OUE
Update
A Publication of Organizations
United for the Environment
Winter 2002
DON SNYDER HONORED AT WHITE DEER PARK
Family and friends of the late Don Snyder gathered October 19th at the White Deer Community Park to dedicate a red maple tree, a park bench, and a commemorative plaque to his memory. Although the day was unseasonably cold, the thoughts and remembrances of Don were warm and heartfelt. Former OUE President, Liz Steward, remarked that Don's commitment to his family and his community said a lot about the kind of man he was. One of Don's sons spoke about his father's humor and determination. A woman who once visited Don's service station in White Deer with her young daughter spoke of Don's careful and attentive response to the girl when she asked him a question about cars. In a gesture in the spirit of the White Deer OUE Chapter, some participants rang cowbells as a fitting tribute.
As most OUE members know, Don was a tireless leader during the Ban the Burner campaign. The innumerable hours Don and his wife Gayle devoted to the campaign ultimately could be measured in years. When the incinerator proposition was defeated, Don served the organization as its president for another six years, providing important transitional leadership with no less dedication than he displayed during the burner campaign.
We thank the White Deer Park Association for its cooperation and those who made contributions to OUE in honor of Don for helping to make this lasting tribute possible. The maple tree will mature in about seventy years; Don's spirit will live long beyond that.
REMEMBERING GIL BLACK
Gil Black, an OUE member during most of the 1990s and once a co-editor of this newsletter, died following a car accident on October 19th near his home in Charlottesville, Virginia. During the 1990-1994 battle against the citing of a Union Pacific hazardous waste incinerator in Gregg Township, Gil was a stalwart and crucial member of OUE. He was an early organizer of the Lewisburg chapter of OUE and followed that with an endless list of other activities in that battle. Gil helped the White Deer Chapter made thousands of sandwiches very early on many cold mornings. He helped plan and participated in all of OUE’s demonstrations. Along with twelve other members he got himself arrested in front of the Department of Environmental Services in 1993. He joined about fifty OUE members in a caravan to visit the lush country compound of Drew Lewis, the President of Union Pacific, and to pass out thousands of leaflets to his neighbors about what an enemy of the environment he was. And, from the mid-1990s on, Gil was a co-editor of our newsletter. In virtually all these activities, his wife, Betty joined him, and when they moved from the area, the organization felt their loss in many ways. When Gil was arrested, he was a ripe sixty nine years old, giving powerful witness to the idea that it is never too late to hold your fist in the air on behalf of the planet. We send our condolences to Betty, and we will miss you, Gil!
A REFLECTION ON FACTORY FARMS
We asked Joe Detelj, who, among other work, runs a small organic farm, to comment on hog farms for this issue. He sent us the following article, which we appreciate and heartily recommend to our readers.
Born and raised in New York City, an outsider in these parts, I have always felt reluctant to comment on rural ways. Yet, a decade of tending my homestead, some home-schooled research, a bias that holds there is right and wrong behavior and that "ought" is a legitimate word too often neglected in our vocabulary, has prompted me to accept the offer I received from this newsletter’s editor to comment on confined animal operations, in particular concentrated hog farms.
I prefer to call these operations "vertically integrated businesses" rather than hog farms because to use the word "farm" in this context is pejorative. A vertically integrated business is a great deal more accurate about the true nature of the beast. A farmer, in our idealized concept of that animal, tends his land. The farm family is integral to our idealization. The family manages the operation, making collective decisions on how and what to produce given the constraints and limits of the land under its stewardship. That is not what the McDonalds are doing under the feudal yoke of a "contract."
Despite our idealization, today when a farmer signs a contract with the pork industry, he legally forbids his household from practicing its trade as farmers. Management, decision making, stewardship, all inherent characteristics of farming, are suspended. The contracting farmer is now totally subordinated to the dictates of the pork industry. The industry supplies the animals, feed, medicines, and disposes of the end product. The industry dictates the specifications of the confinement facility whose capital expenditure remains the farmer’s liability. A huge "by the way" limits the industry’s commitment to this arrangement to one year at a time when the length of the average mortgage is ten years. The pork industry, an oligopoly that mysteriously eludes Federal anti-trust enforcement, controls this production process from the feed mill to the supermarket shelf. The price of the hog at any point in the process is more heavily guarded than Saddam Hussein’s palace.
I offer this rather lengthy clarification because it lies at the root of the toxicity being produced here. Farming is a biological undertaking, sometimes art, always experientially based. It is done best when it is in harmony with nature. As a matter of fact, the more harmonious, the better the work in every measurable way. The farmer has to be tuned in, so to speak, so that he is not turned out.
