Chris Jones spent much of his career as Research Engineer with the University of Iowa. He is avid outdoorsman and one of the nation’s experts on the Upper Mississippi River ecosystem. He’s the author of The Swine Republic, a book that explains the damage being caused by Iowa’s agriculture industry. Recently on WCPt 820Am, we talked about:
How Chris has a double story to tell. One is the story of industrial agriculture, the damage it is doing to the environment. This is a 21st century update to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. The second story is about our politics, how big ag’s power extended to the university system and stood between you and the telling of facts.
The environmental impact of Iowa’s Ag business?
His new book ‘Swine Republic.”
I read one sentence and nearly lost my mind. Chris wrote,
“We’re polluting water at a continental scale. Iowa occupies 4.5 percent of land area in the Mississippi Basin but contributes to 29 percent of the nitrate and 15 percent of the phosphorus polluting the Gulf of Mexico. What we do here is impacting water quality 1,500 miles away.”
How the impact is also felt along racial lines.
His now former blog on Iowa waterways.
The Supreme Court’s recent decision to limit the clean water act’s definition of wetlands and what it will that mean for Iowa and for the hemisphere.
ALSO: be sure to read this Outside Magazine piece featuring Chris’ thoughts on Iowa farming and how the dirty water is spreading beyond the state borders to a stream near you. An excerpt:
Every year, millions of pounds of raw hog waste are applied to the state’s corn and soybean fields. Nutrients from fertilizer wash into lakes and streams, poisoning water that flows into the Missouri and Mississippi river basins, which provide drinking water to a combined 28 million Americans. The state’s tributaries to the Mississippi have played an outsized role in creating the Gulf of Mexico’s annual “dead zone,” an oxygen-depleted area of the ocean.
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