Big ag’s big stink

Factory farms are fouling the country's waterways with millions of tons of animal waste. And the EPA's proposed regulations may not solve the problem.

By Amanda Griscom Little

Topics:Agriculture

The Bush administration wants to let factory farms determine whether the animal excreta that ooze from their facilities into waterways should be regulated, say environmentalists, who argue that the plan, well, stinks.

Agriculture has long been a top source of water pollution in the United States, but in the past two decades the problem has grown dramatically with the proliferation of large-scale pork, poultry, beef and dairy facilities, known as concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). From 2002 to 2005, the CAFO industry in the United States expanded by about 22 percent — with substantially more animals per facility, and ever larger piles of their droppings.

Today these facilities are responsible for some 500 million tons of animal manure a year — three times the waste that humans in this country produce, activists say. According to a 1998 report from the Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency, CAFO muck has fouled roughly 35,000 miles of rivers in 22 states and groundwater in 17 states. More recent data show that 29 states have reported water contamination from these feedlots.

In June, the EPA proposed a rule that purports to address this problem. It would revise a set of rules issued in 2003 that revamped the permitting process required of CAFOs under the Clean Water Act, with the aim of better tracking discharge levels at each facility and holding factory farms accountable for their water pollution.

The 2003 rules were deemed inadequate by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year. This decision was the upshot of a lawsuit filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, and the Waterkeeper Alliance alleging that U.S. waterways aren’t sufficiently protected from farm-animal feces, which can carry viruses, parasites and bacteria such as E. coli.

Says EPA spokesperson Dale Kemery, “The new rule complies with the 2nd Circuit decision, and will result in better Clean Water Act compliance among CAFOs.”

But enviros disagree. “The court required the EPA to bring clarity to some aspects of the 2003 rules; instead they’ve created more confusion and new loopholes,” says Michele Merkel, a former staff attorney in the EPA’s enforcement division who now works for the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project. The most worrisome loophole, she says, would allow CAFOs themselves to define what constitutes a polluting discharge and therefore decide whether a permit is needed at all.

Such flexibility flies in the face of the Clean Water Act, says Merkel, because the law prohibits all large-scale feedlots from discharging any traceable animal waste into nearby waterways and requires them to obtain permits for exemptions under certain circumstances, such as when there’s runoff after a storm.

“The loophole basically renders the Clean Water Act meaningless when it comes to regulating the fecal discharge from CAFOs,” Merkel says. “It says to these massive facilities, ‘Hey, figure out if you need a permit to pollute, and then come and get one.’ It’s appalling.”

The agriculture industry, meanwhile, is applauding the proposed rule. Don Parish, senior director of regulatory relations for the American Farm Bureau Federation, says it would lighten the regulatory burden on CAFOs. Obtaining permits, he says, is “an onerous process. When you have a permit, every ‘i’ that you don’t dot and every ‘t’ you don’t cross is a problem, and creates substantial liability concerns.”

There are plenty of means by which CAFO animal waste can make its way into waterways, according to Melanie Shepherdson, a staff attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council’s water and oceans program. The massive reservoirs in which such waste is stored, known as lagoons, are vulnerable to routine leaks or occasionally significant breaks in their walls. Also, since the lagoons are commonly uncovered, nitrogen from the urine and excrement gasifies into the air, then redeposits onto the ground or nearby bodies of water and can run off into rivers and groundwater supplies. And the waste is commonly liquefied and sprayed onto a CAFO’s surrounding fields, where it can likewise run off or leach into water sources.

“In 2003, EPA’s position was that if you’re a large-scale facility, it’s nearly impossible not to have some amount of discharge,” Merkel says. “Therefore all large facilities should have permits.”

And yet today the vast majority of factory farms still don’t have permits for this runaway pollution: Of the roughly 18,800 CAFOs currently in the United States, the EPA says only about 8,500 have permits.

Parish says this is just fine, arguing that the permitting process should not be mandatory for all CAFOs: “If you choose not to drive a car, does the government require you to have a driver’s license? No. Likewise, if CAFOs do not discharge or intend to discharge, they shouldn’t have to have a federal permit.”

