Wastelands
The True Story of Farm Country on Trial
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- USD 9.99
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- USD 9.99
Descripción editorial
"Beautifully written, impeccably researched, and told with the air of suspense that few writers can handle, Wastelands is a story I wish I had written." —From the Foreword by John Grisham
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.
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.
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this exceptional account, Addison (A Harvest of Thorns) reveals how a cadre of dedicated lawyers and long-suffering North Carolina families fought, and won, against Big Pork. In 2013, attorney Mona Wallace took on the case of 26-year-old Brandon Taylor, who died from toxic fumes while working at a Smithfield packing plant in Clinton, N.C. This case, which ended only in a fine for Smithfield, was the prelude to a series of major environmental nuisance cases. Over the decades, Smithfield, a food corporation giant, had brought five million hogs to four North Carolina counties, polluting the air and water with billions of gallons of hog urine and feces. The rural, mostly Black families who lived near the farms complained about the stench to no avail. Then, starting in 2018, Wallace and her colleagues brought five successive cases to court. Addison dramatically details the massive legal legwork involved, the heartbreaking stories of the families, the courtroom battles, and the intimidation tactics and social media smears by Smithfield. In 2020, after losing an appeal, Smithfield agreed to settle for an undisclosed amount and was forced to change its pork production for the betterment of the people and land of North Carolina. As John Grisham notes in his foreword, this David versus Goliath story has a happy ending. This high-stakes legal saga is a must-read.
