Google Maps: Pollution Detective

Rolling Stone has a great article in this month’s issue (Snoop Dogg on the cover) about hog farm waste in North Carolina. The writer, Jeff Tietz, mentioned taking off from the town of New Bern for a flight over some vast expanse of hog farms. The article pointed out that hog waste lagoons are very often pink in color[1], so naturally I thought it would be interesting to see what they look like with the aid of Google Maps. I only found a few sporadic examples, as rural areas are still relatively unphotographed in detail by Google Maps, but here’s what I dug up, using New Bern as my point of origin:

Example 1
Example 2
Example 3 (may not be a hog farm, but sure looks like one)
Example 4
Example 5

Perhaps future updates to Google Maps will reveal a larger expanse of factory hog farms there, which gives me some hope for the future that at least some environmental abuses will become harder to hide as more people can see the Earth from the sky. I’m still looking to find the massive cattle farms depicted in the Fast Food Nation film.

1.) For reasons I am not going to mention because this is a family blog; plus you might be enjoying a nice snack.

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