November 12 | The Heartland at a Crossroads: Bold Voices on America’s Rural Future

Event Information

Date:

Wednesday, November 12, 2025

Time:

6:00 – 8:00 p.m. CT

Location:

Tom and Ruth Harkin Center (2800 University Avenue, Des Moines, IA, 50311)

Cost:

$40

Accommodations:

American Sign Language (ASL) and live captioning (CART) will be provided. Any additional accommodation requests can be made by emailing harkininstitute@drake.edu.

Event Summary

Pulitzer Prize winner Art Cullen has established himself as an essential witness to the transformation of rural America, thanks to his unique perspective as editor of The Storm Lake Times. His new book, We Crapped In Our Nests: Notes From the Edge of the World, offers an unflinching examination of how we’ve degraded our environment and communities, along with his vision for rural America’s future.

Cullen will be joined in conversation with Chris Jones, President of the Driftless Water Defenders and author of The Swine Republic. They will discuss topics including corporate agricultural dominance, water quality protection, rural community transformation, immigration and rural vitality, and more.

The event will include opening remarks from Senator Tom Harkin (retired). Books will be available for purchase before and after the event.

About We Crapped In Our Nests:

Learn More!

We have fouled our nest over the past half century in a way that was almost unavoidable, given our history of seeking domination — first over the Indigenous people of the Western World, then over their land. Native people for millennia lived with the land in a vital relationship. Europeans set out to transform that relationship brutally, and this destruction has reached a head. We simply cannot go on like this, washing our soil down the river while the planet bakes, ignoring our own immigration story.

As Art writes, “Fifty years around a small town amid the teeming waves of golden corn, a lot has changed, but corn remains king, just like when we were in school. But the place we knew is gone, that world of family farms and the Saturday livestock auction. We are the poorer for it. This is how it went down, or at least how I put it down, in notes compiled over this strange time from Irving Street just up from the lake in the small town we called home.”

About the Speakers:

Art Cullen

Art Cullen is editor and co-owner with older brother John of the Storm Lake Times Pilot (www.stormlake.com) in rural Northwest Iowa. Art is a Storm Lake native, where he graduated from St. Mary’s High School with his pal Marty Case. Art barely earned a journalism degree from the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn. He has been a reporter and editor at newspapers in Algona, Ames and Mason City, Iowa, and helped John launch the Storm Lake Times in their hometown in 1990. They also own the Cherokee Chronicle Times, a weekly in an adjacent county.

Art won the Pulitzer Price in 2017 for a series of editorials about agricultural surface water pollution in Iowa. His columns have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian and regional publications. He authored a journalistic memoir, Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper. The Cullen family and their newspaper also were the subjects of a feature-length independent documentary film Storm Lake that aired nationally on the PBS series Independent Lens.

Art and his wife Dolores, a feature writer and photographer at the Times Pilot, have four children, including son Tom, who is the newspaper’s managing editor.

Chris Jones

Until recently, Chris Jones was a Research Engineer with IIHR-Hydroscience & Engineering at the University of Iowa. He holds a PhD in Analytical Chemistry from Montana State University and a BA in chemistry and biology from Simpson College. Previous career stops include the Des Moines Water Works and the Iowa Soybean Association. As an avid outdoorsman, he enjoys fishing, bird watching, gardening, and mushroom hunting in both Iowa and Wisconsin. While he spends most of his time in Iowa City, he is especially fond of the Upper Mississippi River and the Driftless Area of Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. He recently retired from the Univ. of Iowa, and in addition to his Substack and many speaking engagements, he has become executive director of Iowa Driftless Water Defenders (DWD).