FERN’s Friday Feed: How North Carolina hid complaints about its giant hog farms
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
‘It smells like a decomposing body’
FERN and The Guardian
For years, complaints about hog pollution in North Carolina disappeared after they were filed with state authorities, according to an investigation by FERN and The Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting, published with The Guardian. But as a result of a settlement with environmental justice groups, the state this year began posting complaints online — exceeding in six months the number of complaints in the prior decade.
Putting the ‘community’ in D.C.’s community gardens
Washington City Paper
There are close to 80 community gardens around the District, and demand far exceeds supply. “A stereotype of community gardens is that they exist to solely benefit those who are socioeconomically situated to have the time and money to tend to a plot if they’re lucky enough to make it off a waitlist,” writes Laura Hayes. “While some gardens give preference to those who live within a certain distance or offer discounts to low-income residents, most only require that plot holders live in D.C. If community gardens should reflect the make-up of the communities they’re in, there will always be opportunities to bolster inclusivity and diversity.”
The ecological scourge of feral pigs
The Conversation
Feral pigs are a threat to biodiversity and wildlife. “Much concern over the spread of feral pigs has focused on economic damage, which was estimated in the early 2000s at about $1.5 billion annually in the United States,” writes Marcus Lashley. They accomplish this damage by eating pretty much anything, including plants, fruits, small animals, and fungi. They can also carry disease. “[T]here is virtually no scientific evidence that feral pigs provide any benefits in North America.”
How the U.S.-China trade war could be fueling fire in the Amazon
Bloomberg
“One of Beijing’s main acts of retaliation in the fight has been to freeze purchases of the 30 million metric tons to 40 million tons of American soybeans it imports each year. That’s left it more dependent than ever on Brazilian soy to take up the slack,” writes David Fickling. Most Brazilian soy is grown in the cerrado, a savannah south of the Amazon. But “even Brazil has a finite amount of land and if you squeeze the balloon in one place, it risks popping out in another. As it is, most of the expansion of Brazil’s arable land over the past decade appears to have come at the expense of regrowth forest, which tends to be less well-protected than primary forest like the Amazon. This year’s fires could see ranchers driven out of the cerrado by arable crops to seek new pastures in freshly-cleared former rainforest in the Amazon.”
What to make of the eruption over Popeye’s chicken sandwich
The New Yorker
“There are dozens of fast-food chains in America, débuting hundreds of new menu items each year,” writes Helen Rosner. “Of these, maybe two or three in a generation make significant inroads into our collective culinary consciousness: a McRib here, an Impossible Whopper there … [T]he Popeyes chicken sandwich has ascended to the pantheon in record time, not because of a catchy ad campaign or an irresistible pricing scheme but because it is, if Twitter, Instagram, and uncountable blog posts and off-the-cuff reviews are to be believed, the best goddam chicken sandwich in the world.”