It will kill you in the end
Nitrogen hypoxia is used to execute a convict in Alabama while suffocating the Gulf of Mexico
When clumsy attempts at capital punishment proved too obviously cruel and inhumane, Alabama officials came upon a better way to kill people: gas them with nitrogen. Last Wednesday, prison officials strapped Kenneth Eugene Smith, 58, to a gurney where he writhed and tugged and finally died after 15 minutes of suffocation. It’s called nitrogen hypoxia.
That’s also what they call the slower suffocation of the Gulf of Mexico. Nitrate is depleting oxygen in a dead zone the size of New Jersey. Nitrate flows in the Raccoon and Des Moines Rivers, the Minnesota and Illinois and Ohio and Missouri, all fed by commercial fertilizer and manure at rates several times higher than what public health officials recommend.
Hypoxia is silent and deadly.
Much more effective than bungling a lethal injection. More discreet than hanging a convict in the courthouse square. Humane, you could say, when compared with chimpanzees who club to death deviant males.
In the case of Smith it came relatively fast. He did get a T-bone steak ahead of time. In the case of someone suffering a central nervous system disorder or thyroid cancer, the demise creeps. It is painful. We get a nice cheap cut of pork.
Little by little we commit slow suicide.
The courts say it is up to the legislature to do something. So not much is done. We know what to do: less manure on top of anhydrous, for starters. Native grass in-field strips can reduce nitrate outflows by 95%. At one time Palo Alto County was 70% slough filtering the water. The straightened-out West Fork of the Des Moines River that used to meander has become a conduit for phosphorous and nitrate to the Mississippi and then the Gulf. As weather becomes more extreme, we double down on drainage.
Drip drip drip rural water systems are rife with nitrate. Saylorville Reservoir near Des Moines suffers chronic toxic algae blooms from the phosphorous.
Iowa is a leader in cancer incidence, young and old.
You scarcely would know it from the state of the statehouse. Legislators sang the “Star Spangled Banner” in committee last week as they advanced a bill requiring every student to sing it daily. Water quality is not on the radar.
Not in Washington, either. The farm bill is stalled over food stamps, again. Which holds up progress on crop insurance improvements or conservation enhancements for producers.
There is a five-state hypoxia task force that issues reports occasionally lauding good efforts at installing engineering devices on drainage systems. Funds for water quality monitoring in Iowa were cut off. The lead researcher was run off. The Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University was deappropriated. The livestock confinement coordinator’s position with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources was line-itemed out. You get the picture.
What you don’t know could kill you.
It kills the shrimp. What is it doing to us? We are spending millions upon millions cleaning up water we are polluting — Varina had to install a reverse-osmosis system to get rid of the poison. Des Moines is trying to find wells to avoid the polluted rivers, but the shallow aquifers are not clean either.
If you wonder why Iowa is so cancer-ridden, it is not because 10% of us smoke. We live in a cloud of chemical mush.
It was deadly for Kenneth Smith in a massive hit. We’re micro-dosing, whether you want to or not. It will kill you either way, Parkinson’s Disease or Lou Gehrig’s Disease. If you can afford clean water, you can’t run away from the ammonia and herbicides and fungicides that enable cheap corn and eggs. Not in Iowa, anyhow. It’s a cost of doing business. What the state did to Kenneth Smith we are doing to ourselves and the planet.
Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.
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Jaw dropping! Thank you for real journalism, once again.
Vote BLUE. The GOP does not and never will care about such things as clean water. They deregulate everything. Except when it comes to matters of female health. Vote them all out like your life or the lives of your children depend upon on it.