Dispute Over Biogas Facilities in Eastern N.C. Reveals a History of Discrimination with Broader Implications in the Fight Against Global Warming
An overhead view of eastern NC’s hog belt. Source: Mother Jones
On Monday, September 27th, the Southern Environmental Law Center filed a complaint with the Environmental Protection Agency on behalf of the Duplin County Branch of the NAACP and the N.C. Poor People's Campaign. The complaint comes in response to state regulator’s recent issuance of permits for the construction of biogas facilities at four Eastern North Carolina hog farms, which the two civil rights groups argue will have a disparate impact on black and Hispanic communities in surrounding areas.
The complaint specifically alleges that the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) violated the Civil Rights act of 1964 by knowingly ignoring initial environmental analyses that indicated that the biogas facilities would be located in areas with disproportionately large black and Hispanic populations. In addition to allowing the construction of the biogas facilities, the complaint states that the permits issued by the DEQ also allow for modifications to the hog farms’ existing waste disposal methods that will “exacerbate the underlying system’s impacts on communities of color.”
In a written statement, a spokesperson for Align RNG, a partnership between Dominion Energy and Smithfield Foods, stated his bewilderment with the filed complaint — describing the biogas venture as an “absolute win for North Carolina, the communities where Smithfield operates, and the environment.” The complaint requests that the EPA’s compliance office investigate whether DEQ failed to protect people living near the farms, while simultaneously calling for the state environmental agency to consider existing pollution when making permitting decisions. The dispute currently playing out is no isolated incident, but rather the most recent episode in a decades-long fight against a discriminatory system that speaks to broader questions about who bears the burden of ecological crises and the fight against climate change.
In Eastern N.C.’s rural Duplin and Sampson counties, hogs outnumber people 40 to 1. Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) collect hog waste in “lagoons” before spraying it over fields to be used as fertilizer. Most of the state’s CAFOs are located squarely in the so-called “Black Belt,” a region spanning throughout the South where slaves once worked on plantations. Thanks to generations of discriminatory practices like tenant farming and sharecropping, a century later black residents in the region still experience high rates of poverty, poor health care, low educational attainment, unemployment, and substandard housing. For the primarily poor, minority communities bordering N.C.’s hog farms, the lagoon and spray field system make living hard and dangerous. While most first notice the acrid odor, the waste disposal system has been associated with a laundry list of adverse health effects in affected communities. Despite toxic levels of nitrate in local groundwater due to seepage from waste lagoons, many rural black communities’ pleas for county water have been met with intransigence — even as municipal infrastructure is built in more densely populated, mostly white communities in other parts of the counties.
A crystalline example of “environmental racism,” Eastern N.C.’s hog industry illustrates how disproportionately harmful systems can arise even in the absence of malicious intent. Though the conglomerates like Smithfield might not have intended to discriminate against minority communities, by building farms on cheap land in poorer regions where people are less likely to object, the industry erected a system both built upon and serving to perpetuate racist preconditions.
The ongoing conflict between Align RNG and local civil rights groups over the proposed biogas facilities is emblematic of struggles taking place all over the world. In developed countries like the U.S., poor and minority communities are those most vulnerable to the effects of climate change and the natural disasters amplified by rising global temperatures. As a recent EPA report shows, black and African American individuals are 34% more likely to live in areas with the highest projected increases in childhood asthma diagnoses and 40% more likely to live in areas with the highest projected increase in extreme temperature-related deaths. Both figures stand to rise significantly if global temperatures surpass a 4℃ increase. As the global climate crisis reaches the eleventh hour, similar discriminatory themes are playing out in international efforts to combat it.
The world’s developed nations, whose rise has been inextricably linked to the consumption of fossil fuels, are imposing strict regulations which disproportionately affect poorer nations that cannot so easily transition to renewable forms of energy. Much like the implementation of biogas capture facilities in N.C. (which would serve to provide a cleaner, renewable form of energy) innovations and initiatives that seek to combat climate change often worsen existing conditions for those it most heavily impacts. To truly face and accept these realities is to necessitate environmental regulation and a transition to clean energy that doesn’t disproportionately burden the poor and minority communities that already face the brunt of climate change’s worst effects.