Sun 1 Jul 2007
Everytime I get out, she pulls me back in…
One of the things that veteran members of Congress recommend to newbies is that they specialize in certain topics close to them instead of trying to do everything. Congresswoman Jean Schmidt seems to have taken this advice to heart by becoming the House of Representative’s leading champion of toxic s**t.
First it was her struggle to have nuclear waste trucked by the tons into her own district. Now, as reported by Bill Sloat at The Daily Bellwether, the Congresswoman has become a cosigner of H.R. 4341, to amend the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act so that manure (aka “digestive emissions, feces, urine and other excrement from livestock”) wouldn’t be considered a “hazardous substance, pollutant or contaminant”.
It seems that agribusiness’ (remember mega-farms?) are worried about getting hit from lawsuits related to the rivers of toxic animal s**t that they spew out. Last year Rolling Stone magazine gave us a glimpse into this wonderful world:
Smithfield estimates that its total sales will reach $11.4 billion this year. So prodigious is its fecal waste, however, that if the company treated its effluvia as big-city governments do — even if it came marginally close to that standard — it would lose money. So many of its contractors allow great volumes of waste to run out of their slope-floored barns and sit blithely in the open, untreated, where the elements break it down and gravity pulls it into groundwater and river systems. Although the company proclaims a culture of environmental responsibility, ostentatious pollution is a linchpin of Smithfield’s business model.
A lot of pig shit is one thing; a lot of highly toxic pig shit is another. The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig shit: On a continuum of pollutants, it is probably closer to radioactive waste than to organic manure. The reason it is so toxic is Smithfield’s efficiency. The company produces 6 billion pounds of packaged pork each year. That’s a remarkable achievement, a prolificacy unimagined only two decades ago, and the only way to do it is to raise pigs in astonishing, unprecedented concentrations.
Smithfield’s pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs — anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.
The temperature inside hog houses is often hotter than ninety degrees. The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with gases from shit and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous exhaust fans run twenty-four hours a day. The ventilation systems function like the ventilators of terminal patients: If they break down for any length of time, pigs start dying.
Veteran reporter Sloat offers the Congresswoman some excellent advice:
Schmidt, whose 2nd district is populated by mostly by urban and suburban residents, probably should have stayed out of this fight. She will face opposition in the Republican primary next year, and she has opened herself to being portrayed as a politician who thinks poop isn’t a pollutant. That’s a stinky spot to be in. Just imagine the attack ads with people holding their noses.
She really does blog herself.
