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Residents of some farming communities are being forced to put up with serious airborne bullshit.
The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism reports on the growth of the revolting practice of using water irrigation systems to squirt manure over farmland.
So far, 14 of Wisconsin’s 258 dairy factory farms, known as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, are using the practice, which involves spraying fine mists of dung out of commercial sprinklers. Nearly all of North Carolina’s hog farms do likewise. The practice is also used in Iowa, Michigan, and other Midwestern farming states. From the Wisconsin Watch report:
Applying liquid manure to fields using pipelines and farm irrigation systems is less expensive than trucking manure and applying it with traditional land-spreading rigs. …
The issue is tied inextricably to the controversial spread of CAFOs across the Wisconsin landscape. The farms produce overwhelming amounts of manure and have angered and frustrated nearby residents who feel they have little control over the growth and operations of the industrial farms. Cattle on Wisconsin farms produce as much waste each year as the combined populations of Tokyo and Mexico City, according to calculations by Gordon Stevenson, a retired former chief of the [Wisconsin Department of Natural Resource’s] runoff management section. …
Spraying manure doesn’t just sound gross. It poses real human health risks:
Some research suggests that the plethora of chemicals and pathogens found in liquid manure can have serious health impacts, ranging from respiratory disease to potentially lethal antibiotic resistant infections. Opponents fear wider use of manure irrigation will increase the risk of human illness …
[C]ritics and even some proponents of manure irrigation say the practice can threaten water supplies.
Backers defend the spraying by saying it helps farms more precisely place their manure on their land. But try selling that crap to Wisconsinite Scott Murray, who sold his home several years ago after he and his family could no longer stand the manure mist drifting over from a neighboring CAFO. “It even got into the walls of our home,” Murray said. “It hurt so bad even to breathe.”
Source
Manure spraying under scrutiny, Wisconsin Watch
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.
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What should you do when a fracking company sets up a drilling site right in your backyard? After you stock up on extra-strength Tylenol and Kleenex for the forthcoming chronic headaches and copious nosebleeds, you might want to call a good lawyer.
Yesterday, a jury in a Texas county court issued a landmark ruling against Aruba Petroleum for contaminating a family’s property and making them sick. The company has been ordered to pay $2.925 million in damages to Lisa and Bob Parr of Wise County, Texas.
In March 2011, the Parrs filed a lawsuit against Aruba Petroleum, alleging that air and water contamination from the company’s 22 drilling sites within two miles of their ranch had devastating effects on the family’s property and health.
“My daughter was experiencing nosebleeds, rashes,” said Ms. Parr in a 2011 press conference. “There were mornings she would wake up about 6:00 … covered in blood, screaming, crying.”
Before filing the lawsuit, the Parrs had been forced to sell their ranch and move due to fracking-related contamination to both their land and their animals — oh, and also the small matter of regularly waking up soaked in blood pouring from their nasal cavities.
Parr v. Aruba Petroleum, Inc. is being called the first case in which a jury has awarded compensation for fracking-related contamination. Most such cases are settled out of court. Like the suit filed in 2010 by Stephanie and Rich Hallowich of the ironically named Mount Pleasant, Penn., who were forced to relocate after shale drilling in the area polluted the air and water near their home, resulting in serious health problems. They sued Range Resources and ended up settling their case for $750,000. The terms of the settlement famously included a highly restrictive lifelong gag order that prohibits the Hallowich family, including their children, from ever discussing their case or fracking in general.
The Parrs’ lead attorney, David Matthews, praised the family for persisting in its fight: “It takes guts to say, ‘I’m going to stand here and protect my family from an invasion of our right to enjoy our property.’ It’s not easy to go through a lawsuit and have your personal life uncovered and exposed to the extent this family went through.”
Julia Roberts, are you listening? Erin Brockovich 2: Get Off My Shale is guaranteed box office gold!
Source
$3 million verdict for ‘first fracking trial’, MSNBC
In Landmark Ruling, Jury Says Fracking Company Must Pay $3 Million To Sickened Family, ClimateProgress
Eve Andrews is a Grist fellow and new Seattle transplant via the mean streets of Chicago, Poughkeepsie, and Pittsburgh, respectively and in order of meanness. Follow her on Twitter.
