Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [129]
Instead, I want to focus on what, for me, is the symbol of the Bush administration’s relationship to the environment: the skyscraping pig shit geyser.
The scene I described at the beginning of this chapter was not from some science fiction movie. It’s very real. It happened on one of the growing number of factory farms that are despoiling vast tracts of America. It’s a very, very shitty story.
Before we start, allow me to make it clear that I love meat. In fact, I am eating meat right now. Sitting to my right are two members of TeamFranken. Sitting to my left are two pounds of summer sausage.
Twenty years ago, the hogs produced in this country were raised by family farmers. Today, three companies produce 60 percent of all the hogs in America. And they do it in factory farms, or CAFOs: Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations.
Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations are, perforce, Concentrated Animal Shitting Operations. Every hog produces ten times as much feces as a human being. Imagine if you produced ten times as much shit as you do right now. You’d probably be able to read this entire book on the can, instead of just this one chapter.
A single CAFO in Utah is home to 850,000 hogs, producing as much shit as the city of New York. New York City has fourteen sewage treatment plants. CAFOs have none. This presents something of a problem.
In order to dispose of hog waste, farmers have, since time immemorial, used it as fertilizer. It’s a nice idea. The pig eats an ear of corn and, two or three minutes later, takes a dump. The shit is then used as fertilizer to grow more corn, which is then fed to the pig, producing more shit, and so on and so forth. It’s the circle of life.
The concentration of hundreds of thousands of animals in a small area has disrupted this delicate balance by overloading the shit side of the equation. The waste from a hundred thousand pigs cannot be recycled in the same way. This is where our lagoons come into play.
A typical factory farm lagoon holds anywhere from five to twenty-five million gallons of untreated pig shit. As you might imagine, it smells a bit. In fact, according to pilots, you can smell a CAFO shit lagoon from an altitude of three thousand feet. The smell also travels horizontally. People lucky enough to live in the vicinity of an industrial hog farm are, with each breath, made keenly aware of the cause of their declining property values. If you live downwind of a CAFO, the value of your property drops thirty percent. If you drink a glass of orange juice, it tastes like hog shit.
“I’ve seen grown men cry because their homes stank,” says Don Webb, a very sad retired hog farmer.
The shit stink is exacerbated by the practice of spraying excess shit into the air and onto fields of Bermuda grass when the lagoons threaten to overflow. The industry maintains that spraying the shit onto Bermuda grass is a productive way of recycling the sewage, although the grass is so toxic that it will kill any animal that eats it. At any rate, most of the sprayed shit just goes into the environment, seeping into the groundwater, into the air, and into rivers and streams.
In 1995, a spill from one of these lagoons killed a billion fish in the Neuse River of North Carolina. Every year since, dead fish have continued to wash up onshore by the tens of millions. They’re not dying from the smell. No, these fish are falling prey to a previously unknown life form spawned in the pig shit basins and carried into the river waters: the pfiesteria piscicida. This dinoflagellate is a microscopic free-swimming single-celled organism that can mutate into at least twenty-four different forms, depending on its prey. It attacks the fish, stunning them with one toxin, then liquefying their flesh with another, then feasting on the liquefied skin and tissue. This is why so many of the fish in the Neuse (dead and alive) sport horrible, bloody lesions.
The fishermen