The Des Moines Register from Des Moines, Iowa • Page 19

INSIDE JAMES S. FLANSBURG, editor of the editorial pages, 515-284-8540 Editorials 2C Potomac Fever 2C Books AC Letters 5C mm 3-' June 26, 1988 mtS P. GANNON What is the true value of the land? Sunbay Register By PAUL W. JOHNSON Jit i iiwii imi wm iir Leopold completed his formal education at Yale Forestry School and took his first job with the U.S. Forest Service in the Apache National Forest in the Arizona Territory in 1 909.

The Leopold Center will support research to identify and help reduce negative impacts of agricultural practices. Perhaps someday it will, through its research and with the help of thou sands of Iowa's concerned farmers, show u' how to farm efficiently without destroying the land. At the same time, it can join hands with those farmers to enhance places for wildlife, forests and, yes, even marshes. Perhaps someday, with help from work done at the Leopold Center, we will value the land for its diversity and aesthetic qualities as much as we presently do our lawns and houses. In Leopold's essay, "The Land Ethic," he says, "The key-log which must be moved to release the evolutionary process for an ethic is simply this: Quit thinking about decent land-use as solely an economic problem.

Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." Is Leopold Center our last great hope? Dr. Charles Benbrook, the director of the Agriculture Board of the National Academy of Sciences, recently stated that the Leopold Center may be the last great hope for our land-grant colleges to regain a constructive role in helping farmers practice and profit from resource stewardship. I believe the Leopold Center is the heart and soul of our 1987 Groundwater Protection Act.

Its future now rests with President Gordon Eaton and ISU. They can ignore it or they can nurture it into a research conscience for American agriculture. Aldo Leopold was an Iowan. As we bring back his name 100 years after his birth I hope we will bring home his philosophy as well. Where else but in the heartland should a true land ethic take root? Even on the prairie we must learn to "think like a mountain." When we do, our Groundwater Protection Act will have accomplished its goal.

Paul W. Johnson is a state representative from Decorah. During the 15 years he spent at UW he and his family bought and began restoration of a run-down, sandy farm along the Wisconsin River. Out of this experience came a series of essays that culminated in the publication after his death of "A Sand County Almanac." What is written in that small book by an Iowa native has influenced me more than anything else I've read on conservation and was the source from which came the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. The ideas Leopold espoused are also the source of much discomfort over the center today.

Conservation is getting nowhere In the preface to "A Sand County Almanac," Leopold says, "Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the aesthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture." We have a long way to go, don't we? As I write this we are planting fence row to fence row and drainage ditch to drainage ditch (except where the government pays us handsomely not to). Twenty million acres of Iowa land are being blanketed with pesticides and white "torpedoes" are rolling over the Iowa landscape injecting into its soil $300 million worth of nitrogen, half of which will never enter a cornstalk and a large share of which will end up in our surface and groundwater.

As we presently practice them, are these methods sustainable agriculture? Are they the result of a land ethic that views us as members of a biot-ic community? We continue to destroy our streams, forests and wildlife habitat at an alarming rate. This year in the Legislature we debated the merits of protecting the remaining 26,000 acres of wetlands left in Iowa (out of the original 4 million). We could not pass the bill because certain special interest groups said that in so doing we are taking away the landowner's During Leopold's years in the southwest he wrote frequently about overgrazing and the need to balance our agriculture with the land's capability to sustain itself. While working there he also became more involved in wildlife management and from those experiences eventually wrote the first American text on game management. It is still considered a classic.

He also established the Gila Wilderness Area in 1924, the first in the United States. One particular experience during his tenure in the southwest was to have a profound effect on his thinking in later years. At that time all farmers and game managers believed that predators should be eliminated. Leopold was no exception. One day while working in the mountains he and his co-workers spotted a wolf and her pups playing nearby.

They opened fire and downed the mother wolf and wounded one pup. Leopold wrote 30 years later in "Thinking Like a Mountain" that he "reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes." Leopold says that to the hunter the wolf is "a challenge of fang against bullet. Yet behind these obvious and immediate hopes and fears there lies a deeper meaning, known only to the mountain itself. Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf." Destruction caused by uncontrolled deer herds Leopold went on to talk about the horrible destruction uncontrolled deer herds inflicted on the mountains once predators were eliminated. "So also," wrote Leopold, "with cows.

The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dust bowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea." After a stint as assistant director of the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Leopold worked for three years on a game survey of the Midwest. His original field notes on Iowa were recently uncovered in the move to our new State Historical Building.

During this time Leopold also worked with Jay "Ding" Darling, the nationally known Des Moines Register cartoonist and conservationist, to help him establish Iowa's Fish and Game Commission. It later became our Conservation Commission and is now part of our Department of Natural Resources. This was one of the first such commissions in the United States, and along with the 25-year conservation plan that Darling and Leopold wrote, it became a model for the rest of the nation. In 1933, after teaching part-time, Leopold became the first professor of wildlife management in the United States at the University of Wisconsin. A student there who worked closely with Leopold, Paul Errington, was soon picked to become the first director of Ding Darling's newly established Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit at ISU.