The EPA adds that factory farms that send pollution into waterways without a permit risk punishment: “Under the Clean Water Act, CAFOs that do not seek permit coverage risk liability for any unpermitted discharges that may occur at the facility,” Kemery says.

But there are few penalties being doled out, or even inspections taking place, Merkel says. Between 1997 and 2004, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a grand total of eight lawsuits against CAFOs for violating water-pollution standards under the Clean Water Act.

“Without permits, government officials don’t even know you’re out there in many cases,” Merkel says. Take the example of Illinois, she says, a major farm state where nearly 85 percent of the total public lake acreage is contaminated. “There are at least 500 large CAFOs in the state; only about 40 have permits, and only about a fifth of them have even been inspected,” Merkel says. The state EPA has an inventory of only 30 percent of the CAFOs operating in Illinois. “They don’t even know where the vast majority are,” Merkel says.

Says Shepherdson, “You’d be hard-pressed to find any other industry that is as loosely regulated as this one.” She says it’s no coincidence, noting that the ag industry is well-known for flexing its political muscle: “All of the big players have their trade groups out there on their behalf, lobbying both the EPA and friendly members of Congress to rewrite the [discharge] rules and exempt them from Clean Water Act requirements. The EPA is clearly kowtowing to industry and abdicating its role as protector of public health.”

The new rule is expected to appear on the federal register shortly and will be subject to a 45-day public comment period. NRDC, the Sierra Club, and the Waterkeeper Alliance plan to submit detailed criticisms of the proposal, and Sierra Club attorney Ed Hopkins says they will consider a second lawsuit if their concerns are not taken into account.

: Amanda Griscom Little is a columnist for Grist Magazine. Her articles on energy, technology and the environment have appeared in publications ranging from Rolling Stone to the New York Times Magazine. More Amanda Griscom Little

- 3Comments
- Permalink
- Print
- Short URL
Share:
- Email
- Twitter
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Digg
- Reddit
- StumbleUpon
- ShareThis

Another hidden supercommittee menace

The "secret farm bill" could overhaul U.S. agriculture for the next five years with no public debate

By Maggie Severns

Rep. Collin Peterson, ranking Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee (Credit: Reuters)

Topics:Jeb Hensarling, Agriculture, Supercommittee

The congressional deficit supercommittee is pulling into the home stretch. Whether the secret, round-the-clock negotiations among its 12 members will yield a budget-cutting deal before its Thanksgiving deadline is the subject of intense speculation in Washington.

Republican co-chair Jeb Hensarling indicated on MSNBC on Tuesday night that the Republicans have gone as far as they are willing to go when it comes to compromise. House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md., Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., and others held a press conference this morning urging the supercommittee to “go big” on an agreement over deficit reduction. The White House, in the meantime, is bracing for failure, according to the Washington Post.

This speculation changes daily, making it hard to tell how things will unfold over the next week. But what if the supercommittee does succeed in “going big”? What would that deal look like? Yes, a deficit agreement could result in changes to programs like Social Security and Medicaid. What has been less noticed is that a supercommittee deal could — and likely would– end up rewriting other policies in ways that are entirely unexpected.

Enter the so-called secret farm bill, an oddball piece of deficit reduction legislation that could rewrite agriculture policy in the United States in one behind-closed-doors deal.

“There’s no question that the farm bill is what agriculture wants to do,” said a budget expert who works closely with farm states. Essentially, the farm bill could become a part of deficit reduction because the House and Senate Agriculture Committees are trying to take advantage of the way the supercommittee’s process was set up. Congressional committees can submit recommendations to the supercommittee on ways they would like to see spending cut in their programs.

The House and Senate Agriculture Committees, led by agriculture’s “Big Four,” Sens. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and Pat Roberts, R-Kan., and Reps. Frank Lucas, R-Okla., and Collin Peterson, D-Minn., appear poised to try to submit their suggestion in the form of the farm bill.

The farm bill, approved every five years by Congress, has more to do with your life than you might think. This legislation sets most food and agriculture policies in the United States, from food stamps to food safety measures and crop subsidies. If the Big Four submit a bill that spends less money than the old farm bill did, it could be passable as deficit reduction and potentially get swept through Congress on the coattails of a deficit reduction plan. Though it’s impossible to tell exactly what such a plan would look like, it’s logical that states the Big Four represent — Michigan, Kansas, Oklahoma, Minnesota — and other farm states would be well-represented.

