Pulitzer Prize-winning Iowa editor, author shares views

Storm Lake’s Art Cullen reads from his new book, talks farming and politics

By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

Storm Lake newspaper editor Art Cullen has a lot of opinions, and he isn’t shy about sharing them:

• The temporary riches that came from the development of the ethanol industry mask how it is destroying the land and eroding rural communities, he said.

• The Supreme Court decision on Citizens United has allowed billionaires and corporations to buy the government.

• “Idiots” in the Iowa Legislature don’t care if 100 Iowa lakes are dying, Cullen maintains.

• President Trump’s idea for a southern border wall “would be a great thing for the ladder industry,” otherwise “it’s a huge waste of money. It’s ridiculous.”

• And Cullen really, really doesn’t like “big agriculture,” such as Monsanto and some businesses the Koch brothers own.

Cullen blames big ag for destroying traditional Iowa farming and rural communities, and especially for encouraging farming practices that are resulting in the loss of Iowa topsoil and the pollution of the state’s surface waters.

It was a series of 10 editorials Cullen wrote for the Storm Lake Times in 2016, about agriculture causing water pollution and the fight for government transparency, that led to him winning the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing.

Cullen was the guest speaker last Thursday at a forum presented by the Charles City Press and Hallmark Integrated Media.

He was introduced by Gene Hall, former publisher of the Press, who called him a longtime friend and colleague — in addition to being a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Cullen thanked Hall for the invitation, and noted that his views “are not necessarily the views of Gene Hall or the Charles City Press.”

Cullen talked to a full house at the Elks Lodge in Charles City about his history in the newspaper industry, and about how he, his wife, his son and his brother ended up working at the Storm Lake Times, which his brother started in 1990.

And he talked about the reporting and editorials chronicling nitrate and phosphorus pollution in the Raccoon River and a lawsuit filed by the Des Moines Water Works against Buena Vista and other counties because that pollution was affecting the water reaching Des Moines.

As a result of winning the Pulitzer Prize — the most prestigious honor available in print journalism — Cullen also got a book deal from Viking Press, which turned into “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper.”

“It’s a book about growing up in Storm Lake, a meatpacking town with a beautiful lake and a pretty little college, Buena Vista University, and then about the farm crisis in Algona, and what we’re seeing now in the death of rural communities,” he said. “I don’t think that anybody can argue that Laverne, Iowa, or Kanawha, Iowa, is better off now than it was in 1980. What’s happened to rural Iowa, it’s depopulated, and we’re all hamsters on that wheel chasing 200-bushel yields.”

Cullen said Storm Lake is changing, some for the better and some for the worse.

He said it is one of the few small rural communities that is growing in population, largely because of the influx of immigrants to work in the towns’ pork, turkey and egg plants.

“Storm Lake’s elementary school is about 90 percent immigrant and about 75 percent of them are Latino,” he said. “We speak about 30 languages in Storm Lake, and it’s growing. We have a $30 million bond issue on the ballot Tuesday for a new early childhood education center because we have kids coming out of our windows.”

Immigrant residents own stores, hold positions on the City Council and the school board and contribute to the community, he said. The high school valedictorian was from an immigrant family.

Yet, despite that, “We have a congressman who wants to run off all our best people,” Cullen said, referring to U.S. Rep. Steve King.

Cullen said his book, “puts all those things together and it kinda swirls in this isolated rural community in the middle of nowhere. All these huge world forces come together, world markets, climate change and weather, world immigration patterns, and it’s kind of fascinating to be in Storm Lake.”

Cullen read three chapters from the book, then took questions from the audience on a wide range of political, agricultural and social issues.

His answer to the question of how to deal with the rise in civic ignorance and the reliance on social media for “news” — subscribe to a newspaper.