Another Form of Racism Impacting Black and Brown Communities: Environmental Racism
An Environmental Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM Cowspiracy.com
June 2020

I studied the medical literature and learned about the allergens, gases, bacteria, and viruses released by these facilities – all of them capable of making people sick.

hog farms
Image from FEP Food Empowerment Project

Excerpt from The Guardian...A million tons of feces and an unbearable stench: life near industrial pig farms

Research published by the late Steven Wing, a professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Global Public Health, linked similar health concerns to proximity to hog farms.

Wing, who passed away in November, described his research in a 2013 TED Talk: “In 1995, I began to meet neighbors of industrial hog operations,” he said. “I saw how close some neighborhoods are to hog operations. People told me about contaminated wells, the stench from hog operations that woke them at night, and children who were mocked at school for smelling like hog waste. I studied the medical literature and learned about the allergens, gases, bacteria, and viruses released by these facilities – all of them capable of making people sick.”

Wing’s research showed a correlation between air pollution from hog farms and higher rates of nausea, increases in blood pressure, respiratory issues such as wheezing and increased asthma symptoms for children and overall diminished quality of life for people living nearby. “Air pollutants from the routine operation of confinement houses, cesspools, and waste sprayers affect nearby neighborhoods where they cause disruption of activities of daily living, stress, anxiety, mucous membrane irritation, respiratory conditions, reduced lung function, and acute blood pressure elevation,” Wing and fellow UNC researcher Jill Johnston wrote in a 2014 study.

They also found that the state’s industrial hog operations disproportionately affect African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans.

That pattern is generally recognized as environmental racism. 

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