Review of Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial by Corbin Addison
Rating *****
Wastelands is a story about odor. It’s also a story about large corporations putting profits above doing the right thing. The book shares a similar theme with the book Toms River, which is about two large chemical companies that polluted the air and water around Toms River, New Jersey, and the people who fought to stop them. The main question at the center of this story is whether people living near large-scale pig farms, or concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), have a right to enjoy their property without the unpleasant smell that comes from these large pig farms and the vast amounts of animal waste that are collected in lagoons and then sprayed onto nearby fields.
Describing something that smells bad is sort of like defining pornography: you know it when you see it, or, in this case, smell it. As I read the author’s attempts to describe the awful odor emanating from these pig farms and spraying operations, it reminded me of my time as a regional airline pilot. How is that? You ask. I’m not talking about smelly passengers, though there were plenty of those; I’m talking about one specific route we used to fly. The route was from St. Louis to Sioux City, Iowa. There were many occasions when we would descend into Sioux City and be hit with a terrible odor that permeated the entire cockpit and cabin. The smell was especially bad when there was little wind. I learned from the employees at the airport that the smell was coming from a nearby meatpacking plant. What we were smelling was the scent of animal blood.
I had little difficulty empathizing with the neighbors who joined a class-action lawsuit against Smithfield Foods. Just like in the story in Toms River, the people who brought the lawsuit were ridiculed and accused of trying to hurt the local economy. Some of the worst accusers were politicians. Once they learned about the class action lawsuit, they banded together to write legislation to prevent nuisance lawsuits. Fortunately, since the bill was signed after the lawsuits were brought, it wasn’t retroactive, and the class action lawsuits were allowed to proceed to a jury trial.
One of the more aggressive politicians who fought the lawsuits was Senator Tom Tillis of North Carolina. He went on and on about how these people and their out-of-town lawyers were just out for the money, and he was going to do whatever he could to stop them. I am willing to go out on a limb and say that if Senator Tillis lived next to one of these CAFOs, he might have had a different opinion on the matter.
The author does a good job not only of describing the problem and the environmental impact of the open-air wastewater lagoons and the spraying of that wastewater onto nearby fields, but he also provides several alternative solutions that have been implemented at other large-scale farm operations, such as simply covering the lagoons and pumping the wastewater into the soil. Or, better yet, treating the waste and then turning the resulting methane into usable energy.
The author covers a great deal of territory in the ten-plus years it took for the story to unfold. The audiobook was over 16 hours long. I’m sure I lost a few pounds as I walked the neighborhood with the audiobook playing in my earbuds.
There was a statement read by Judge Harvie Wilkinson III, an appeals judge with the U.S. Fourth Circuit, that could serve as a summary of this book: “The rights of neighbors to enjoy their property free from unreasonable interference must be respected. And the dignity of animals must not be used as a shield for practices that treat them—and the humans who live nearby—with disregard.”