As a result of the collaboration between these three Iowans, dozens of wildlife research units were established at universities across the United States. From 1933 until he died in 1948 while fighting a grass fire on his neighbor's farm, Aldo Leopold continued to teach and do research at UW. One of his most popular courses was on farm wildlife management, and he worked with numerous farmers in the central Wisconsin region to establish and preserve wildlife habitat. Last year our state Legislature passed what is now known nationally as the 1987 Iowa Groundwater Protection Act. It has become a model that officials from such diverse interests as the Environmental Protection Agency and the American Farm Bureau have praised.

The uniqueness of our act lies in its calling upon all Iowans to develop a conservation ethic through a host of programs in research, education and demonstration. One of the most controversial parts of the legislation established the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University. From my first suggestion that we establish such a center, people have expressed discomfort. Administrators at ISU suggested that we call it something else, colleagues in the House of Representatives questioned the wisdom of putting it at ISU, and certain powerful senators asked that it be dropped from the act. In a rare display on the House floor, environmentalists debated each other on an amendment to call it the Rachel Carson Center.

The 25th anniversary of her book, "Silent Spring," was in 1987, and some felt it was appropriate to name the new center at ISU after her. The lobbyists for the Iowa Chemical and Fertilizer Dealers Association were fit to be tied. Just before the debate on the bill they contacted their membership and told them that we were starting an organic-farming center with taxes on their products. A few days later we were met by 400 angry dealers in the Capitol rotunda. One year later the association had not given up.

Their No. 1 request for changes in the 1987 act was to add three chemical-industry members to the 13-person Leopold Center board. The board now consists of persons from our three universities, private colleges, the Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship, the Department of Natural Resources and farmers. Why all the controversy? To a certain extent we asked for it. We could have called it the Center for Excellence in Groundwater, we could have packed the board with every interest group from Du Pont to the Sierra Club, and we could have given it to ISU and let them develop its mission.

We didn't. We called it instead the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture and we structured it the way we did because we actually wanted to make people feel uncomfortable. We wanted the center to stir our consciences. Hunting, hiking along the Mississippi Who was Leopold and why does the name evoke such emotions? Aldo Leopold was born in Burlington, in 1887. His youngest brother, Frederic, still lives there and the Leopold desk company that his grandfather and father developed is still operating.

Leopold's formative years were spent hunting and hiking along the Mississippi bottomlands and bluffs near Burlington. In later years, he wrote about these experiences in an essay called "Goose Music." In it he described a boy who could not remain an atheist when "he saw that there were a hundred-odd species of warblers, each bedecked like the rainbow, and each performing yearly sundry thousands of miles of migration about which scientists wrote wisely but did not understand." Why Iowa By DAVID YEPSEN I Our 3-year-old daughter had an infected throat the other day and I stopped off to pick up a prescription for her. She calls it "pink medicine" and just loves its bubble-gum flavor. The first rule on the little instruction sheet that came with it says she's to take all 'the medicine in proper doses. The pharmacist says that's because, with many medications, patients will start feeling better before they have finished the prescribed amount.

If they quit before the treatment is finished, they can get sick again. The second round could even be harder to treat if they've built up a tolerance for the stuff. Iowa may be in that situation. After years of pain, there's been good economic news. The patient is up and taking nourishment.

The bean-counters show us reports saying Iowa's income is up. The numbers-crunchers show us polls saying Iowans are feeling better. Do Iowa's politicians, academic and business leaders have the stamina to stay with it, finish the medicine, and get Iowa back on the road to more permanent health? Or will they JTT A I AV3 Ireland sings its old lament UBLIN, IRELAND A song by an Irish folk group called the Wolfe Tones echoes a theme of Ireland's painful past, but also serves as up-to-the-minute commentary on conditions in this beautiful but troubled island nation. The song is called "Flight of Earls," a reference to the 1 7th-century emigration of some of Ireland's prominent Catholic families after Protestant England gained domination over this country. It was the leadership class that left in that flight, and now the Irish fear that the same may be happening again.

This time, it's the best and the brightest the college graduates and professionals, lured by better job opportunities and pay abroad who are leading the exodus. In the words of the song: 'We got nothing left to stay for, We have no more left to say, And there isn 't any work for us to do. It's farewell, you boys and girls. Another bloody flight of earls, Our beat asset is our best export too. A visitor from Iowa can't help but be struck by the remarkable similarities between the Irish lament heard in song, parliamentary debate and newspaper stories, and the situation back home.

So many speeches, reports and news stories in Iowa the past few years Same song, Irish version. have recited the same set of facts and fears: A sluggish economy providing few job opportunities causes the most able and ambitious, especially the young, to seek their fortunes far away, leaving behind a dwindling and graying population. "It's not war nor fear nor famine. That makes us leave this time, We 're not going to join McAlpine's fusiliers. We 've got brains and we've got vision, We've got education, too, But we just can't throw away these precious years." The headlines in the Irish newspapers are reminiscent of many seen during the 1980s in Iowa and other hard-hit parts of rural America.