Confined animal operations are a feature of a vertically integrated business – the application of an industrial model. This assembly line mind-set may, or may not, be appropriate for turning out cheap shoes, but clearly not so for the food we eat. We are what we eat, after all, and for the past century we have known that animals raised on pasture, in natural, environmentally sound conditions are healthier than those raised in confinement. The animals (us) that eat the naturally raised animals are naturally healthier, and there is a body of evidence concluding that illness has root causes linked to malnutrition. Natural, biologically healthy environments produce healthy animals from the simplest to the most complex molecular arrangements. This linkage reflects immutable biological laws and is fundamentally the life process. We suffer when we ignore this reality and raise animals in confined facilities to accommodate the pork industry, whose only goal is to make profits.
To the pork industry, the well being of the confined animal is not a concern; hence, the administration of antibiotics and a medley of pharmaceuticals to keep the creature alive, not necessarily living. The well being of the farmer, in hock up to his manure pile, is not a concern, hence the extremely low rate of return on his precarious investment backed by the full faith and credit of the bank’s ability to foreclose on his homestead. The well being of paid and un-paid labor (family members) is not a concern, hence the toxic levels of methane, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, ammonia, and germ-laden dust they breathe when earning their keep. The well- being of neighbors is not a concern, hence the depreciation of land values in proximity to these factories (location, location, location). Economists call these fallout externalities. I liken it to a neighbor’s dog constantly relieving itself on your front porch. Bad for you, good for the neighbor.
In rural communities, these operations produce the inevitable fight that pits neighbors, Rotarians, families against each other. Farming is degraded to the extent that we are depopulating the countryside of its natural stewards. We are building malls and boarding up our downtowns. We are shipping our wealth to the city. Given enough time, this production model will fail -- because it is not sustainable -- but it can generate a great deal of harm before its day will come. Pork has been produced for centuries in a more environmentally sound manner, and not long ago farmers referred to the hog as the "mortgage lifter." We need to remember. We need a reversal of fortune.
Ultimately, no living thing directly benefits from this factory mode of production. We have an enormous disconnect of form and function. The major beneficiary of this bizarre arrangement is a non-living, limited-liability, legal entity, a corporation born of the industrial revolution. Whether this form of absentee ownership puts good shoes on your feet is not the issue here. I bemoan using this form of production as a way to put food on the table. Even in New York we knew that shoes have to possess souls.
A Passion for Our Planet
On November 2nd, I went to my first Penn State football game. It was a cold, but beautiful day, and at the game it was emphatically clear that something very dear was at stake, that the final score really, truly mattered. It was also clear that another costly bad call against Penn State (in a season where such calls might have cost them two or three games) would be more than the simple error of a very human referee, but an unfair blow to the hopes and dreams of the team members and to the tens of thousands of passionate fans yelling and stomping their feet in the stands.
There was passion too among the tail-gaters (which The New York Times estimates at about 40,000 per home game, the largest number in the history of American sports.) Their cooking, their eating and drinking, and their music and conversation were full of passion, lively, loud and happy, a world unto itself. All were having a good time, and because Penn State won the game the day would get better as it went on. And, why not? Being part of a crowd rooting for the home team is one of the joys of life everywhere, where a sense of community emerges that can sustain people in other parts of their lives.
On the Monday evening after the game, I attended the monthly OUE Board meeting where we spent most of our time talking with two members of a local group about how they might best ward off the siting of a hog farm close to their homes. This meeting was also full of passion, as such conversations always are, because something was at stake that really, truly mattered. But, there was a huge difference between the passion at our meeting and that at State College. There were eight of us in the room, about 109,992 fewer than there were at the football.
The odd juxtaposition of these two events led me to write this appeal to our readers, to ask you to consider developing a passion for your planet. We desperately need something like that, where 110,000 people, full of fire and full of feeling, stand up and demand from their politicians and from the corporations that rule the world (including most of the politicians) that they help us take care of the planet. The desperation comes from the evidence. And, what evidence! For over a decade now, we’ve steadily reported in this newsletter examples of air and water fouled by industrial wastes, toxic disposal techniques and, more recently, global warming. The evidence of our perilous state continues to bubble up. For instance, in mid-October, newspapers reported that the fuel efficiency of new cars produced in the U.S. last year actually declined, and this despite the fact that emissions from automobiles are the leading cause of global warming. And recently, National Public Radio reported that the number of tigers in the world has fallen to 3,000. Imagine that! The beautiful, powerful, singular tiger, close to extinction!
