By Eric Gidal, Munachim Amah, Javier Espinosa, Richard Frailing, Ellen Oliver, Clara Reynen, and Kaden St Onge
As we contend with the environmental degradation of our waters and the fragmenting of our communities that such degradation both exhibits and accelerates, we need to draw on the arts and the humanities as much as we do on hydrology, engineering, politics, and law. Alongside work in environmental engineering, hydrosciences, community organizing, and political advocacy, the humanities and the arts can provide needed perspectives to help imagine new forms by which our present situation may be more fully understood and through which possible solutions may be conceived. In her introduction to a special issue of Resilience devoted to models of Green Humanities Labs, Joni Adamson makes a case for integrating the environmental humanities into cross-disciplinary research with a goal not only of communicating, but of generating knowledge and perspectives. “Can the humanities,” she asks, “catalyze imagining of new ideas, narratives, frameworks, alternatives, demands, and projects that will enable people to envision plausibly different, even livable, futures?”[1] To do so, writes Sally L. Kitsch, in another contribution to the same issue, humanists must think of themselves “as generative and future oriented…as solution (or approach) proposers rather than as critics and problem multipliers.”[2] They must seek ways to build, in Michael Simeone’s words, “a framework for participation to supplement critique.”[3] Adamson, Kitsch, and Simeone extend ideas articulated by Doris Sommer in her book The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities, in which she seeks “to link interpretation to engaged arts and thereby to refresh a civic vocation in humanistic education.”[4] Sommer, who directs the Cultural Agents program at Harvard University, makes a strong case for the public role of aesthetic production and suggests that “democratic life depends on the dynamic between art-making and humanistic interpretation.”[5] These mandates apply as much to efforts in environmental renovation as they do to social and cultural revival and suggest how the arts and humanities can contribute to work at “the intersections between biophysical systems and human systems,” to cite the mandate of this journal. This is a story about one such effort.
For 10 weeks in the summer of 2023, six early career scholars, writers, and artists from the University of Iowa gathered to learn about the problems of nitrogen pollution in Iowa waterways and to create content for the Blue Green Action Platform, a communication and knowledge platform that seeks to empower people through storytelling and accessible water quality information. Nitrogen pollution is an indirect consequence of the plowing and draining of the tall-grass prairie that used to cover Iowa’s lands. The conversion of prairie to farmland by nineteenth-century Euro-American settlers led to soil erosion and the elimination of natural water filtration. Deep-rooted prairie ecosystems were replaced with annual crops while streams and rivers were channeled to free up more land for cultivation. In the post-war years, as the production of nitrogen for ammunition converted to the production of nitrogen-based fertilizer, farmers were encouraged to apply increasing amounts of chemicals to their lands to meet growing demand. In the wake of the farm crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, which depopulated many rural communities and concentrated land ownership in the hands of fewer but larger operations, the problems only intensified, separating crop production from livestock farming and encouraging amplification of both.[6] The increased gathering of livestock into CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) produces far more manure than can be absorbed by the corn and soybean fields that dominate the state, fields already saturated with anhydrous ammonia (NH3). As the ammonia and urea fertilizers spread on farmer’s fields are converted to water-soluble nitrate through soil bacteria, the nitrate leeches into streams and rivers where it creates harmful algal blooms. These algal blooms deplete oxygen throughout the Mississippi River watershed all the way to the Gulf of Mexico where a hypoxic “Dead Zone” stretches for 6000 to 7,000 square miles. Regulations put into place by the Clean Water Act intentionally exempt agriculture as a “non-point source” pollutant, even as the intricate system of drainage tiles and ditches that enable large scale farming operations make such categorization hard to defend.[7] Iowa’s streams contain some of the highest concentrations of nitrogen and phosphorus in the nation and Iowa contributes an average of 29 percent of the long-term nitrate load to the Mississippi-Atchafalaya basin and into the Gulf of Mexico.[8]
The Blue Green Action Platform—BlueGAP for short—seeks to help communities reduce nitrogen pollution by sharing data and stories across different watersheds. This work was funded by a two-year National Science Foundation (NSF) Convergence Accelerator grant, one of a number of grants offered to projects that combine cross-disciplinary approaches to social problems with an emphasis on tangible solutions. With a motto of Data + Stories = Action, BlueGAP connects community organizers, scientists, engineers, and concerned citizens in Iowa, Florida, and the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI). The BlueGAP Information System provides reliable, up-to-date information on nitrogen loads in different waterways while establishing channels of communication and models for individual and collective action. The platform features interviews and educational videos to highlight the work of water quality champions in Iowa, in Florida, and in the USVI—individuals and organizations who are working to promote best practices and to organize communities adversely affected by nitrogen pollution. And, thanks to the work detailed below, the platform also shares stories through more experimental forms that use different media and different perspectives to give expression to the problem of nitrogen pollution in our communities.
