Poroi, 8, 1, Throgmorton
Pork, Place, and Planning
Professor Emeriti, University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA USA
Poroi 8,1 (April 2012)
Keywords: negative externalities, space, place,
sustainability, industrialized agriculture, Iowa River watershed, collaborative
Imagine two people, “Liz” and “Andre,” sitting down for
dinner in their favorite restaurant. The restaurant happens to be located in a
charming older neighborhood in one of the nation’s larger cities, but it could
be almost anywhere. “I really love this place,” Liz says to Andre. “Yes,” says Andre, “you can see
signs of care and affection everywhere you look.” Glancing around, they notice
that many nearby people appear to be overweight, and this causes Andre to
comment about a newspaper article he had recently read about the relationship
between diet and health. Andre asks, “What are you going to have to eat?”
“Maybe the pork dinner,” Liz replies. “It’s my favorite.”
Imagine also agricultural producers in other parts of the world
growing enormous amounts of corn, much of which is used to feed the hogs that
become the pork that pleases consumers like Liz and Andre so much. Enormously
productive and located a thousand or more miles away from Liz and Andre’s
charming neighborhood, these producers tell themselves and others that they are
efficiently meeting market demand. As many people say in one of those highly
productive areas, “Iowa feeds the world.”
What ties consumers and producers in these two places together?
The answer seems obvious: they are both embedded in a globalized market
economy. But if one looks just a shade deeper one will find that they are also
embedded in a complex web of relationships that are external to that economy.
It is this connection between pork consumers like Liz and Andre
and agricultural producers—especially ones located in Iowa—that interests me.
Are the globalized market economy and its associated web of “external”
relationships enhancing long-term sustainability in the places of consumption,
production, and the whole of which they are a part? If not, can greater
awareness of the web of relationships be used to transform those places in a
more sustainable direction?
A fruitful way to begin mapping this web and envisioning how it
might be transformed in the context of capitalist democracies is to consider
what consumers like Liz and Andre are not thinking about while enjoying
their pork dinner. As consumers they are not thinking about what economists
call “negative externalities.” Nor are they thinking about the variety of ways
in which their places (and the negative externalities associated with pork
consumption) are related to other places.
Consequently, I have three primary purposes in writing this
paper. I seek first to put negative external that is,
connect the spillovers of Liz and Andre’s quite typical consumer behavior to
contemporary urban theorizing concerning “space” and “place” in the emerging
globalized “network society.” To explicate this connection and its implications for long-term sustainability,
I will analyze Liz and Andre’s remoteness from the costs of their food’s
production and transport in terms of “tenticular radiations,” the “Environmental
Kuznets Curve”, and “ecological footprints.” Second, I seek to document how
consumer behavior in large U. S. metropolitan areas is linked to the
industrialized agricultural system that produces corn-related products in the
Midwest of the United States and distributes those products to distant markets,
and to detail the complex ecology of effects associated with that agricultural
system by using the Iowa River watershed in east-central Iowa as a paradigmatic
example. And third, I will explore the merits of collaborative planning as a
means of transforming the Iowa River watershed (and the larger systems of which
it is a part) in a more sustainable direction.
Negative Externalities
In most respects Liz and Andre are typical food consumers: they
like the fact that markets enable them to obtain a good pork dinner at a
reasonable price. If they are like most other food consumers, they are also
unaware of the extent to which these market prices reflect a significant market
imperfection: they do not account for (internalize) the “negative
externalities” associated with their food’s production and transport, and hence
do not reflect the full costs of their pork dinner. (If, for example, Jim and
Barbara suffer respiratory ailments as a result of living near a hog processing
facility that emits harmful air pollutants, then they would be experiencing a
negative externality of the market transaction between the pork producer and
consumers.) Moreover, like most other food consumers Liz and Andre live in a
large metropolitan region distantly removed from the sources of their food, and
hence are quite unlikely to have any direct first-hand experience of their
diets’ environmental and social effects in other parts of the world. In the
words of ecological anthropologist Laura Jackson (2008, 23), this distance
creates for Liz, Andre, and other food consumers “the illusion of a limitless
food supply devoid of ecological consequences.”
In the context of capitalist democracies, the concept “negative
externalities” is undeniably important. Because market prices do not include
costs imposed on third parties, consumers like Liz and Andre demand more
resources and produce more pollution than economists would consider optimal. If
environmental economists are right, most environmental problems would wither
away if we could simply “get the prices right”; that is, internalize those
externalities into the prices of goods and services.
Although “getting the prices right” seems to be an eminently
rational way of “internalizing negative externalities,” actually getting them
right presents a daunting challenge for policymakers in particular places.
Public officials in the place where Liz and Andre live, for example, would not
be able to “get the price of pork right” without putting their place’s food
producers and consumers in uncompetitive market positions relative to ones
located in neighboring places, at least in the short run. If those officials
imposed fees to ensure that prices reflected the true costs of pork production
and transport, consumers like Liz and Andre would be likely to cross boundaries
and purchase their pork dinners in nearby places that do not have such fees.
Likewise, restaurant owners would have to sell their pork dinners at higher
prices, and hence would be at a competitive disadvantage relative to producers
who do not have to internalize the externalities. Consequently, public officials who propose “internalizing” full costs into
prices would be in serious trouble politically: they would be condemned for
raising taxes and for increasing the costs of food to ordinary food consumers,
especially low-to-moderate income ones. But until negative externalities are
internalized in prices, consumers cannot account for the unpriced consequences
of their choices. Worse perhaps, they might not even know that their choices
are producing adverse effects. The political difficulties of internalizing
negative externalities at the point of consumption are, therefore, formidable.
A further difficulty is that the concept “negative externalities”
hides almost as much as it reveals. It implies that internalizing the monetizable
physical and environmental costs of production and transport into the price
of pork dinners (and other products) would make Liz and Andre’s place more
sustainable over the long run. As I will argue more thoroughly below, however,
this limited understanding of negative externalities ignores or obscures social costs and the social justice compone e.g., family
disruptions associated with a product’s production and transport.
Moreover, the concept—which simply indicates that costs are born
by others outside the market exchange—presumes that it does not matter where the externalities are experienced, or who experiences them, and it
transforms the relationship between consumer(s) and those who experience the
negative externalities into merely a monetary one. Remarkably a-platial, the
concept ignores the increasingly complex trans-place web of connections among
environmental and social problems, and hence ignores the extent to which costs
are shifted to other places and people. In brief, “internalizing negative
externalities” into market prices is an important but insufficient ingredient
for long-term sustainability.
