For the first
Whole Living Awards
, we’re honoring eco-heroines who pour their passion into turning our blue marble green — including the winner featured here.
Who
Lynn Henning, 53
Eco Achievement
Exposing the polluting practices of livestock factory farms
On a crystalline September morning, south-central Michigan’s Lenawee County couldn’t appear more bucolic. Goldenrod dapples the unsown meadows, and hundred-acre patches of amber cornstalks and dusty-green soybeans blanket the fields. Traffic on the dirt roads is nonexistent.
But the beauty of this rural landscape belies an ugly truth: Noxious chemicals are slowly tainting the region’s air and water. The pollution can be traced to the proliferation of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) — feedlots that confine thousands of cattle or pigs in windowless, hangar-size barns.
CAFOs make up only about 5 percent of all U.S. animal operations, but they contain half of the animals producing the nation’s meat and dairy products. Crammed indoors on concrete floors, CAFO animals spend their days eating and, inevitably, eliminating.
A large CAFO produces as much waste daily as a city of 411,000 does. And while municipalities are required to treat their waste before it’s discharged, CAFOs are allowed to store liquefied manure in open pits (called lagoons) until operators are ready to spray it on leased farm fields as fertilizer.
“We’ve got 12 of these operations within 10 miles of our house,” says Lynn Henning, who monitors CAFO discharges for Michigan’s Sierra Club, as I tag along on a surveillance mission in her hometown of Clayton. “When they’re spraying waste, the smell is so bad you can’t open your windows or sit outside.”
A grandmother with long white hair, Henning isn’t being prissy. She’s a farmer herself — she and her husband, Dean, grow corn and soybeans on a 300-acre plot that’s been in his family for four generations.
But the more than 60 lagoons near the Hennings’ home hold 400 million gallons of liquefied manure each year. This toxic farrago contains cleaning solutions, pesticides, blood, hormones, antibiotics, and other substances common to industrial agriculture. As this mixture decomposes, it generates methane, ammonia, and hydrogen sulfide, gases that can cause burning sinuses and respiratory illness.
Diagnosed with hydrogen sulfide poisoning, Henning’s mother- and father-in-law, who have lived within 1,000 feet of a CAFO operating since 1999, routinely experience short-term memory loss, balance problems, and delayed reactions. Across the nation, rainfall has sluiced CAFO waste, transporting such pathogens as Cryptosporidium, E. coli, and Listeria from fields into waterways. Storms have ruptured lagoons and sent raw manure into creeks, killing huge numbers of fish.
It gets worse: CAFO’s overuse of antibiotics to promote growth and prevent disease contributes to the rise of superbugs. Even more perniciously, CAFOs force neighbors to take sides: jobs or health?
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The Cost of Eco-Activism
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