Eric Gidal, a professor of English at the University of Iowa, gathered two consecutive teams of students from graduate programs in the arts and humanities at the University of Iowa to produce creative content for the platform. Gidal’s scholarly expertise is in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature with an emphasis on the intersections of literary and environmental histories. The students he gathered for the summer of 2023, all co-authors on this article, came from programs in book arts, ceramics, choreography, creative nonfiction writing, English literary studies, journalism, and library sciences. Gidal collaborated with David Cwiertny, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Iowa and research engineer at IIHR—Hydroscience and Engineering (IIHR), and Kate Giannini, a program manager at IIHR. Cwiertny serves as the University of Iowa lead and Giannini helped foster boots-on-the-ground connections with individuals and communities across different watersheds, leveraging IIHR’s expertise and position as a trusted and reliable resource for understanding Iowa’s complex water-related challenges. Together, they designed an educational program for the students built around interactions with university and community partners. During the initial weeks of the project, the student team traveled around eastern Iowa to learn about its river systems and the different people and organizations who work to sustain and protect them. They met with farmers to learn about riparian buffers, prairie strips, cover crops, and no-till agriculture, which decrease the need for nitrogen fertilizers, improve soil quality, and filter the waters that pass through cultivated lands. They toured water treatment facilities and met with stormwater managers and civil engineers, appreciating how urban areas seek to minimize their own impacts on water quality while expending great efforts—and money—to reduce nitrates and other contaminants from the water supply. And they met with community organizers who work to address not only water quality, but the social and economic inequities of our industrialized agricultural systems. Nitrogen pollution, they came to understand, is symptomatic of many structural imbalances in modern industrial societies.
The challenge was to capture these connections in the various stories they assembled and the forms that they created. From the beginning, the students in the summer program took on active roles: interviewing community members, pitching in at volunteer farms and food banks, trying to understand the human as well as chemical dynamics of nitrogen pollution throughout the state. Their projects moved between different perspectives and different scales, approaching one-on-one interviews through a wide lens, blending photography with drone footage, journalism with creative writing, archival research with visual and material arts. These different scales and media help situate stories—and water—within intersecting economic and ecological dynamics.
Our Stories
Photo Essay
Munachim Amah is a doctoral student in journalism and mass communication. He produced a modular photo essay built around the question of “Home,” a topic Munachim has been preoccupied with in his creative and journalistic work over the past few years. As a Nigerian man whose family moved around a lot during his childhood and who now finds himself in a new country, he often feels unanchored, adrift, and especially sensitive to the question of belonging: Who belongs to a place and why? How does a place become home? As Warsan Shire writes in her poem “Home” (2009), home may be a place one must flee, a place one dares not return to: “I want to go home / but home is the mouth of a shark / home is the barrel of the gun.”[9] This imagery of home as a destructive and propulsive force resonates deeply with Munachim who has had to leave his country in search of a more rooted and peaceful life.