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Pony up, frackers: Texas family wins $3 million in contamination lawsuit
Mother Jones
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A 19-year-old undocumented immigrant confronted Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and not-quite-presidential candidate, about immigration reform at an event hosted by the Clinton Foundation Thursday.
An hour into the panel discussion, which featured Clinton and her daughter, Chelsea Clinton, the moderator, actress America Ferrera, called on a young woman at the front of the room to ask a question. “I have a very different glass ceiling than some of the girls here,” the 19-year-old woman explained, fighting back tears. “For the first time publicly I want to say that I am an undocumented immigrant.” She went on to explain that her family had illegally brought her to the US from Croatia when she was five-years-old. “It’s been very hard,” she continued, “because I don’t have the documentation to get a job, to vote—which is essential obviously to women representation—to buy an apartment, to take out a loan to go to college, so I couldn’t even go to my dream college because of that, to get no financial aid.”
Clinton immediately sympathized. “I believe strongly that we are missing a great opportunity by not welcoming people like you,” she said, “and 11 million others who have made contributions to our country, into a legal status.”
You can watch the exchange here, beginning at the hour and 20-minute mark.
Clinton continued, saying that she favors “immigration reform and a path to citizenship.” The former secretary of state shied away from offering an opinion on how exactly she thinks the government should offer citizenship to those residing in the country without documents, but she endorsed the reform bill that the Senate passed last year. Without naming the party, she called out the Republican leaders of the House of Representatives and said that they should allow a vote on the bill. “I think that’s a big missed opportunity for our country,” Clinton said, “because part of the reason we’re going to do really well in the 21st century is because we are a nation of immigrants. We keep attracting people like you and your family who want to make a contribution. It’s not only because we want to make life better for people like yourselves who is already here, it’s good for us.”
The Clintons were speaking at an event for the family foundation’s No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project, which focuses on advancing women’s rights worldwide. The younger Clinton made news herself at the event by announcing that she is pregnant.
Clinton supported the failed bipartisan efforts to reform the immigration system during George W Bush’s second term. The Senate’s latest stab at fixing the system is more modest than the Bush-era proposal.
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Watch Hillary Clinton Tell an Undocumented 19-Year-Old Why She Supports Immigration Reform
Mother Jones
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Religious conservatives are urging the GOP to scratch Sin City off its list of potential locations for the 2016 Republican National Convention, the Dallas Morning News reports. According to the paper, advocates are concerned that Las Vegas’ reputation as a gambling and prostitution haven will discourage conservatives from attending the event and that the city is a “trap waiting to ensnare” convention attendees.
“The GOP is supposedly interested in reaching out to conservatives and evangelicals. Maybe that’s just a front, but if they really mean it this is not the way to do it,” James Dobson, founder of Family Talk, a Christian radio show that broadcasts across the United States, told the paper. “Even though Vegas has tried to shore itself up and call itself family-friendly, it’s still a metaphor for decadence. There’s still 64 pages of escort services in the yellow pages.”
Dobson, along with leaders of the American Family Association, Eagle Forum, the Traditional Values Coalition, and Family-PAC sent a letter to Republican chairman Reince Priebus warning him to choose another destination.
Las Vegas is considered a frontrunner for the 2016 convention. Other cities under consideration are Dallas, Denver, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Kansas City, Missouri. The Nevada city has never hosted a national political convention for either Democrats or Republicans, but it’s been aggressively courting the GOP. The city’s promotional video for the convention does not feature any gambling. Instead, it emphasizes Las Vegas’ hotels, sunshine, rock climbing, proximity to the Hoover Dam, NASCAR, places of worship, and the “growing Asian population.” The video pans to Disney’s logo.
Las Vegas has a strong lobbying campaign behind it. The team includes casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who spent over $98 million on GOP candidates in 2012, resort businessman Stephen Wynn, and Washington political strategists, according to the New York Times. Andrea Lafferty, president of the Traditional Values Coalition, told The Dallas Morning News that while she supports Adelson, she fears that with all of the escorts and prostitutes available in the Las Vegas area, she “can see all the setups that are going to take place.”
