Corban Addison WASTELANDS: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial
Transcript of interview for Writer's Voice with Francesca Rheannon
Industrial hog farming has an industrial-sized waste problem…
The challenge with hogs is they produce five times the waste of a human being. So if you put 1,000 in a barn or 1,200, which is the max capacity in one barn, you've got the waste of a town of 6,000 people. And what do you do with that if you put five barns on a farm and, in fact, many of them have ten barns? I mean, you're talking about, you know, the waste of a small city. And this is really awful stuff. — Corban Addison
We spend the hour with Corban Addison talking about his spell-binding legal thriller, WASTELANDS: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial.
Host Intro
In eastern North Carolina's hog country, pigs outnumber people 30 to 1. The stench of hog waste permeates everything. There's no getting away from it outside or inside the house.
It's not just about the smell. Disease pathogens from waste lagoons pollute the air and water, making it unhealthy to breathe or wash or drink from the faucet. People living near the hog farms are plagued with headaches, coughing, and nausea.
It's a classic case of environmental racism because the residential communities bordering the hog farms are largely poor and black, Latino, or indigenous. Many were established long before hog raising went industrial, cramming thousands of pigs into barns so tightly they can't even turn around.
The hog farmers themselves are little better than sharecroppers to Big Hog, enthralled to companies like Smithfield Foods that cut farmers' profit margins to the bone.
Workers in Smithfield plants, overwhelmingly workers of color, endure horrifically dangerous conditions.
Corban Addison's powerful new book, Wastelands, his first non-fiction book, is a David and Goliath story that pits some of the most powerless people in North Carolina against the state's business and political establishment.
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.
From the small group of intrepid neighbors to their legal allies like Mona Lisa Wallace who took on their case, Wastelands features a cast of characters as compelling as any in fiction.
Corban Addison is the best-selling author of four novels, including A Harvest of Thorns, which we spoke to him about in 2017.
Interview
FR: Corban Addison, welcome back to Writer's Voice.
Corban Addison: Thanks so much for having me. It's a delight to be back with you.
This was an absolute thriller, but not a novel, your first non-novel. It's really as John Grisham, who wrote the introduction and said that he wished he had written it, he describes it as a David versus Goliath story.
I'm just curious, before, in your other novels, you have taken up a social issue in order to write the fiction. \Why didn't you novelize this?
Yeah, you know, out of the gate, when I first met Mona Lisa Wallace, I mean, this came to me through a friend who knew Mona growing up.
They are from the same town, and my buddy called me up and told me about this crazy case involving hog farms and actually had this idea, you know, maybe you could tell it.
And my immediate thought was, hog farms?
I don't think so.
But he, like, who's going to want to read that?
But he told me more, and I was intrigued by the litigation angle, you know, because I'm a lawyer by training, and I love writing about lawyers and about trials.
And so he recommended that I just talk with Mona.
And when I did, I was pretty swept away by her, by the story that she had to tell.
And, you know, I had to ultimately decide if I wanted to write this.
I mean, it's a huge investment of life, of time, of money, you know, this is my livelihood.
And so it's a huge decision to make, you know, am I going to tell this story or something else?
I mean, there are countless other options out there.
And frankly, at this point, I didn't know, you know, what the story was, other than that I was impressed by Mona and that my buddy, John Hart, who's a novelist and who's, you know, who is someone I trust, you know, had recommended this.
So Mona ultimately was like, why don't you come down and see the opening of the fifth trial?
That's where it was at this point in early 2019.
And she said, look, I don't know, you know, I don't know anything about what it's like to be a writer.
All I know is the trial's happening and there is a story here.
I know that at minimum, there's a story of the plaintiffs and my clients.
And so, you know, I decided to go down and see the opening and was pretty blown away by it.
There was definitely, there were definitely questions in my mind because of my background as a novelist, you know, is this something that, because I've definitely, I do a ton of research for my novels and then sometimes, you know, with my past books, I just novelize them.
I mean, I would change characters, I'd make composite characters, I'd draw liberally from real events, but then I'd make changes to the story in order to make it work better in my opinion.
And so that was always an option, but really it wasn't an option for that long because as soon as I actually met in flesh and blood the characters and sat in the courtroom and watched Mike give his opening, which is, you know, I've never seen a trial lawyer like that, or had not at that point, it was pretty, I was blown away by it.
And then to sit in the lunchroom with the clients and listen to their stories about the land and about what this meant to them, I realized this is a, you know, a civil rights story that really hasn't been well told.
But these characters are like, I mean, I couldn't make up better ones.
I mean, I really was sitting there kind of scratching my head going, you know, these characters are all like, I barely know them at all, but like all of them are people I'd actually want to write about.
And, you know, I mean, most people in the world are just ordinary folks.
And I think any, you know, a good writer could make any person's story beautiful and meaningful, but I wouldn't necessarily see that on the outside, but I saw it this time.
So pretty quickly, I realized, look, if I'm going to tell this, I'm going to tell it as a true story.
