Must-read recap: The New Lede's top stories
How "Big Ag" pollutes America's water; effects of "unprecedented" marine heat waves may be irreversible; new worries about risks PFAS and other chemicals pose for pregnancies.
How “Big Ag” pollutes America’s water, and makes money doing it
It’s been 33 years since an Iowa State University agronomist named Fred Blackmer thought he’d struck gold for Midwestern corn farmers. Using a fairly simple three-step method, Blackmer developed an analytical tool that could accurately tell farmers exactly how much fertilizer their fields needed to produce abundant harvests each season.
Despite what Blacker saw as obvious benefits to producers, not to mention the environment, his method failed to gain significant traction in farm country. Farmer allegiance to the excessive fertilizing practices pushed by the so-called “Big Ag” industry and aligned academic institutions left Blackmer’s common sense approach on a shelf gathering dust. He died in 2006.
State and federal data now show that since 1990, nitrogen spread on fields in Iowa and nine other major US corn-growing states has increased 26%, with more nitrogen than ever pouring off the land and polluting US waters. Demand for corn is high, both to supply ethanol refineries and to feed industrial livestock operations that add to water contamination themselves through manure runoff, according to the US Department of Agriculture.
In Iowa alone, according to state research, farmers apply about 2 billion pounds of commercial nitrogen annually to corn fields, and much of it is ending up in waterways that flow all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, worsening the conditions in a 6,500-square-mile “dead zone” where the waters are so oxygen-deprived that they can’t sustain marine life. Iowa contributes almost a third of the nitrogen scientists say causes the dead zone. (Read the rest of the story.)
Effects of “unprecedented” marine heat waves may be irreversible
Tens of thousands of dead fish are washing up on the Texas Gulf Coast, unprecedented numbers of seabird carcasses are showing up on beaches, and toxic algal blooms are growing in size and frequency: all signs of the calamitous impacts of warming trends for ocean waters that some scientists say may be irreversible.
July marked Earth’s hottest temperatures ever, and heat waves are currently affecting over 44% of ocean area, making the current marine heat wave the most widespread ever recorded. Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) expect that number to rise to over 50% by this fall. Usually, about 10% of the world’s oceans experience a heatwave at any given time.
The levels of marine heat waves this year are “unprecedented,” said Dillon Amaya, a scientist who studies climate extremes at the NOAA.
The marine heat wave could lead to a redistribution of ocean species that may then also destabilize additional ecosystems, according to Jenn Caselle, a research biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Marine Science Institute. (Read the rest of the story.)
New worries about risks PFAS and other chemicals pose for pregnancies
California researchers have found new evidence that several chemicals used in plastic production and a wide array of other industrial applications are commonly present in the blood of pregnant women, creating increased health risks for mothers and their babies.
The researchers said their findings add to a growing body of evidence showing that many chemicals people are routinely exposed to are leading to subtle, but harmful, changes in health.
“This is such an important issue,” said Tracey Woodruff, professor and director of the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment. “It’s urgent we do more to understand the role that chemicals have in maternal conditions and health inequities. We are being exposed to hundreds of chemicals and this research contributes to better understanding of the impact they are having on our health.”
The US has the highest maternal mortality in the developed world. Maternal death rates in the US doubled between 1999 and 2019, with mortality highest for African-American mothers. (Read the rest of the story.)