But if the secret farm bill become law, some people will go ballistic. Anti-obesity advocates, food safety watchdogs, and food policy advocates have been waiting for Congress to write the next farm bill, which is a rare opportunity for them to plug new policies, such as targeting food stamps so they encourage low-income families to buy healthy foods. But if the new farm bill is written and debated behind closed doors, as is happening right now, they will have to wait another five years for that opportunity.

“A farm bill that preserves the status quo instead of addressing a food system that causes disease and wrecks the environment isn’t even marginally serious about deficit reduction,” wrote food writer and activist Mark Bittman in an Op-Ed for the New York Times last week.

It sounds batty, but slipping relatively small pieces of legislation into large, high-stakes bills is a proven way to get a bill passed. The health care reform bill that passed last spring, for example, included a major rewrite of a 40-year-old student loan program that was similarly folded into health reform at the last minute. It was the biggest piece of education-related legislation to get passed Congress in years and it was barely reviewed.

Corn states vs. rice states

The Big Four stand to gain two things by slipping their farm bill into a deficit agreement:

First, they avoid a scenario where the supercommittee simply caps the amount of money budgeted for agriculture in coming years, giving the agriculture committees less autonomy in their decision-making.

Second, if they reauthorize the farm bill now they can avoid what would likely be a messy, public battle over food policy and agriculture reform slated to take place next summer, in the middle of an election cycle.

Insiders and advocates say the possibility of the secret farm bill becoming the law of the land depends on a number of things happening in the coming weeks.

First, the Big Four need to come to an agreement and actually submit a plan that saves the $23 billion to $25 billion over 10 years, as the supercommittee has asked it to do. There are three areas where the agriculture budget could get slashed: nutrition programs such as food stamps, conservation programs that help preserve land and prevent pollution, and crop subsidies.

It’s likely that around half of the cuts, ranging from $13 billion to $15 billion over 10 years, would come from dropping crop subsidies and replacing them with an expanded crop insurance program that would enable farmers to collect a larger share of their losses from insurance during years with poor profits.

Currently, internal divisions are preventing the committees from agreeing among themselves, says a source who works on Capitol Hill. The division line within the Big Four and other congressmen who are trying to lobby them currently falls mostly between corn states, such as Minnesota, and rice states, such as Arkansas.

Collin Peterson of Minnesota, for example, is a strong supporter of the new insurance plan. Corn is somewhat volatile and corn farmers would gain from having expanded insurance. Rice, on the other hand, is a less volatile crop and thus benefits more from straight cash subsidies, making it likely that congressmen from rice-producing states are opposing the new insurance deal. Sen. John Boozman, R-Ark., for example, recently emphasized the importance of keeping the “farm safety net” (subsidies and insurance) intact in a deficit deal and played down the need for crop insurance in his state when speaking to the Arkansas News. Unsurprisingly, Arkansas grows almost half of the U.S. supply of rice.

That’s the debate within farm states. The interests of those not representing farmers, such as people concerned about reducing agriculture pollution or reforming the food stamps program so it encourages families to buy healthier food, don’t figure into this equation, and are likely to be overlooked by the secret farm bill.

Food stamps would also likely see a small cut, because the the program is popular but constitutes an estimated two-thirds of the costs of the current farm bill, making it hard for the Big Four to plot out a way to reduce spending without at least a minor reduction in spending on food stamps.

The Big Four will likely try to sell the new insurance program as having big cost savings though it might not, in fact, save money. During years with good crop prices and yield, offering government-subsidized insurance to farmers is relatively inexpensive. But during years when crop prices and/or yields fall, the government will dole out more money to farmers who have experienced losses, resulting in much less savings.

There’s a good chance the supercommittee won’t fall for agriculture’s bait-and-switch with regard to crop subsidies. But the committee could make a deal that hits its deficit reduction mark and looks good on paper while ignoring the variations in actual agriculture savings. An expanded crop insurance program could be popular, too. As one Capitol Hill veteran noted, “Congress loves temporary disaster relief.”