The particular idea for his modular photo essay, which explores how farmers and residents in Iowa’s watershed communities come to call those places home, emerged during an event the team attended in Dyersville, Iowa in the second week of the summer project. Dyersville was awarded the River Town of the Year title by the nonprofit advocacy group Iowa Rivers Revival in honor of their efforts toward wetland restoration and water quality improvement. In Dyersville, the students had the opportunity to collaborate with Impact 7G (now part of the Eocene Environmental Group), an environmental planning company, to collect stories from event attendees. Munachim spoke with many people that day; however, one conversation stayed with him, a conversation with Robin Fortney, an environmental educator and advocate who asked him a question that both surprised and intrigued him: “And what is your relationship with water?” He had not been prepared for this question and did not know what to say, but the question taught him that collecting stories is an active dialogue; people wanted to know why he was doing what he was doing, and people were eager to hear his story while sharing their own. The people he talked to also celebrated farmers and community organizers who were doing inspiring work in managing nitrogen pollution in Iowa. This informed the celebratory tone of his contribution.
The product is, consequently, a photo essay and accompanying mini-profiles of Iowa farmers and activists. The profiles are in conversation with Munachim’s own reflections. Collectively, this content blurs the lines between journalism, photojournalism, creative nonfiction, and poetry. By including himself in the portraits, Munachim provides a model for potential users of the BlueGAP platform who will need to reflect on connections between the people and water in their communities and on their own experiences of water, care, and home. This experimental approach aligns well with BlueGAP’s mission to integrate data and stories to improve nitrogen management and focuses on making people feel something, experience something, and thus be inspired to do something.
“Home” presentation poster by Munachim Amah. Images and text courtesy of Munachim Amah.
Drone Essays
A second project, “Flyover Country,” by Richard Frailing, an MFA student in creative nonfiction writing, presents three “drone essays” (“Marshall County”; “Cedar River Watershed”; “Spillway at the Coralville Dam”) to offer a synoptic yet personal perspective on its featured voices and experiences. These videos offer innovative uses of drone footage in concert with lyrical essays that Richard composed as well as montages of audio from different interviews that Richard, Munachim, and a third student, Clara Reynen, conducted over the summer. The essays thus couple aerial perspectives with on-the-ground voices and help viewers approach nitrogen pollution as a social as well as an environmental problem.
Richard decided on the title after encountering the writing of Kristin Hogenson, whose book The Heartland: An American History (2019) interrogates the perceptions of the Midwest through history, sociology, and other lenses. Her chapter, “Flyover Country,” is a thorough study of the history of aviation in the region, but she opens with a more critical thesis: “These two words convey a world of meaning. They imply that the American heartland is best regarded through an airplane window; there is really no reason to land, for the rural Midwest is a provincial wasteland in contrast to the cosmopolitan coasts.”[10] As an Iowan transplant from the coast, Richard is compelled by the tension between the coastal gaze of the Midwest that he inherited and the values that Midwesterners have of their own landscape, particularly farmers who have an outsized effect on shaping it. After studying environmental writing at Iowa State University, Richard spent a year interviewing farmers with Iowa State Extension, during which he heard numerous perspectives from farmers about the aesthetic values that inform their farming decisions.
In his drone essays, Richard drew insight from the rural sociologist Rob Burton, particularly Burton’s 2004 article “Seeing Through the ‘Good Farmer’s’ Eyes.” Among other aspects of “productivist” farmer identity, Burton describes the role that visibility and communal expectations have in shaping the public art of farming. He particularly examines the importance of borders to communicate farming mastery between a farmer and onlookers. The tidiness of a farm, appraised by the neatness of its rows, the uniformity of its crop, and the absence of weeds—among other criteria—has clear implications for a farmer’s sense of self-worth.[11] As an artist, Richard argues that there is something implicitly “aerial” in the way Midwest farmers shape their own landscape, or at least at a removed gaze that is more concerned with geometry and yield than ecological health. His essays imply a problem of scale: the birds’ eye (or plane’s eye) view of mastery is prioritized to the detriment of both the health of the local landscape and communities downstream.
