. But Iowa’s poison harms far more than just Iowans - our water is so toxic, the effects of it are felt in the Gulf of Mexico, where the algae blooms have wreaked havoc on both the fishing industry and the environment.

There can be no blaming of liberals or Democrats for our current situation. Iowa has been run by a Republican majority for decades. The results of state legislative policies are seen clearly in our cancer rates and nations’ worst economy. Our most ‘liberal’ candidates can be described at best as ‘moderate centrists’ whose most progressive policies seem to be legalization and maybe, hopefully, possibly doing something about the lethal water situation… but only if Big Ag-dono allows it.

There is a groundswell of young, more progressive candidates who genuinely care about the state and its people. But they know as well as anyone else, that young people with the misfortune of being raised here do everything in their power to leave the state the moment they are able to.

I used to care. I joined the Sierra Club in my 20’s. I worked with environmentalists interfacing with farmers to convince them to plant prairie strips along waterways and use cover crops to do something - anything - to stop the flow of runoff and soil. I saw the potential to turn the ship around, to adopt policies and practices that could transform the state into something reflective of its prior beauty.

But for every good-souled young person who is willing to do what it takes to save this state and its people, there are a thousand more elderly Republicans who see nothing wrong with our current state of affairs. If democracy truly is the will of the people, then we must accept the fact that our broke, ugly, carcinogenic state, where you cannot swim nor drink, where the air reeks and there are no economic opportunities, where racism is policy and “get out” is now considered Iowa Nice, is the will of the majority of Iowans. We are here because Iowans wanted us to be here. We will not improve our situation through politics. The will of Iowans forbids it.

It breaks my heart. I grew up in southeast Iowa. I love the summer cicadas droning in the thick, humid summer evenings. I chose to return, to raise my son here, because small-town Iowa was safe and supportive… at least for the people who look like us.

But lately I’ve had to face the fact that there is no saving this state. Even if we elect a middle-road ‘progressive’ governor, whose only policy platform seems to be ‘maybe let’s not make things actively worse,’ that is not a solution to our deep-rooted issues. It would take decades of dedicated action, a whole-scale paradigm shift in industrial agriculture, to even begin to restore a fraction of our lost beauty. That would require not just a complete economic shift, but a shift in the hearts and minds of the staunch, elderly Republicans. It seems to me that those Iowans would clearly rather see this state burn to the ground than cede an inch to anyone other than the handful of international mega-corps that are actively, perhaps even gleefully, killing their livelihoods - indeed, their very lives.

The youth, for all their troubles, at least have the common sense to run. In my middle age I have begun to see the wisdom in fleeing. Why should I sacrifice my life for this mud-pit? Why should I risk the health of my family for the sake of a concept of a ‘state’? Why should I deny myself beauty, fresh air, and safe water? Why should we throw ourselves into the gears of Big Ag’s machinery, to be ground up in a machine far too large to care about the people who stupidly decided to live in their industrial soil-mining operations?

They can have it. I can’t leave immediately (mostly because I’m poor), but plans are in motion. I will find a new home. I desperately wish to breathe truly fresh air, to sit by a creek and enjoy the fresh, clear water. To live in a state that cares about the well-being of its citizens, with representatives that work on behalf of their people at least slightly more than kowtowing to industrial pressures.

I spent decades advocating to save Iowa from itself. I saw self-sacrifice as the noble thing to do. Now I advocate for something more real, more effective, and perhaps even more humane: Let’s all just go. The state of Iowa is already dead. The best thing you can do for yourself is to leave and not look back.

It may be the best thing for the state as well - the faster we all leave, then perhaps the more our representatives must eventually face the true cost of their policies.

One day, when the hog-shit winds rattle rotting windows in empty towns, when all the water is deadly, when every remaining person is indebted and poor, perhaps then the handful of remaining Iowans might begin to wonder if there was more to life than sacrificing everything to generate corporate profits. Perhaps sometime in the long-distant future, the bones of what was once Iowa will fertilize something new.

And maybe then, at long last, Iowa may be become something beautiful again.