At the Frontlines of the Global Transition
Who knows how the November 3rd election turns out. Don’t pay the polls much mind. They’ve been wrong too many times. Don’t for a minute consider the White House is going to treat polling stations or the results with the necessary weight and respect. Try to do this: Understand that the United States is a very big, exceptionally complex, and quite sturdy nation. Americans have shown ourselves capable of making the right decisions at the …
TIPTON, Iowa – Democrats filed into the Cedar County party headquarters late last month to hear Chris Jones, the Democratic candidate for state agriculture secretary, propose the most aggressive agenda for curbing pollution and human disease from the crop and livestock sectors ever uttered by a candidate running for a statewide office in Iowa. In order to sharply reduce the billions of pounds of nutrients causing Iowa’s worst-in-the-nation water quality, and address the fastest-in-the-nation increase …
In the shadow of wooded hills near the confluence of the Kentucky and Ohio rivers is Lanes Landing, the 125-acre farm where Wendell Berry tended the land and published the most trenchant appeals in American letters to tame the damage from industrial agriculture. “No amount of fiddling with capitalism to regulate and humanize it can, for long, disguise its failure to conserve the wealth and health of nature, eroded, wasted, or degraded soils, damaged or …
SALINA, Kan. – In 1976, Wes and Dana Jackson launched The Land Institute as a nonprofit school to teach a small group of students ways to grow food that respected nature, conserved energy and water, and managed wastes. As one of the nation’s first regional nonprofit environmental and farm research organizations devoted to land stewardship, the Institute set sail in the powerful current of alternative ideas and new organizations in that era that were determined …
Ever since Jacob Leinenkugel discovered spring waters here that were pure enough to brew his famous beer, this small Wisconsin city’s devotion to clean water has been paramount. That’s why in 1997, when Chippewa Falls utility managers detected potentially dangerous concentrations of nitrates in a well supplying city water, officials acted. They installed new filtration equipment in their treatment system and drilled deeper wells into cleaner aquifers to ensure the water delivered to the city’s …
I met environmental attorney Jim Olson 35 years ago, just as he was developing uncommon expertise in Michigan law and exhibiting an appealing measure of courtroom flair, both of which make him a towering figure in Great Lakes resource protection. At the time he was defending the shoreline of the Crystal River in Leelanau County from being damaged by a golf course development proposed by Bob Kuras, owner of the Homestead Resort. I was a …
Top executives of Bayer, the German chemical maker, were understandably elated on June 25, the day the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in their favor in a product injury case involving the company’s Roundup herbicide. The high court reversed a state court decision and dismissed the legal theory that prompted a jury to award $1.25 million to a Missouri man who accused Roundup of causing his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. “This decision is good for American farmers who …
Real change occurs in America when civic pressures from outside the centers of influence force insiders to retreat. Arguably the most compelling example of systemic change in how a state could operate is now unfolding in Iowa. Severe water contamination from crop and livestock production linked to the nation’s second highest and fastest rising incidence of cancer developed into the election year issues of their time in Iowa, one of the country’s most important farm …
Just like his presidential predecessors – George Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden – Donald Trump has a thing for ethanol. But why? Inordinately expensive to taxpayers, monstrously polluting, and now linked to mounting cancer incidence in Midwest Corn Belt states, fermenting ethanol from a third of America’s corn crop would appear to sane people as an insane pursuit. Not to corn growers, ethanol refiners and their allies in farm industries, the White House, Congress, …
Expect the unexpected. That’s the only certainty of planting season across the Corn Belt. Heat. Frost. Insects. Too much rain, or none at all. Now add the distress the Trump administration has cursed farmers with: Broken markets. Tariffs. Rising fuel costs. Never, though, has the unexpected included this spring’s surprise: serious consideration of the harm from industrial crop and animal production. Farming’s mammoth water pollution and its consequences for public health are on the ballot …