In fact, we might share the tiger’s dilemma, for the scientific community seems to have concluded that dramatic climatic changes from global warming could push us toward our own extinction. What keeps us locked in an embrace with our sports teams, or our consumer goods, while we are relatively so indifferent to the planet that sustains us? Some put the blame on rotten, greedy corporations, and their incessant badgering of us to buy things we don’t need. Others blame cowardly politicians, who have sold out to their corporate bosses. There are surely plenty of such bosses and politicians. Still others simply deny that the problems exists, chanting inanely that, "Global warming isn’t happening, and the environment is not that dirty, and besides that, after you’ve seen one tiger, you’ve seen them all."
Of course, blaming only produces shouting matches about causes. What could help, though, is to realize a crucial truth about our threat to our planet: we did it all by ourselves. We came up with the ideas, techniques, machines, and buying habits that brought us to our present perch on the edge of the cliff. And, of course, that means: we can do it differently all by ourselves. There are almost seven billion of us on the planet now, and that represents an unimaginably large warehouse of potential talent and toil, enough to do whatever we want to do. But, to go in that different direction, we badly need to develop a passion for this planet of the kind that so many of us have for sports teams, or for the things we buy that we don’t need.
If you already feel that passion, but haven’t acted on it, join us at OUE, or some other group working for a clean environment, or work to elect politicians who do. You might find, as many of us have found, that fighting against a bullying, polluting corporation can be as fulfilling as, say, spending energy as a rabid fan for your favorite sports team. It’s possible you might even find the time to do them both! Charles Sackrey, Ed.
UPDATES
NIPPENOSE VALLEY FIGHT WITH THE HOGS
The Concerned Citizens of Nippenose Valley (CCNV) provided the following update on their ongoing fight to protect their health, safety, and welfare. We first reported on that battle in our previous newsletter.
Members of the CCNV have been busy on several fronts in our fight against the Corporate Hog Factories. On the legal front, our appeal of the Nutrient Management Plans, including the process by which they were approved, created enough "concern" that the other side requested a stay in discovery, putting the appeal on hold. Letters that CCNV and Limestone Township sent to DEP clearly listing the misleading and false information contained in the NPDES Permit Applications caused DEP to reject the applications and cancel the scheduled public hearing. A more detailed application will be required with any new application.
On the media front, Farm Aid sent a film crew to Nippenose Valley and aired the segment as part of CMT’s National Coverage of the Farm Aid Concert on September 21, 2002. Ten members of CCNV traveled to Pittsburgh for the Concert, and one of our members was interviewed live during the event. The message this year is that we can support family farms by purchasing locally from farmer’s markets, and buying organically grown food from the supermarket. Farm Aid has long recognized the threats health, environmental, and economic -- of corporate farms. We were easily noticed in our "No Hog Factories in Nippenose Valley" T-shirts and personally presented a specially designed shirt to Willie Nelson who was very appreciative. Everyone at the concert wanted to hear our story and wish us luck. We thank Farm Aid for their support and national exposure.
On the political front, CCNV chartered a bus to transport 51 Concerned Citizens to a protest rally at the capitol in Harrisburg on October 8. The rally was against SB 1413 that will strip local governments of the right to protect their communities from the dangers of corporate animal factories and the spreading of sewage sludge. Our State House Representative, Brett Feese, met with us before the rally and informed us that he shares our concerns and will vote "no" against SB 1413. Unfortunately, our representative in the Senate, Roger Madigan, sponsor of SB 1413, did not have time to meet with us and appeared indignant that we would dare to visit his office to ask. CCNV’s own Nick Dillman, Ph.D., Pathology, was a guest speaker at the rally and he spoke of the specific diseases and illnesses identified by the medical profession as a result of hog factories. Locally, County Commissioner, Dick Nassberg, has attended several of our community meetings and "is with us all the way" in defense of the right of self-determination.
Our success in delaying the permit process has allowed time for our concerns to be heard and has also opened us to pot-shots from agribusiness supporters. We find ourselves engaged in an important legal battle against two huge hog factory operations proposed for our Valley. We are in this fight till the end! Please visit our web site:
http://sites.micro-link.net/limestone and if possible, please send a tax deductible contribution to: CCNV, PO BOX 831, Jersey Shore, PA 17740.
FIGHTING THE HOGS IN MONTOUR COUNTY
Late last summer, OUE got involved with some spirited citizens in the Washingtonville area who were organizing to resist the siting of a hog farm in Derry Township. We have made donations to the group, Montour Citizens for a Clean Environment, and we plan to continue to give them our support until they prevail. MCCE’s president, Kerry Yerg, submitted this update for the newsletter.
The MCCE (Montour Citizens for a Clean Environment) wishes to thank our many friends at OUE for your donations of time, strategy expertise, and funding in our community fight against the factory farm corporations. As all of you well know, and, as we are finding out, to slay the corporate dragon is not an easy task.
