farms and associated processing plants on the Delmarva Peninsula. Such
probable causation obliges us to return once more to land animals and the
industrial-scale production of meat.
tPfiesteriahad been discovered and named in Raleigh by a young aquatic
biologist named JoAnn Burkholder at North Carolina State University. In-
tensely engaged in her own research and still struggling for tenure, one
day Burkholder took a call from across campus, from the veterinary school:
the fish specialist there complained that his specimens kept dying in his
tanks, no matter how well he and his assistants cleaned and checked;
would she help? So began an amazing and horrifying story. Burkholder
and her assistant, especially the latter, suffered disorientation and mem-
ory loss from working over an infested tank. Later, reports of many thou-
sands of dead fish floating up with dreadful lesions came in from eastern
Carolina’s sounds and rivers, along with reports of watermen and swim-
mers with lesions on their hands and arms. Burkholder, at her microscope,
finally saw her dinoflagellate as it morphed through an astounding number
of shapes when, stimulated by oxygenated nutrients in its environment, it
was aroused to mass as a red tide and attack fish and all other flesh.^23
After Burkholder’s research was confirmed and published, she was
hailed by environmentalists and some representatives of the tourism-
recreation industry as heroine and savior. A few businesspeople along the
coast cursed her for prolonging bad news, which (they profoundly hoped)
might simply go away. Unambiguous fury came from a new and powerful
group in North Carolina: big pork, since that industry happened to be the
leading suspect, among a slew of polluters in eastern Carolina, as a trig-
ger ofPfiesteria. By the early s North Carolina was challenging Iowa
as the nation’s leading pork producer. (It had succeeded by .) There
were about as many hogs in the state—most of them in the east—as people
in New York City: about million. It is disgustingly fascinating, too, that
pound for pound, hogs generate approximately twice as much feces and
urine each day as humans. Coastal Carolina’s geologic morphology is un-
suited for such intensive industrial husbandry. It has a high water table
and wetlands everywhere, between rivers great and small: the Chowan, the
Tar and Pamlico, the Neuse, the New, and the Cape Fear. What to do with
these oceans of swine waste, then? Spread or spray it on nearby crop fields.
Before it can be disbursed, though, the waste accumulates so rapidly and
enormously that it must be stored somewhere. So Carolinians resorted to
an old midwestern solution to handling the effluvia of great concentrations