Despite decades of awareness of the causes and consequences of nitrate pollution, surface and groundwaters in the state of Iowa remain perilously contaminated with the agrichemical, a potent environmental and human health hazard. The lack of progress on reducing agricultural non-point source pollution, which affects both urban and rural drinking water supplies, is increasingly prompting politically charged social conflicts as well as robust responses from entrenched industry interests. This dissertation traces the problematic of persistent drinking water contamination in Iowa to examine how unseen infrastructures, ideologies, and institutional power dynamics construct and interact with local socio-ecological relations to perpetuate drinking water degradation. Through a critical ethnography of American prairie capitalism, I contribute a deeply situated analysis of the internal politics of contestation at the heart of the contemporary global food regime.
Thinking from and across a symbolic-materialist conception of drainage, I draw connections between the historic hydrological transformation of the Iowa landscape wrought by extensive subsurface farm drainage and the extractive capitalist practices that are hollowing out rural communities. I explore the enduring political-ecological effects of a widespread, yet largely invisible, hydraulic technology to explain enclosures of both physical spaces and agricultural imaginaries. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews, document analysis, and participant observation, I detail the concealed ideologies and infrastructures that continue to (re)shape Iowan’s livelihoods and landscapes and explore the nuanced ways community members experience and contest environmental harms.
Across the three papers that comprise this dissertation, I delineate the circuits of capital, narratives, and knowledges that mutually constitute the ongoing nutrient pollution crisis. I ground the analysis in the hydrosocial history of agricultural drainage and industrial corn cultivation to document the enduring socio-ecological significance of draining the wet prairie. This underexplored history is vital for understanding the contemporary landscape of capitalism, which constrains farmers in a debt-ridden model of intensive row-crop cultivation and perpetuates nitrate runoff from fields into the state’s lakes, rivers, and streams. I then turn to the cultural and ideological infrastructure that effaces this history through an interrogation of the responses to a polarizing lawsuit brought by the capital city of Des Moines. I articulate three interconnected myths that rationalize and naturalize the damage caused by productivist agriculture. Finally, I explore state-capital institutional imbrication and the contradictory role of scientific expertise in forestalling reductions in nutrient loading and legitimizing continued accumulation by agroindustrial interests.
This study centers the intrinsic complexity obscured within the monocultured landscape and the power relations that enable the socio-ecological draining of Iowa. I conclude with a discussion of the ways contaminated water is a threat not only to human communities and ecologies, but to the power structures maintaining industrial agricultural production. These hidden structures are exposed in discursive and territorial struggles over clean water, revealing opportunities to forge common cause between rhetorically fractured Iowans, who all suffer the effects of the dominant paradigm. Through the contentious politics of water quality in Iowa, I survey the costs of agrarian capitalism – clean water, prairie biodiversity, rural vitality, embodied knowledge – and raise critical questions about the future of this contested landscape.