But then that required me actually convincing or having to convince the characters to trust me.
So, I mean, there was definitely a different kind of approach that I had to take to tell this in truth.
Because, you know, in the past, when I interview people for novels, I would always say, look, you know, your name's going nowhere in the book unless I can put it in the acknowledgements.
But, you know, your stories, I'm going to use whatever.
I'm just, I need your subject matter expertise.
Here, it's like, actually, I want to write about you.
And who knows who's going to read it.
So, it required, you know, some additional trust building.
But, you know, what was amazing about the folks is that they ultimately said yes.
And how do you build that trust?
That's my first question.
And then tell us why is this a civil rights story?
So, you know, building trust is more than anything about sitting down across from someone face to face and just, you know, explaining what my purpose in telling the story is.
And, you know, a lot of people come to the table with expectations about journalists.
I don't pretend to be a practicing journalist.
I'm a storyteller.
And I come to the table with the desire to tell stories about issues that matter.
And often issues that are either not known at all or, you know, not well known in a way that, you know, on a deep level that I think I could actually, you know, help people understand.
And so, I've thankfully, I've come to the table with a pretty good track record for telling meaningful stories.
I invited Mona out of the gate to read my books.
I said, you know, why don't you read one of my books and see what kind of story I tell?
And while it's fiction, if you agree, I'm going to tell a similar kind of story here in truth.
And, you know, so she did.
She read A Harvest of Thorns, my last novel that was, I think that came out in 2017.
And she loved it.
So, once she agreed, it really helped move things along with other people.
Because trust really is a chain in human society.
You know, we can't make a choice about trusting everyone.
We ultimately have to trust certain people and then trust their word about other people.
And so, really, that's once Mona ultimately decided, yeah, I've never told my story to the media before, but I think I'm going to trust you.
It helped that John Hart, my friend, was her, you know, I should say, his mother is a good friend of Mona's.
And so, that helped.
But ultimately, when she said yes, a lot of other people kind of fell in line.
And then I would sit down with them and we'd start talking.
And, you know, initially, some of them were taciturn and didn't really want to say a lot.
But as I kept asking questions and showing interest, and then coming back for a second conversation, a third conversation, showing up on their porches, I mean, showing interest in what interested them, you know, human beings getting along.
They ultimately were like, yeah, I think, I think I'm going to tell you my story.
And what a story it is. You open incredibly dramatically, with almost the denouement of at least part of the story. And in fact, I mean, it was such a cliffhanger that I had to restrain my impulse to flip through to the end of the book to find out what happened.
I know.
So tell us where you were. I mean, here it is, it's a trial, the jury is announcing that it's just reached a verdict. What is that trial?
Yeah, right.
So and this is really an answer to your last your second question that I didn't get around to asking [sic] before.
So so this case is is just a fascinating kind of story about communities in eastern North Carolina, rural communities, farming communities, really the world that old tobacco built that had been transformed in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s by the hog industry, which industrialized I mean, a lot of people grew hogs in the past.
Any rural place does you have animals around and not always are they lovely to smell.
But, you know, if they live outside, you can keep them away.
I mean, the hogs dies, you never put the hogs die next to your kitchen.
And, you know, you just live with with that.
But what had happened is a guy named Wendell Murphy from down east in eastern North Carolina had kind of taken the hog industry industrial in the same way that that Don Tyson had done with chickens.
He put hogs in barns by the thousand and and turned himself into quite a rich man.
And he sold this idea to other farmers who were struggling to make ends meet that they could raise his hogs in their barns on their land.
And he'd pay him a certain amount on the back end.
And, you know, it was a great idea for a lot of these farmers.
It was wonderful.
It was a salvation for many of them.
They could keep their properties, keep their family on farms and make money from Wendell Murphy.
What Wendell didn't tell him, really. And what I don't think really Wendell knew at the beginning was the kind of byproduct that this industry was going to create.
I mean, the challenge with hogs, they produce five times the waste of a human being.
So if you put a thousand in a barn or twelve hundred, which is the max capacity in one barn, you've got the waste of a town of six thousand people.
And what do you do with that if you put five barns, you know, on on a farm?
And in fact, many of them have 10 barns.
I mean, you're talking about, you know, the waste of a small city.
And and this is really awful stuff.
I mean, this is like pathogens and just it's a really awful waste concoction that comes out of a pig.
It's again why they keep you wouldn't put a hog next to a kitchen.
But imagine, you know, a truly super sized hogs die.
You've got to deal with that waste.
And so what they did, the cheapest thing possible is just dig big holes in the ground, basically these massive latrines or cesspools uncovered open to the air.
And then when those things filled up as they would normally, because you're constantly cycling through new animals and then the rain falls and fills up the lagoons.
That's what they called them, not cesspools, lagoons.
Then you got to you got to do something with it before it overflows into the creeks.
And so, you know, they would spray it out.
They'd hooked up these giant spray guns and sprayed it out onto open farmland.
The idea was that waste is a fertilizer and could maybe grow some row crops.