If the supercommittee does accept the farm bill and then manages to strike a deal before Thanksgiving, then the farm bill heads to Congress as part of the deficit reduction agreement. Congressmen will have to swallow the entire agreement or none at all. It’s unlikely that many would change their vote on the $1.2 trillion bill because of the relatively small, $23 billion agriculture component, meaning that if the supercommittee makes a plan that wins approval, the secret farm bill would become law regardless of who loves or hates it.

“The outside has really been shut out of the process,” commented a source on Capitol Hill. With this and other “secret” bills, there’s no knowing what surprises might be waiting if the supercommittee does in fact make a deal.

: Maggie Severns is a program associate at the New America Foundation. Follow her @maggieseverns. More Maggie Severns

- 12Comments
- Permalink
- Print
- Short URL
Share:
- Email
- Twitter
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Digg
- Reddit
- StumbleUpon
- ShareThis

How to save small farms

By protecting farmland from development, land trusts are making small-scale agriculture more viable

By Jane Black, Gilt Taste

(Credit: Courtesy of Maine Farmland Trust)

Topics:Agriculture, Sustainable food, Food Business

This piece originally appeared on Gilt Taste.

You could say Penny Jordan saved the farm. A veteran of the insurance industry with a business degree, she came back to work at her Maine family farm at age 48. Since then, she’s revitalized her old farm stand business with a bus that delivers produce to senior centers. She’s opened a tiny restaurant on wheels, The Well, where a fine-dining chef turns out an ever-changing menu to be eaten at picnic tables by the parking lot—albeit one with a stunning view of Spurwink River. Jordan, a spunky, silvery blonde who favors fleece and Carhartts, has so much energy she almost bounces as she walks. Her creativity may spark new business models for other small farms, and why not? This is a woman who seems like she could do anything.

But Jordan doesn’t take the credit. The secret to her booming business, she says, is instead a complex and seemingly rather dull legal contract called an agricultural easement. The arrangement, made with a land trust, allows farmers to be paid in return for stripping their land of its development rights – no new subdivisions or shopping malls allowed – and instead keeping it as farmland. In 2004, the Jordan family placed 47 acres of their property under an easement with the Cape Elizabeth Land Trust for an undisclosed sum. “The Jordans settled Cape Elizabeth,” Jordan says. “We would not have kept the farm, let alone been able to invest in the business, without this.”

Interest in small-scale agriculture has soared over the last decade. But it’s still anything but easy for farmers to get in or stay in the game, not least because farmland itself is disappearing: In Maine, for example, 75 percent of farmland has vanished since 1950. What’s left is often worth more as future house lots than as a farm—especially if it has panoramic views like the Jordan farm. Over the next decade, about 400,000 acres, or about one-third of Maine’s remaining farmland, will be in transition as older farmers retire or die. Here in the Pine Tree State, agricultural easements are an increasingly powerful tool to help revive and grow small farms.

John Bliss and Stacy Brenner have built their business – a 150-member CSA, a farm stand and flower design studio – thanks to an agricultural easement. Their 150-acre Broadturn Farm is actually owned by the local Scarborough Land Trust, which leases it “at a very modest rent” to the young couple. Bliss and Brenner are your stereotypical new farmers. They’re young, business savvy and hip – you can just picture them sampling cheese and sipping a craft brew at a bar in Brooklyn – and neither of them grew up farming. (Plus, if either of them decides to give up on farming, they have a future as models for J. Crew.)

Over the next decade, about one-third of Maine’s remaining farmland will be in transition as older farmers retire or die.

After apprenticing for a few years, Bliss and Brenner learned enough to want to set out on their own. But had they bought the land they currently occupy, it would have cost $750,000 and one of them would have had to take an off-farm job to pay the mortgage. “This is an arrangement where we have an affordable rent and we can reinvest in our business, not the real estate,” says Brenner.

In Damariscotta, about an hour north, the Maine Farmland Trust, a state preservation non-profit, purchased a 67-acre farm for $500,000 along the state’s main thoroughfare, Route 1. Its plan: To sell it for less than half that to the local food co-op, Rising Tide, or to a new farmer. It’s an example of what the Trust calls a “Buy, Protect, Sell” program, which has preserved 3,000 acres of farmland since it was launched in 2008. “Buy high, sell low doesn’t seem like a good business plan. But to preserve land, it makes sense,” says John Piotti, the Trust’s executive director.

