Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reminds us, in The Los Angeles Times, that President Bush's environmental record is a disaster. I've rearrayed some of RFK's main point in a numbered list:
1. American waterways are getting dirtier… for the first time since passage of the Clean Water Act;
2. Administration policies have driven automobile fuel efficiencies to their lowest levels in decades.
3. Superfund cleanups for millions of Americans in tainted communities have been halted …
4. Any prospect of dealing seriously with global warming evaporated when the administration abandoned the Kyoto treaty, suppressed more than a dozen major scientific reports … and punished and blackballed scientists who reported their findings honestly …
5. The Bush administration is trying to eliminate Clean Water Act protection for more than 60 percent of the nation's stream miles and most of the nation's wetlands.
6. … [Bush] would let factory farms escape responsibility for catastrophic water and air pollution caused by millions of tons of untreated animal waste …
7. … [Bush would] allow industrial polluters to foul our aquifers and drinking water.
8. [Bush's EPA is dropping] prosecution and criminal investigations directed against 50 power plants [for] illegal emissions …
9. Bush [is] gutting the Clean Air Act, discarding the provision that required the oldest and dirtiest power plants and refineries in the United States to install state-of-the-art pollution controls when they expanded or modernized.
10. [Bush has opened] the nation's pristine areas … to road building, pipeline construction and a host of other industrial activities associated with development.
11. Other [administration] proposals eliminate the fundamental requirement that forest management protect wildlife, reduce public involvement in forest planning and scale back long-standing requirements for environmental reviews and public participation in highway construction and offshore oil development.
12. Bush's Department of Interior is the first not to voluntarily list a single species as endangered.
13. [Bush'] Interior Department has used fraudulent science in attempting to de-list protected animals like the grizzly bear, trumpeter swan, Florida panther and desert fisher.
14. Fines collected for violating environmental laws have dropped by more than half.
Phew. That's quite a list. And it's far from complete.
I want to call particular attention to No. 6 above. We got a whiff of this problem last fall in Delaware, where I work, when a relatively small factory farm had some trouble containing its lagoon of liquid manure. (I wrote about this in a post titled "Thousands of gallons of liquid manure are seeping toward the Chesapeake.")
This was, as I said, from a relatively small operation — 250 veal calves — but it was big enough to turn the Choptank River into a soupy mix of water and feces. Remember when the Cuyahoga River caught on fire? I think I'd prefer the fire.
In the really big factory farms, the shit piles up even faster. Al Franken has a very funny, but appalling chapter on this in Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. That chapter draws heavily on the work of Bobby Kennedy Jr. and his Waterkeeper Alliance. In it, Franken decribes the "vast lagoons of pig feces" — 5 million to 25 million gallons of pig feces — that are part of the industrial "agriculture" that lets factory farmers bring home the bacon:
Nobody claims that factory farming is pretty. But its defenders say that it brings economies of scale that drive down the price of meat for consumers. This is true as long as you don't factor in the shit. Bobby Kennedy Jr., president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, told me that, if the waste were disposed of legally, the cost of pork from factory farms would be higher than pork from family farms.
Under the Bush administration, corporate polluters get to do pretty much whatever they want. That includes the owners of industrial meat factories and their vast lagoons of pig feces. Thanks to George W. Bush, The Meatrix is all around us.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In