If we want to help produce a more sustainable world in the
context of a capitalist democracy, we need to alter the way urban food
consumers such as Liz and Andre and food producers in distant agricultural
areas relate to one another. This will require not just adjusting prices to
internalize the negative externalities, but also enabling food consumers to
become conscious of how their behavior affects distant places and the lives of
people who live and work within them.
The Place of Negative Externalities
The charming older neighborhood in which my fictional
couple is enjoying their pork dinner is one of the places upon which
urban theorists have focused much attention. But, as geography scholar Tim
Cresswell (2004) and others have observed, “place” is a slippery concept. When
Liz says to Andre, “I really love this place,” what does she mean? Answering
this question will help us understand the web of relationships in which food
producers and consumers are embedded.
To begin, place can loosely be defined as a space that
people have made meaningful, a space to which people have become attached, a
“space invested with meaning in the context of power” (Cresswell, p. 12). It
has a geographic location, constitutes a material setting for social relations,
and evokes a “sense of place” among its diverse users.
What then is “space”? According to Doreen Massey (2005),
geography scholars have identified two competing ways of conceptualizing space.
One is a world of separate bounded places (that is, a surface containing fixed,
closed entities easily represented on a map), each of which has its own
essentialized identity. Liz and Andre’s charming older neighborhood might be a
good example. The other is a world of flows, “a depthless horizontality of
immediate connections” (Massey, 2005, p. 76) enabled by transportation and
communication technologies and symbolized by the Internet. Massey rejects this
dualistic way of conceiving space and argues instead that space can best be
understood as
“a meeting up
of histories” (p. 4)
“a simultaneity
of stories-so-far” (p. 9)
“contemporaneous existence of a plurality of trajectories” (p. 12) in which
“space unfolds as interaction” (p. 61).
In Massey’s view, places can then be understood as
“collections of those stories, articulations within the wider power-geometries
of space” (p. 130); that is, as sites for the unfolding of “a power-geometry of
intersecting trajectories” (p. 64). “[R]ather than being locations of
coherence, [places] become the foci of the meeting [of potentially dissonant
(or concordant) narratives]…and thus integral to the generation of novelty” (p.
To comprehend a place as a site for the unfolding of a
power-geometry of intersecting trajectories, one might begin by evoking the
idea of home. The house in which Liz and Andre live had no meaning to them
until they began inhabiting it, filling it with personal items, planting
flowers in the garden, developing an emotional attachment to it, and
transforming it into their home. So too they gradually began to inhabit their
neighborhood: finding their favorite places to walk, discovering their favorite
restaurant, seeing familiar faces, and looking for ways to improve it.
Likewise—although with decreasing intimacy—they gradually began to inhabit the
city and region in which they live. In this sense a place is where one can feel
at home, where one can be oneself and live authentically.
Thinking of a place as home often generates stories that
elaborate on what we might call “the founders’ tale” (Throgmorton, 2003). Such
nostalgic tales typically focus on the families, institutions, and buildings
that have long been familiar parts of the place. At their best such tales can
help people inhabit places with care, affection, and a sense of belonging. But
they can also be profoundly exclusionary. For instance, they often omit the
people who live in the place for a few years and then move on. They disregard
the multiple ways in which the place is (and has always been) connected with
the external world. And they tend to gloss over the weird and the distasteful,
the aspects of the place’s history that old timers would like to forget. At the
extreme, such stories presume a clear boundary between the place and its
surroundings. Perhaps more important, they presume that the residents of the
place share a common identity authentically rooted in history. In brief, such
stories essentially claim, “this is our place” and around here “we” have always
done things this way.
According to this “essentialist” way of thinking about platial
identity, authentic places are under threat from a variety of forces,
especially the homogenizing tendencies of global capital, mobile workers and
tourists, and “dangerous outsiders.” In response to this threat, some people
celebrate the place’s unique features and traditions as an act of resistance,
whereas others strive to exclude or marginalize unwanted newcomers. Still
others don’ they advertise the place’s unique qualities as a
way of attracting new visitors and investment. Contrary to the essentialist
view, therefore, one can argue that the meaning of a place is never finished
it is always being performed, reimagined, and produced in
practical ways by the actually existing users of the place (Cresswell, 2004).
Such performances are, however, always constrained by structures (material
landscapes, laws, rules, cultural and social expectations) that users did not
In addition to thinking of a place as home, one can feel
connected to a place in at least four other ways (see Figure 1). The five
dimensions combine to form complex places and senses of place connection or, in
Massey’s terms, sites for the meeting up of “intersecting trajectories” (or
“stories-so-far”).
As has just been implied, the second type of connection relates
to the fact that places have histories and are constantly changing. These
changes superimpose upon the visible surface an unseen layer of usage, memory,
and significance. Places can be saturated with a sense of the histories of
previous inhabitants and
Figure 1. Five Dimensions of Place Connection
the events that have occurred in specific locations. If
Liz and Andre have lived in their place for a long time, they are likely to be
acutely conscious of that unseen layer of usage and memory. Even if they have
not lived there for long, they will gradually become aware of the extent to
which powerful emotions such as joy, anger, love, fear, and hope, circulate
through the place via stories that people tell and the photographs they share.
As these emotionally-resonant stories circulate, they help construct a
psychogeographic “economy of spirit” that is at least as important as the
economy of our pocketbooks (Coverly, 2006).
A third type of connection derives from the fact that people are
constantly moving into or departing from places. Thus any one place contains
its residents’ accumulated or composite memories of all places that have been
significant to them over time. Having moved into their place from somewhere
else, Liz and Andre would have brought with them memories of those other places
and the pathways leading away from them.
Fourth, fictive or virtual (or cyber) places can also matter. In
some cases, as with architectural renderings of a possible development, such
imagined worlds can have direct and immediate effects on the physical features
of a place. But even novels, poetry, sculpture, and scientifically-grounded
projections and scenarios can exert a powerful influence on people both
consciously and subconsciously and thereby affect expectations, hopes, fears,
and choices about how people invest their time, energy, and resources in the
here and now.
We can imagine, for example, that Liz and Andre might have seen
Alfonso Cuaron’s 2006 film Children of Men. Set 18 years from now in the city of London, it portrays the collapse of society
following a devastating flu pandemic. No children have been born since 2008,
most governments have collapsed, technological innovation has ceased, there
might have been a nuclear attack on Washington, and millions of illegal
immigrant refugees have flooded into the United Kingdom seeking asylum. In
fearful response, the U.K. has been transformed into a militarized police
state, which terrorists resist. The lead character undertakes a heroic journey
that leads him and the film’s viewers from despair to hope. After seeing the
film, Andre might express his worry to Liz: “Where might such a global pandemic
emerge? Is there anything we can do to avoid it?” “Not to worry,” Liz might
respond. “It’s only a movie. It has nothing to do with us. Let’s have dinner.”