Initially, the farm’s owner planned to sell the land to Wal-Mart. But the community revolted, and the deal was abandoned. Concerned that the land would still be developed, the Trust purchased the land and put an easement on the property. The easement payments, which come from federal and state agencies, plus private fundraising, will allow the Trust to sell the acreage at the farmland value, $180,000, and still just about break even.

For the Jordans, an easement was their ticket to stay on the farm, which was experiencing financial issues. Money had been diverted from the business to help pay for family health care, among other things, and there were overdue bills and unpaid taxes.

The money the Jordans received for the easement allowed the family to make a substantial capital investment in the farm. They almost doubled the number of acres under cultivation, from 40 to 70. They built a new three-room farmstand, where at this time of year you might find squash, shell beans, kale, salad greens, beets, eggs, apples, cider and maple syrup. Retail sales, which are far more profitable for farms, now make up 90 percent of the family’s business.

Business certainly was brisk on a recent sunny autumn afternoon. Older couples parked their cars and greeted sales staff by name. Mothers piled apples and greens in their baskets and appeased their children with pumpkins stacked on a bale of hay by the door. “Writing an easement – it was the hardest process. But it forced the family to confront the hard decisions that had to be made,” says Jordan. “And that’s what saved the farm.”

: More Jane Black

- 2Comments
- Permalink
- Print
- Short URL
Share:
- Email
- Twitter
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Digg
- Reddit
- StumbleUpon
- ShareThis

Why Americans can’t afford to eat healthy

The real reason Big Macs are cheaper than more nutritious alternatives? Government subsidies

By David Sirota

Why Americans can't afford to eat healthy

Topics:Health, Agriculture

The easiest way to explain Gallup’s discovery that millions of Americans are eating fewer fruits and vegetables than they ate last year is to simply crack a snarky joke about Whole Foods really being “Whole Paycheck.” Rooted in the old limousine liberal iconography, the quip conjures the notion that only Birkenstock-wearing trust-funders can afford to eat right in tough times.

It seems a tidy explanation for a disturbing trend, implying that healthy food is inherently more expensive, and thus can only be for wealthy Endive Elitists when the economy falters. But if the talking point’s carefully crafted mix of faux populism and oversimplification seems a bit facile — if the glib explanation seems almost too perfectly sculpted for your local right-wing radio blowhard — that’s because it dishonestly omits the most important part of the story. The part about how healthy food could easily be more affordable for everyone right now, if not for those ultimate elitists: agribusiness CEOs, their lobbyists and the politicians they own.

As with most issues in this new Gilded Age, the tale of the American diet is a story of the worst form of corporatism — the kind whereby the government uses public monies to protect private profit.

In this chapter of that larger tragicomedy, lawmakers whose campaigns are underwritten by agribusinesses have used billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize those agribusinesses’ specific commodities (corn, soybeans, wheat, etc.) that are the key ingredients of unhealthy food. Not surprisingly, the subsidies have manufactured a price inequality that helps junk food undersell nutritious-but-unsubsidized foodstuffs like fruits and vegetables. The end result is that recession-battered consumers are increasingly forced by economic circumstance to “choose” the lower-priced junk food that their taxes support.

Corn — which is processed into the junk-food staple corn syrup and which feeds the livestock that produce meat — exemplifies the scheme.

“Over the past decade, the federal government has poured more than $50 billion into the corn industry, keeping prices for the crop … artificially low,” reports Time magazine. “That’s why McDonald’s can sell you a Big Mac, fries and a Coke for around $5 — a bargain.”

Yes, it is a bargain, but one created by deliberate government policy that serves the corn industry titans, not by any genetic advantage that makes corn derivatives automatically more affordable for the budget-strapped commoner.

The aggregate effect of such market manipulation across the agriculture industry, notes Time, is “that a dollar [can] buy 1,200 calories of potato chips or 875 calories of soda but just 250 calories of vegetables or 170 calories of fresh fruit.”