In reality, you know, most of it just kind of grows wildflowers and goes on to plow dirt.
So, you know, this kind of worked initially.
I mean, when the industry was young, but you know what it what it did pretty quickly is start to affect the neighbors.
I mean, in the neighbors of these hog farms, these are rural people.
These are people of very modest means.
And most of them in this part of the Black Belt are African-American.
And a lot of them trace their ancestry on their own land back to the, you know, to in some cases, the antebellum period, in many cases, reconstruction.
I mean, this is land that their great grandfathers or grandfathers acquired in the aftermath of emancipation.
They'd held onto the land despite lots of attempts in the South to steal it from them.
This is precious to them.
And they're simple people.
You know, the most value they have in the world is their land.
And then all of a sudden, it turned out that this hog spray started drifting into their kitchens and started like getting on their clothes lines and started getting in their, you know, in their kids' noses and making it so that if their kids got on the bus, they stunk.
And so all the other kids would, you know, do what kids would do, which is make all sorts of, you know, really awful comments and move to the other side of the bus.
I mean, the stories these people told of having to live next door to these hog operations with mostly, in almost every case, a white farmer spraying this stuff next door to communities of, you know, Black people of modest means, who in the South, in rural North Carolina, don't really have a voice.
They never have had a voice.
They're just not going to complain.
A few of them had the courage to complain to their neighbors, the farmers.
And for the most part, everyone just said, look, it's not a big deal.
Even Wendell Murphy, when asked at one point, said, look, it's the smell of money.
You know, there were a handful of farmers who actually said, no, we can't, I can't pollute my neighbors.
Like, I can't make my neighbors who are my friends, they've been friends for decades, I've known their parents and grandparents, I can't, you know, ruin their lives with this stench.
And I tell the story of those remarkable human beings who acted against their interests, you know, in the story as well.
So ultimately, the challenge is, okay, what do you do when you have a community of people who are really being impacted, but they're poor, and they don't have a lot of power, and nobody in the legislature cares.
And frankly, no lawyers around there want to touch the industry with a 10 foot pole.
And you've got on the other side, a multi-billion dollar, you know, industry that, you know, in 2013, the biggest company Smithfield was bought by a Chinese company.
So it's now multinational.
I mean, you know, this really is David versus Goliath.
What do you do?
You know, who's going to put the stone in the sling?
I mean, who's going to go after the giant?
It takes somebody like a Mona Lisa Wallace, it takes a lawyer who's been in the trenches and who's taken down big corporations before, and who has a war chest, and who can spend her own money, even not knowing if she's going to make any of it back, and who has a big heart and is willing to take on clients like these who've never been in a courtroom before, who really have no idea what seven years of litigation is going to cost them, or their community or Mona or anybody else.
So that's really the setting is this extraordinary litigation.
I mean, there are lots of lawsuits, there aren't that many that are like this.
And so I, you know, as a lawyer, I've got to tell you, it was such a delight to be able to bring, you know, this clash to life on the page.
Well, that is a terrific introduction to really so many of the issues in the book. So let's go into some of the details. First of all, these characters, as you say, are absolutely compelling. You've said something about Mona Lisa Wallace. She is like a force of nature in a good way.
Yes.
And you mentioned Elsie Herring. She's so compelling. Tell us about her.
Yeah, I mean, it's funny.
At the very beginning, there were 500 plaintiffs just in the case.
And so I knew that I was going to have to pick a few and focus on them.
And I would need to pick a few that were attached to the trials.
But I wanted to know who were the people there at the beginning?
Who were the pioneers of this sort of community movement?
And immediately, everybody in Mona's law firm said, you've got to talk to Elsie Herring.
So Elsie, her grandfather actually was enslaved on the land or very near the land that he acquired in the aftermath.
After being emancipated, he acquired 80 acres of land and handed it down to his kids and to his grandkids.
And Elsie is actually the last of his grandchildren.
And she actually just passed a year and a half ago, which is extremely sad.
But she lived an extraordinary life.
And as the last of her mother, her mother, Bula, lived to 99 on that land and had 15 children.
And Elsie was the youngest.
And all of them went away during the Great Migration.
Elsie went with a number of her siblings up north to New York with a high school education.
She was able to actually build a nest egg on Wall Street.
Pretty amazing.
And then came home in the 90s because her mom was too old to keep caring for herself.
And also Elsie's older brother, Jesse, the 14th, the 15th, who had Down syndrome.
So Elsie comes home in the early 90s, 92, 93, something like that, and figures out quite quickly that the world has changed.
The land next door, which used to be just farmland, is now a big hog farm.
But the industry does a really good job of hiding these farms.
And so she couldn't really see the barns very well from her land.
She couldn't see the lagoon because, of course, she's not overhead.
She thinks, well, we've always had hogs.
I mean, OK, so they've got a bunch of hogs in a barn.
That's fine.