Wade Dooley, a farmer who operates along the Iowa River about 15 miles from Iowa’s geographic center, posits that farmers are more akin to artists than scientists or businessmen. They are, ultimately, creative problem solvers whose creativity has been suppressed and repressed in an irrational agricultural system. So, their creativity “comes out the wrong way,” as Richard writes in his drone essay “Marshall County,” by engineering uniform landscapes over hundreds of acres of canvas. As Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about a proverbial cornfield in Braiding Sweetgrass, “the truth of our relationship with the soil is written more clearly on the land than in any book. I read across that hill a story about people who value uniformity and the efficiency it yields, a story in which the land is shaped for the convenience of machines and the demands of a market.”[12]
Richard argues that devaluation of the land, which often arrives externally, can also fuse with a self-conception that accepts ecological “inconveniences” as the byproduct of an agricultural mission that is vital to the world, yet underappreciated and “flown over.” In this devaluation, ecological “inconveniences” are accepted tacitly. The water bodies are not swimmable or fishable, but that is simply the price Iowa must pay for “feeding the world.” The deep, black soil of the Midwest is best used to grow undifferentiated, engineered grains—which are, of course, inedible—because that is what the land is for. Richard’s essays attempt to defamiliarize these landscapes—both natural and manmade—to loosen the sense that the land must look this way or that it always has looked this way.
StoryMaps and Archives
Kaden St Onge, a doctoral student in English literary studies, created a StoryMap to curate the voices of rural Iowa women past and present within different watersheds throughout the state, positioning audio files, images, and narratives along axes of space and time. Drawing on research and materials from the Iowa Women’s Archive, “Watershed Stories of Rural Iowa Women” profiles eight women whose oral histories are included in the archives as well as materials from the Women, Food and Agriculture Network (WFAN).
“Watershed Stories of Rural Iowa Women” StoryMap by Kaden St Onge. See the full-size map here.
Taking inspiration from WFAN, this StoryMap addresses connections between food systems, soil health, and social justice from the perspectives of gender and racial equality. In addition to rural perspectives and political issues, the StoryMap highlights women and their experiences. Despite surveys demonstrating that “women own or co-own nearly half the farmland in the Midwest,” they are underrepresented in policy-making organizations and have historically not had access to the same education and information resources as men. Agriculture in the Midwest is a heavily white male dominated industry, and WFAN recognizes the “interconnection of ecological justice and gender equity” in building more sustainable agricultural practices.[13] In addition, when they are empowered with education and the necessary resources, women (along with people of all genders traditionally disenfranchised by patriarchal structures that dominate agriculture in the United States) are often more likely to take action toward conservation and sustainability.
Kaden’s goals for this project were to present stories and information in a less hierarchical format that considers rivers and land as focal points; to honor the history of the land and document change over time; and to connect with people’s values and encourage them to care about the immediate area where they live. Using a map as a method of data organization helps to make connections within and between watersheds and to present stories and data in a format that is accessible and easy to develop. A time slider allows a user to perceive the position of stories at different points in time and space and so makes the map historically dynamic. This layering of perspective demonstrates change over time and presents a clearer picture of a space than a single snapshot enables. Rather than traditional political borders such as state, county, or township lines, this map instead features scalable watershed levels as the primary borders. Iowa’s ninety-nine counties overlay a near-perfect grid on the region between the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. This disconnect between watersheds and county and township borders inhibits jurisdictional cooperation around river systems. The Iowa River alone runs through nine separate counties before feeding into the Mississippi. But contemporary roads, structures, and political boundaries fade into the background in Kaden’s StoryMap so as to emphasize the connection to watersheds and the larger relative geography present in each individual’s story. By foregrounding the stories of a handful of women landowners and farmers, the StoryMap project can serve as a starting point for users to build the connections and knowledge networks that empower action.
Story and Material
Clara Reynen, an MA student in library and information sciences and now an MFA student in the University of Iowa’s Center for the Book, bound together voices from the community and the archives. She created her book, “Home is Where the Water Is,” out of handmade paper, with fibers and water as the material components, and a ceramic drainage tile donated by a local farmer as its central binding. The book includes digital collage, cyanotypes, and painting imprinted in its unfolding pages. The result is a tactile and visual realization of the intersections of land, water, and stories. As with all of the pieces produced by the students, Clara’s book focuses on making the invisible visible. The drainage tile offers a medium to collapse the space between agriculture in Iowa and the consequences in the Gulf of Mexico. She embraced community involvement through the choice of text in her book, all of which is taken directly from interviews and oral histories. These quotes are woven together to speak for themselves, rather than Clara providing text based on her own understanding of the issues. Letting those most directly involved and affected speak for themselves allows her to amplify their voices, rather than use them for a predetermined end goal.