So while it may be amusing to use Americans’ worsening recession-era diet as another excuse to promote cultural stereotypes, the nutrition crisis costing us billions in unnecessary healthcare costs is more about public policy and powerful special interests than it is about epicurean snobs and affluent tastes. Indeed, this is a problem not of individual proclivities or of agricultural biology that supposedly makes nutrition naturally unaffordable — it is a problem of rigged economics and corrupt policymaking.

Solving the crisis, then, requires everything from recalibrating our subsidies to halting the low-income school lunch program’s support for the pizza and French fry lobby (yes, they have a powerful lobby). It requires, in other words, a new level of maturity, a better appreciation for the nuanced politics of food and a commitment to changing those politics for the future.

Impossible? Hardly. A country that can engineer the seemingly unattainable economics of a $5 McDonald’s feast certainly has the capacity to produce a healthy meal for the same price. It’s just a matter of will — or won’t.

: David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. More David Sirota

Share:
- Email
- Twitter
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Digg
- Reddit
- StumbleUpon
- ShareThis

“Farmageddon”: Government thugs vs. organic farmers

Contraband sheep! Illicit yogurt! A new documentary explores the bureaucratic attack on crunchy farming

By Andrew O'Hehir

A still from "Farmageddon"

Topics:Agriculture, Documentaries, Our Picks, Movies, Quick Takes

Let me heal America’s political divide with an issue that can bring together enviro-lefties and free-market conservatives: In this back-to-basics era when the demand for traditionally produced food has exploded, government regulation of small farmers is often capricious and incoherent. Kristin Canty’s documentary “Farmageddon” isn’t memorable cinema, and it follows a familiar formula. Activists, farmers and foodies make the case for locally grown and minimally processed food, and we hear a lot of anecdotes about governmental overreach, while the bureaucrats either damn themselves by keeping their mouths shut or damn themselves by talking and saying nothing. A Vermont family has its entire herd of imported sheep destroyed, thanks to a completely imaginary outbreak of mad-cow disease (which is not known to occur in sheep in the first place, and definitely didn’t occur in theirs). Armed agents invade an upstate New York farm to seize a cooler full of raspberry yogurt. An undercover unit breaks up an interstate trafficking ring — one devoted to bringing USDA-certified raw milk from South Carolina across the line into Georgia.

You don’t have to believe that raw milk is good for you (which is a contentious issue I can’t tackle here) to think that the hodgepodge of state and federal regulations covering it — and numerous other “natural” animal and vegetable products — is ludicrous. As someone in “Farmageddon” observes, the fast food and processed food that renders so many Americans morbidly obese and hastens the deaths of millions is legally available everywhere, but in many states people can’t make their own decisions about whether to consume raw dairy products. (E.g., in California you can buy raw milk at the grocery store; in New York or Pennsylvania you have to buy it from a farmer; in Maryland you can’t legally buy it at all.)

Canty makes a compelling case that federal and state agricultural officials — who are supposed to help farmers sell their products, not make their lives miserable — have fallen way behind the public’s growing appetite for locally sourced and artisanal food. But “Farmageddon” also implies that this is because corporate agribusiness is using its friends in government to crush small producers. Given the revolving door between government and industry we absolutely can’t rule that out, but Occam’s razor suggests that entropy, chaos and bureaucratic thinking are more to blame. Food-safety laws dating to the 1930s and earlier are being enforced alongside those written more recently in response to outbreaks of E. coli and other dangerous pathogens, and regulatory schemes designed to cover billion-dollar corporations fit poorly on small family farms.

No one in “Farmageddon” ever suggests that small producers of raw milk or organic poultry or anything else shouldn’t be subject to safety inspection and prudent regulation, only that it might be nice if they weren’t subjected to security-state crackdowns for reasons that have little to do with reason or science. “Farmageddon” is an informal sequel to the hit documentary “Food, Inc.,” and features several appearances by Virginia farmer Joel Salatin, one of that film’s stars and a genuine local-food celebrity. Canty clearly hopes to drive a lobbying campaign aimed at reshaping the regulatory climate to the realities of the organic-mad marketplace. Do I smell a Bernie Sanders-Rand Paul libertarian-socialist bill in the making?

