Today, after we woke up and ate breakfast, we got a couple hours of free time to hang out in downtown Iowa City, which was exciting because we don’t get very much free time, especially not in a populated area. As in any new city that I go to, I found a good record store and went immediately there. It was called Record Collectors, and it was a pretty cool store for being in Iowa. I bought The Judas Factor’s “Ballads in Blue China” LP, which I’ve never seen before and am excited about. After that was done, I basically wandered around the city with everyone else and watched them shop in various clothing stores. At one point we went to a local ice cream shop and I got a slushy smoothie. The town itself was pretty hipster, and so were most of the stores that we went in. Hedley is a pretty preppy individual so it was funny to see her trying to navigate the world of hipster fashion while looking extremely out of place, especially when she bought a ring at this one shop and the girl at the counter said, “I think this is a step for you in the right direction”.

Our free time ended with a trip to Mary Mascher’s house, who is a Democratic state legislator in Iowa. She had organized a type of panel discussion in her living room which ended up being really interesting. The panel included Jim, who was an activist and did a lot of planting of trees and restoration of native habitats, Lance, who was acquiring his PhD and doing research on climate change, Sally, who was also a Democratic state legislator, and David, an organic urban farmer in Iowa City. We talked about a lot of large questions regarding agriculture, climate change, and politics, and I found myself agreeing with a lot of what Jim said, as he took a pretty radical stance on the side of small-scale sustainable organic farming that most mimicked the natural environment. He said that Iowa has the most changed landscape of any state in the United States which makes sense, given that Iowa was mostly covered in wetlands before European immigrants settled here. It still saddens me to think about all of those wetlands being drained to plant rows and rows of the same crops across the entire landscape of Iowa. 60-70% of Iowa’s land is corn and soybean fields. One thing that Lance brought up that I thought was really interesting is how much building, roads, and other types of pavement contribute to climate change. I vaguely understood this argument but would like to know more about this. We also talked a lot about population control in the conversation because Sally was making the common argument that conventional agriculture is necessary because we need to feed the world. However, we finally came to the conclusion that it was not population that needed to be controlled, since population is leveling off in most industrialized countries and that will most likely happen in any country that is industrialized.  Rather, the demand for food is rising because of the growing middle class in nations such as India and China, and with that rising middle class comes the demand for animal proteins.  Consumerism is driving the bus.