By Alice Eberhart

For the past two years, students from a variety of humanities programs spent their summer traveling around Eastern Iowa to learn about water pollution and its impact on local communities—and then created art and writings to share the stories they uncovered.

This project, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), aimed to foster collaboration between engineering, environmental sciences, and the humanities to create educational resources and imagine solutions to local problems.

The students’ work from the summer is a portion of a larger project called the Blue-Green Action Platform, or BlueGAP. It spans multiple states, institutions, and disciplines, and aims to connect communities to address the ecological and health effects of nitrogen pollution in waterways.

The University of Iowa’s portion of the project is headed by David Cwiertny, William D. Ashton Professor of Civil Engineering and professor of chemistry, and Ibrahim Demir, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering. The humanities portion is led by Eric Gidal, professor of English, who was assisted by Kate Giannini, a Project Manager at IIHR – Hydroscience and Engineering.

Gidal accompanied the students as they toured areas across eastern Iowa. They met with farmers, hydrologists, engineers, and community organizations to learn about agricultural runoff. Students then created videos, essays, story maps, virtual exhibits, creative journalism, and sculptural art to give voice to the experiences of watershed communities.

“I recall many visits to farms, cities, and wetland restoration sites where we met inspiring community partners and were able to bring our own skills in imaginative interpretation and creation to help understand and communicate what we were learning,” Gidal said.

Gidal and Giannini created two exhibitions of these works in the Iowa City and Coralville area, one at Public Space One and the other at the Iowa Water Conference. Gidal also shared and spoke about the work with community members in Fremont County, the site of a fertilizer spill earlier this year.

“I was privileged to have been able to recruit two excellent teams of students working in a wonderful range of fields, and I learned much from them and their different approaches to our project,” Gidal said. “Sharing this work with the public in a variety of settings has reaffirmed my sense of the value of the arts and humanities for building a sustainable future.”

Gidal and the students who participated in the project in 2023 published an article in the journal Open Rivers in 2024 that outlines the goals of the project, as well as provides a detailed overview of each student project. Since then, the work has also been featured in recent issue of Currents, and was discussed by Cwiertny and Gidal on the podcast Gulf Streams.

The BlueGAP project has ended, but UI faculty are currently applying for grant funding to further develop the combination of data collection, storytelling, and community engagement on a more local basis.

“I think there is great potential for more work of this kind,” Gidal said. “I think there is value in using the arts and humanities to help connect experts in environmental sciences and engineering with different Iowa communities.”

While working with BlueGAP, Gidal also became involved with the Iowa Initiative for Sustainable Communities, which has opened other opportunities for publicly engaged in the arts and humanities.

“It’s very rewarding to collaborate across disciplines and to work alongside the many talented people and organizations in our state,” Gidal said.