And it is fine until the hog farmer took out the big spray gun, put it in a field right next door to Elsie's mother's house, and shot the thing off on a day in the summertime when Elsie and her mom had put all the windows up, tried to catch the breeze.
I mean, it's incredibly hot and sticky in eastern North Carolina in the summer.
And all of a sudden, this spray, which is made up of chemicals and pathogens from the intestines of hogs together with a little rainwater, shoots up into the air and drifts on the wind onto Elsie's mother's house.
Elsie described that experience as the live scent of hog, which I think is really maybe the best way of putting it, the pithiest way.
She had a way with words.
She had a way with storytelling.
And she just said, look, it was in our clothes.
It was inside our nose.
I mean, it was the worst smell we'd ever smelled.
Drove us indoors.
I mean, indoors, there's no air conditioning, so they're like slamming windows.
And of course, the windows, this is a fairly modest home, hand-built.
It's certainly not sealed from the outside.
This stench gets in.
There's no way to avoid it.
It's on their clothes.
It's inside of them already.
And as soon as this happened, Elsie decided, I've got to fight.
I mean, she was a fighter.
She had mastered the white man's world in New York.
And so she was not someone who was just going to take this sitting down.
This is her mother's property.
This is her grandfather's property.
And she just started fighting.
I mean, she started calling people.
The local sheriff was a hog farmer.
He didn't care.
The local soil and water regulators were totally in the back pocket of the industry.
They didn't care.
The folks in Raleigh at the state house didn't seem to care.
The governor, the attorney general, Jesse Jackson, the NAACP, I mean, she wrote letters, she called, she tried everything.
And it wasn't until one woman who was her local representative, a brand new legislator, the state house in Raleigh, took her phone call and said, I'll come out and see.
That woman, Sidney Watson, talked my ear off for four hours about her experience of being the only person in the legislature who was willing at that point, despite being a card carrying Newt Gingrich style Republican, she had a big heart for her neighbors and felt like there's got to be a solution that doesn't put the industry out of business, but doesn't force people like Elsie and Beulah Herring and Jesse Herring to live with hog stench in their nostrils every day.
And Sidney Watson, you know, went up against Boss Hog and she quickly learned that Boss Hog rules.
And so, you know, that was kind of the story until something happened.
Now, maybe you were going to ask about that.
Well, I mean, she got death threats.
That's right. \Yeah, Elsie did. And Sidney, I should say Sidney did.
Absolutely. She got death threats when she was pushing in the legislature.
Yes.
And she fought back.
She did. \Yeah.
And but, you know, it's funny because there was a lobbyist at one point who took her aside and in an alcove at the statehouse and just said, look, Representative Watson, I mean, everybody here knows that you're speaking the truth.
I mean, we all know there's a problem here, but that industry pays me a lot of money to make sure that nothing happens.
So, you know, at that point, I mean, here's the way that North Carolina politics works.
And sadly, I'm not going to say this is not the same way everywhere.
Maybe it is.
It's very much a kind of buddy buddy system in Raleigh, North Carolina.
I mean, to the point where especially was in the 90s.
I mean, the governor was Wendell Murphy's former college roommate.
I mean, so you're talking about like it's so close and there's just all this wheeling and dealing and, you know, nothing gets done if people don't want it to get done.
And then here's what happened.
So in 1997, some hog farmers, I mean, the industry was exploding.
By this point, there were 2000 hog farms, these giant industrial hog farms around the state.
Most of them concentrated down in the east area, you know, near where Elsie lives in Duplin County, the number of counties around there.
But some hog farmers were like, look, there's no more land down there.
So why don't we build a hog farm, you know, in Moore County, which is the home of Pinehurst.
And of course, if you're a golfer or know anything about golf, Pinehurst is like Shangri-La.
I mean, you don't build a hog farm up the road from Pinehurst, especially when a lot of the golfers are the people in the state house and they don't want to be smelling hog crap on the 18th green.
And so, you know, the golfers went to war with the pork producers and the golfers won.
So what happened in 97 is suddenly the governor, you know, Wendell Murphy's former college roommate calls up Cindy Watson and says, look, you were asking for a one year moratorium on new hog farms.
I'll give you two years.
And then it turned into a permanent moratorium.
But of course, that didn't change the existing hog farms.
And there were already over 2000 of them.
Those were the ones that were causing the problem.
And Cindy Watson, you know, what's amazing is Boss Hog mobilized a multimillion dollar campaign to unseat a local representative in a state race in a rural area.
I mean, nobody had ever seen this kind of money.
And of course, she lost.
She lost to a hog farmer who took her seat.
I mean, this is just the way these things roll in North Carolina.
You just kind of can't believe this is true.
So she was able to get some good stuff done.
The moratorium helped, but it didn't ultimately resolve the problem.
And that left Elsie and all the other neighbors with the fundamental challenge, which is, you know, what are we going to do about the existing ones?
So the story, you know, two years later, Mother Nature has something to say, which is that Hurricane Floyd blows in, dumps feet of rain on this area, and all of a sudden rivers are flowing with hog waste.
