Water Hardly Worth Wading In

“Wade in the Water” was one of the songs they sang at the program yesterday afternoon. Humming it, subconsciously I suppose, as I walked around the lake this morning – enjoying the calm reflection of the bridge and surrounding trees in glassy waters disturbed only by a lazy duck or two, the occasional flip of a fish, and the “ploink” of a fisherwoman’s baited cast – a very different body of water came to mind. Spewing oil from a deep water well; black feathers shellacked to the birds they cover; dead fish floating in the tides of a poisoned Gulf Coast; company execs sputtering fecklessly in the face of the Pandora's Box they have so matter-of-factly opened. But picturing the “black gold” still spilling and staining the waters and beaches and habitats and beyond I recalled how the oil in the Gulf is only the newest poison poured into the toxic cocktail that has become those waters; this new toxin stirred or shaken along with the farm chemicals already washed down the river from Iowa fields where they were sprayed as a means to feed the world.

I mused aloud, recently, with my new friend Fred about the ethical dilemma that we Iowans now face – utterly dependent as we are on an economy inseparable from farming practices that have become standard since the Second World War. Mono-cultures (largely corn and soy beans) grown on a larger and larger scale, evoked from the soil by increasing amounts of herbicides and fertilizers, using seeds hybridized to maximize the nutritional elements most commercially desirable. Fred, a world leader in the field of sustainable agriculture, readily agreed that there is a problem; but he was protective of the farmers. Farmers, he noted, are hard-working, capable people who were challenged by a hungry world to produce more and more food that was less and less expensive. And using the best that science could offer them and the smartest practices available to them they succeeded, marvelously. Beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. The fact that we now know that those scientific enhancements and agricultural practices came with collateral damage doesn’t diminish their accomplishments – or their integrity. They did what the world asked them to do.

But as often is the case, yesterday’s solutions become today’s problems. Virtually everything we now eat is made out of the corn that we have engineered to produce maximum sugar that we consume in the form of high fructose corn syrup that “mainlines” sugar into our bodies, or cattle fattened on feed lots that serve up a diet that cattle were never designed to eat. And now we know that all those chemicals used to extract those ever-increasing yields aren’t doing the soil any long-term favors, and that the Mississippi River has come to serve as a kind of agricultural mega-toilet down which we annually flush the residue of all that science. And the result is a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico spanning an area more than 8500 square miles. “Dead” perhaps needing no further explanation.

So, in the name of “feeding the world” we are now in the process of killing it. I suppose irony is one form of humor. But I'm guessing that our children and grandchildren won't be laughing. Another old song reassures us that “God's got the whole world in his hands,” but I think God would have us remember that in a real and immediate sense it's in our hands as well. We are among the many hands of God. If, then, we want to continue to have water in which we and our children are willing to wade, we'd better start living our lives differently.

That, of course, is the ethical problem to which I referred earlier. It was one thing to do what we were doing when we didn’t know any better. But as the poet Drew Dellinger asks from the point of view of great great grandchildren,

“what did you do
once
you
knew?”