Analyze

From Tu (2020): "In Taiwan, the community air-monitoring projects often have difficulties in identifying the specific pollution sources due to the historical patterns of industrial development that tend to set up dense clusters of different factories in the industrial parks along the west coast (Liu 2012).3 The agglomeration of polluting facilities complicates pollution identification that further creates significant knowledge gaps between the predicted emission, the actual emission, and the community sensory experiences throughout the policy process. This pattern of development has somehow constrained Taiwan community air monitoring to target the specific polluters."

percolation and evaporation pond operation accepting oilfield produced water, which is a highly saline byproduct of local oil production that contains small concentrations of cancer-causing chemicals.

The wastewater allegedly contained arsenic, benzene, ethylbenzene, naphthalene, radionuclides and toluene.Clean Water Fund and AIR alleged the practice has created an underground plume that has spread more than two miles since monitoring wells were established in the area in 2004, and that the contamination may eventually reach Buttonwillow's drinking water supply.

Valley Water Management Company (owner) & Sentinel Peak Resources (oil producer): fined $645,000

Clean Water Fund & Association of Irritated Residents: sued using Prop 65 (Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986) to shut down pond

other oil companies: inject wastewater deep underground in or near reservoirs where it originated

Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board: forced closure of pond out of concern that underground plume will reach Kern River and Bakersfield's drinking water

This image hides many things, including:

1. the slow but steady dispossession of smallholder (often African-American) farms that have been overtaken/bought out by Smithfield Foods to enlarge the industrial footprint of CAFOs;

2. the hogs themselves, whose hooves never touch the ground as they stand on "hog slats" inside the hangers as they move through the Fordist stages of transformation from individual animals into packaged pork;

3. the human operators, themselves, who are rarely wealthy, and are contracted for decades (or life) to purchase all "inputs" (feed, semen, etc) from Smithfield; in 2010, I took my EJ class from UNC-Chapel Hill to visit one of these operators at his CAFO, outside Raleigh, NC, and he was battling Smithfield and Duke Energy to be allowed to erect and operate a small-scale, experimental wind turbine that ran on methane captured from his pigs; years later, individual efforts at small-scale biogas would be overtaken by entities like Align LNG which now, in Sampson County, proposes the "Grady Road Project" to scale-up factory-farmed methane gas capture from much larger operations;

4. the legacy of resistance to this form of agricultural production, led by community-based intellectuals like Gary Grant, who as early as the 1980s was speaking out, traveling to state and federal lawmakers, publishing, and organizing against the growing harms of CAFOs in his home territory of Halifax County, NC. [See the suggested readings by Gary Grant and Steve Wing, Naeema Muhammed and others, that tracks this organized resistance and the formation of several community-based EJ groups in response].