I mean, beautiful rivers, the rivers that everybody wants to boat on, the rivers that feed the Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds that are on the interior of the Outer Banks.
I mean, these are pristine water areas.
And so, you know, you've got people that are suddenly really offended by this.
I mean, folks that have money and power, and they tell the industry, look, you've got to deal with this.
This can't keep happening.
We can't stop Mother Nature from sending us storms.
And we can't have the Neuse River, basically, you know, a billion fish dying from all these pollutants every time we get a big hurricane.
So again, Smithfield, by this point, it was Smithfield that pretty much, they owned Murphy, they owned everything by 2000.
And they did a deal with the state.
So, you know, the state could have taken them to court and forced their hand.
The state didn't do that.
They used kid gloves.
They negotiated a contract, which basically said, look, Smithfield, kick over like $15 million, it became 25, and let the scientists at NC State, which is basically bankrolled by Wendell Murphy in many ways, do some research and come up with a new technology for the waste disposal, just to civilize it, you know, sort of like we did as humans, you know, when we decided that our open sewers were no longer good public health.
So for 10 years, Smithfield was able to pay the scientists to do the research.
Of course, the scientists came up with a solution, but Smithfield decided it was too expensive and found a way to torpedo it legally.
So 10 years passed, they buy 10 years apiece.
In this time, Elsie Herring and the other plaintiffs realized that nobody's coming for them.
I mean, the industry is not going to change.
Nobody in the state house is going to force their hand beyond the moratorium.
Like, they're not going to get anywhere.
And ultimately, they need lawyers.
But who's going to take their case?
Because all the local lawyers, they don't want to come anywhere near this.
They're like, sorry, I don't know.
Never sue Smithfield.
One of them tried once and it nearly bankrupted him.
So that was that.
And so it ultimately, you know, required some serendipity.
I mean, Mona was brought into the case in 2013 by some other lawyers.
She'd never heard of it, even though just living up the road was quite wild.
Other lawyers who had, in fact, won a nuisance case against hog growers.
Talk about that strategy. First of all, to bring a nuisance case. And why did they bring it against the growers first? Because it seems to me the growers are in many cases just not just as exploited, but they're pretty exploited as well. They're not making a lot of money.
Yeah, that's true.
So there were, you know, different strategies.
Legal strategy is tough because it doesn't naturally map onto moral strategy.
I mean, you can sit down and have a moral conversation about who's really responsible.
And then you got to ask the question, well, who can we sue?
Who will the law actually allow us to sue?
And what are the benefits of suing one person versus another?
Mona's feeling from the beginning was that the responsible party is the big corporation.
What's interesting is it took them some a ton of research to even get their hands on a grower contract because these things were buttoned up.
I mean, nobody was sharing them.
The grower community was locked down.
They were totally on the side of the industry, even though it turns out that a lot of the growers hate Smithfield and the industry and have been exploited by them almost like sharecroppers in a modern day kind of context.
But at the very beginning, Mona didn't have the contracts, didn't really know what the control was.
So the idea was, OK, well, at minimum, we know that the people who own the land have a responsibility for the waste that's being sprayed out onto their neighbors.
And the theory was nuisance.
And the nuisance theory is neighbor to neighbor.
Right.
So the neighbor isn't Smithfield. The neighbor is the owner of the land, the farmer.
Even though the deeper they got into it, the more Mona realized that this really is just a sharecropper relationship and the farmers have no control.
Smithfield controls everything, even though they in their contract say that the farmer is responsible for disposing of the waste and also the dead carcasses of the hogs that die in the barns.
But, hey, the hogs themselves are the big companies, as is pretty much all the money coming out of it.
All the debt is the farmers. All the profit is pretty much the big company.
So, you know, the more Mona realized what was going on, the more she realized that this really needs to be a case against Smithfield.
But they had to jump through some legal hoops to get there.
And, yeah, there was some difference of opinion with the prior lawyers who ultimately were kicked off the case for various reasons.
And ultimately, Mona took it forward herself.
Just to go back for a minute to the impact of these hog farms on the community, something you haven't yet mentioned is it's not just a nuisance in the term that, you know, the non-legal sense.
It's not just a question of odors. It's really a question of health. I mean, pigs are one of the classic mixing vessels for pathogens that can infect human beings.
So talk a little bit more about the health impacts on the neighbors to these hog farms.
You're absolutely right.
And I mean, we've seen a lot of diseases come out of porcine stock.
Of course, you know, we've also seen a lot of diseases come out of lots of different animals.
But hog waste is notorious for being full of pathogens.
And and so, you know, there were community health studies that were done.
I mean, long before there were any lawsuits by a pioneering epidemiologist named Steve, Steve Wing at UNC Chapel Hill and Dr. Wing pioneered these community health studies with the help of the community.
I mean, he was a white guy from Chapel Hill, but he really developed trust with the black community down east to the point where they spoke of him almost as a patron saint.
He died in 2016.
He was not able to speak or testify live at the trials, but he testified by video from a video deposition.
