Gazette guest columnist Mark Edwards makes an impassioned plea for protecting Iowa’s water resources in a column published in Sunday’s Gazette. Here’s just a brief excerpt:

“Two-thirds of Iowa’s 36 million acres are drowned in chemicals for just two annual plants — corn and soybeans — with diversity dwindling all around us. Iowa imports 86 percent of what we do eat and this food travels an average of 1,500 miles to get here. Yet 93 percent of Iowa has been permanently altered for agricultural purposes and 5 percent is developed in cities and roads.

“We could talk of ‘sustainability,’ which is a joke as we have lost about half of our topsoil over the last 50 years with all our conservation practices in place and have the worse water quality ever.

“I feel poisoned, angry and dying to escape this shallow, short-term thinking. The deadly decision of voluntary compliance as floated by the ‘strategy’ is killing our world! Must we rely on the federal government and the Environmental Protection Agency to force our faithless Iowa government to finally enforce the now ’40 year-old’ federal Clean Water Act?

“Can’t we as the people of Iowa believe in clean water?”

Read the full column for more background. Do you agree that Iowa needs tougher water-quality rules and enforcement?