Our most monumental task has been to educate the people in our community about the following destructive consequences that may be realized from the operation of a factory farm:
* Depleted and/or contaminated aquifers
* Contaminated soil
* Unbearable stench
* Fly infestation
* Viral infection
* Stream pollution
* Diminished property values
* Increased truck traffic
Throughout our five-month battle, we have attended township meetings, public information meetings, and weekly strategy sessions, and several of us went to Harrisburg to rally against SB 1413. We have applied to the DEP for a public meeting on the proposed factory farm in Derry Township. During the public meeting, our citizens will be able to voice our concerns on environmental issues to DEP.* To date, Mr. Douglas Beachel, proposed owner of said factory farm, has not yet been granted a building permit. If he gets one, it would only be after the public meeting. (We sent our copy to the printers before the meeting date was announced. We will report on the results in the next update on this group’s work. Ed.)
Unfortunately, we have not been able to secure a permanent site for our weekly meetings. However, our sign-making campaign is progressing nicely and we have begun to dot the landscape with many slogans against factory farms.
Again, we wish to thank our brothers and sisters at OUE and invite all of you to join us in this struggle. You may contact us by calling Kerry Yerg at (570) 742-4920 or Herb Yerg at (570) 437-2482. By calling, you may secure times and places for meetings. We have sign-making meetings every Sunday at 2:00 at the first farm on the right on Strick Road, of route 54 (suburbs of Ottawa).
CLEAN (COLUMBIA/LYCOMING ENVIRONMENTAL NETWORK)
CLEAN is the group fighting the efforts of J. P. Mascaro and Sons to modify its permit at White Pines landfill, north of Millville, in order to bring in each day -- about 800 tons of New York garbage. In its latest newsletter, CLEAN reported the update below. For details, you can subscribe to the newsletter by sending your request to PO Box 517, Millville, PA, 17846.
When CLEAN received word that White Pines Corporation’s application for a municipal waste permit had been denied by DEP, it was time for cautious celebration. With trepidation CLEAN’s steering committee and its members wait and watch. Several members are checking with DEP in Williamsport on a regular basis. In a September letter, the Pine Township Supervisors were notified that White Pines will submit an application for a major permit modification that would provide for pre-treating leachate before it is piped to the Millville Sewage Authority treatment plant (MSP). This modification was expected and necessary because MSA does not have the capability to eliminate all hazardous materials from leachate. [The] permit modification [would also] allow White Pines to dig its cells deeper bringing them to minimum allowable distance from the water table. This change would likely involve blasting with its inherent dangers and digging to the allowable limit leaves no margin for error -- both increasing the risk of water contamination. Why does White Pines want to make this change? The modification does not increase maximum allowable capacity so increasing cell size would mean a decrease in the number of cells. Is this a move to preserve cell sites for an increase in capacity in the future? When White Pines submits this modification application, CLEAN will carefully review it and present the findings to DEP.
WHITE DEER CREEK WATERSHED ASSOCIATION (WDCWA)
OUE gave assistance early to WDCWA as the group was forming. After that, its members took the reins and they have done a great job, as the update below indicates (and which we have taken from their most recent newsletter.) We salute the Association for giving an example to everyone of what you can do if, like its members did, get off the couch and go clean up part of the mess we’ve all been making of our planet.
In August, in conjunction with its fiscal agent, Union County Conservation District, WDCWA was awarded a growing greener grant for $104,000. This grant will allow for a design and assessment plan of the entire White Deer Creek. Recently, the State’s Growing Greener funding has been extended to 2012 following approval of the most recent state budget. This is an important factor for the future plans of WDCWA.
The Association met on November 18 and featured a speaker, Mike Yeager, Environmental Science teacher at Milton High School, who discussed how to conduct efficient stream monitoring. Mr. Yeager and his students have conducted a stream-monitoring project on Limestone Run, and he is willing to assist the WDCWA in developing an appropriate monitoring project for White Deer Creek that will enhance its current stream-monitoring plan. Tom Poust and the present monitoring committee of WDCWA continue to collect valuable information, consisting of ph levels of the stream, ph level of rainfall, rainfall amounts and water temperature.
An additional note is that signs identifying the White Deer Creek have been planned at five stream crossing locations: Harbeson Road, Leiser Road, Old Route 15, State Route 15, Gray Hill Road and Dyer Road.
Those interested in volunteering to work with WDCWA, becoming a sponsor of the Association, or those who want information about upcoming projects and events should contact its chairman, Van McBryan at 538-2519. Your support would be greatly appreciated.
OUE Board meetings are held at 7:00 p.m., the first Monday of each month at the United Methodist Church in Watsontown. All are invited to attend!