A Tragedy
This story out of the Friday, March 24th, 2006 edition of The Des Moines Register saddens me as a former Iowan.
Rivers in Iowa among the most highly polluted
Why can't the Iowa Legislature stand up to the agriculture industry and set real standards that will clean up Iowa's groundwater, punishing those responsible for this mess? The fallacy of hurting the small farmer with regulations is only hogwash propaganda produced by the Farm Bureau and other interests to protect the industrialists.
When I was young, I enjoyed swimming and canoeing in Iowa's lakes and rivers. It angers me to think that they probably were contaminated, although probably not near the level of today.
There is hope, however, if the powers that be act now. Here in Germany, for example, the Rhine was declared dead after a mercury spill from Switzerland in the mid 1980's, and the Elbe was terribly polluted from Czechoslovakian and East German sources before the wall came down. Today, both rivers are clean enough to swim in, and their fish populations have returned.
Rivers in Iowa among the most highly polluted
Why can't the Iowa Legislature stand up to the agriculture industry and set real standards that will clean up Iowa's groundwater, punishing those responsible for this mess? The fallacy of hurting the small farmer with regulations is only hogwash propaganda produced by the Farm Bureau and other interests to protect the industrialists.
When I was young, I enjoyed swimming and canoeing in Iowa's lakes and rivers. It angers me to think that they probably were contaminated, although probably not near the level of today.
There is hope, however, if the powers that be act now. Here in Germany, for example, the Rhine was declared dead after a mercury spill from Switzerland in the mid 1980's, and the Elbe was terribly polluted from Czechoslovakian and East German sources before the wall came down. Today, both rivers are clean enough to swim in, and their fish populations have returned.
Comments