Clare Reynen “Home is Where the Water Is,” 2023. A closeup image of the second of four panels, this image shows pigs from a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFOs) contained within a water droplet, symbolizing the large-scale damage CAFOs have on our water quality. Image courtesy of Clara Reynen.
Clare Reynen “Home is Where the Water Is,” 2023. The final display of the artist’s book, which is housed inside a ceramic drainage tile and stretches to be approximately 8 feet long while displayed, alongside other handmade paper samples from the summer collaged together to be reminiscent of aerial photography of farms and various crops found commonly in Iowa. Image courtesy of IIHR—Hydroscience and Engineering.
Voices, Choreography, and Montage
Ellen Oliver, an MFA student in dance and choreography, blended these same voices from the interviews and archives with choreography and motion-capture video to produce a video montage of movement and sound, “Watershed Stories,” This short video, developed through Adobe After Effects, is intended to bring people closer to their watersheds by expressing the physicality of water. Ellen layered video footage of dance, underwater shots from local waterways, drainage tiles, plants from a local farm, and samplings of the drone footage from Richard’s “Flyover Country.” She spent early weeks in the dance studio to generate movement phrases based on the information that the team was gathering from concurrent field trips and presentations. She was interested in the movement of water, and she designed movement scores based on the qualities of the water in Dubuque and Iowa City. The movement was shaped by the topography of the Mississippi; her arms, legs, and torso moved in response to the directionality and angles of the Mississippi and its tributaries.
Each week, Ellen collected footage for the video. She experimented with filming underwater at multiple locations, including the Iowa City public pool, the Iowa River, the Cedar River, and a pond next to the university’s Art Building West. The footage in the natural water was much murkier compared to the pool water, which added contrasting effects in the editing process. She also noticed her own physical reaction to filming in Iowa’s water. The water often emitted pungent odors and she found many dead fish scattered along the river’s edge. Her body became tense with caution while filming in these spaces. Filming between natural and artificially maintained spaces allowed her to reflect on how people express their comfort in the water. Additionally, she filmed Clara and her paper-making process, which provided footage of water moving through the paper press channels. She filmed the choreography and the drainage tiles on a green screen. Later, she inverted the image, keyed out the green, and filled the moving image with shots of water. The editing process was very time consuming because she was compiling dozens of layers within each frame, but it allowed her to blend multiple shots so as to highlight the relationship between fluid movements and drainage tiles. The result is a video that incorporates the voices and stories of Iowa farmers, past and present, and gives them artistic form.
Her goal is to project the video at different locations along Iowa rivers, mapping the projection onto a solid object near the water so that it aligns with the design of the space. Ideally, the video would play on a loop for the public to stumble upon. This offers one method of sharing the work of BlueGAP with a wider audience and draws more attention to local water quality. At the same time, Ellen’s video, alongside all of the other projects, is being incorporated into the BlueGAP Information Platform, placing experimental art and media alongside people, places, and community champions as inspirations for action.
Javier Espinosa “The Hands and the Rivers,” 2023. This ceramic mural evokes a deep connection between human labor and nature’s flow, highlighting the interplay of cultural and environmental elements. Image courtesy of Javier Espinosa.
