Our staff share their stories for World Environment Day.
We are all facing the challenges brought by the climate crisis, industrial agriculture, and fossil fuel interests in our daily lives. This week we’ll be sharing stories from our very own staff about how closely connected they are to the issues we work on and how they fight to protect our food, water, and climate every day. It’s just one way we’re all in this fight together.
My name is Krissy, and I’m the Factory Farm Organizing Director at Food & Water Watch. In honor of World Environment Day, I’d like to share a personal story about how climate chaos has impacted my life and community.
In 2018, Hurricane Florence raked through the Carolinas. It dropped 36 inches of rain, nearly half of which was attributed to a warming climate. Fifty three people died and nearly 75,000 homes and businesses were flooded — including mine. After the storm, we knew we’d be returning home to a nightmare — the only question was how bad it would be.
Photo credit: Cape Fear River Watch
It wasn’t just floodwater in my home. All across eastern North Carolina, manure lagoons full of hog waste from factory farms were flooded or breached entirely — including one upstream from my house. Millions of gallons of untreated hog waste washed downstream into people’s homes, compounding the nightmare — and the danger — from the storm.
The devastation was no accident. It was the result of decades of poor policy decisions that allowed factory farms to be built in floodplains and corporations to spew pollution into our waterways. The outcome was an unacceptable violation of my family’s and neighbor’s homes.
In my role as Factory Farm Organizing Director, I’m working to ban factory farms and fight for meaningful action to stop climate change. We need to do these things as if our lives depend on it — because they do.
We’re fighting for legislation that would enact a moratorium on factory farms in Iowa and Oregon. We’re taking a stand against the overuse of water by factory farms in New Mexico and the development of factory farm gas in Delaware. And at the federal level, we’re fighting for the Farm System Reform Act to win a national ban on factory farms.
Enough is enough — it’s time to get rid of factory farms. Through my work at Food & Water Watch, my hope is no one ever has to face the devastation I faced in 2018.
Food & Water Watch and its affiliated organization, Food & Water Action, are advocacy groups with a common mission to protect our food, water and climate.
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