“Farmageddon” is now playing at Cinema Village in New York. It opens July 22 at the Hollywood Theatre in Portland, Ore., and Aug. 26 at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago. Check website for other cities and one-time screenings.

: More Andrew O'Hehir

- 25Comments
- Permalink
- Print
- Short URL
Share:
- Email
- Twitter
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Digg
- Reddit
- StumbleUpon
- ShareThis

“If a Tree Falls”: Understanding the era of “eco-terrorism”

A fascinating and remarkably fair-minded documentary probes the roots of the notorious Earth Liberation Front

By Andrew O'Hehir

A still from "If a Tree Falls"

Topics:Terrorism, Agriculture, Anarchism, Documentaries, Environment, Our Picks, Movies

Radicals perform a social function that they themselves often view with contempt, and one that is similarly misunderstood by people in the political mainstream who almost always see radicalism as crazy and counterproductive. People who chain themselves to old-growth redwoods — or, for that matter, to the doors of abortion clinics — hardly ever get what they want in the short or medium term, since what they want is generally unrealistic, and often amounts to a revolutionary change in the social order. But in posing an unrelenting and quixotic challenge to the consciences of their fellow citizens, radical activists often nudge us along toward more modest, incremental changes. Does anyone dispute that facts on the ground with regard to environmental policies and abortion rights have changed, thanks in part to the actions of activists many people view as deranged?

I’m not trying to claim that the shadowy alliance of underground environmental radicals known as the Earth Liberation Front were (or are) a constructive force; taken as a whole, their actions were idiotic and vainglorious. But I am trying to sneak up on Marshall Curry’s fascinating new documentary, “If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front,” because it takes on a complicated subject that calls forth an unfortunate wealth of received opinion and knee-jerk reaction. Curry, whose Oscar-nominated “Street Fight” explored a nasty mayoral election in Newark, N.J., is to be commended for surrendering to neither. “If a Tree Falls” is a remarkably evenhanded story about an eager young activist who was drawn down a slippery slope toward property destruction and violence, and who wound up as a baffled defendant in a widely publicized federal terrorism case. Those eager to defend the motives and ideology of the ELF will be made uncomfortable, and so will throw-away-the-key viewers who view the group as a hippie-flavored answer to al-Qaida.

During its brief heyday as an underground direct-action movement in the late ’90s and early 2000s, the ELF was simultaneously the subject of massive media hype and widespread incomprehension. Daniel McGowan, the young man at the center of “If a Tree Falls,” was involved with an ELF cell operating in and around Eugene, Ore., which committed various arson attacks on perceived environmental evildoers in the Northwest. These ranged from a Forest Service ranger station to a slaughterhouse where wild horses and burros were rendered into dog food to a timber company to a Ford dealership. If that makes it sounds as if the group’s rationale was all over the place that’s exactly right, but let’s not get ahead of the story. Since ELF was conceived as a “leaderless collective” of autonomous cells, McGowan’s group presumably had no connection to a series of ELF attacks in Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin and Indiana, nor to the suburban arson fires set in San Diego or on New York’s Long Island. (Who exactly committed the ELF’s most famous arson attack, the 1998 torching of five buildings at the Vail ski resort in Colorado, causing at least $12 million in damage, is a disputed question.)

Curry came to this film with no particular knowledge of environmental activism or its underground component, which may be for the best. Purely by chance, McGowan was working for Curry’s wife in New York when he was arrested by the FBI in December 2005. In fact, this is a sterling example of journalistic documentary, clearer, fairer and more engrossing than any of the sensationalistic newspaper or magazine stories about ELF. Curry spends a lot of time with McGowan and his family, which is almost the opposite of what you’d expect from an accused eco-terrorist. McGowan grew up in middle-class, Irish-American Queens, and his father is a retired New York police detective. By his own account, McGowan’s environmental awakening happened not in the wilderness but at Wetlands, a now defunct nightclub in downtown Manhattan.