But he had he had taken these, you know, done these studies of the health effects of hog waste exposure over the course of years and what he had shown.
And it's hard to prove causation.
Right.
I mean, scientists are very loathe to say this causes this.
They always want to say this correlates with this.
But over the course of years, you know, correlations that point in only one direction usually suggest a cause.
And certainly in a court of law, you can use that kind of evidence to suggest a cause.
And so Steve had kind of pioneered this and he had shown that living next door to a hog farm, as you can imagine, breathing this kind of, you know, this hydrogen sulfide, this ammonia, this these pathogens and all the other chemicals in the air, you know, is not good for lungs, is not good for mood, is not good for hearts, is not good for brains.
I mean, the effects, you know, so many people had developed asthma and various other lung challenges and disorders, breathing disorders.
You know, there was hypertension and mood disorders, a lot of a lot of anxiety and depression nearby.
And people just really spoke of having had their their experience of both of the body, their bodies and the land degraded dramatically.
I mean, they remembered a day when they could breathe fresh air.
And now on any given day, they may be breathing these pollutants or given night.
I mean, there was one woman who told me a story of having been woken up in the middle of the night numerous times in the early years to basically this unbearable stench of hog, like all throughout her house.
No doubt her windows were open because they don't have air conditioning.
But, you know, to have this wake you up at night, I mean, can you imagine?
So, you know, the health effects were very real and very pervasive and damaging.
At the same time, they were really hard to prove.
And one of the things that Mona recognized out of the gate was that she could use Steve Wing's science to establish the detriment, the nuisance of of the case, which was her theory from the beginning.
And so Steve science actually got to really stand tall in the trials.
But she wasn't going to ask the court and the juries to award damages for the health effects, because all that would do is open the door for the big, the giant multibillion dollar company and its giant law firm to go rifling through the plaintiff's medical records and come up with a thousand alternate theories about why they were sick and who in the world wants that.
I mean, these these folks, you know, some of them smoked.
I mean, you know, and so you could totally imagine a big defense firm saying, really, you're complaining about lung issues and you're a smoker.
I mean, you know, so it was it was very it was too hard to prise those things apart.
And so they wanted to make the case as simple as possible for the jury.
But the plaintiffs did get to talk about the health effects on the stand.
It's just it wasn't part of the request for damages.
So that was an important part of the story.
In fact, your book, Corbin Addison, this book, Waste Lands, the True Story of Farm Country on Trial, has been compared to Jonathan Haar's Civil Action, which I read with, I used to be an occupational health and safety advocate and educator, and I read that with a lot of interest.
And that was, in fact, a key issue in the failure of those suits, because it is so difficult to connect exposures in the real world to health effects.
But there's so many issues here as well. You know, Smithfield Farms and the other growers, it's not just, you know, my old interest comes in. It's not just the impact on the neighbors, but the way they treated their workers. I wonder if you could say something about that, because workers' health, of course, is, I mean, the workers are the ones who get the brunt often of the health impacts of exposures.
Yeah, you know, one thing that I didn't actually get to put in the story, but I got to, I talked to a woman who had actually brought a workers' comp claim against Smithfield for the challenge, I mean, the exposure of working inside the barns.
And I mean, she described the, just the horror of having to go into those barns on a daily basis and breathe like the undistilled odor, you know, the pathogens.
I mean, it just, and then to have it get on her clothes and it just get in her hair.
And I mean, the truth is the lawyers had this experience when they went in the barns themselves.
I mean, one of the scientists that was hired and testified at the trials actually like couldn't, I mean, he left, went back to his home in upstate New York and still smelled like hog.
And, you know, for weeks he still smelled like hog and he couldn't figure it.
He showered and bathed himself and washed his clothes a thousand times.
And his wife kept looking at him and said, you just, you still stink.
And I mean, he's like, what am I supposed to do?
And it wasn't until one day sitting in his office at the college and takes his glasses off and realizes that they're the things that smell.
And he'd not washed his, his eyeglasses.
So literally the pathogens, you know, the, the odor, of course, is particles that, you know, travels, or I should say it's chemicals that get attached to particles in the air.
I mean, they had gotten attached to his glasses and persisted that long.
I mean, it just, it really is incredible.
So when you, when you think about the folks that work inside these barns, and when you think about the folks that work inside the slaughterhouses, I mean, that's a different kind of story.
But there are all kinds of folks.
I mean, Mona, her first dealings with Smithfield was actually a case that she filed a worker's comp death claim.
Actually, it was a worker's comp claim that then became a civil claim for wrongful death on behalf of a young mother, you know, with an autistic child whose husband had been overwhelmed by the hydrogen sulfide gas when working at the slaughterhouse to actually put the waste coming from the, the slaughter of hogs into a giant tanker truck.
He was up on the tanker truck and he was directing the waste into the tanker and the gas overwhelmed him and he died, you know, from the hydrogen sulfide exposure.
So this is really, it's dangerous stuff. It's bad stuff.
