A Watershed Year: Anatomy of the Iowa Floods of 2008

Epilogue

Epilogue My office window overlookstheIowaRiverindowntownIowaCity.Sometimes I glance up from work to see flocks of gulls the size of small clouds swooping over the water, or dozens of feeding swallows, or soaring bald eagles searching for fish. Once, even here in the city, an otter bobbed in the water below my window. Often people fish along the river’s gravel shores, chatting and hauling in buckets of catch. But I have also heard the shouts of rescue workers probing the river bottom for the bodies of boaters who were swept over the nearby dam, and I have watched Norway rats the size of cats scurry along the river’s banks at dusk. I have seen what this river can give and what it can take. I have heard the river’s divergent voices. The 21st century has been dubbed the water century, a time when fresh water will take the place of oil as the most highly sought-after resource. Many predict that the search for adequate fresh water for Earth’s growing billions of people will shape foreign policy and cause wars, as well as human suffering. Already dozens of nations lack the water they need. This may not be a comfort to people recovering from flooding, but consider this: sufficient water and rich topsoil are Iowa’s and the Corn Belt’s most valuable natural resources, the envy 236 epilogue of nations around the world. The way we exploit their benefits has diminished these resources, twisting them into interacting environmental problems, our water gushing away with our rich topsoil, the topsoil polluting our waterways. But these two commodities remain elementary assets. Our task is to find ways to ensure that both serve as healthy, balanced assets that nurture, rather than harm, life. How might this be done? First, we need to accept that floods will continue, we have not yet seen the biggest floods, floods and their damages are becoming larger, and climate change may further intensify these trends. There is no silver bullet for preventing or totally controlling floods or eliminating their destruction. But we can learn to live with floods, trusting that their size and destructive power can indeed be moderated. Living with floods involves two broad activities: better managing the risks and taking steps to reduce our vulnerability, and better managing the landscape to reduce the magnitude and destructive power of floods. The first incorporates practical actions such as flood-proofing valuable structures or moving them out of the floodplain. Section IV described a number of other vulnerabilityreducing activities, including revamping of floodplain regulations, stretching these to consider the entire watershed, following through with long-term flood mitigation strategies, and implementing careful and well-planned engineered constructs such as flood barriers. Ongoing research is sure to present us with greater knowledge (see plate 11) and more options for reducing vulnerability. The second activity, managing the landscape to reduce flood magnitude, requires restoring our land so that it will absorb and hold more water, as it did in previous centuries. Specific techniques for doing so are increasingly being incorporated in urban areas. We should not ignore the power and importance of individual and community actions. As suggested in chapter 23, each one of us can take steps toward healing our landscape and restoring its flood resilience . Just as a river’s excess flood flows are constructed drop by drop, so each of us can lessen these flows drop by drop—through the way we manage our own land. But we also need to consider the vast stretches of annual row crops that now cover about two-thirds of our state and shed water as well as soil and chemical pollutants. Their vast coverage and intensive manipulation along with the eliminationofperennialvegetationhavecreatedafragilityinourlandscape,one matched elsewhere around the globe by ongoing loss of biodiversity, increasing environmental contaminants, and other pressures. For the sake of today’s citizens as well as those to come, the Corn Belt’s landscape must once again epilogue 237 become a provider of environmental health, rather than be narrowly viewed as a site only of agricultural commodity production. The concept of ecological services lands is now being implemented in hundreds of projects around the world, with China investing $100 billion to create ecological function zones that support flood control throughout the country (Ellison 2009). Lands throughout the Corn Belt have the potential to grow both “ecological services” and food in quantity. If we...