Cultural Capital & Nutrient Reduction:An example from Iowa

Cornelia Butler Floracflora@iastate.edu

Political Capital

Cultural Capital

Natural Capital

Human Capital

Financial Capital

Social Capital

Healthy EcosystemEconomic Security

Social Inclusion

Built Capital

Cultural Capital • Cosmovisión-relation

of the seen and unseen• Ways of knowing• Food and language• Ways of being • Definition of what can

be changed

What we think possible to change

Acknowledging that nature has multiple values and that environmental deterioration is not inevitable often requires a change in cultural capital. Cultural hegemony can devalue the importance, meaning, and uses of natural resources for non-financial purposes

Cultural capital …

• determines how we see the world • how the seen is related to the

unseen • what we value, and what we think

possible to change Cultural capital impacts and is impacted by the other capitals

Des Moines Water Works N Extraction Plant • Uses ion exchange to extract Nitrates• Costs $7,000 per day• Denitrification of portion of flow• Zero content effluent backmixed into stream• Nitrate slurry released downstream of plant• Extremely precise nitrate monitoring– 9.5-9.9 mg/L (10mg/L unsafe)

March 2013 Historic Nitrate Levels in Des Moines Water Works’ Source Water

The new nitrate concentration levels found in the Des Moines and Raccoon River follows the continued upward trend of nitrate concentrations. Fertilizer is the largest source of nitrogen input in the Mississippi River Basin and has increased more than six-fold since the 1950s, and thus is a major contributor to Hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico.

This is the worst we’ve ever seen,” said Bill Stowe, manager of Des Moines Water Works, which serves about

500,000 customers in central Iowa. Both rivers are used as water sources for the

Des Moines plant.

• The Raccoon and Des Moines Rivers above Des Moines were at a record 24 and 18 mg of nitrates/liter in May.

• The EPA requires nitrate in drinking water be below 10 mgs/liter. Above that level can be deadly to infants younger than 6 months because it reduces the oxygen carried in their blood. Pregnant women and adults with reduced stomach acidity should not to drink water above the EPA limit.

• Des Moines had to switch on a $4 million nitrate-removal system for the first time since 2007, raising the cost of providing water to consumers from 5-10 cents/1000 gallons to an estimated $4-$5.

• Associated Press, June 5, 2013

The situation got worse in 2014 and 2015

• In January, 2015, Des Moines Waterworks threatened to file a lawsuit against three rural Iowa counties for not regulating farmers’ nitrate runoff from their fields.

• The Des Moines Water Works files a federal lawsuit • Why, with the threat of a lawsuit, did water

monitoring decrease and behavior did not change?• The farmers say there is no problem• Farm Bureau and DNR calls for cooperation, not

alienation

Yet there are different responses to the “facts” and how they are gathered: views of the

situation are completely different

Their cultural capital is different

Iowa farmer

Bill Stowe, Water Works Director

Snippets from April 18, 2015 New York Times article “Conflict Over Soil and Water Quality Puts‘Iowa Nice’ to a Test”

ScientificInformationabout conditionsand threats

Improved conditions

Old Model of Environmental Research and Policy

Cultural capital determines what scientific informationwe accept and how we interpret conditions – inevitable or threats

Facts often do not determine behavior or policy

Policies as hypotheses

Policies suggest how one variable (such as land use) impacts another (such as water quality) – there is an assumption about how action and results are linked.

PoliticAL Capital includes stated objectives, operating procedures, laws and legal codes

• Legislation, leading to laws• Executive decrees that determine how the

laws are interpreted and enforced• Contracts and agreements, what one party

does that depends on what the other party does.

• Powerful entities that can influence the implementation of policies

Types of policies• Reactive – Des Moines constructed the world’s

largest nitrate removal system• Directive (requires a control mechanism)• Restrictive (requires a control mechanism)• Enabling (depends on incentives and initiative)– Incentives are both direct and indirect – and they

can be perverse

Iowa watershed policy determined dominant cultural capital

• Voluntary individual choice • Belief in the efficacy of “sound science”

to convince polluters “to do the right thing.”• Taxes must be low • We feed the world with corn and

soybeans• Saving the family farm by letting farms do

what they need to do

Water is contested as

• Natural capital (drinking and irrigation use to exchange value)• Financial capital (input for industrial production, selling of

water rights – exchange value)• Cultural capital (lifestyle/ use value)• Human capital (impacts on health)• Built capital – ecological modernization/techno fix• Political capital (relates to all of the above)

Possible Solutions-Positive Sanctions• In November 2010, Iowa voters overwhelmingly passed the

Water and Land Legacy Amendment to create a Trust Fund that will allocate 3/8th ₵ from all new sales tax revenue to invest in improving water quality (financial, built, & political capital).

• Des Moines Water Works should use creative financing to pay upstream farmers in Raccoon & Des Moines River watersheds to adopt practices that reduce runoff – boxes, more complex rotations, cover crops, buffers, wetlands (financial & built caps).

• Build strong watershed associations. A viable Raccoon River Watershed Association already exists (social & political capital).

• Continue and strengthen Iowa State University Extension Education functions, the Iowa Food Systems Council’s policy work, and other local food and sustainable ag organizations.

• Build a consumer food movement to counter political power of Farm Bureau and commodity organization.

Possible Solutions - Negative sanctions

• Build political support for EPA to enforce the Clean Water Act – with effective timelines.

• Increase funding of IDALS to properly staff existing enforcement programs.

• Transform USDA farm programs by– Requiring all who receive federal farm subsidies to

have a whole-farm conservation plan with teeth.– Get rid of perverse incentives in crop insurance

program, including reducing federal share. Increase coverage to greater diversity of crops.

– Strengthen CRP and CSP