Tenticular Radiations, the Environmental Kuznets Curve, and
Environmental Footprints
Although each type of place connection is important, it is
the fifth that I want to emphasize here. All places are, to one degree or
another, embedded in complex technosystems and environmental pathways that tie
distant places to one another in something like an archipelago of locales
(Buell, 2001; Throgmorton, 2005). Consequently Liz and Andre’s home, restaurant
and neighborhood are tied to other locales via “tenticular radiations” or
“paths out of town.” Happily for the quality of their immediate neighborhood,
for example, the pork in Liz and Andre’s dinner would not have been produced in
their neighborhood. It would instead have been produced in some distant locale and
then transported to their favorite restaurant via a complicated network of
tenticular radiations. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, large urbanized
areas such as the one in which Liz and Andre live could not exist in their
current form without having the ability to import key goods and services and to
export negative externalities.
That Liz, Andre and other urban residents export the negative
externalities associated with their consumption of pork has, indirectly, been
the subject of a considerable amount of research over the past twenty years.
Briefly summarized and critiqued below, this body of research has focused on
the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC), environmental load displacement, and
Environmental Footprints (EF).
Conventional economic wisdom has long claimed that consumer
demand in wealthier “developed” countries can benefit “developing” countries
and hence enable “sustainable development” even if this demand also entails the
displacement of negative externalities to those “developing” countries. The
Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) has played a prominent part in this claim
(Kahn 2006; Stern 2004). According to the EKC, the relationship between
economic growth and environmental harm takes the form of an inverted U-shaped
curve: economic development initially causes environmental quality to decline,
but over time development produces a middle-income population that pressures
the country’s government to solve many pollut as income
grows, consumption and production patterns become increasingly “green” and the
prospects for greener governance improve. Consequently the EKC claims that
economic growth has already benefited the environment in developed countries
and can be a powerful way of improving environmental quality in developing
Critics have challenged the validity of the EKC on many grounds,
however, including EKC researchers’ tendency to use narrow indicators that are
well understood, well documented, and easy to solve as measures of
environmental harm (e.g., sulfur dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants
using nation-based cross-sectional air pollution data from publicly available
sources) and to ignore environmental harm that is displaced to other parts of
the world or is more difficult to measure (Dinda, 2004). By having such narrow
indicators metonymically stand for environmental harm, for instance, EKC
analysts ignore the loss of biodiversity associated with the transformation of
ecosystems and thereby understate the magnitude and risks of environmental transformation
quite dramatically.
A few researchers have substituted Ecological Footprints (EFs)
for those narrow indicators (Bagliani et al. 2008). Doing so has led them to conclude that economic growth does not lead to
environmental improvement. While using EFs as the measure of environmental harm
has produced more valid results, even this has not accounted for where the footprint falls. What is more, it limits attention to the flow of energy
and materials, and hence ignores the non-material consequences of environmental
that is, upon whom the footprint falls.
To better understand the complex web of “external” relations
between urban consumers like Liz and Andre and food producers in other parts of
the world, therefore, the critique of the Environmental Kuznets Curve needs to
be taken even deeper.
One striking feature of EKC analyses is their disregard for
history. Proponents of the EKC naturalize changes that occurred within
countries of the North and ignore the historical contexts within which those
transformations occurred. An historically-informed assessment would argue
instead that a certain pattern of transformation in one place at one moment
does not necessarily mean that the same pattern will be replicated at any other
place and time. Furthermore, to claim that environmental degradation will
increase as the structure of an economy changes from agricultural to industrial,
but then will decrease as the economy becomes more service- or
knowledge-based, is to presume that the meaning of those concepts (e.g., agricultural)
does not vary over time or by place. But this presumption ignores the extent to
which agricultural economies have industrialized over the past thirty years, at
least in the United States.
The EKC also presumes an identity between countries and
that is, it uses nation-states as the spatial/platial unit of
analysis. This inevitably implies that environmental and economic data can be
aggregated for individual nation-states without losing important information
about variations within countries. And yet there is nothing about the
EKC itself that requires using nation-states as the platial unit. If the EKC is
valid, one should be able to document it using other spatial units, especially
regions within nation-states.
Lastly, the EKC implicitly reduces human existence to just two
dimensions: economic wealth and environmental harm, and suggests that one can
be traded for the other within any spatial unit (Bell and Morse 2008). In this
sense, the EKC can be understood as part of the story of neoliberal capitalist
globalization, a story that transforms existence within places to bi-variate
data points on a graph and transforms relationships between places into what
Massey (2005, 76) calls a “depthless horizontality of immediate connections,”
wherein underdeveloped places are catching up with developed ones.[9] By reducing human existence to economic wealth and environmental harm (even if
expanded by using the EF data), the EKC omits the social justice component of
sustainability.
In brief, even the best EKC analyses are a-historical, a-platial,
and silent about social justice.
With these observations and conclusions in mind, we are now
in a position to ask: To what places are the negative externalities associated
with Liz’s and Andre’s pork consumption displaced? How does that displacement
occur? What social, economic, and environmental costs and benefits derive from
this displacement, and who experiences them?
Industrialized Agriculture in the Iowa River Watershed
Not produced in their neighborhood or city, Liz and
Andre’s pork had to be produced in some distant place and then transported to
their restaurant. Data about how that pork is transported and how far it would
have to travel is hard to find. In 2001 Rich Pirog and others at Iowa State
University’s Leopold Center provided a first approximation. They estimated that
conventional food traveled a weighted average of 1,546 miles from the point of
production to the point of purchase for consumption. In a later analysis Weber
and Matthews (2008) estimated that the total life-cycle food supply chain
requires movement of 6,760 kilometers for the average household, with final
delivery of food accounting for 1,640 of the total. Food groups vary in these
distances, with red meat being the highest at 1,800 km delivery and 20,400 km
For reasons elaborated below, Liz and Andre’s pork probably would
have come from the Midwest of the U. S. There its production constitutes an
important part of an industrialized agricultural system that efficiently provides
inexpensive food for the national and international markets within which Liz
and Andre are embedded. For the past thirty years or so, however, many critics
have been claiming that this industrialized agricultural system has also been
imposing a set of interconnected costs that are causing rural parts of the
region to be failing ecologically, economically and socially (e.g., Kimbrell,
2002; Pollan, 2006; The Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production,
2008; Jackson, 2008). In brief, they have been claiming that the economy and
way of life engendered by the industrial agricultural system and sustained by
pork consumers like Liz and Andre is not sustainable. In the following sections
I will summarize the key features of that system and the web of negative
externalities that leads critics to make that claim.
