and, just as notoriously, the grimy Mississippi in southern Louisiana (‘‘the
American Ruhr’’) and Buffalo Bayou and other industry-impacted streams
in Texas. Virtually none of these plants is unionized, and southern state gov-
ernments have been loath to examine the effects of the operations’ toxic
effusions on either workers or surrounding environments.
The industrial-scale production and slaughter of chickens and hogs is
arguably both a worse instance of environmental discrimination and a
more insidious environmental poison than chemical refining and manu-
facturing. Chicken slaughtering plants employ women, especially black
and, lately, Hispanic women. Hog disassembly operations workers are
women and men, some white, most black and Hispanic. Chicken farms
(‘‘broiler factories’’ would be more descriptive) usually produce more
wastes than farmers might reasonably return to crop fields as fertilizer.
Such high-nitrogen wastes will wash into streams anyway, but dumping
of excesses is not unknown in Arkansas, Alabama, and Maryland, among
other big broiler-making states. In , Maryland chicken wastes were ap-
parently responsible for a fish-killing ‘‘red tide’’ in upper Chesapeake estu-
aries. This particular tide was the same as one earlier identified in east-
ern North Carolina—Pfiesteria piscicida—a ‘‘new’’ and particularly toxic
dinoflagellate that caused lesions and death in fish and, more shocking,
made humans sick and disoriented simply from breathing air or touch-
ing water affected by the tide. The source ofPfiesteriawas eastern Caro-
lina’s newest industry: hog farms with many thousands of enclosed ani-
mals each. Since swine are astoundingly productive of wastes, each farm
maintained a ‘‘lagoon’’ to hold urine and feces—enormous surpluses be-
yond any farmer’s requirements for fertilizer. The subregion’s soil is por-
ous, its water tables are high, and rainfall is heavy. Field fertilizer and
lagoons leached into drainage creeks and into rivers and sounds. Lagoons
burst into the Cape Fear, New, Neuse, and Pamlico rivers. Watermen and
swimmers became ill. The young North Carolina State University biologist
who discovered and namedPfiesteriaherself became ill. Yet as years pass
since the ‘‘crisis’’ of the s, meatpacking companies continue to merge,
encouraging yet greater meat production in this dangerous industrial-scale
mode. The Chesapeake, Carolina sounds, and many other southern water-
ways, meanwhile, seem bound for septic lifelessness. Southerners (and
many others) have infested a lush country and imperiled, if not ruined, it.^15
tYet both despair and nostalgia are problematic. First, there is not a
place on earth with a human history that is not soaked in blood and the