Mural and Repurposed Materials
Javier Espinosa, an MFA student in ceramics, created a beautiful large-scale mural and accompanying repurposed drainage tiles glazed with organic designs. His piece, “The Hands and the Rivers,” takes up the ideas of Land Art theorists, specifically how art forms a language that emanates from our aesthetic needs. Artists may thereby facilitate understandings of our experiences through expressions of our relation to the environment and to others.[14] His work draws on this aesthetic need to convey a clear message to viewers and evoke viewers’ deep relationship with lands and waters. In their multiple forms of expression, the arts can also produce a reencounter with visual nature and its emotional character. In realizing his project for BlueGAP, Javier focused on patterns that could represent a kind of emotional reunion with water, rivers, nature, and the craft of farming. As he listened to the experiences of different community partners who shared their stories and perspectives, he realized that all the stories could come together like a hydrological map in which the common thread would be the emotional relationship Iowans have with the lands and waters of their state. The ceramic mural he made represents this reflection. He used Peter S. Stevens’s concepts of patterns in nature to evoke the idea of the ramification design pattern that can be found in leaves, aquifers, and the textures of hands.[15]
Javier’s mural expresses a vision of farmers as practitioners of a craft. From his own perspective as an artisan, his approach was to invoke a sense of the craft in which the material is respected or even loved and cared for. He glazed botanical images on drainage tiles that were obtained from various farmers. These pieces are a proposal that exalts the concept of the craft and the pride that prevails in those who make things with their hands. His mural attempts to establish a story that unites rivers, land, and humans as a single character. If we lose the water, we lose the land and we lose ourselves.
Javier Espinosa ‘Endemic Culture,” 2023. Made with ceramic drainage tiles from the Iowa area, it reflects on the interwoven identities of tradition and landscape, exploring the transformation of cultural heritage. Image courtesy of Eric Gidal.
Moving Forward
These varied works sit side-by-side on the Blue GAP online platform with water quality data, interviews with water quality champions, and short features on nitrogen pollution and community organizing. The aim is to present a range of approaches to storytelling around this crucial topic. But these works also provide a basis for community outreach. In the fall of 2023, the team showcased their work at a public gallery in Iowa City: Fluid Impressions: A Water Quality Exhibit. They invited members of the community to view the pieces alongside a prototype of the BlueGAP platform to facilitate reflection on the many social, historical, and aesthetic dimensions of the problem. In collected surveys, visitors to the exhibit commented on the variety of interdisciplinary approaches, the creativity of the contributing artists and scholars, the use of multiple media to describe people’s relationships with water, and the integration of farmers’ voices. People noted how both the beauty and the diversity of the pieces effectively communicates scientific topics to a general audience and demonstrates the multiple ways in which human activity affects water quality. And they took inspiration from the different approaches to consider ways in which they too might fit into the picture and how their own words and deeds can make a difference.
Indeed, what these projects seek to provide is an aesthetic connection to the problems of nitrogen pollution. Aesthetics, from the Greek term for perception, is the name we give to the mediation between sense and reason. Neither a purely sensory experience nor a purely rational understanding suffice to comprehend any situation or condition. But when we give those situations or conditions aesthetic form, we help connect information to values and make visible and tangible that which is often unseen and abstract. BlueGAP seeks to make visible that which is invisible—nitrogen, most prominently, but also the larger systems of economics, law, and society that amplify its presence in our waters to degrees that are unhealthy and unsustainable. A large part of that effort involves the use of “hydroinformatics” to provide resources for advocacy and change. But a key insight of the BlueGAP project is that any meaningful response to these problems requires storytelling as much as data, poetics as much as politics, aesthetics as much as engineering. While the problems in any one location—be it in Iowa, Florida, or the U.S. Virgin Islands—must be understood as symptomatic of larger systems, meaningful responses will need to speak as much to the local as to the global if they are going to have any positive impact on people’s lives and the lands, airs, and waters they inhabit.
In April of 2024, Eric Gidal was able to travel to Sidney, Iowa in the southwest corner of the state to share this work with a group of local citizens who had gathered to learn about a particularly devastating nitrogen spill in the East Nishnabotna River in March 2024. Alongside David Cwiertny and Adam Janke, a wildlife extension specialist at Iowa State University, Gidal presented the materials produced by the students and a narrative of their production to address the role of storytelling in confronting environmental disasters.
Soon after, Gidal assembled a new team of students for a second iteration of this summer program. They came from programs in creative nonfiction writing, English literary studies, French, geography, graphic design, and history. They built on the work of the first team while exploring other media and modes for creative storytelling and engaged action. Their work resulted in a second StoryMap that draws connections between nitrogen pollution and frontline communities, a tone poem that represents the environmental history of Iowa through ambient sound and recorded interviews, a set of lyric profiles and accompanying photographs, a sequence of creative data visualizations, a documented engagement with members of eastern Iowa’s Francophone immigrant community, and a virtual exhibit on the drawings and writings of J.N. “Ding” Darling, an editorial cartoonist with the Des Moines Register and active conservationist of the 1930s and ’40s. The projects will join the work of the first team, both online and in exhibitions around the state.