Pork Is Produced Efficiently in Iowa, Resulting in Lower
Market Prices for Consumers
The vast majority of hogs in the U. S. reside in the upper
Midwest, with additional clusters being found in North Carolina and the
Texas-Oklahoma panhandle region. The three largest counties in terms of pig
population are located in North Carolina and Texas/Oklahoma, but ten of the 20
largest counties are located in Iowa.
Hog processing plants locate near these hog populations. In 2007
9.96 million metric tons of pork were produced in the United States, with about
14 percent of it being exported to other countries and the remainder being
consumed in the U. S. Five firms accounted for 73.6 percent of the daily
slaughter capacity (424,835 hogs): Smithfield (27.9 percent), Tyson Foods (17.4
percent), Swift (11.1 percent), Hormel (8.7 percent), and Excel (8.5 percent).
New technologies have allowed larger breeding farms to become possible.
Consequently the number of hog operations decreased by 90 percent from 647,000
in 1977 to 65,640 in 2007, the percent of operations in excess of 50,000 hogs
increased from 7 percent in 1988 to 43 percent in 2006, and the average number
of hogs per operation increased from 87.4 in 1977 to 991.9 in 2007.
These and other changes in production have greatly increased the
market efficiency of pork production and have thereby contributed to
lower-priced pork for consumers like Liz and Andre. As the “Stats” section of
the National Pork Board’s web site proudly proclaims, “U. S. pork producers are
among the most efficient in the world. …[T]he nation’s pork producers continue
to make great strides in production efficiencies while at the same time
producing a higher-quality product for consumers. These improvements are due to
genetic selection, new technologies, advanced nutrition and new management
techniques. The results of these changes are more and lower-cost lean pork for
U. S. and world consumers” (Pork. Org, 2009, p. 78)
Much of Iowa’s Pork Is Produced at Three Large Slaughter
Facilities in the Iowa River Watershed
One place pork comes from is the part of eastern Iowa
drained by the Iowa River. Approximately 800,000 humans live in this 12,500
square mile watershed (see Figure 2). It actually consists of two major watersheds, the Iowa and Cedar, but when they
merge shortly before entering the Mississippi the conjoined rivers are known as
the Iowa. Three large meatpacking plants are located within this watershed:
Tyson Foods’ plants in Waterloo and Columbus Junction, and Swift Foods’
facility in Marshalltown.
Figure 2. The Iowa River Watershed
Swift and Company is the world’s third largest processor
of fresh beef and pork, with nearly $10 billion in annual sales as of 2007. In
July 2007 it was purchased by JBS S.A., the largest beef processor in South
America and one of the largest worldwide beef exporters. According to anthropologists Mark Grey and Anne Woodrick
(2002), Swift Food’s Marshalltown facility is “the third largest pork plant in
the world, slaughtering and processing approximately 3.6 million hogs each
year—as many as 16,000 each day. It produces nearly 100 million pounds of pork
products each year, and annual sales approached $800 million [in] 1999. It
employs about 1,900, with roughly 1,600 of these jobs in production. Swift is
the community’s largest employer, with a payroll of about $51 million in 1998”
Tyson Foods is the world’s largest processor and marketer of
chicken, beef and pork, and annually exports the largest percentage of beef out
of the U. S. With 2005 sales of $26
billion, it is the second-largest meat producer in the world, and one of the
100 largest companies in the U. S. It employs approximately 107,000 people at
its 123 food processing plants throughout the world. It supplies all of the
Yum! Brands chains that use chicken (including KFC and Taco Bell), as well as
McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Wal-Mart, Kroger, Costco, IGA, and others.
Every week its six pork plants process 348,000 hogs. Its Columbus Junction
facility is located just north of the confluence of the Iowa and Cedar Rivers.
In 2007 that facility’s slaughter capacity was about half that of Swift’s
Marshalltown plant, or about 9,500 hogs per day.
Hogs Are Fattened at Concentrated Agricultural Feeding
Operations (CAFOs)
The hogs processed in these plants come from Concentrated
Agricultural Feeding Operations (CAFO’s). Nationwide, the 110 largest hog
operations, each of which contains over 50,000 hogs, now constitute 55 percent
of the total national inventory. Iowa leads the nation in hog production, much
of which takes place in the state’s 742 hog-producing CAFOs. As Figure 3 shows,
the watershed’s CAFOs are most densely concentrated in Hardin, Franklin, and other
counties in the upper reaches of the Iowa and Cedar Rivers, but there is also a
significant cluster in the lower reaches of the river in Washington and Louisa
Daniel Imhoff’s (2010) edited collection, The CAFO Reader,
presents a comprehensive and deeply troubling critique of these “factory
farms.” “Our domesticated livestock have never been as cruelly confined or
slaughtered in such massive quantities in all of history,” Imhoff writes in his
introduction. Moreover, he reports that an increasing number of observers argue that the
extraordinarily high concentration of animals in these feeding operations “has
arisen as a direct result of intentional U.S. government policies that have
allowed CAFOs to avoid paying the true costs of their operations.”
Figure 3. Location of Hog CAFOS in the
Iowa River Watershed
Not surprisingly, CAFO operators do not agree with this
critique. Working within the context of the existing agricultural system, some
(perhaps most) of them believe they are producing quality pork in a manner that
is safe for workers and the environment. A good example might be Heidi Vittitoe
who, with her husband Jerome, operates Vittetoe Pork, Ltd., near Washington in
the southeast part of Iowa. Their firm produces roughly 150,000 hogs per year,
and Vittitoe considers environmental stewardship an important part of the
firm’s operation (Caldwell 2005). It is difficult to know, however, whether
this sense of stewardship is more verbal than real. While witnessing Vittitoe
defend her operations during a small public forum early in 2010, I was
persuaded that she is committed to complying with existing regulations
concerning the environment and workplace safety. But this did not convince me
that those standards are sufficient. Nor was I able to judge whether other CAFO
operators share Vittitoe’s stated commitment to complying with those standards.
Whether real or merely verbal, Vittitoe’s expressed desire to
comply with existing standards takes place in the context of a market economy
that systematically externalizes costs. According to Robert P. Martin,
executive director of the Pew Charitable Trust’s Commission on Farm Animal
Production, “[t]he present system of producing food animals in the United
States is not sustainable and presents an unacceptable level of risk to public
health and damage to the environment, as well as unnecessary harm to the
animals we raise for food” (2008, viii).
Major Employee and Public Health Risks Are Associated with
In a comprehensive recent synthesis of the human health
threats associated with CAFOS, researchers at Plains Justice (2010) reported
that ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, and airborne particle emissions from CAFOs can
contribute to human respiratory problems such as asthma and chronic bronchitis.
