Terraforming Iowa

Logline: Iowa’s ecological un-making is an environmental disaster on a massive scale, yet some Iowans are convinced that humans can follow a more restorative path that has the potential to heal the state’s broken landscape. 

Film Summary:

By many accounts, Iowa is the most transformed landscape in the United States. Two hundred years ago, eighty percent of Iowa’s lands were covered by tallgrass prairie, thick with wildlife and wetlands. Today, less than one tenth of one percent of that grassland remains. Iowa’s lands have been plowed, drained, and terraced. The wildlife is mostly eradicated. The thick topsoil that was present before the United States expanded into the region is mostly gone. What remains is a vast industrial farm populated by unending acres of cloned row crops. These crops are artificially kept alive by chemical inputs that further degrade the soil and the microbial life that supported the ancient prairies for eons. Iowa has been terraformed, and the results are troubling.

Originating in the world of science fiction, the word “terraforming” refers to the idea that space-faring humans might need to remake the environment of a planet to prepare it for colonization. Elon Musk, for example, has said that we will need to terraform Mars before humans can live there. At a minimum, Mars needs an atmosphere, warmer temperatures, and plant life to support a human colony. Terraforming, then, is the aggressive remaking of a hostile landscape into an environment suitable for humans.

I am calling my film Terraforming Iowa both to provoke the viewer to recognize the magnitude of change that has occurred to the landscape of Iowa and to expose the ironic —and perhaps somewhat tragic — character of this change. Those who reshaped Iowa’s lands intended to create an agricultural paradise. Instead, they unintentionally unleashed forces that have left Iowa so biologically devastated that it now resembles the planet Mars far more than their imagined utopia. Iowa’s ecological un-making is an environmental disaster on a massive scale. Reflecting on this situation, one farmer recently said to me over coffee in Ames, “it’s probably too late for Iowa, John.”

Given these massive ecological challenges, it is tempting to lapse into dystopian filmmaking. I plan to resist this temptation because the story of Iowa’s environmental future is not set. I take it as given that there is no going back to the pristine Iowa of the past. That Iowa is gone forever, and, for the foreseeable future, Iowa’s lands will continue to be needed for large-scale food production.

At the same time, there are people in Iowa who are convinced humans can follow a more restorative path that has the potential to heal this broken landscape. My film will highlight the voices of some of these individuals and hold them up as prophetic witnesses to a different future.

This film is in production and should be completed in late 2025.