Erick Erickson, editor-in-chief of the conservative blog RedState.com, also expressed concern about the GOP choosing Las Vegas. “Good Christian delegates getting drunk, gambling, stuffing dollar bills in strippers’ g-strings, etc. will be the toast of not just MSNBC, but the front page of the New York Times, ABC, CBS, NBC, the Huffington Post, and more.” he wrote. Not to mention, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) might wake up with a tiger in his bathroom.
Source:
Religious Right Fears the GOP Can’t Handle a National Convention in Las Vegas
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Mother Jones
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The Bosnia List
By Kenan Trebincevic and Susan Shapiro
PENGUIN BOOKS
An estimated 100,000 people died during the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the early 1990s, but few Americans grasp the insanity of the conflict. Kenan Trebincevic, a Bosnian Muslim, was 11 when the fighting broke out. He describes how lifelong friends turned on his family, how his brother and father were thrown into detainment camps, and how they eventually fled under nightmarish conditions. He also takes us on a trip home to complete his titular to-do list as he confronts the betrayers and attempts to make sense of the nonsensical.
This review originally appeared in our January/February 2014 issue of Mother Jones.
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Quick Reads: "The Bosnia List" by Kenan Trebincevic and Susan Shapiro
Mother Jones
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In late February, when Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni signed the nation’s harsh new anti-gay bill into law, he claimed the measure had been “provoked by arrogant and careless western groups that are fond of coming into our schools and recruiting young children into homosexuality.” What he failed to mention is that the legislation—which makes homosexuality a crime punishable by life in prison in some cases—was itself largely due to Western interlopers, chief among them a radical American pastor named Scott Lively.
Lively, a 56-year-old Massachusetts native, specializes in stirring up anti-gay feeling around the globe. In Uganda, which he first visited in 2002, he has cultivated ties to influential politicians and religious leaders at the forefront of the nation’s anti-gay crusade. Just before the first draft of Uganda’s anti-gay bill began circulating in April 2009, Lively traveled to Kampala and gave lengthy presentations to members of Uganda’s parliament and cabinet, which laid out the argument that the nation’s president and lawmakers would later use to justify Uganda’s draconian anti-gay crackdown—namely that Western agitators were trying to unravel Uganda’s social fabric by spreading “the disease” of homosexuality to children. “They’re looking for other people to be able to prey upon,” Lively said, according to video footage. “When they see a child that’s from a broken home it’s like they have a flashing neon sign over their head.”
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Mother Jones
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One snowy week near the end of January, the halls of the Elko Convention Center are abuzz with the tipping of hats and toasting of beers. Thousands of cowboys and girls had descended on the small northern Nevada city from all over the West for the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, the oldest—and one of the largest—of the various gatherings celebrating America’s waning ranching lifestyle.
Performing on the main stage on a Thursday night, Jessie Veeder doesn’t exactly match the current cowpoke demographic. She has dark curly hair, and wears a brightly colored top and pleather pants. More notably, though, she’s only 30—the same age as the gathering itself—which makes her a good deal younger than the average participant. The next night, 80-year-old Ian Tyson, a classic cowboy musician, would headline this stage in classic ranch-hand gear, crooning: “Everything’s fast forward now, years are flying by. Man, that can really fuck up a 1950s guy.”
Veeder’s showcase, “Straddling the Line,” features a bill of younger talents who are taking the torch from Tyson’s generation and adapting it to their own. It’s part of an ongoing effort by the festival’s organizers, who are desperate to diversify and expand the cowboy niche. The Elko shindig also includes panel and group discussions on the decline of ranching and the challenges facing the rural west. After all, what is cowboy poetry and music without cowboys?
There was once a time, at the turn of the 20th century, when half of America grew food. But the number of cattle raised in the United States is at its lowest since 1952. And nearly two-thirds of Great Plains counties declined in human population between 1950 and 2007—69 of them by more than half. There are plenty of reasons for these numbers: the industrialization of agriculture, encroaching development, battles over the use of public land for grazing, and an aging population. Ranching is increasingly unprofitable—feed prices have doubled in recent years—and the children of ranching families are fleeing for financially greener pastures.
By 2007, the number of farm and ranch operators younger than 35 had dwindled to 5 percent, down from 16 percent in the early 1980s. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that by 2020, agricultural operations will have shed 96,000 jobs (8 percent of the total), the largest decline of any occupational category.