Ammonia and hydrogen sulfide (which are related to the strong odors found in
and near CAFOs) can result in serious health effects on the employees who work
in these facilities, and particulate emissions (such as fecal matter, fur,
feathers, and dust) can increase the incidence of heart problems. Plains
Justice’s researchers also reported that manure pollution produced by CAFOs can
impair water quality. Bacteria originating in CAFOs can get into recreational
waters and thereby increase the public health risks associated with water
recreation. High levels of ammonia and the hypoxia it produces can also impair
fishing and other recreational activities. Lastly, when manure spills occur at
CAFOS, the resulting bacteria or chemical contamination of surface and ground
waters have produced large numbers of fish kills and can also negatively affect
drinking water supplies for people who live near or downstream from the CAFOs
that cause the spills.
Public health researchers have raised many other worrisome
concerns about CAFOs, especially with regard to (1) the role of intensive
livestock production in (2) contaminated air, flies, and
vermin migrating into the neighborhoods surrounding the CAFOs; (3) the
emergence of antibiotic and (4) the specter of a global
pandemic arising from new strains of avian influenza incubated in swine and
transmitted to humans.
In his introductory article for a series that appeared in Environmental
Health Perspectives in 2007, for example, public health researcher Peter
Thorne writes: “Dramatic changes in livestock production have occurred over the
past two decades…The state of Iowa, which produces one-fourth of U.S. pork,
exemplifies this trend. The number of farms in Iowa raising hogs decreased from
64,000 in 1980 to 10,500 in 2000—an 84% decrease—while the average number of
hogs per farm increased from 250 to 1,430 over this same period” (p. 296). The
increasing intensity of livestock operations has increased problems associated
with air and water contamination, and to fears of communities and neighbors
about the potential adverse human health effects. The National Institute of
Environmental Health Sciences joined with the University of Iowa’s
Environmental Health Sciences Research Center to sponsor a “town meeting” in
Des Moines to “bring stakeholders together to seek common ground” (p. 296). The
results of the town meeting prompted the Center to organize a conference and
workshop in 2004 to consider the major topics, assess the state of the science,
identify areas in which further research is needed, and suggest opportunities
to “translate science to policy initiatives that would advance public and
environmental health” (p. 296).
The second article in the series (Gilchrist et al., 2007)
summarized the finding of the workshop focusing on the potential role of CAFOs
in infectious disease epidemics and antibiotic resistance. Liz, Andre, and
other consumers might have been frightened to learn that this workshop “raised
concerns about the practice of co-locating swine and poultry facilities and the
specter of a global pandemic arising from new strains of avian influenza
incubated in swine and transmitted to humans” (p. 297). They recommended the
establishment of minimum separation distances between facilities and the
adoption of specific management practices. They also strongly endorsed phasing
out the use of antimicrobial agents as growth promotants in the U. S. And they
identified the need to establish national surveillance programs to track the
transmission of antimicrobial-resistant organisms from livestock to humans.
Another article in the series (Donham et al., 2007) summarized
the findings of the workshop focusing on community health and socioeconomic
issues surrounding CAFOs, especially the impacts of industrialization of
livestock production on rural communities in terms of economics, social
capital, and quality of life. They recommended that comprehensive studies of
community health be undertaken. They also noted, “much of the research funding
for agriculture is directed toward nonsustainable production and recommended
that funds be reoriented to sustainable systems” (p. 297). They indicated that
“a more measured approach to siting and permitting of facilities and waste
management is needed” and that “[d]ecisions concerning the issuance of permits
should…include greater involvement of communities through public hearings and
open meetings” (p. 297).
Thorne concluded his introductory article by stating: “Expansion
of large CAFOs into central and eastern Europe and South America is occurring
without attention to lessons learned from health and environmental problems in
the United States and western Europe. Major concerns exist over the role of
intensive livestock production in influenza outbreaks and the emergence of
antibiotic resistance organisms” (p. 297).
What, one might wonder, would be the cost of a global pandemic
that originated at co-located swine and poultry CAFOs in Iowa or elsewhere?
Latino Employees in CAFOs and Meat Processing Plants Are
Doubly at Risk
A large proportion of the workers in these CAFOs and meat
processing plants are Latino immigrants from Mexico and Central America. This
fact, and others directly related to it, constitutes one of the key set of
social costs embedded in the web of “negative external relationships”
associated with Liz and Andre’s pork consumption.
According to anthropologists Grey and Woodrick, for
example, Swift Foods’ Marshalltown plant employs approximately 900 Mexican
workers, a large percentage of which come from a single small town in Mexico,
Villachuato. According to them, Marshalltown and its pork processing plant are
part of a “global labor market”; it’s a new “destination community” for Latino
migrants in the U. S. Moreover, “[t]he plant would
shut down without a continued supply of workers from this community—documented
and undocumented—and the workers, their families, and their home town would
suffer without the plant” (p. 364).
As Grey and Woodrick see it, hiring Latinos solves a number of
important problems for Marshalltown’s meatpacking plant. First, it provides
people to replace rural Anglos who left during the farm crisis of the 1980s and
subsequent years. (In
people lived in Marshalltown, 0.9 percent of
whom were Latino. Ten years later, 12.6 percent of the city’s 26,009 people
were Latino.) It also helped the plant overcome a shortage of applicants during
the thriving economy of the 1990s. Most important, it provides workers who are
willing to do unpleasant, physically difficult, low-skill, and risky labor for
the wages provided. Common ailments among slaughterhouse workers include back
problems, torn muscles and pinched nerves, as well as more dramatic injuries
such as broken bones, deep cuts and amputated fingers and limbs (Bhushan 2011.)
Turnover at the plant is high, which benefits the company by lowering aggregate
wages and health benefit costs.
About half of the Marshalltown plant’s Latino workers come from
Villachuato. The Latino workers frequently migrate between Marshalltown and
Mexico (or other meatpacking plants), which results in high turnover rates at
local schools. The ability to leave gives the workers a little bit of advantage
in the global labor market. But the turnover also means that Latino employees
“are not interested in settling down in Marshalltown because they have
obligations to families, homes, and a community, which just happens to be 3,000
miles away” (p. 369).
Latino in-migrants bring economic vitality and social change to
small towns, but they are also exposed to considerable risks. As recent events
at Agriprocessors, Inc., in Postville reveal, meat processing plants require
employees to do hazardous and distasteful work that most Iowans will not do
(Preston 2008). Because Iowans won’t do the work at the wages offered, while
distant consumers (such as Liz and Andre) demand the meat, meat processing
companies hire new residents from Mexico and other Central American countries. Moreover, the undocumented workers’ illegal status makes
them vulnerable to employer exploitation and deportation if they complain about
low wages or poor working conditions. Meanwhile, Anglo residents and local media in places like Marshalltown tend to
focus on problems such as higher crime rates and growing enrollments of
non-English-speaking students.