It's, it's waste, right?
I mean, they're all waste is, is not great. So yeah, that, I think the sad thing for me is, is that an industry like Smithfield knows exactly what's going on here. They're, they're too smart not to know.
And there are solutions.
It's not like they've always claimed, you know, there aren't solutions.
Really what they're saying when they say that is there aren't solutions we're willing to pay for.
And that is just a fundamental challenge of, you know, businesses that are run by investors and executives who have every incentive to minimize cost and maximize profit.
And so, you know, when they're doing that, you know, if they can offload a cost onto society and not have to pay for it themselves, they'll do it.
And so it really comes down to, you know, society to, to, to strike back and say with laws, which is the way that society speaks, no, you can't do that.
So Smithfield has continued to exploit its workers, has continued to exploit the environment, has continued to exploit the neighbors, anybody they can exploit, get away with exploiting until the law strikes back.
They, they continue to.
And let's say it's not just law, it's the enforcement of the law as well.
That's precisely right.
Yes.
Yeah.
Law is nothing if, if, you know, the teeth aren't applied.
Now, this was a long and involved legal process, although not as long as, let's say, the opioid addiction trials, but it was seven years. It involved five different trials. What were some of the most important factors that led to ultimate success?
If not every, they didn't get everything they wanted, but they did get some, and we want to reserve a little bit of, of suspense for the reader, but I think we can say something about that.
Yeah, sure.
Look, the, and you get this right out of the gate in the, in the opening.
I mean, what the plaintiffs are looking for is not a big payday.
I mean, these are, you know, these are people that are humble people.
I mean, really their humility, it just, you see it right away when you meet with them, their family people, they're not interested in building a mansion on their families, you know, ancestral land.
They're interested in just taking care of themselves and their families, paying their medical bills, maybe sending a kid to college.
I mean, if he, you know, things like that, these are folks that really did not have a big payday in mind.
What they wanted is they wanted somebody to believe the stories that they were telling.
They wanted, they wanted to be dignified, you know, and that's ultimately, I think what convinced a lot of them to get involved in this was the chance to tell their stories and maybe somebody would believe them.
And so, you know, what came to bear in the courtroom, and it doesn't always happen this way.
I've practiced law.
I mean, I've been in a lot of courtrooms.
What came to bear in the courtroom was a confluence of really fortuitous gifts and events.
I mean, in one hand, you've got a great judge, you know, an 80-year-old judge, senior judge who just has an even hand, was sharp as a whip, handled four of the five trials, despite them being multi-week trials.
You know, the judge was, he just really wanted these people to get their day in court, and he gave them their day in court.
He had a lot of rulings.
He didn't rule always for the plaintiffs, but he ruled enough for them to give them their day in court.
That doesn't always happen.
They got their day in court.
It was critical that the juries, I mean, these are going to be, these are Raleigh juries, most of them white people, you know, these are folks that needed to have a heart.
And so it was something that, you know, Mona and the trial lawyer, Mike Kesky, that she brought in to handle the trial action.
Mike is an exceptional lawyer, and, you know, they knew that they needed to really tell a human story.
And, you know, they couldn't use the race angle.
They were forbidden to.
So they just said, look, you know, this needs to be about just the sheer justice of neighbors being bad to neighbors, a big giant corporation being bad to their little neighbors.
That's the story they told.
And, you know, it's a kind of American right that we all recognize that our home is our castle.
There's something sacred about that.
And, and these juries, five of them understood that they recognize that it didn't matter that these are humble people with small homes, small castles.
They have the right to, to breathe clean air.
I mean, when it got ultimately to the court of appeals and I, you know, it was just such a wonderful experience to see a very conservative judge recognize the very same thing.
I mean, just to understand the basic morality of it.
And this is where the joy for me as a, as a writer, I mean, I enjoyed getting to help readers who are not lawyers along and understand, you know, the ins and outs of the litigation, recognize how fascinating it really is.
But at the end of the day, the beauty of this is that actually the moral question got answered in the courtroom, which rarely happens.
Almost always we watch court proceedings that leave lots of fundamental moral questions, either unanswered or answered badly.
This is a situation where you had good people that came together to answer the fundamental moral question in a way that was pretty satisfying.
And so, you know, I won't say any more about the particulars, but you know, I think even if people understand kind of where the road's leading, the journey of this story is so remarkable that I just, you know, I, it's been such a joy for me to see readers, you know, from just folks that had never read my work before to the reviewer for the New York times.
I mean, just saying the same sort of thing. I mean, never thought I'd enjoy a book about hog farms. Can't believe this nonfiction story reads like a legal thriller. I read it in two days, like I couldn't put it down.
I mean, who could possibly believe that about a book about pigs, you know, all these, these sorts of responses, which says, look, you know, I mean, my goal out of the gate was to write, you know, a, not a sequel, but an air of Jonathan Haar's masterpiece, A Civil Action.