Curry spends time with several other ELF members, including McGowan’s ex-girlfriend Suzanne Savoie (who spent nearly four years in prison) and the notorious Jake Ferguson, a charismatic founder and leader of the Eugene cell who subsequently turned police informant and wore a wire to incriminate McGowan and others. “If a Tree Falls” includes archival footage of many ELF attacks and visits to most of the sites, including interviews with the befuddled owners of a lumber mill and a tree farm that were burned to the ground. The filmmaker also has revealing conversations with assistant United States attorney Kirk Engdall and Eugene police detective Greg Harvey, who led the four-year ELF investigation that culminated with the arrest of McGowan and many other suspects — and both have a more nuanced understanding of the group than you might expect.

Most important of all, Curry pushes backward into the heady, crazy world of recent activist history, before the ELF started grabbing headlines around 1998. (He’s aware, furthermore, that you can go back still further, to Dave Foreman and the founding of Earth First!, or to Edward Abbey and “The Monkey Wrench Gang.” This is one movie, and it doesn’t claim to be comprehensive.) Those years saw an escalating series of confrontations in the Pacific Northwest between activists, timber companies and law enforcement officials, who began to use increasingly brutal methods to deal with nonviolent civil disobedience. As you’ll see in the film, cops sometimes beat and mauled activists engaged in such time-honored tactics as lockdowns or tree-sits, and frequently maced resisters at close range or daubed pepper spray directly in their eyes with cotton swabs. After a 1997 tree-sit at a park in downtown Eugene led to a violent police crackdown, the town’s long-standing community of anarchists and left-wing libertarians began to coalesce around more radical possibilities.

McGowan, Savoie, Ferguson and other Eugene activists played roles in the “Battle of Seattle” in 1999, when the World Trade Organization conference collapsed amid widespread protest and rioting. By that time they were already the central nexus of Eugene’s ELF cell, which became identified by the FBI as the most dangerous domestic terrorist group in the U.S. Activists have accused the government of using the activities of a handful of radicals to foment a widespread “Green Scare,” and one can definitely argue that the word “terrorist” doesn’t fit ELF, whose attacks were meant to cause economic damage but not to spread fear or inflict civilian casualties. (No one was ever injured in an ELF fire.) As someone in the film observes, “terrorist” is always a political term of art, which in practice means “someone who uses force in service of a goal we don’t support.” Your terrorist is somebody else’s freedom fighter.

Curry captures the rush that ELF members got, for instance, from burning down that horse-butchering facility, which was never rebuilt or reopened. But the media seized on ELF as a hot story and the group almost instantly became seduced by its clandestine, badass reputation, meaning that the supposed original goal — educating the public about the evil actions of corporations and government — evaporated completely. ELF members became highly skilled at staging arson fires and covering their tracks; several years and millions of dollars were expended before the FBI “turned” Jake Ferguson and broke the case. But the actions themselves went from borderline-counterproductive to flamingly stupid: In May 2001, McGowan’s cell firebombed the Center for Urban Horticulture at the University of Washington in Seattle, causing $7 million in damage to an eco-friendly research facility under the mistaken impression that the center engaged in genetic engineering. Simultaneously, an ELF cadre burned down a tree farm in rural Oregon, one that grew hybrid poplars using conventional methods used in agriculture for centuries, if not millennia.

McGowan suggests to Curry that his ELF cell blew apart not long after that, partly out of regret over those mistakes but also because some members suggested the possibility of going after human targets (something that I don’t think has been attested elsewhere). One thing is for sure: After September of 2001, the national climate shifted dramatically and the ELF’s bush-league experiments in terrorism, with or without scare quotes, stopped seeming like fun to anybody. You can find several different warring websites claiming to represent the remnants of ELF, and people still commit “actions” in its name, if you want to glorify acts of petty vandalism at shopping malls and auto dealerships with that word. Daniel McGowan will be eligible for release from federal prison in a couple of years, and if there’s a lesson to be learned from the thorny history of his brief but stellar career as an eco-terrorist, I don’t think he, or any of the rest of us, has learned it yet.

“If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front” is now playing at the IFC Center in New York. It opens June 23 at the Bijou Cinemas in Eugene, Ore.; July 9 in Olympia, Wash.; July 15 in Denver, Los Angeles and San Francisco; July 22 in Minneapolis, San Diego and Seattle; and Aug. 12 in Washington, with more cities and dates to be announced.