Twenty years ago a small group of legislators sought to protect groundwater in Iowa. We identified agricultural chemicals, landfills and underground storage tanks as especially responsible for compromising groundwater supplies.

The legislation we passed established programs and centers to address all these potential pollutants. This is how the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at ISU, the Waste Reduction Center at the University of Northern Iowa, and the Center for the Health Effects of Environmental Contamination at the University of Iowa were established.

High hopes
We had ambitions and hopes for all the centers and programs. We had especially high hopes for the Leopold Center because of a small amount of research 20 years ago. In 1987, I was the new chair of the House Agriculture Committee. I used that position to inform all committee members about new issues in agriculture and farming and brought in so many ISU professors, that, at the end of the year, the members asked me to see if they could get college credit.

I had a staff person look into how much money the pesticide industry was providing to ISU research efforts. I thought I knew what I would find – that the companies dominated research. What I found was the opposite: pesticide companies directly contributed very few dollars compared to the USDA and the state through its funding of the Agricultural Experiment Station. That is why the authors of the groundwater legislation decided $1.5 million could actually make a difference. That amount of funding could make sustainability a player.

The term 'sustainable'
Representative Paul Johnson put the word "sustainable" into the Center’s name. That term was pretty well known to some of us at the time, but not generally used. Some people may recall that Our Common Future, also known as the Brundtland Commission Report, was issued in 1987, the year that the Leopold Center was established.

The online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, notes that "sustainable" development came into general usage following the 1987 publication of this report. Formerly the World Commission on Environment and Development, the Brundtland Commission was set up by the United Nations. This commission coined what was to become an often-quoted definition: sustainable development "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

The Leopold Center joined this stream of new thinking, along with other institutions in the public sector and some NGOs that were attempting to show a new way. ISU now has a graduate degree program in sustainable agriculture and it has the Henry A. Wallace Chair for Sustainable Agriculture.

I believe that the Center and organizations such as Practical Farmers of Iowa contributed mightily to this new direction at Iowa State and throughout the nation. Just how much the Center contributed to this thinking is hard to measure, but Iowa and the nation need institutions like this to help provide the research and to become a beacon to those who want to put their boats into this stream of sustainable knowledge and action.

A near miss on 'sustainable'
Sustainable is an important term. However, when we passed the groundwater legislation, there were a number of important amendments before the bill came to its final passage, which was unanimous.

One of the most important amendments came from a Democratic representative from Sioux City who wanted to change the name of the center to the Rachel Carson Center for Organic Agriculture. He had many women legislators supporting this amendment but it failed, just barely. It was a close vote because many who wanted to give credit to a great American woman scientist were joined by many who wanted to do damage to the new center.

Paul Johnson realized that what was in the new center's name was very important. He assumed that to name the new center after Rachel Carson, a very well-known opponent of pesticides, and that to have "organic" in the name would have made it very difficult for the new center to get into the mainstream and move the current toward a sustainable future for agriculture.

Sustainable agriculture and global warming
I want to return to the 1987 report, Our Common Future. The U.N. committee report stated that society should make the economy use no more than was sustainable so that future generations would have as many resources available to them as we have. Twenty years later, the reality of global warming means that we must be sustainable – not because we will run out of resources such as coal and oil, but because we cannot continue to use these resources due to their pollution of the atmosphere.

The 4th Report of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) being released in 2007 is a warning. Thankfully, the American public and many of our institutions are heeding the warning that the Earth is warming very quickly and that the addition of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide is the overwhelming cause.

As we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Leopold Center, those who direct its mission must decide how this Center addresses global warming as part of making agriculture sustainable.

The best example of how sustainable development and global warming come together is the new coal-fired power plant that Alliant Energy has planned for Marshalltown. Of the 660 megawatts of capacity being built, the company claims that much of this power is necessary to feed the expanding electrical load for corn ethanol plants. Using coal, with more carbon dioxide per BTU than any fuel, to make ethanol from corn, with more fertilizer N energy than any other crop, is not sustainable and it does not address global warming in any important way.

Thus, my introduction to a panel on the mission of the Leopold Center for the next 20 years is this question: How will the Center both address sustainability and confront global warming?