Language differences and the
workers’ tendency to move relatively frequently also create significant
educational challenges within K-12 school systems. Consequently a relatively
small but important number of towns and school districts in Iowa are being
dramatically affected by the presence of Latino in-migrants who are employed at
meat processing plants. Although only 3.8 percent of Iowa’s population is
Hispanic or Latino, the school districts in Columbus Junction, Postville,
Denison and other towns and cities display muc for
example, 620 of Columbus Junction’s 992 K-12 students (62.6%) were Latino in
2009-10 (Columbus Community Schools, 2010). Given contemporary pressures to
crack down on “undocumented workers” and “illegal aliens,” these school
districts and towns risk economic and social disruption that could prove quite
traumatic.
How does the presence of these Latino newcomers affect the
towns in which their plants are located, and what effect will living in these
old Iowa towns have on them? According to Grey and Woodrick, “What this new
reality will look like is unknown” “It is reasonable to speculate, however,
that given current conditions and relations between Latino workers and Anglo
residents, both communities will never look the same. Marshalltown itself will
continue to look more and more like Mexico…But…Latinos are also changing.…The
cultural and social consequences are striking. The result is a
Marshalltown, born of the postnational age, that is not its old self, nor is it
a new transplanted Villachuato—it is something in between” (p. 373). As shown
in the photograph at right, Columbus Junction’s downtown streetscape looks much
as it did years ago, but now many of its stores cater to Latinos and include
signs written in Spanish.
Iowa’s Corn Feeds Hogs, Not the World.
“Iowa feeds the world” is a claim that proponents of the
existing agricultural system frequently make, but careful scrutiny engenders
many doubts about the claim.
As shown in Figure 5, roughly 78 percent of the land in
the Iowa River watershed is used for growing corn and soybeans. Hogs in Iowa’s
and other states’ CAFOs feed on the corn. According to ecological
anthropologist Laura Jackson (2008, p. 24), about 54 percent of U. S. corn and
soybeans is fed to livestock, approximately 18 percent is exported to other
countries (primarily for consumption by livestock), 14 percent is made into
ethanol, and the remaining 14 is made into vegetable oil, or food products such
as starch, high fructose corn syrup, and food additives. “In reality,”
therefore, “corn and soybeans feed livestock to produce meat for the US and
other wealthy industrialized countries” (Jackson 2008, 31).
Figure 5. Corn and Soybean
Production in the Iowa River
Humans cannot eat the corn produced for livestock. That
fact notwithstanding, production of these crops is heavily subsidized. During
the period from 1995 to 2006, Iowa received $16 billion in farm subsidies—more
than any state other than Texas—including $1.2 billion in 2006 (Environmental
Working Group). Jackson (2008) writes, “Meter (2005) has calculated
farm-related income and expenses for a nine-county area of northeastern Iowa
between 1999 and 2003. On average, the region’s farmers produce $1.08 billion
of food per year, but spent $1.14 billion to raise it. Over the five-year
period of the study, production costs exceeded farm receipts by $308 million.
Over 30 percent of the farms lost money in 2002. This region survived only
because of an average of $173 million in federal subsidies and $72 million in
off-farm income each year” (p. 29).
If these and other subsidies were removed, then
surely Liz, Andre, and other consumers of corn-based products would encounter
significantly higher market prices at the supermarket and in the restaurant, at
least in the short run. And they might not be happy to see their prices rise.
But in the meantime others bear substantial costs that do not appear in market
Figure 6. A Farmer
in Central Iowa
6 shows a farmer in central Iowa. He, Jerry Peckumn, grows corn and soybeans on
2,000 acres in the standard way, but he thinks that way is not sustainable.
Still, he feels he has no real choice because that’
federal farm policy promotes it. The policy needs to be changed, he believes, but farmers can’t change it by
themselves. Part of Peckumn’s farm is more experimental, and he is involved in
native prairie restoration and river/wetland protection. Birds and butterflies
are returning to a restored prairie plot on his land. Peckumn
he also the Chair of Iowa Rivers Revival, a member of Practical Farmers of
Iowa, a former chair of the State’s Environmental Protection Commission, and a
member of the Iowa Environmental Council’s Board of Directors.
The Federal Government Massively Subsidizes the State’s
Agricultural Economy
Is the industrial agricultural system a free market
without government intervention, and do food prices reflect the true costs of
production? According to researchers at the conservative Cato Institute (Edwards,
2007), it is not:
The USDA [U. S. Department of Agriculture] distributes
between $10 billion and $30 billion in cash subsidies to farmers and owners of
farmland each year. The particular amount depends on market prices for crops,
the level of disaster payments, and other factors. More than 90 percent of
agriculture subsidies go to farmers of five crops—wheat, corn, soybeans, rice,
and cotton. Roughly a million farmers and landowners receive subsidies, but the
payments are heavily tilted toward the largest producers. In addition to
routine cash subsidies, the USDA provides subsidized crop insurance, marketing
support, and other services for farm businesses. The USDA also performs
extensive agricultural research and generates statistical data for the industry.
These indirect subsidies and services cost taxpayers about $5 billion each
year, putting total farm support at between $15 billion and $35 billion
annually…Agriculture subsidies have never made economic sense, but since the
1930s farmers have resisted changes to subsidy programs, and they have
generally held sway in Congress. While farmers comprise a smaller share of the
population today than in the 1930s, the farm lobby is perhaps as strong as
ever. One reason is that farm-state legislators have co-opted the support of
urban legislators, who seek increased subsidies in agriculture bills for
programs such as food stamps. Legislators interesting [sic] in rural
environmental subsidies have also been co-opted as supporters of farm bills.
Thus many legislators have an interest in increasing the USDA’s budget, but
there are few opposing them on behalf of the taxpayer.
In brief, it’s not really an either/ governments
are always already involved in markets. So the real question is, to what extent and in what ways should governments
shape markets? And to what ends?
Major Public Health Risks Are Associated with Consumption of
Corn-based Products
This industrialized system for providing food
requires/creates consumers who demand corn-based products in the market. The
sixty-five percent of U.S. Americans (including “Liz” and “Andre”) who live in
the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas consume corn-based products,
ignorant of the costs and consequences of their production, while also
experiencing adverse health effects, especially obesity, heart disease, and
Type II diabetes (Brownell et al., 2009).
The incidence of obesity and heart disease among U.S. Americans
has reached near-epidemic proportions. According to the Center for Disease
Control (2009), there has been a dramatic increase in obesity in the U.S. over
the past twenty years, and the proportion of U. S. adults who are obese
increased from 25.6 percent in 2007 to 26.1 percent in 2008. Moreover, obese
Americans spend about 42 percent more on health care than do normal-weight
Americans, most of the excess of which is spent on prescription drugs needed to
manage obesity-related conditions (Finkelstein et al., 2009).
