280 The Environmental Debate
that crack corn into its elements: starches and
sugars— especially in the form of high-fructose
corn syrup, the basis of the high-energy diet that
makes so many people sick and fat.
It ought to be harder than it is to account
for the American diet. There are, after all, thou-
sands of edible domesticated plants, dozens of
animals, and endless ways to raise, combine,
and create food. The big picture, however, is
depressingly easy to paint. American agriculture
is corn, soybeans, wheat, and hay— four crops
that account for 85 percent of the nation’s farm-
able land. In Iowa, corn and soybeans cover 23
million of the state’s 24 million acres of crop-
land.Source: From harpers.org/archive/2016/Richard Manning,
“The Trouble with Iowa,” Harper’s, Feb. 2016.immigration. Nationally, the chief fire-breather
on this matter has been Steve King, the Repub-
lican congressman from Iowa’s Fourth District.
He says that those favoring immigration reform
“advocate for the destruction of rule of law and
for anarchy and the descending down into Third
World status.” His district happens to contain
some of the state’s heaviest concentrations of
hog factories, slaughterhouses, and restaurants
where it is possible to find decent carne asada.
Virtually all of the corn that doesn’t go to
ethanol is eventually consumed by humans,
but it usually gets to our plates by a circuitous
route. One way or another it is processed. About
12 percent is funneled into industrial refineries
Document 184: Elizabeth Kolbert on Global Warming (2016)
Although people still debate the rate of climate change, there is no question that icebergs and glaciers are
melting, seas are rising, and the ocean is becoming increasingly acidified. Builders and city planners in coastal
areas around the world are increasingly focused on the need for resilient designs capable of withstanding
flooding, storm surges, and tsunamis. The nature writer Elisabeth Kolbert notes that while people in places like
New York and Miami are worried about the effects of global warming, those in northern climes like Greenland
and Siberia may look forward to unfrozen waterways and longer growing seasons.The town of Ilulissat [in Greenland] sits three
hundred and fifty miles north of Nuuk, above
the Arctic Circle. It’s home to one of Green-
land’s richest archeological sites—a stretch of
springy tundra that was inhabited first by the
Saqqaq, then by the Dorset, and finally by the
Inuit. Near the abandoned settlement is a bare
stone ledge overhanging a fjord. Elderly Green-
landers used to jump from the ledge to avoid
becoming a burden to their families, or so the
story goes.
...
The suicide ledge is a good place to go to feel
small—presumably that’s why it was chosen.
Standing at its edge, I could imagine how the
Saqqaq and the Dorset were awed by the inhuman
beauty. But today even sublimity has been super-
seded.
The city of ice is the product of the Jakob-
shavn ice stream. Like the negis [north-east
Greenland ice stream], the Jakobshavn origi-
nates in central Greenland, only it flows in the
opposite direction and into a long fjord. Where
the ice meets the water, there’s a calving front,
and it’s here that the ice arches and ice castles
take form. These float down the fjord toward
Ilulissat. (The town’s name is Greenlandic for
“icebergs.”) They would continue on out to
sea, except that they’re blocked by a subma-
rine ridge—a moraine—composed of rocky
debris left behind when the ice sheet shrank at
the end of the last ice age. The biggest icebergs
become lodged on the moraine and the smaller