Why not an Iowa national park--Mid-section Des Moines River Valley? Education does not really touch on the Iowa landscape--its bioregional essence, its rare soil fertility in the biosphere, and our commodity approach to landscape causing its rapid en masse exploitation/decimation/absence of protection. Education for a homeland would be quite different.
Excerpts from Your 2 Cents Worth, Part 2 [selected reader’s submissions/Des Moines Register]:
Have you ever noticed the water tastes different in other states? Do what I do. Bring along a small salt shaker of nitrates! Just a sprinkle in that glass of water, and you will have the taste of home.
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Why doesn’t Iowa have a national park? Oh, that’s right, were not about conserving natural resources.
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Of course, some Iowa farmers are doing what is needed to protect water. The problem is that they are a small percentage of Iowa’s 86,000 farmers. Good conservation by less than 3 percent of Iowa’s farmers doesn’t even begin to be enough.
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In my area, some children learn more about rainforests in distant countries than they learn about the prairies, waters, and woodlands right here in Iowa. There’s a direct connection between that and Iowa’s dirty water, and conservationists understand it all too well.
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