When Fertility Leads To A Dead Zone

For the last century, Americans have been stuck in a simplistic mechanical model of prosperity: The more we produce, the more prosperous we become. One of the most profound refutations of that model is the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone, a great area of the Gulf of Mexico, spreading from the delta of the Mississippi River in Louisiana, where no marine animals can live.

This dead zone is created by the great industrial agricultural push in America’s MidWest. For generations, farmers have been told by the government that they’ll be most successful if they fertilize their fields with fertilizers created, not through the natural decay of plant materials, but in factories far from the field. Those fertilizers then run off into streams that feed into rivers that feed into the Mississippi River, which flows into the Gulf of Mexico. There, the fertilizers create such an intense bloom of plant growth in the water that the decaying plant material creates a vast stretch of water in the Gulf of Mexico that is starved of oxygen, and kills any animal unlucky enough to swim into it.

The maps below show the results of a recent study by the US Geological Survey, tracing these fertilizers, nitrogen and phosphorus back to the states upstream where they enter the Mississippi River watershed.

The following states have only 31 percent of the area in the Mississippi River watershed, but they contribute 75 percent of the nitrogen and phosphorus that lead to the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone:
Illinois
Iowa
Indiana
Missouri
Arkansas
Kentucky
Tennessee
Ohio
Mississippi

That study ought to have been done by the US Department of Agriculture, given that it’s agriculture that delivers so much of the pollution into the dead zone. People ask what good organic, sustainable farming does us. This new USGS study makes it clear. Organic, sustainable farming could spare us dead zones.

Iowa Peace Up And Quit

I’m going through our directory of progressive resources for each of the 50 states, and it’s downright depressing to see the number of organizations and sources of information that have simply called it quits.

For the last few years, for example, at our page for Iowa, we have had a listing for “Iowa Peace and Protest Books” at IowaPeace.com. Now, the web site simply isn’t there. It’s held by a domain squatter who is trying to sell the domain for a profit.

Luckily, for every site that’s quit, a new site has popped up to keep the fight going.

So, we welcome Iowa Independent, Century of the Common Iowan, Bleeding Heartland, and Iowa Progress to our progressive directory of Iowa, along with the Iowa Secularists.

To these relatively new voices, I have this advice: Persistence is at least half of the political battle.

Iowa Democrat Leon Boswell Betrayed Liberty

It’s the weekend of the Iowa Republican straw poll, and so the attention of political junkies everywhere is riveted on Iowa, just aching to know what decision a bunch of Republicans who have been bribed and boozed by the Republican presidential candidates will make about who ought to become President of the United States in 2008.

What better time to discuss a more serious political story from Iowa? This story focuses on one mystery: What led one of Iowa’s Democratic members of the United States House of Representatives, Leonard Boswell, to betray his Oath of Office, and help the Republicans attack a crucial segment of the Constitution of the United States of America?

One week ago tonight, the House of Representatives rushed a piece of legislation called the Protect America Act through to passage. The Protect America Act, in spite of its Orwellian name, does not protect America at all. What the Protect America Act actually does is protect a secret spy program, the Total Information Awareness project, which began years ago in the Pentagon, but was shuffled into secrecy in the National Security Agency when the public found out about what the program actually does.

The Total Information Awareness project was designed to take many bits of private information, like medical records, logs of telephone calls, and credit card statements, and pieces them together into a profile, a collection of personal information about anyone that the government could look through without restraint at its convenience. Just think about what someone could do with that kind information.

Now imagine that such a database were able to gain access to your emails, your web surfing habits, and even the information stored on your cell phone. That’s what is enabled by the Protect America Act. The Protect America Act appears to be timed to close down a class action lawsuit that would have revealed to the public the extent of a gigantic electronic surveillance operation run by the NSA that diverts and stores records of immense amounts of Internet traffic that reveals some of the most personal details about Americans’ lives, all searchable by government officials at their whim.

The Protect America Act keepts that Internet surveillance operation alive, and puts just two people in control of it: Alberto Gonzales and John Michael McConnell, who many people do not realize is one of the original architects of the Total Information Awareness spy program.

The provisions of the Protect America Act are in flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which is part of the Bill of Rights. Once the government starts spying, the law allows government agents to go from location to location, searching and searching wherever they want, without having to tell anyone at all who the target of the search is. There is no meaningful judicial or congressional power of oversight over this program. Everything takes place at the discretion of Alberto Gonzales and John Michael McConnell, who are in effect made unstoppable.

Why did Leon Boswell vote for this terrible law? Why would he, knowing how dishonest Alberto Gonzales has been, and knowing how the Bush White House has abused the spy powers it has already been given, grant the Bush White House and Alberto Gonzales even more power? Was he blackmailed?

The Democrats of Iowa’s 3rd congressional district will be seeing Congressman Boswell this month. I hope that they sit him down and ask him these questions, and don’t stop until they get a straight answer.