"Flood of Exiles Alarms Church," shouts a page-one headline in the Irish Independent, reporting the fears of the Archbishop of Dublin that the flight of the young may turn Ireland into "the retirement home of Europe." Archbishop Desmond Connell, the story reports, said that if the emigration continues, "it will mean that for many people, Ireland may become a place where they are born, educated and from which they leave and to which they may return on their retirement." He warned that Ireland's politicians even may be tempted to treat the exodus of job-seekers as a "safety valve" to keep unemployment, and social-welfare costs, down in this country. It's estimated that 100,000 Irish have emigrated from this land of 3 million in the past four years equivalent to more than 8 million leaving the United States. With a national unemployment rate of 18 percent, triple the U.S. rate, the Irish economy simply can't provide the jobs for its people. It's the old Irish story of having to look over the seas for opportunity, a story that has populated America, Australia and Europe with homesick Irish immigrants and their offspring one decade after another.

"So we walk the streets of London, And the streets of Baltimore, And we meet at night in several Boston bars. We're the leaders of the future, But we 're far away from home. And we dream of you beneath the Irish stars." Our flight from Shannon Airport to New York City was filled with young, college-age Irish coming to the United States on student visas, presumably for summer jobs. But it's uncertain how many of them will return. New York, Boston and other East Coast cities have seen an influx of illegal Irish immigrants in the past few years an estimated 100,000 in New York, 30,000 in Boston.

Strict U.S. immigration laws permit only a trickle of legal immigrants from Ireland less than 1 ,000 a year so thousands more come as students and tourists, and simply stay as illegal aliens. Go in to any Boston pub that serves Guinness stout and you'll find them. "So switch off your new computers, Because the writing's on the wall. We're leaving as our fathers did before.

Take a look at Dublin's airport. Or the boat that leaves Northwall, There'll be no youth unemployment any more." IJ rights to do as he or she pleases with land and thus we were reducing the land "value." Where are the rights of the land? What is the true value of the land? that in 1980 there were only 58,000 part-time workers who were looking for full-time work. It's just one example of how Iowa is better off than it was a year ago but still isn't cured. Much of Iowa's new-found optimism is based on shaky foundations. Farm-income and sales-tax revenues may be rising, but much of that is based on federal farm subsidies.

No one really believes the deficit-ridden federal treasury can continue those payments in the farm legislation for 1990. Farm prices are up? Sure, and most of that is weather-related and won't last after good rains. Yes, $10 beans are great if you have some to sell. And so it goes with lots of statistics. New business starts may be increasing, but the bankruptcy rate may be rising, too.

There may be more jobs, but a lot of them are minimum-wage jobs. The population may growing, but the fastest growing segment are elderly Iowans who are no longer productive workers in their retirement. Many of these statistics mask a decline in the middle class. The poor get poorer and the rich get richer but, on average, Iowa feels pretty good. Some of us have it pretty good but the Food Bank of Iowa is building a new ware must take its economic TOM WEINMAN medicine house to meet increasing demand for free food.

It's like the old story about the guy with one foot in the bucket of ice water and another on a bed of hot charcoal. When asked how he feels, he replies: "on average, pretty good." Who wants to wallow in gloom? No one. But who wants to be a Pollyanna? The good news doesn't mean Iowa can again tolerate inefficient schools or highways built to nowhere. None of this good news suggests the duplication in higher education is now affordable. Some business types, who think they can make it just by sitting on daddy's money, still need to learn to take risks.

Sick communities can't tolerate older, in-bred local leadership structures. Bankers need to invest in their communities instead of increasing their shipments of billions of Iowa dollars to Washington to invest in the federal debt. Too bad this medicine isn't as tasty and doesn't work as fast as the "pink medicine" our child adores. There's no bubble-gum flavoring in the medicine Iowa still needs to take. David Yepsen is The Register's chief political writer.

lose their nerve and slip back into the complacent do-nothing lethargy of the 1970s that lead to the problems facing the state today? But the drought serves as a reminder that the good news can shrivel as fast as a corn leaf in 105-degree temperatures. It's a relapse and a clear message that Iowa still must make some changes to have a brighter future. Even the good news was deceptive. Frankly, if there is any good news to this drought, it may a painful but needed reminder of how Iowa's economy is still too dependent on agriculture. We haven't finished taking the medicine of diversification.

The statistics often touted by politicians and other government-types can be misleading. Perfectly good statistics can be used to paint a false picture, something politicians and civic boosters just love to do. Here is an example: According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 71,000 Iowans in 1987 who were working part-time who said they would like to get full-time work. A city the size of Waterloo, population 75,000, is underemployed. But the 71,000 figure is a decrease from the 86,000 from a year earlier.

Good news? In a sense. But it is not good news if you consider I.