While the increases in obesity and heart disease cannot be solely
attributed to the consumption of corn-fed meat and poultry and other corn-based
products, especially in fast-food restaurants, the evidence does seem clear
that it would be possible to improve the health of our land, water, and selves
by shifting the farm economy away from corn and soybean for cows and hogs and
sweeteners – as Michael Pollan (2006) argues in The Omnivore’s Dilemma –
toward more diversified “grass farms,” and by shifting consumers’ diets away
from meat (and corn-based sweeteners) and more toward fruits and vegetables.[22]
Industrialized Crop Production Contaminates Rivers and the
Gulf of Mexico
The Iowa River is home to beavers, raptors, water snakes,
a large array of warm water fish, and several endangered species including the
Indiana bat. Humans use the river for power boating, paddle sports, fishing,
hunting, and swimming, and (in Iowa City and Cedar Rapid) for drinking water.
Largely because of the industrialization of crop production in Iowa, however,
many of the State’s and the watershed’s stream segments have become “impaired”;
i.e, do not support drinking, fishing or swimming. (Figure 7 shows the
locations of impaired stream segments in 2008.) This impairment results from
low biological diversity, siltation and turbidity, habitat and flow alteration,
nutrients, pesticides, bacteria and low dissolved oxygen.
Figure 7. Impaired Streams in the
Iowa River Watershed,
In 2007 the public interest organization American Rivers
listed the Iowa River as one of the nation’s ten most endangered rivers.[23] According to it, the health of the Iowa River…is in serious jeopardy. The Iowa
and Cedar Rivers have fifteen river segments included on the state’s list of
impaired waters. The main pollutants causing these impairments are nitrates,
fecal bacteria, and sediment that originate from farm fields, livestock farms,
industries and town sewer systems, among others. Iowa is far behind in
implementing and enforcing the Clean Water Act to reduce and eliminate
pollution being discharged into the rivers. Although it would seem like common
sense to at least maintain current water quality levels where considering new
or expanded pollution sources, Iowa has yet to adopt a key provision of the
Clean Water Act that triggers such a review. More than 30 years after Congress
passed the Clean Water Act, Iowa has still not adopted these anti-degradation
rules. As a result, state agencies routinely issue permits allowing new or
increased pollution loads to be discharged into rivers without the required
review of the impacts on river water quality (2007, p. 14).
In an analysis for the Iowa Policy Project, Jan Flora and others
(2007) found that manure production from hog CAFOs is strongly and positively
related to manure spills, fish kills and impaired waters, and that CAFOs may
well be the largest agricultural polluter of Iowa’s streams and lakes.
Moreover, “[i]t is possible that their growth has hampered rural tourism,
recreation, and destination retirement development, particularly in certain
counties of northeast and southeast Iowa that have natural amenities as well as
a high density of hogs” (p. 21).
Long-term nitrate data on the Iowa River shows a slow increase in
nitrate concentrations over the past thirty years, due to farming.&The
changes are so slow that they cannot be easily be observed by current
residents, and the quality of river waters slowly degrades without anyone
Nitrogen in fertilizers and manure also significantly contributes
to the hypoxic “dead zone” in the Gulf (Committee on Environment and Natural
Resources, 2000). (Figure 8 displays nitrogen loads in the Iowa River and
nearby watersheds.) According to many analysts, resolution of the hypoxia
problem in the Gulf depends on changing farming practices in the Midwestern
corn belt (Nassauer et al., 2007; Turner et al., 2007; Mississippi River/Gulf
of Mexico Watershed Nutrient Task Force, 2001). This negative externality
exemplifies “environmental load displacement” and can be thought of as a major
part of the Iowa River watershed’s (and ultimately Liz and Andre’s) “ecological
footprint.”
Industrialized Agriculture Contributes to (and Is Influenced
by) Climate Change
Figure 8. Nitrogen Stream Loads in Eastern Iowa
Industrialized agriculture in the region both contributes
to and is influenced by global climate change. According to Iowa State
University climate scientist Eugene Takle (2009), Iowa’s climate has been
changing “in ways, at rates, and for reasons that require analysis for future
planning and risk management” (p. 1). Some of the key trends include the following:
precipitation has been trending upward, with wetter springs, drier autumns,
more intense rain events, and an increase
the state now
has longer frost-free periods than in the past, with winter temperatures
increasing m surface wind speeds have been declining, as
has sur and levels of streamflow have been amplified.
When projected into the future, these and related changes are
likely to have significant effects on the agricultural economy, including: the
possibility of more water-logging of soils and delayed planting in the spring
but better dry-down co a higher probability of crop
d increased drainage tile flow from
and increased incidences of flooding af (in a counter
trend) enhanced crop growth in “C3” plants, such as soybeans and many “weeds”;
and a northward migration of weeds accompanied by greater resistance to
herbicides. Takle (p. 6) also reports that the North American Regional Climate
Change Assessment Program is using “four AR4 [Fourth Assessment Report] …
global climate models of contemporary and future climates to provide input to
six regional climate models for assessing climate change between the end of the
20th C[entury] and the period
for the A2 SRES emissions
scenario.”
The Iowa River watershed is not simply experiencing the effects
of g as documented by the Iowa Climate Change Advisory
Council (2008), it is also contributing to it. According to the Advisory
Council, Iowa’s gross greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions continue to grow steadily
and are now 52 percent above 1990 levels. The agricultural sector was directly
responsible for 23 percent of total emissions in 2005, but the Council projects
that share will decline to 17 percent by 2025. Electrical power production
accounts for 31 percent of the state’s GHG emissions in 2005, with an undefined
fraction of that power production being used within the agricultural sector. As
is the case with nitrogen loads in streams, these greenhouse gas emissions are
negative externalities that contribute to “environmental load displacement” and
can be thought of as indirect manifestations of Liz and Andre’s “ecological
footprint.”
The Advisory Council recommended adoption of a comprehensive
package of multi-sector policy options to reduce GHG emissions. It also
evaluated the direct costs and cost savings of these policy options, and
reported: “Although the total net cost associated with the 37 policies analyzed
is estimated at about $4.8 billion between 2009 and 2020, the weighted-average
cost-effectiveness of the 37 policies is estimated to be approximately
$8.80/tCO2e [tons of carbon dioxide equivalent] reduced,” and hence
to yield significant cost-saving opportunities for Iowans. The Council also
developed two greenhouse gas emission reduction scenarios, which would achieve
50 and 90 percent reductions of 2005 emissions by 2050.