Veeder is defying the trend. Three years ago, after college and a period of employment and touring, she moved back to the 100-year-old North Dakota ranch where she grew up. The day after her show, she participates in a panel called “Back on the Ranch” with three other young ranchers who followed a similar path.
As a musician, Veeder tells the audience, she is frequently asked why she lives so far from cultural centers like Nashville or Austin. She describes how she grew up riding horseback through the beautiful buttes alongside her father. To afford that kind of lifestyle, her dad had to work a professional job during the day. “I understood the sacrifice it took to keep a place like that intact and in the family, to continue the legacy,” she says. “I saw the work and the struggle, but I saw the passion.” The other panelists agree. “It’s not a great living, but it’s a really good lifestyle,” one adds.
Her connection to the land, and the hardships that go with that, is something Veeder explores in her lyrics. The words have always been front and center in cowboy music. Many of the songs have their roots in cowboy poetry, which harkens back to after the Civil War; bored cowboys picked up on a British Isles tradition, and started writing poems influenced by Spanish lingo and the songs of soldiers. The first collections of cowboy songs, in the early 20th century, paid little attention to melody. It was often just poems set to a tune. “Them that could sing usually did,” the poet and musician Dale Girdner once told Charlie Seemann, who runs the Western Folklife Center. “And them that couldn’t carry no kinda tune would usually just say the verses.”
The song “Boomtown,” Veeder explains during her performance, is an ode to her hometown of Watford City, which has ballooned from 1,200 to an estimated 10,000 people in the past six years due to the Bakken oil boom.
Stopped by the farmhouse the other day
Jimmy’s moved back home he’s helping dad cut hay
Pumps in the morning but he gets home by 5
We almost lost him there
Now he’s more alive
God bless the sound
Boomtown
Jimmy’s story is not too distant from her father’s—or her own. To make ends meet, Veeder’s husband works for Marathon Oil, and she works as a communication specialist, freelance writer, and musician. Ranching is their labor of love.
The festival’s attendees are also grappling with a changing rural landscape. Novelist Johanna Harness traveled all the way from Nampa, Idaho, to Elko to give her kids a taste of the culture. I meet her at an open discussion called “Into the Future,” held in a convention center room divided up by theme.
She and her kids had joined the Youth and Economics group. A large sheet of paper on the wall nearby bears questions scribbled in marker: “If there were no limitations, what is your vision of the West/rural you want to build? What is the story about the future you want to tell?”
Ivy, Harness’ 8-year-old, is curled up on the floor, a purple bandana around her neck, absorbed in drawing the family’s large converted red barn. Virginia, 15, takes notes while her brother Paul, 12 looks on bright-eyed, clad in a cowboy hat and sneakers. It’s the family’s second year at the fest, and Harness says she gets choked up just thinking about it. The poems and songs “are memories that my grandparents told me—and they’re gone now.”
She’s part of the first generation to leave the farm and attend college, but she misses the tradition of agricultural work. Her mother moved from Kansas to Idaho during the Dust Bowl at the chance of employment, only to give up the farm they lived on soon after for health reasons. Her father, the youngest of 11 children, dropped out of school at age 15 to work full-time, but the family still couldn’t make things work financially.
“There has to be a way for people to make a good living so that people can commit to that lifestyle,” another member of the Youth and Economics group comments in a hushed rant. “A lot of ranchers need to be more business-like, and I would whisper that, because we’re just doing that now in our 84th year. You can’t fall in love with your cows; you can’t fall in love with the old photos. You’ve got to put numbers on things and you’ve got plan ahead.”
Harness understands all of this. But “these are my roots,” she tells me. “This is incredibly important to me…I want my kids to hear these stories and know who they are.”
Virginia, Harness’ eldest, considers herself a “rural person”—one who always wants the elevation of the town she lives in to exceed its population. But she doesn’t think she wants to go into ranching. “How sustainable would it be for me to do that?” She would probably have to work a second job in town. Instead, she hopes to work in politics, lobbying for rural causes. Attending the festival has been “a form of education,” she says. “Rural people aren’t stupid. That stereotype is really harmful to teens and kids in rural communities.”
