Of Earth and Stars

At the end of last week, I saw that one of our regional air quality nonprofits was hosting a book club centered around Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial. So I started the book on Sunday afternoon and finished it by late Monday night.

My review of this book will reveal my bias, but this was such an emotional read. My family moved to eastern NC in the early 1990s, when the tobacco industry was failing, and contract growers began signing up farmers to build the concentrated animal feed operations (CAFOs) that now litter the eastern side of the state. These are not your traditional farm, but warehouse-like operations that can hold tens of thousands of animals in what are essentially dark, dim sheds. Beautiful farmland and forested countryside made way for these sheds, but also, particularly for pig farms, the "lagoons" (open pits) where their liquid waste was pumped, stored, and eventually sprayed into the air as a means of "treatment". When I went to university to get my environmental sciences and engineering degree, I met then the researchers who were beginning to look at the health effects of the neighbors who had to live near these operations - typically disenfranchised black or Hispanic populations, but a wide variety of people who suddenly had to contend with the reality of odor, particulate, and spray and/or "rain" from these operations coming onto their property, absorbing into their homes and clothes, and generally making their lives unbearable. It turns out that literally breathing in pig sh*t results in increased headaches, nausea, asthma, sickness, and other health effects. This is aside from the noise of the trucks, the smell of the deadboxes (often open over-piled boxes of animal carcasses from animals that died on the farm) and the trucks that carted those remains to the feed recycling facility. But of course, if you spoke out against it, you were simply told "that's the smell of money".

It has been a fight for environmental justice that I have followed for over 20 years, lifting the voices of community activists, standing outside the legislature, and traveling to some of the darkest hellholes you can imagine. I have been fortunate to meet and know several of the names mentioned in the book along the way, and the book does a great service to those who have left us - Steve Wing, Elsie Herring, and Don Webb.

The book is non-fiction, but written as a novel, and brings to life the history and story of how one of the world's largest agricultural companies (now owned by a foreign conglomerate that finds it cheaper to pollute here) has ritually screwed over everyone involved (including the small farmers themselves), and the nuisance trials in which they were ultimately brought to task to answer for the mess they created (which still persists). The book follows the history of the industry through to the circumstances that set pace for a mass-action lawsuit that made it all the way up to the Fourth Circuit.

To be fair, the prose is flowery, at times a bit much, even if you can relax into a good southern metaphor-laden drawl. But the book is well-researched and lays out the lies of the industry and the powerful political players, the ways in which the state legislature attempted to shut down the court cases, the failures/weaknesses of the state DEQ, the false narratives that were promoted, as well as the amazing work of the lawyers, expert witnesses, and advocates for the plaintiffs.

It's a book of persistence and hope, ultimately.

One of my few quibbles with the book is that it continues to push the "clean CAFO" narrative - this is not something I believe is possible. You can't have a ratio of animals-to-people of 29:1 and expect that anything humane or sustainable is happening there. There are prices to be paid for that imbalance of nature, as we have come to learn over time from the fish kills that result from spraying the effluent into our streams and rivers, and the poisoned groundwater wells, not to mention H1N1 and other near-miss pandemics in our backyards. Although the book does highlight the cases of fraud, environmental negligence, and animal cruelty that lies beneath the industry, it appears to want to hope that we're simply one engineering solution away from a romantic sense of bacon. So, if you care for animals at all, and are familiar with the life they suffer, this will ring a bit hollow there.

But beyond that - this book is engaging, enthralling, and entertaining, and I definitely recommend for anyone not familiar with the brokenness of American agriculture, and how what you consume ties into the health and dignity of others.