And so it was with extraordinary gratitude that I received Jonathan's own words for the book, which, you know, we put on the cover that he just, he wrote me back and I almost wish I could have used some of his email, you know, in the blurb that he gave me, because he was just really struck by so many of the, the, the characters that I drew and, and he went off about like how he just loved certain characters.
And it was really special for me to hear that from him because he's been a hero of mine for a long time.
It's amazing. I mean, you got kudos from one of the masters of legal thriller fiction.
I know. I know truly. It's funny.
My wife once said she was like, between John Grisham and Jonathan Haar, I think that you kind of like you, that w that was a, you know, swept the deck.
I mean that, you know, you, you nailed it on both sides. So yeah, it's pretty amazing.
So let me ask you, are you, are you working on something else and is it a novel or do you think you're going to do another nonfiction book?
Yeah, that's a fraught question.
And I'll give a simple answer, which is I'm always working on other things.
I was working on a follow-up to Wastelands in nonfiction that ultimately it proved to be the spruce goose.
It did not fly from a publishing standpoint, which was heartbreaking, but I am, you know, I'm always working on stuff.
So I haven't given up on the fundamental story.
We'll see what I do with it.
And, you know, but I'm always, you know, it's funny.
Wastelands has actually led to more people reaching out to me with stories they want me to tell than any of my novels did.
I know, you know, being friends with John Grisham, I mean, he's been a friend of mine for a long time.
You know, he's told me, of course he gets countless suggestions from people about books that he should write, but I've never received that.
I mean, I've received a few through the years and I've never done anything with them, but Wastelands, like I've gotten so many people who've reached out and said, you need to write.
And I even have gotten a number of handwritten letters from people telling me about stories that are happening in their community that, you know, that I need to take on.
I'm like, oh my gosh, like what do I do with these?
I mean, I don't know.
I like, I always dignify them with a response and I always thank people, but it's challenging because, you know, they're really, Wastelands set the bar really, really high for a true story.
I mean, any, I could turn any great story into fiction and I know I'll write more novels.
I definitely am not through with fiction, but man, like Wastelands was as good as a novel, but it was true.
And so for me, it's like, if I'm going to write another true story, it's got to be on that level from both just a commercial standpoint for readers and also just for the investment that it takes.
I mean, it takes multiple years to write a book like that.
And just finally, I have heard you say that every book you write changes you. How did this book change you?
You know, I'm going to answer, that's a great question.
I appreciate it because it's a little different, the true story.
And that is, you know, I actually got to see this story unfold in real time.
So it wasn't me sort of going back into the past and gathering facts and becoming a subject matter expert, and then telling a modern story based on, you know, in fiction.
This was me, like I got to be involved in this.
I got to befriend these people.
I got to watch the world change for them.
I got to witness things no one expected.
I got to feel the joy and the sorrow of real life as it happened.
I got to, you know, in the aftermath, you know, when the book came out the summer of last year, it was such a joy because John Grisham agreed to do a headlining event in Raleigh, you know, and Mona also went, pulled out the stops and brought in a bunch of plaintiffs.
And we just had like 200 folks in a books, in a bookstore.
I'd never been to an event like that.
You know, it was videotaped.
It was really beautiful, you know, and Grisham's asking me questions and I'm answering questions from the audience.
What was so joyous is that afterward, a number of the plaintiffs who were featured in the story came up and got their books signed and took pictures with me, you know, and these are people who they're friends of mine.
I mean, I don't see them frequently.
I'm not down in their neck of the woods much, but like I've stayed in touch with them.
When one of them passed away, actually, we've lost two, Elsie Herring and also Widow McGowan in the last couple of years.
And, you know, I mean, I mourned as a friend of these people when they died.
That's something that I've not had an experience with before.
So to get to be a part of the community, to get to befriend these folks, to get to know them and their families, to get to cheer from the sidelines when good stuff happened, and then ultimately to give them the gift of keeping their story alive.
I mean, I'll end with this, you know, Woodell's sister, who I'd never met before, reached out to me after he passed and asked if I would be so kind as to sign a book for her and the rest of the family.
And of course I said, yes.
I had to find out first, because this was a person who I'd never met before.
I was like, is this really Woodell McGowan's sister?
But once Mona's team vetted it and said, yes, this is, I had this interesting exchange.
It was really touching with this woman who said, I just can't tell you what it means to our family that you preserved Woodell's legacy this way.
We've lost him, but we've not lost his story because you wrote it.
Wow.
I didn't set out to do that.
Right.
I didn't set out to give them a eulogy, but somehow, you know, by the grace of God and, you know, it worked out that way.
So, you know, that's changed me, right.
As a human being to get to be a part of these people's lives, you know, and to get to tell their story and to preserve it and mortalize it for as long as the book exists.
That's so special.
Well, Corban Addison, it is such a wonderful book, and I'm so grateful to you for having written it.
It's really such an important story, not only for the story itself, but for what it reveals about how we organize our economy and how we really need to change that if we're going to really preserve our communities and our lives.
Thanks so much.
Absolutely. Thank you.