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The True Story of Farm Country on Trial
by Corban Addison
Book Reviewed by:As vivid and fast-paced as a thriller, Wastelands takes us into the heart of a legal battle over the future of America's farmland and into the lives of the people who found the courage to fight.
The once idyllic coastal plain of North Carolina is home to a close-knit, rural community that for more than a generation has battled the polluting practices of large-scale farming taking place in its own backyard. After years of frustration and futility, an impassioned cadre of local residents, led by a team of intrepid and dedicated lawyers, filed a lawsuit against one of the world's most powerful companies - and, miraculously, they won.
There is Elsie Herring, the most outspoken of the neighbors, who has endured racial slurs and the threat of a restraining order to tell the story of the waste raining down on her rooftop from the hog operation next door. There is Don Webb, a larger-than-life hog farmer turned grassroots crusader, and Rick Dove, a riverkeeper and erstwhile military judge who has pioneered the use of aerial photography to document the scale of the pollution. There is Woodell McGowan, a quiet man whose quest to redeem his family's ancestral land encourages him to become a better neighbor, and Dr. Steve Wing, a groundbreaking epidemiologist whose work on the health effects of hog waste exposure translates the neighbors' stories into the argot of science. And there is Tom Butler, an environmental savant and hog industry insider whose whistleblowing testimony electrifies the jury.
Fighting alongside them in the courtroom is Mona Lisa Wallace, who broke the gender barrier in her small southern town and built a storied legal career out of vanquishing corporate giants, and Mike Kaeske, whose trial skills are second to none.
With journalistic rigor and a novelist's instinct for story, Corban Addison's Wastelands captures the inspiring struggle to bring a modern-day monopoly to its knees, to force a once-invincible corporation to change, and to preserve the rights—and restore the heritage—of a long-suffering community.
A former attorney with litigation experience, Addison deftly narrates dramatic courtroom showdowns, leading us through the ins and outs of the legal proceedings in five separate class action suits filed against the hog industry's biggest offender: Smithfield Foods, a 15-billion-dollar multinational corporation that controls more than a quarter of the United States market for pork. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews, months of on-the-ground research and meticulous documentation from court records, media reports and other written sources, Addison brings the trials to life in immersive detail, weaving the personal backstories of the plaintiffs, witnesses and lawyers into a sweeping account of North Carolina's hog industry and the repercussions of the Smithfield verdicts for Big Agriculture in general...continued
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(Reviewed by Elisabeth Herschbach).
In Wastelands, Corban Addison recounts the true story of a group of North Carolina residents fighting for justice after suffering through years of pollution and nuisance from neighboring industrial hog farms. It's an uphill battle against a powerful multinational corporation, a broken regulatory system and a political establishment determined to shield the state's billion-dollar hog farming industry from accountability.
North Carolina's pork lobby was not always so powerful, and pig farms were not always so polluting. Traditionally, hog farming was a small-scale affair, with a large number of independent family farmers raising a small number of pigs alongside other animals and crops.
But while in 1965 North Carolina had an ...
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