May 19

Some of our conversations with Liz Kolbe at Practical Farmers of Iowa began to push my understanding of environmental justice and forced me to revaluate my mental picture of the faces that fall victim to environmental justice issues. At Furman I took a course on community and environmental health, which allowed me to imagine environmental justice as a fight between the wealthy and the poor. Rich corporations and the consumers of industrial production benefit from production and release harmful externalities at the health and economic expense of the poor. Toxic technological trash is dumped from developed nations to scrapyards in developing regions, and factories are built in low-income areas where people don’t have the power to fight the poisonous plumes that fill their neighborhoods. It wasn’t the fault of the course that inspired my boxed-in, rich vs. poor understanding of environmental justice issues, but exposure to farm related issues has begun to push my partial perception a bit further.

Liz shared a case with us in which a resident of Iowa reported heavy pesticide applications during high winds that had been sprayed near a residential community and school. In this situation, residents may have more or less wealth than the farmer who got away with spraying the public trail. In this case and others, the “winners” were not the individuals or groups that maintained the upper hand because of wealth but because of political power and insufficient policy infrastructure. Liz told us about the need for reform in the process of reporting drift. The Pesticide Bureau believed that making reports more accessible would increase reports and take extra time to sort through. This lack of adequate and effective governance makes food producers the winners in their ability to behave with little regulation and repercussions for their misdemeanors, and leaves residents and other farmers victim to pollution, contamination and injustice.

The case of Des Moines Water Works vs. three Iowan drainage districts was an even more interesting challenge to my previously established understanding winners and losers in environmental justice issues. When I first heard of the lawsuit, it was easy to assume that a large corporation like Des Moines Water Works would have more power in wealth to win the case than the counties it was suing. Environmental attorney Josh Mandelbaum assured us otherwise. The state’s political power falls largely in the hands of farmers and, in this case, made it a hard (and ultimately unachievable) win for Des Moines. The outcome of the case leaves nitrogen release into the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers unregulated and other measures for Iowa water protection (e.g. buffers) voluntary. If the negative environmental impacts of agriculture remain unregulated in the state, Des Moines Water Works will not only acquire an even larger denitrification bill, but Des Moines residents and other down-stream dwellers face threats to their health. Both of our experts today inadvertently suggested a need improvements in regulation to shorten the environmental justice gap between all political, social, and economic groups in the state of Iowa.