Authored on:
Nov 09, 2020
Featured Program
In 1900, Iowa was the tenth largest state in the country. A hundred years later, it was the thirtieth largest and had experienced the biggest decline in its population rank of any state. Today, Iowa is at a crossroads. Its population is more urban, less white, and more environmentally challenged than its longtime reputation suggests. In a new book,
Green, Fair, and Prosperous: Paths to a Sustainable Iowa, Charles Connerly provides a thoroughly researched history lesson on how we got here and suggests decisions to make going forward.
“What kind of state does Iowa want to be?” Connerly, the director of the UI School of Planning and Public Affairs, asks in his introduction. To respond to this question, he uses a triangular model of sustainable planning that was developed by University of Michigan professor Scott Campbell. The three points of the triangle are issues that must be equitably addressed: environmental protection, economic growth, and social justice. They are inherently in tension with each other: when one of these issues is “solved,” it often throws the others out of balance; the conundrum is how to do all three well. Connerly is concerned that at this moment, Iowa is not doing any of them particularly well. “Put bluntly,” he writes, “neither the state’s environmental nor its social justice record is exemplary, and Iowa appears to be on a path in which environmental degradation is made justifiable by the health of the economy—or at least the agricultural portion of the economy.”