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Our friend, Bobby Kennedy, has given us this article on industrial
farming for MAXIMS.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, is
credited with leading the fight to protect New York City's water
supply, but his reputation as a resolute defender of the environment
stems from a litany of successful legal actions.
The
list includes winning settlements for Riverkeeper, prosecuting
governments and companies for polluting the Hudson River and Long
Island Sound, arguing cases to expand citizen access to the
shoreline, and suing treatment plants to force compliance with the
Clean Water Act.
Kennedy serves as Chief Prosecuting Attorney for Riverkeeper. He also acts as Senior Attorney for the Natural
Resources Defense Council and as the President of the Waterkeeper
Alliance.
At Pace University School of Law, he is a Clinical Professor
and Supervising Attorney at the Environmental
Litigation Clinic in White Plains, New York.
The New York City watershed agreement, which he negotiated on
behalf of environmentalists and New York City watershed consumers,
is regarded as an international model in stakeholder consensus
negotiations and sustainable development.
He helped lead the fight to turn back the anti-environmental
legislation during the 104th Congress.
Among Kennedy's published books are "The
Riverkeepers" (1997), New York State Apprentice Falconer's
Manual, New State Department of Environmental Conservation (1987),
and Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr.: A Biography (1977).
Bobby Kennedy is a graduate of Harvard University. He studied at
the London School of Economics and received his law degree from the
University of Virginia Law School.
Max
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I
Don't Like Green Eggs and Ham!
By
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
THE EARTH PLEDGE FOUNDATION has asked Americans
to consider, on Earth Day, the meaning of "sustainable
cuisine."
Arguably, the most sustainable food is the hot
dog, since that's where all of the stuff would otherwise go to waste
ends up.
It's like the Indians and the buffalo -- they
used everything. Buffalo
hot dogs might be the best bet because, among all ungulates, buffalo
use the prairies without destroying them.
But most hot dogs are neither dogs nor buffalo
but hogs, and, nowadays, that means industrial pork, which is one of
the most unsustainable foods on earth.
North Carolina's hogs now outnumber its
citizens and produce more fecal waste than all the people in
California.
Some industrial pork farms produce more sewage
than America's largest cities.
But while human waste must be treated, hog
waste, similarly fetid and virulent, is simply dumped into the
environment.
Stadium-size warehouses shoehorn 100,000 sows
into claustrophobic cages that hold them in one position for a
lifetime over metal-grate floors.
Below, aluminum culverts collect and channel
their putrefying waste into 10-acre, open-air pits three stories
deep from which miasmal vapors choke surrounding communities and
tens of millions of gallons of hog feces ooze into North Carolina's
rivers.
Such practices have created a nightmare that
seems like something out of science fiction -- but in this case, the
effect is all too real.
In North Carolina, the festering effluent that
escapes from industrial swine pens has given birth to Pfiesteria
piscicida, a toxic microbe that thrives in the fecal marinade of
North Carolina rivers.
This tiny predator, which can morph into 24
forms depending on its prey species, inflicts postulating lesions on
fish whose flesh it dissolves with excreted toxins.
The "cell from hell" has killed so
many fish -- a billion in one 1991 incident -- that North Carolina
used bulldozers to bury them beneath the rancid shores of the Neuse
River and Pamlico Sound.
Scientists strongly suspect that Pfiesteria
causes brain damage and respiratory illness in humans who touch
inflected fish or water. Two
years ago Pfiesteria sickened dozens of people, including fisherman,
swimmers and state workers.
Industrial farming is also for the birds. Some
corporate poultry farms crowd a million beakless chickens in cramped
dark cages, soaking up antibiotics and laying their guts out for the
duration of their miserable lives.
Corporate farming isn't just bad for chickens
and hogs -- and the environment.
It is destroying family farms. According to Sierra magazine, billionaire chicken barons and
billionaire hog tycoons have used their market power to drive a
million family farmers out of business, including virtually every
independent egg-and-broiler farmer in America.
Each corporate farm puts 10 mainly farmers out
of business.
The same process of vertical integration has
put the final nail in the coffin of Thomas Jefferson's vision of a
democracy rooted in family-owned freeholds.
Industrial meat moguls site their stinking
farms in the poorest communities and pay slave wages to their
minuscule work force for performing one of the most dangerous and
unhealthy jobs in America.
Massive political contributions by billionaire
agricultural barons allow them to evade laws that prohibit other
Americans from polluting our waterways.
Agricultural run-off now accounts for more than
half of America's water pollution.
Last year Pfiesteria outbreaks connected with
wastes from industrial chicken factories forced the closure of two
major tributaries of the Chesapeake Ban and threatened Maryland's
vital shellfish industry.
Drugs and hormones needed to keep confined
animals alive and growing are mainly excreted with the wastes and
not saturate local waterways.
Such discharges foster the growth of the
drug-resistant superbugs and threaten the disruption of human and
animal endocrines.
Moreover, our pork and poultry are unsavory.
Factory-raised pork is soft and bland.
Corporate chicken is spongy.
Americans have forgotten they're not supposed to be able to
cut chicken with a fork.
Americans can still find networks of mainly
farms and farmers who raise their animals to range free on grass
pastures.
They feed them natural feeds without steroids,
subtherapeutic antibiotics or other artificial growth promotants and
treat their animals with dignity and respect.
These farmers bring tasty, premium-quality meat
to customers while practicing the highest standards of husbandry and
environmental stewardship.
Sustainable meats taste the best.
This is a case where doing right means eating
well.
Like other Americans, I've reconciled myself to
the idea that an animal's life has been sacrificed to bring me a
meal of pork or chicken.
However, industrial meat production -- which
subjects animals to a life of torture -- has escalated the karmic
costs beyond reconciliation.
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