I begin the book by saying that people are walking tributaries of the nearest river. We are three-quarters water. Water passes from a river system through us, then back into a river again. That water has probably been around for billions of years. It isn’t ours, really, and it isn’t “us.” But for all that, we can’t live for more than a few days without water. Knowing that really brings Leopold’s message home.
While I show that people have been successfully interacting with the Upper Iowa River for over 10,000 years, I also try to show the problems that stem from the modern misperception Leopold pointed out to us: thinking we are overlords of the more-than-human world around us. Our misuse of water resources is just one example of the way we mistake ourselves as somehow above the physical world. We are dependent borrowers in a world we often mistakenly think we own.
Soil loss and water quality are huge issues in Iowa, and the Upper Iowa River is no exception. You’ve lived in the Upper Iowa basin for more than forty years. What has changed since you first came to this area? What’s better, and what’s worse?
The Upper Iowa flows mostly through a state with some of the most extreme water-quality issues in the nation. For every ton of corn our farmers harvest, we let two tons of soil, nitrogen, and phosphates flow down the nearest river. On the Upper Iowa it’s sometimes ten tons of soil per ton of harvested grain.
For all that, we are doing better than when settlers first came here, better than farmers before the conservation movement of the Great Depression. Urban and point-source wastewaters are better treated now than before the Clean Water Act of 1972. We’ve got a long way to go, but there’s ground for hope.
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