During the 2010 session, the Iowa Legislature chose not to act on
any of the Council’s recommendations.
Industrialized Agriculture Depends on Risky Imported Oil and
Polluting Coal-fired Electric Power Plants
According to the Iowa Office of Energy Independence (OEI),
the total amount of energy used in Iowa grew by 22.7 percent from 1980 to 2007.[25] Perhaps more important, Iowa
is almost completely reliant on energy imported from other states and nations.[26] Although the share of energy
consumption produced by “homegrown” sources, especially wind, has increased
slowly over the past few years, the state still imports 93.7 percent of the
energy it uses. The industrial sector, which includes agriculture, accounts for
39.9 percent of all primary energy consumed in the state, which makes it
considerably larger than transportation (25.6 percent) and the other two
economic sectors (residential and commercial). (This report does not specify
where Iowa’s imported energy comes from, nor does it enable readers to
determine how much energy use in these four sectors is directly or indirectly
attributable to agriculture.)
Coal, petroleum, and electric power are crucial components of
Iowa’s energy mix. Between 1980 and 2007 the amount of primary energy provided
by coal nearly doubled from 234.4 to 464.4 trillion Btu (and from 23.3 to 37.6
percent of the total). The use of petroleum grew by 17.2 percent over that same
time period, although its share of the total remained essentially constant at
35 percent. In 2007 electric power generation accounted for about 41 percent of
the total amount of energy consumed in the state, a figure that is considerably
larger than the 24.5 percent share it had in 1980. Coal provided the fuel
(primary energy) for 76.3 percent of that electric power generation in 2007,
but roughly two-thirds of that primary energy was dissipated as waste heat.
Electric power consumption has been growing at a rate of approximately 3.4
percent per year. One glimmer of good news is that wind turbines are providing
an increasing share of electric power generated in the state: 5.5 percent of
the total in 2007 and nearly 20 percent in 2010.
What is the solution to this energy problem? According to
Randolph and Masters (2008) and many other analysts, we need to: (1) improve
efficiency of energy use to reduce growth in demand, (2) replace oil with other
sources to avoid the economic and security consequences of depending on risky
sources of imported oil, and (3) increase the use of carbon-free source, reduce
use of fossil fuels, and trap carbon emissions before they enter the
atmosphere.
In Iowa the emphasis has been placed on generating more electric
power from wind and replacing some imported petroleum with biofuels. Some
analysts and advocates claim that ethanol from corn can alleviate the demand
for imported oil. Between 2001 and 2007 (largely because of incentives and
mandates included in the national Energy Policy Acts of 2005 and 2007) the
fraction of the U.S.’s corn supply used to produce ethanol grew from seven to
27 percent. Is this a good trend? David Pimental and Tad Patzek (2005) have
rigorously argued that it takes more energy to produce corn-based ethanol that
one gets out of it. Others have disputed this claim.
In brief, industrialized agriculture and other parts of the Iowa
River watershed’s economy are profoundly dependent on imported petroleum and
coal. The first poses enormous environmental and security risks, which are
apparent in the wars currently being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the
tragic oil spill that occurred in the Gulf of Mexico in mid-2010. The second
(coal for electricity) makes the state profoundly dependent on the major
greenhouse gas emitter. All can be thought of as part of the web of “negative
external relationships” in which Liz, Andre, and Iowa’s pork producers are
Industrialized Agriculture Increases the Risk of Damage from
In June 2008, the upper Midwest – especially the
Iowa/Cedar River part of eastern Iowa – was hit with a massive flood that far
exceeded the “Great Flood of 1993” (Mutel 2010a; Connerly et al. 2009). Until
that event occurred, common wisdom was that the 1993 event had been a “100-year
flood” (Changnon 1996), a flood so extreme that there would not be
another one like it in our lifetimes. Consequently, when the 2008 flood struck,
many people who thought they lived in safe areas were caught off guard.
Although the flood’s severity varied considerably within the Iowa River
watershed, it inundated some areas that were thought to be well outside the
500-year flood plain (Mutel, 2010a, p. 64). As can be seen in Figure 9, the
University of Iowa in Iowa City was hit very hard by this extreme event: 22
buildings were affected, especially the Arts Campus, at an immediate monetary
cost of roughly $220 million. The city of Cedar Rapids was hit even harder,
especially in its downtown and several nearby neighborhoods.
A series of questions flowed out of the Great Flood of 2008,
especially in light of the earlier event. Very broadly speaking, the core
question was: how shall we humans live with “nature” (the river) now, when the
“natural” has already bee i.e., when there is no longer
any such thing as a “natural” disaster (Hartman and Squires, 2006; Birch and
Wachter, 2006; Achenbach, 2008)? This challenge can be expressed in planning theoretic
terms: embedded in a humanly-transformed and –managed natural river basin
ecosystem, the residents and other users of the Iowa River watershed confront a
“wicked problem” (Rittel and Webber, 1973) when trying to figure out how to
recover from the flood in a sustainable and resilient way.
Figure 9. The University of Iowa’s
Flooded Arts Campus,
June 2008.
The flood itself resulted from the confluence of three
extreme events: heavy winter snow, which produced significant flooding in
A e and heavy rains in June. Many observers have also
suggested that the industrialization of crop production contributed
significantly to the intensity of the June 2008 flood (Achenbach, 2008; Mute,
2010a). Heavy spring rains fell on a landscape that had been radically
reengineered: in the years since European settlers first arrived in the 1830s,
tallgrass prairies have been replaced by plowed fields, fields have been tiled
and drained so as to speed the run off of precipitation, streams and creeks
have been channeled and straightened, wetlands have been drained and filled,
cultivated land has been extended closer to creeks, floodplains have been
filled and developed, floodwalls and levees were built, stream gauges and
monitoring systems were established,
integrated basin-wide system modeling has been initiated, and—in the case of
the Iowa River—the Coralville Dam was built to provide a measure of flood
control. Moreover, conventional farming practices left fields compacted and without
vegetation to absorb late winter precipitation. Many observers speculate that
global climate change might also be altering precipitation patterns in such a
way as to produce more severe storms. Consequently, one can argue that the
severity of the 2008 flood was not a “natural” event but instead—at least in
significant part—a consequence of human action.
It would be easy to follow the familiar path and focus
exclusively on flood management without taking into account the multiple
connections between floods and the many other issue areas discussed in this
paper. But, as Swedish water scientist Malin Falkenmark () argues,
“the challenge is how to advance from today’s single-component approaches…to
integrated approaches to catchments [or river basins] keeping both biophysical
and societal processes in focus.”
Industrialized Agriculture Is Hollowing out the Heartland
Industrialization of the farm econo}