Nine things to be grateful for from the Board of Supervisors meeting

Writing in response to the widespread disappointment at the failure of the Board of Supervisors to reject applications for new hog factories, Jonathan Andelson supplies nine reasons to take a more optimistic view of Poweshiek CARES's role in that meeting:

1. The large turnout of folks from all around the county coming together to make common cause
2. Having the opportunity to gather in the presence of the supervisors and to make our views known
3. The large number of people who spoke-- politely and eloquently -- about the harmfulness of CAFOs
4. The young people who spoke
5. The growing awareness that CAFOs cause multiple problems that affect all of us
6. Supervisor Gaard’s vote
7. The fact that the permit applicant attended and heard the testimony of his neighbors and others (maybe it registered at some level)
8. The knowledge that for every person who came to the meeting there were others who couldn’t come but were with us in spirit
9. The conversations I heard after the meeting indicating that people have not lost hope and will continue to work for change

Jonathan added:

I would like to share with you a passage from author and activist Rick Bass’s The Book of Yaak, which is about his adopted home in the Yaak Valley of northwest Montana and the threat it is facing from clear-cutting by the timber industry:

I realize that the point at which what was being done to the valley began to hurt me deeply was the time I first began to feel that I was starting to fit: that the landscape and I were engaged in a relationship. That I was being reshaped and refashioned, to better fit it in spirit and desire. That I was neither fighting this nor resisting it. As it became my home, the wounds that were being inflicted upon it – the insults – became my own.

Rick Bass will be visiting Grinnell on Saturday, April 6, and speaking at two events: from 10:00 to 11:30 a.m. he will lead a nature walk at the college’s Conard Environmental Research Area on the theme of “reading the landscape,” and from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. he will speak in Drake Community Library on the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline and why he went to Washington D.C. to protest it. The public is invited to both events.