This collaboration between faculty and graduate students in the arts and humanities with faculty and staff in engineering and hydrosciences achieves many ends. It provides the students with valuable research skills, experience in collaborative, cross-disciplinary production, and expertise in publicly engaged scholarship and art. It contributes useful materials for a larger platform seeking to promote environmental change and social justice. And it offers a model for other initiatives in publicly engaged environmental arts and humanities. Doris Sommer calls us to dedicate ourselves to “an optimism of the will, beyond the despair of reason, [that] drives life toward social commitments and creative contributions.”[16] The projects described in this article will not solve the problem of nitrogen pollution on their own, but neither are they merely supplemental to the data and action plans featured on the BlueGAP platform. Rather, they address nitrogen pollution in new terms and new forms. They speak across different communities and across different watersheds. They generate new understandings of factors polluting our waterways and they help us to imagine new possibilities for the future.
Footnotes
[1] Joni Adamson, “Introduction: The HfE Project and Beyond: New Constellations of Practice in the Environmental and Digital Humanities,” Resilience 5.2 (2018): 1.
[2] Sally L. Kitsch, “Experimental Humanities and Humanities for the Environment,” Resilience 5.2 (2018): 25.
[3] Michael Simeone, “Resilient Observation: Towards Transformational Research among Environmental Humanities and Sciences,” Resilience 5.2 (2018): 36.
[4] Doris Sommer, The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014) 5.
[5] Sommer, The Work of Art in the World, 104.
[6] For recent assessments of the U.S. farm crisis, see the articles gathered in Agricultural History 96.4 (2022): 487-615. On the connections to nitrogen pollution, see Benjamin Leon Bodirsky, Agricultural Nitrogen Pollution: The Human Food-Print. (Technische Universitaet Berlin, 2015). On the situation in Iowa, see Chris Jones, The Swine Republic: Struggles with the Truth about Agriculture and Water Quality (Ice Cube Press, 2023).
[7] Silvia Secchi and Moira Mcdonald, “The State of Water Quality Strategies in the Mississippi River Basin: Is Cooperative Federalism Working?” The Science of the Total Environment 677.8 (2019): 241–49.
[8] Cornelia Mutel, The Emerald Horizon: The History of Nature in Iowa (University of Iowa Press, 2007); C.S. Jones, J.K. Nielsen, K.E. Schilling, et al., “Iowa Stream Nitrate and the Gulf of Mexico,” PloS ONE 13.4 (2018): eo195930, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0195930.
[9] Warsan Shire, “Home,” unpublished manuscript, 2009, lines 73–75, https://www.amnesty.ie/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/home-by-warsan-shire.pdf.
[10] Kristen Lee Hoganson, The Heartland: An American History (Penguin, 2019), 198.
[11] Rob JF Burton, “Seeing Through the ‘Good Farmer’s’ Eyes: Towards Developing an Understanding of the Social Symbolic Value of ‘Productivist’ Behaviour,” Sociologia ruralis 44.2 (2004):195–215.
[12] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Editions, 2013), 138.
[13] Women, Food, and Agriculture Network, “About,” Women, Food & Ag Network, 2024, https://wfan.org/about-wfan.
[14] Jeffrey Kastner and Brian Wallis, Land and Environmental Art (London: Phaidon Press, 1998).
[15] Peter S. Stevens, Patterns in Nature (Little, Brown, & Co., 1974).
[16] Sommer, The Work of Art in the World, 6.
Recommended Citation
Gidal, Eric, Munachim Amah, Javier Espinosa, Richard Frailing, Ellen Oliver, Clara Reynen, and Kaden St Onge. 2024. “Fluid Impressions: Connecting Data and Storytelling in Iowa’s Watersheds.” Open Rivers: Rethinking Water, Place & Community, no. 27. https://doi.org/10.24926/2471190X.11737.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.24926/2471190X.11737
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