Roaming the center’s halls, an 11-year-old named Colton Lee is dressed in knee-high Tony Lama boots, Wranglers, a pocket watch, wool vest, polka-dotted wild rag, and Justin cowboy hat. He learned the ins and outs of cowboy attire on his dad’s ranch in Hudson, Colorado, although he doesn’t get to wear it all the time (during PE, for example).
But Colton, who aspires to be a rancher and a veterinary surgeon, brings a cowboy perspective wherever he goes. Like his father, and unlike most of his peers, he isn’t into the Internet. He’d rather listen to cowboy poets like Paul Zarzyski. And the ranching lifestyle still appeals to him, even if it’s a struggle.
“It’s worth it,” he says, wracking his brain for the title of a song he knows that says it perfectly. He can’t quite recall it, but he remembers the sentiment well enough: “You’re rich, but you’re broke.”
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Mother Jones
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On Friday, hard-line anti-gay activists gathered at the National Press Club in Washington to announce the formation of a new organization to fight what they call the “global LGBT agenda.” Known as the Coalition for Family Values, the group is the brainchild of two extreme anti-gay advocates: Scott Lively, a Massachusetts-based pastor who is running for governor of the Bay State, and Peter LaBarbera, the founder of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality. The coalition’s aim is to spread Russian-style anti-gay legislation throughout the world. Lively kicked off the event by praising Russia’s “much needed leadership in restoring family values,” and urged other countries to follow its “excellent example” by passing laws against gay-rights “propaganda” and banning adoption by gay parents. But the event did not go as planned.
About 20 minutes into the program, a young gay Russian man named Slava Revin stood up and yelled, “Vladimir Putin is a dictator!” After that, the conference dissolved into chaos, with Revin and the speakers shouting over each other. “Stop killing us,” cried a Lively supporter. “Stop killing speech. Stop killing freedom.” Eventually, Lively launched into a diatribe about “homo-fascists,” and Press Club staffers ushered Revin and another activist named Ellen Sturtz out of the room. Below is video of the exchange:
This kind of rhetoric is not unusual for Lively. The anti-gay crusader co-authored a book called The Pink Swastika, which argues that homosexuals were the driving force behind the Holocaust. In the United States, Lively’s ideas haven’t gotten much traction. But he has forged deep ties to religious and political leaders in Uganda and former Russian republics, where he has helped pave the way for anti-gay bills. Uganda’s main gay-rights organization is suing him for crimes against humanity for allegedly fostering anti-gay sentiment and legislation in that country. (Last week, President Yoweri Museveni​ of Uganda declared that he would sign a bill that makes homosexuality a crime punishable by life in prison.)
Through the Coalition for Family Values, Lively and LaBarbera intend to promote other types of legislation, including a bill to protect discrimination based on sexual orientation. (Lively casts it as a matter of religious freedom.) So far, they say, 75 pro-family organizations around the globe have signed on. Those listed in press materials are mostly obscure groups, but a few prominent social conservative outfits have joined, including Liberty Counsel Action and the American Family Association. “Other nations, including the United States, could learn form Russia and stop the homosexualization of our nation,” Diane Gramley, a representative of the AFA’s Pennsylvania affiliate told the crowd at Friday’s event. “It’s time for the United States to stop using our children as lab rats to see how they react to homosexual propaganda.”
Lively noted at the press conference that he considers most family-values crusaders too timid and said that he believes strong laws, such as the recently-passed Russian measure that criminalizes public support of same-sex relationships, are the only way to keep gay activists from “tearing down the fabric of society.”
After the event, the crowd spilled out onto the sidewalk. Revin, the gay Russian activist, was standing in the rain, holding a rainbow banner, and reciting the speech he had intended to give inside. “Putin is corrupted thief who invents scapegoats and deflects attention from his crimes” he declared. “His latest invention is the anti-gay law, so gays in modern Russia feel like Jews back in the USSR.” Then Sturtz handed Lively a miniature rainbow flag.
Lively tucked the flag into his pocket.
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Defend The Family statement (PDF)
Defend The Family statement (Text)
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American Family Association of Pennsylvania statement (PDF)
American Family Association of Pennsylvania statement (Text)
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WATCH: Anti-Gay Evangelical Calls Protesters "Homo-Fascists"
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