Letter: Work together to heal hurting land

If we do not have healthy farming practices and grand scale development plans, it is inevitable that we will flood.

When you build new homes on land that was absorbing water, water will deluge. The concrete driveway doesn't angle toward a pond, but the streets, directing runoff to waterways. When you tile every square inch of land, you take away land for absorption. And you allow more erosion to build up in riverbeds, etc., that we do not even dredge with the regularity of the past century. (Not to mention losing that 'Iowa gold” when so many people around the world don't even have topsoil.) When set-aside lands are no longer privileged, we all lose. And when you can't agree with your neighbor about a creek, how can we expect to make plans about the life cycle of a river? Areas north are sending their water down the way. And delta areas in Louisiana are literally dying by the mile because of our chemical farming practices in Iowa.

Sit down to take five minutes and think about how to reverse your consumption; how to add, not deplete from the earth; how to heal a hurting land. Because she will take care of herself, but you will be treated like a parasite to purge. Not one of us deserves natural disasters, not one of us contributes to the problem. All of us do. Today is a great day to do better.

Sayde Alexandrescu

Cedar Rapids