The environmental problems in China continue to grow worse as the regime spurs industry to keep up production numbers in an economic downturn. We have recently seen environmentalists attacked for criticizing Communist officials for the dismal condition of rivers in China. Now, one city that uses a polluted river for drinking water woke up to find more than 900 dead pigs floating down their river. Chinese officials insist that it is not a case of dumping but curiously say that they have no idea how it happened or where the animals came from.
The pigs were pulled from a Shanghai river used as a water source for city residents. Pictures of the river are equally shocking in the realization that this disgusting river is used for drinking water, even without the presence of almost 1000 rotting pigs.
Officials say the water quality has not been affected and if you cannot believe the Communist regime on environmental problem, who can you believe?
Source: Independent
Facts about Pollution from Livestock Farms
http://www.nrdc.org/water/pollution/ffarms.asp
Excerpt:
Giant livestock farms, which can house hundreds of thousands of pigs, chickens, or cows, produce vast amounts of manure, often generating the waste equivalent of a small city. A problem of this nature and scale is tough to imagine, and pollution from livestock farms seriously threatens humans, fish and ecosystems. Below are facts and statistics that tell the story.
Livestock pollution and water pollution
Huge open-air waste lagoons, often as big as several football fields, are prone to leaks and spills. In 1995 an eight-acre hog-waste lagoon in North Carolina burst, spilling 25 million gallons of manure into the New River. The spill killed about 10 million fish and closed 364,000 acres of coastal wetlands to shellfishing.
In 2011, an Illinois hog farm spilled 200,000 gallons of manure into a creek, killing over 110,000 fish.
In 2012, a California dairy left over 50 manure covered cow carcasses rotting around its property and polluting nearby waters.
When Hurricane Floyd hit North Carolina in 1999, at least five manure lagoons burst and approximately 47 lagoons were completely flooded.
Runoff of chicken and hog waste from factory farms in Maryland and North Carolina is believed to have contributed to outbreaks of Pfiesteria piscicida, killing millions of fish and causing skin irritation, short-term memory loss and other cognitive problems in local people.
Nutrients in animal waste cause algal blooms, which use up oxygen in the water, contributing to a “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico where there’s not enough oxygen to support aquatic life. The dead zone fluctuates in size each year, extending a record 8,500 square miles during the summer of 2002 and stretching over 7,700 square miles during the summer of 2010.
Ammonia, a toxic form of nitrogen released in gas form during waste disposal, can be carried more than 300 miles through the air before being dumped back onto the ground or into the water, where it causes algal blooms and fish kills.
China’s Dead-Hog Scandal Is Gross—But So Are the Hog Feces in US Waterways
—By Tom Philpott
| Thu Mar. 14, 2013
http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2013/03/chinas-dead-hog-scandal-gross%E2%80%94-so-are-our-factories-farms
Excerpt:
In a river that flows through Shanghai, Chinese officials have pulled 6,000 dead pigs from the water, CNN reported. The situation is undeniably grotesque: “Sanitation workers, clad in masks and plastic suits, have been fishing the bruised pig bodies surfacing in the Huangpu River. The pink, decomposing blobs have wreaked foul odors and alarmed residents.”
According to CNN, the corpses began turning up in the river after a government crackdown on the selling of meat from diseased pigs. In a bind, farmers sought a riparian solution to the problem of disposing them. Gross.
China’s pig-dumping scandal must be seen the context of the nation’s rapidly industrializing hog-production system—as this 2011 Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy report shows, national policy is driving a lightning-fast switch from backyard hog production to vast US-style hog factories. (And now poultry production is following suit.)
But as China reshapes its meat production in our image, we have no standing to feel superior when scandals like the current one in Shanghai’s hinterland erupt. That’s because we don’t do a very good job of protecting our waterways from the hog industry, either. Consider Iowa, which houses around 18 million hogs, making it our most hog-intensive state. All of those hogs concentrated into a relatively small space generate unthinkable amounts of toxic manure. How much? Food & Water Watch weighs in:
• The nearly 733,000 hogs on factory farms in Plymouth County, Iowa, produce twice as much untreated manure as the sewage from the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area.
• The more than 857,000 hogs on factory farms in Hardin County, Iowa, produce three times as much untreated manure as the sewage from the greater Atlanta metro area.
• The more than 1 million hogs on factory farms in Sioux County, Iowa, produce as much untreated manure as the sewage from the Los Angeles and Atlanta metro areas combined.
And it’s not just hogs that are crammed into the state’s factory farms. According to FWW, Iowa’s vast confinement facilities also house 1.2 million beef cattle, 52.4 million egg-laying hens, 1 million broiler chickens, and 64,500 dairy cows. Altogether, this teeming horde annually churns out “as much untreated manure as the sewage from 471 million people—more than the entire US population.”
As you might imagine, keeping such titanic amounts of shit out of water is a near futile task. There are occasional spectacular incidents—FWW points to the time in 2008 when spring floods “destroyed at least 3 hog factory farms near Oakville, drowned up to 1,500 hogs and flooded manure from storage pits downstream into waterways throughout eastern Iowa.” And according to the Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, a group that fights factory farming in Iowa, there have been more than 800 documented in Iowa since 1995.
Was ted nugent in China lately?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/11/ted-nugent-kills-pigs-bill-maher-animal-freaks_n_2852302.html
Ted Nugent is bragging about killing over 400 wild pigs, a kill he dedicates to Bill Maher and other “animal rights freaks.”
Idealist,
I’d like to join the group welcoming you back, at least for now. Good luck with everything.
guess i won’t be buying that frozen moo shoo pork from wal-mart any time soon.
good to hear from you, ID
p.s. listen to the nurses.
ID, welcome back!