Des Moines Register
10-28-07
Doak: Show a little respect, Iowa: Take care of a gift - the water
Richard Doak
With huge chunks of southern California smoldering from drought-induced
wildfires, and with an anxious Atlanta, Ga., watching its water supply shrink by
the day, Iowans should be counting our blessings.
We have what much of the world would, and sometimes does, kill for - abundant
fresh water.
Yet, as has been said before and can't be said often enough, we treat our water
like dirt.
In a world growing desperate for fresh water, we have plenty, but we show it no
respect.
We dump farm chemicals and manure in it, we turn it brown, we let municipal
waste flow into it, we channelize it and make it barren, we often can't swim or fish
in it. We send nutrients downstream to create a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.
We have three times more impaired bodies of water than we have counties, and
our namesake river, the Iowa, is on the list of the nation's most endangered.
If states could be guilty of sin, Iowa would be on the road to perdition for defiling
a precious gift.
The state government claims to be making progress in cleaning up the water, but
there's a long way to go before it sparkles enough to be the attraction to
newcomers and the delight to old-timers that it should be.
The shortsightedness of fouling the water is especially tragic in an age when
much of the world's population should be looking for places just like Iowa - high
enough to be unaffected by rising oceans and wet enough to sustain agriculture,
industry and recreation.
The cover story in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine added to a mound of
recent alarms about chronic drought in the Colorado River basin. The river
sustains much of the West, yet its flow isn't enough to supply all the water
Westerners think they're entitled to. There are bound to be conflicts over water,
and at some point growth will come to a screeching halt.
Dry regions all over the world will face similar constraints. Areas that depend on
mountain snow melt, as the American West does, will find themselves in crisis as
the snow packs disappear and the rivers dry up.
Between low-lying coastal areas flooded by rising oceans and arid interiors
where rivers run low, climate change is expected to displace millions of people.
The wildfires in California and the shrinking reservoirs in Georgia might or might
not be evidence of climate change. They could be just normal cyclical events, but
they are almost certainly a glimpse of a future in which such events become
more frequent.
Iowa is not immune to drought and fire. In 2005, wind-whipped grass fires swept
across southwest Iowa so rapidly that fire departments couldn't keep up. In
pioneer times, raging prairie fires awed and terrified settlers. Drought hits Iowa
periodically but not chronically - so far.
No one knows for sure how climate change will play out, but models examined by
the Union of Concerned Scientists suggest that Iowa won't be severely affected.
Iowa might have somewhat wetter springs and somewhat drier summers. Iowa
might begin to feel a lot like Kansas. Perhaps the most damage will come from
more pests being able to survive winter, resulting in more disease and crop
damage.
Overall, it looks as if Iowans might have reason to count their blessings once
again as climate change unfolds.
If that's the case, the least we can do is show a little gratitude.
The way to show gratitude for nature's gifts is to respect them.
Let's start by becoming better stewards of a most precious gift, the water.
Iowa's magnificent soil would be useless without the just-right 30 or so inches of
rain that fall each year. That rain gives Iowa tens of thousands of miles of rivers
and streams.
That flowing water, so absent in much of the rest of the world, could provide
recreation and more sheer joy of living for Iowa - if it were cleaner and more
inviting.
Making Iowa an ever-better place to live requires action on several fronts, but the
single most important is this: Clean up the water.
RICHARD DOAK is a retired Register editor and columnist and a lecturer in
journalism at Iowa State University.