Iowa Sierra Club awards go to Minburn advocate and ThePerryNews.com

DES MOINES – Two Dallas County residents received awards from the Sierra Club Iowa Chapter at its annual meeting Saturday in Johnston.

Stacy Hartmann of rural Minburn was presented with the Sierra Club’s Grassroots Award for 2015. As leader of the advocacy group Dallas County Farmers and Neighbors (DCFN), Hartmann has been opposing industrial hog confinements in and around Dallas County for the past four years.

The Hartmann-led group believes large-scale livestock confinements “harm the environment, human health, quality of life, property values and rural economies,” according to the DCFN website. “DCFN works to stop their growth and promote sustainable and human livestock production.”

In local actions, DCFN successfully defeated a proposed concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) two years ago near Woodward and more recently convinced the Dallas County Board of Supervisors to reject a CAFO construction permit proposed for an expansion project south of Dawson.

The Sierra Club Grassroots Award is presented to any individual whose contributions have resulted in significant change regarding the environment in a local community, according to Sierra Club Iowa Chapter Chair Wally Taylor.

“The Chapter is grateful to Stacy’s dedication to the environment, making her worthy of this award,” Taylor said.

Some of DCFN’s fellow advocates include Jefferson County Farmers and Neighbors, the Socially Responsible Agricultural Project and Food and Water Watch.

In her acceptance speech, Hartmann said CAFOs “are a scourge, the embodiment of all that is wrong and absurd about industrial agriculture and the food system it has given us. By extension, their proliferation points to a broken political system, which not only fails to effectively regulate them, but actually protects and promotes them as a matter of policy.”

A second award went to ThePerryNews.com, which was presented with a Sierra Club Environmental Journalism Award. Jim Caufield of Perry, editor and publisher of ThePerryNews.com, accepted the award.

Taylor said Caufield has positioned ThePerryNews.com to provide a forum for opinions that small-town newspapers often marginalize, particularly on environmental issues that might run contrary to the opinions of Iowa’s powerful agricultural interests.

“ThePerryNews.com deserves the 2015 Environmental Journalism Award,” Taylor said, “because it has established itself as a prominent voice on environmental issues for readers in the central Iowa counties of Dallas, Boone and Greene. We thank Jim for the contributions he has made to protect our environment.”

Taylor said the Environmental Journalism Award is reserved for a person working in the news media who has contributed significantly to environmental understanding at a community, county or state level.

In accepting the award on behalf of ThePerryNews.com, Caufield said, “I’m no advocate but a mere observer and a scribbler. I like to see opinions aired on issues that seem important, such as Iowa’s water quality and its relation to industrial agriculture. Two years ago, a wildlife biologist with the DNR said to me, ‘Environmentally, Iowa is in the Dark Ages,’ and I’m still testing just how far that’s true.”

The Sierra Club, founded by the American naturalist and nature writer John Muir in 1892, has 2.4 million members nationwide. With about 5,000 members in Iowa, the Sierra Club Iowa Chapter aims to “take action so all Iowans can enjoy clean air, clean water, clean and renewable energy, expansion and protection of natural areas and wildlife and a government that represents people not polluters.”

Neila Seaman is chapter director of the Sierra Club Iowa