James Larew is an attorney in Iowa City who served as general counsel and chief of staff for former Governor Chet Culver. This post is a revised version of a letter he sent to Polk County supervisors as a public comment before their July 1 meeting.
We are on the cusp of a civil rights movement—a movement to protect citizens’ fundamental right to access clean water.
In the mid-1840s, our ancestors marveled at the “well-watered” rivers and creeks and the readily-available water supply.
But for the confluence of the abundant and clean waters of the Raccoon and Des Moines Rivers, the City of Des Moines and the nearby communities would likely never have amounted to anything. Instead, that resource allowed for the founding of a capital city and a robust economy.
Centuries ago, in English and early-American common law, natural rights were those considered universal and inalienable—they could not be taken away or surrendered.
Today, our constitution and our laws speak of fundamental rights. Fundamental rights are the legal embodiment of natural rights. They are the rights that our governments recognize and protect within the legal system. They are the rights that assure that citizens are treated with dignity and respect.
Having access to clean water is such a natural right, a fundamental right that must be protected. Consistent with these rights our Iowa Code describes water occurring in a basin or watercourse, or other bodies of water, as “public water and public wealth of the people” and, as such, “are subject to the control by the state.” Iowa Code section 455B.262(3).
Governments—such as the Polk County Board of Supervisors—exist to protect natural rights, fundamental rights and statutory rights of the people.
The Central Iowa Source Water Research Assessment (CISWRA) study was commissioned in 2023 by the Polk County Board of Supervisors, paid for with federal taxpayer funds.
The CISWRA panel includes some of Iowa’s and the nation’s foremost experts on water quality issues. After two years of study, they have concluded, in “Currents of Change,” that farm pollution threatens the ability of Iowans to drink clean water and to interact safely with rivers, streams and lakes in the watersheds of the Des Moines and Raccoon Rivers.
In Iowa, practices of the “industrial-agricultural-complex” directly impinge on Iowans’ fundamental right to access clean water.
Two executive agencies of Iowa state government—the Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship (IDALS)—are responsible for monitoring and regulating Iowa farms and protecting Iowa’s water.
Although satellite photos suggest that there are thousands of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) in existence, these two agencies report only fuzzy statistics in the numbers of farms and animal feeding operations they should be regulating.
The term “regulatory capture” describes how a regulatory agency, which has been created to protect the public interest, instead advances the commercial and political concerns of the special interest groups that the agency has been tasked with regulating.
It is difficult to imagine more glaring examples of captured regulatory agencies in Iowa than DNR and IDALS. The captures have resulted in threats to public health and safety and environmental degradation: the very characteristics of the waters flowing through Polk County that the CISWRA report describes.
The present untenable situation, imposed on Iowans by a dominant industrial-agricultural power structure, is not a surprise. It is the predictable result of an unbalanced system that, on the one hand, applies very few anti-degradation mandates on farm operations to reduce the flows of nitrate pollution in our water while, on the other hand, imposes millions of dollars of mitigation costs facilities on cities, along with mandatory use-limits caused by pollution-caused clean-water shortages.
With the CISWRA report, cracks finally are beginning to appear in that power structure.
Iowans’ fundamental right to access clean water is being damaged. Once one of the healthiest states, Iowa is now is saddled with the second highest cancer rate in the nation. And Iowa is the only state where that rate is increasing. That seems to correlate with the rise of industrial-agricultural practices. Those practices include the excessive production of corn and soybeans; the over-use of manufactured nutrients; and the slathering on the land of livestock manure in amounts that are often far in excess of amounts than can be utilized by those crops.
Having framed right to access clean water for personal, business, and recreational uses as fundamental, Iowans want and deserve a moral commitment from their elected officials that this right will be protected and will not be traded away for political favors from powerful pressure groups.
This demand for moral clarity can no longer be answered by calls for “patience.” Nor can it be answered by calls for ever-expanding and expensive water treatment facilities to mitigate the poisons that are injected into water sources by agricultural operations upstream. The exercise of fundamental rights and human dignity require more than such calls.
Throughout our state, in the past thirty years, there has been an undeclared war waged upon citizens’ fundamental right to access clean water. The effects of this war have been made more visible recently in Polk County by orders that citizens must diminish their uses of clean waters made scarce by the rural contamination of otherwise-plentiful water supplies. This pollution-caused scarcity has revealed the yawning gulf between words and deeds of too many elected officials who voice general concerns about Iowa’s water quality but do nothing effectively to improve the dire situation.
Historically, clean water has been the lifeblood of this region and this state—a precious commodity. Elected officials who fail to address the protection of this fundamental right, and to preserve this lifeblood, will be derelict in their duties.
The heart of the matter is that elected officials in Polk County must ask themselves: am I doing the right thing for the moral and physical health of our citizens?
Central Iowa’s water quality crisis is a national, not just a Polk County, news story. In responding favorably and adequately to the recommendations of the experts it retained to perform a thorough study of the area’s water pollution crisis, Polk County can be a leader that Iowa needs. The Board of Supervisors has the opportunity to re-make Polk County before the eyes of Iowa and the rest of the nation.
If it fails to do so, if the sparks of citizen support for effective action are, instead, smothered by the false narratives in slick commercials plastered across airwaves by industrial-agriculture apologists, what will come is a radical new militancy of those who seek the recognition and protection of the fundamental right to access clean water—in our homes, in our businesses; and in the streams, rivers and lakes where, historically, Iowans once upon a time broadly enjoyed decent outdoor water-based recreational opportunities.
Our state motto proclaims: “Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain.” Citizens’ militancy to secure their right to access clean water, if required, will be waged in the highest tradition of Iowa freedom and thereby securing government’s power to improve the lives of our citizens.
Editor’s note from Laura Belin: Here is the full text of the Central Iowa Source Water Resource Assessment (CISWRA) final report. The executive summary can be found here.
Aerial photo of downtown Des Moines showing confluence of Raccoon River and Des Moines River is by cnetten, available via Shutterstock.
1 Comment
Kudos to water quality advocate Larew
Let’s all hope that Iowans are waking up to the crisis in our water quality. Shouldn’t take a shortage or the highest cancer rate in the nation to raise concern. Thanks, Larew and others who are fighting for our very long term survival.
Dean Lerner Fri 11 Jul 8:54 PM