Watching the coverage, of the onslaught of Hurricane Florence, against the Tar Heel State, I find my heart strongly drawn to that extraordinary coastline. So much of the TV coverage has focused on beautiful New Bern, North Carolina, absorbing so much of the force of the storm. That is where my first America ancestor settled in 1835, after emigrating from Spain.
Four generations later, in 1902, my own father was born in New Bern and grew up on a nearby tobacco farm. Fifty years later, when I was only two, he left my life, and memory, forever. He abandoned us, leaving my mother penniless.
Yet, Mom never judged my father’s family through the lens of his own failings. Though we lived 1000s of miles away, my growing up years were anchored by visits, taken by car, from our Midwest home to my father’s kin In North Carolina and, in the case of one uncle, in California. We lived near my mother’s family, yet she took considerable pains, even after she remarried another guy, to take my brother and me to visit our absent father’s relatives.
As a result, I developed a certain appreciation for the deeply flawed version of North Carolina that existed when I visited there in the 1950s and 1960s, though never for the racism that underlaid it. I certainly harbor great fondness for my surviving kin in the area who still live in the path of the terrible destruction of Florence.
I’ll close this semi-aimless reverie with the tale of the time I dragged my own children from Texas to the North Carolina Outer Banks, many years ago. During that trip, we visited with an uncle from back in the day, and my cousins, who live on Pamlico River riverfront property with their own dock. My daughters, young then, but now adults, loved riding the jet ski up and down the river.
But now I am worried. Even though i’m sure my kin have moved to safer ground, for now, the water that washes back out over their property, after the worst of this storm, may carry dreadful contaminants that the incoming flood from the sea did not bear. No less a champion of unfettered Capitalism than Fortune has noticed that:
While Hurricane Florence is making a million residents of the Southeast face evacuate their homes, hog farmers are facing a much different kind of evacuation: draining the massive manure lagoons that result from high-density factory farming, before the storm floods them out.
Industrial-scale pig farms shift hog output into giant pools for management. These lagoons contain the manure and gradually compost them into fertilizer, but they’re effectively open-air waste pits, only somewhat secured against flooding. Overflowing or breached lagoons can render drinking-water supplies dangerous, cause phosphorus blooms, poison animals and agricultural land, and spread farm-related pollutants and toxins, like pesticides, fuel residue, and chemical additives. These spills kill wildlife and livestock.
Also, it smells terrible.
This is particularly depressing given how anti-science North Carolina legislators have been. And I have to ask, just where is this manure pond drainage supposed to go? Huh?
Eventually failures of governance show up as governmental failures. This is one of those times. Perhaps if the persistent smell of hog shit becomes sufficiently pervasive in places like North Carolina, we may become the change we seek.