Haze from wildfires in the Pacific Northwest focuses the mind on our cooking climate as skies grow dim over Chicago at midday.
Alberta and Saskatchewan are wheat and canola country. Scorched. Chronic drought runs down from the Dakotas all the way to El Paso. In Illinois they measure corn at the knee on the Fourth of July for lack of rain. Scientists think that all the smoke will stunt yields from shielded sunlight.
The way we grow wheat, corn and canola and how we feed it contributes mightily to the drought that afflicts Kansas just as it does China. We should be able to see the connections between the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, high phosphorous levels in the Saylorville Reservoir, soil depletion and a warmer, wetter climate in the Upper Midwest.
Most of us can, and change is underway.
We deliver papers in an electric van. Windpower now accounts for well over half of Iowa’s electric supply, and solar is expanding rapidly. MidAmerican Energy has ambitious plans to expand renewables, and Alliant would like to go big with solar in Cedar Rapids. The Storm Lake City Council wants to figure out how to get a charging station for resort customers driving EVs. This was all Star Trek stuff back in 1980 before we dreamt of a cellphone. We can transform our energy economy.
Most Iowans know that agriculture must change. They voted to amend the constitution to provide a permanent revenue flow for conservation and natural resources, but the legislature has refused to acknowledge it for over a decade. Iowa Agriculture Secretary Mike Naig often vigorously defends state efforts in voluntary nutrient reduction to surface water because he has to — people are upset about beach warnings, and they are concerned about what may be in their water.
Iowans do come together around the issue of clean air and water. If you have those, you are well on your way to climate adaptation.
Iowa State University is taking soil health and resilience seriously. The Practical Farmers of Iowa are attracting attention in Northwest Iowa helping each other learn about sustainability and profitability. Young people take their responsibility to the land more seriously, I think, than my generation has. Younger evangelicals, in particular, are developing strong themes around stewardship. Old folks, too: I was talking with a friend from Bayard, whose 78-year-old father, almost driven out of agriculture by the Farm Crisis, eschewed the whole corporate ag thing and is raising high-dollar beef on pasture that used to be in row crops, loving life and making money re-introducing native plant species.
Sometimes it’s hard to see that through the haze.
Or that two companies gained approval from the Food and Drug Administration to start selling meat cultivated from animal cellular cultures. Tyson is invested in one of them. The top chefs in California soon will introduce cultivated meat in the form of chicken in fine restaurants. Many smart people dismiss the idea as a niche that can never achieve scale. If there is money in it, they will find a way to scale it up affordably. They have to find a way, because we can’t raise enough hogs to feed the world without killing it. I think they will. Thirty years ago, few among us could have imagined talking in a Zoom session live with someone across the ocean.
The people who figured out how to make your wristwatch talk to you warn that we must act fast to save the next generation from us.
We can.
The corporate world is buying into the notion of “climate-smart” agriculture. The Biden Administration, in the person of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, has dangled enough carrots to get the likes of Cargill and Tyson interested in ag resiliency amid the wildfires. Tyson surely knows that the cattle complex is drying up on the Great Plains. That is key to shaping a farm bill that supports conservation agriculture. Of course there is greenwashing. But Cargill is working on getting more acres into permanent cover. That’s some progress.
There will be failures. Recently, Lordstown Motors in Ohio filed for bankruptcy after trying to convert a shuttered GM auto factory into making electric trucks. Lordstown claims that its business partner, Foxconn of Taiwan, failed to come through on financial commitments. The Trump Administration can own that one. The Obama Administration got tagged with Solyndra. There will be high-profile implosions that obscure the new battery plants going up in Georgia.
The climate crisis comes home with the haze over North America. But when you look you can find change for the better. It is coming fast. Just look at the explosion of wind turbines in Buena Vista, Pocahontas and Sac counties over the past 25 years.
Ultimately, I think that conservation and renewable energy will be the issue that brings Iowans together. It already is.
Art Cullen is publisher and editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2017 and is author of the book “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland.” Email times@stormlake.com.
From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2023
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