Big River gets big crowd

The Sierra Club Sangamon Valley Group had a packed house at the February program meeting for a showing of Big River and a talk by Stacy James from the Prairie Rivers Network. Big River is a follow up to King Corn with a focus on how chemicals used in farming impact water quality and public health.

One new thing I learned is how much Illinois and Iowa are responsible for the Gulf Coast Dead Zone. Chemicals find their way down the Mississippi and form a 5,000 square mile area in the Gulf of Mexico that can't support tasty ocean creatures like shrimp and crab.

The after-movie discussion was a highlight too. One retired farmer in the audience spoke about how the industry has changed over the years and said that five farmers in his family have had cancer.

Also that same week, the Illinois General Assembly held a hearing on atrazine, a farm chemical linked to cancer and other health issues. Even the Illinois Farm Bureau is fighting to let chemical companies give more farmers cancer.

Of course, you won't read anything about the Sierra Club meeting or the atrazine hearing in our daily newspaper. With the exception of the non-controversial stone soup hike, I don't believe the State Journal-Register has covered a Sierra Club event in the past two years. That must be the liberal media bias I keep hearing about.