EDU> Subject: EXERCISE: Plot # Wretched Excess: 20 Master Plots [posting slightly early since I am scheduled to change offices tomorrow, which often has.
Table of contents
- Tasty wretched excess - Stack Restaurant and Bar
- Been to Stack Restaurant and Bar? Share your experiences!
- The Best Wretched Excess, Example of, in Boston
- Can't get enough TreeHugger? Sign up now and have it sent straight to your inbox.
One of the largest corporations in Houston, it reigns over a doo-doo empire. This revolution in waste disposal was born of an era of pink antibacterial hand soap, treacly air freshener and increasing scrutiny at the other end of the pipes. The Environmental Protection Agency has argued that spreading sludge on farmland is safer than old methods of disposing of it in rivers and oceans.
Synagro agrees, and pledges in its mission statement to "enhance the environment and the quality of the communities that we serve. Typical of such communities is the small town of Guy. A Fort Bend County ranching hamlet 40 miles from Synagro's headquarters, it became, in , a destination for the contents of Houston's toilets. Not everybody would have called the town lucky. David Lewis, at the time a high-ranking EPA scientist, criticized the agency's handling of sludge, arguing that it was creating "the Mount Everest of environmental problems.
Tasty wretched excess - Stack Restaurant and Bar
He died four days later. Yet the sludge trucks hit Guy before the debate over the science. The trucks rumbled past Massey's house all that day and into the night. They dumped their loads in a nearby pasture, heaping them into gelatinous piles. Massey's nine-year-old granddaughter awoke around midnight. She ran for the toilet, stopped short and threw up.
You shall have a place outside the camp and go there, and you shall have a spade among your tools, and it shall be when you sit down outside, you shall dig with it and shall turn to cover up your excrement. Since the LORD your God walks in the midst of your camp to deliver you and to defeat your enemies before you, therefore your camp must be holy During his 44 years preaching the word of God in small-town churches, Massey saw a few miracles. His Bible's yellowed and soiled pages converted sinners to believers, pulled a teenager off drugs and healed a bitter soul who had lost a brother.
Massey knew God could feed the hungry and part the Red Sea. So the preacher appealed to Him to part a sea of sludge. The scripture, however, didn't do much to sway James Yelderman, the owner of the pasture near Massey's house, who said his sleepy land needed a boost. So Massey asked Yelderman if he wanted a flock of angry neighbors. Yelderman said he wanted the sludge. The spring wind rustled across the water sedge, whipping the stench through Massey's open windows. He was building his modest ranch-style house by hand, with the help of his favorite Carpenter, and still hadn't installed air conditioning.
A print on his wall showed an old-fashioned barn and a saucer moon. A plaque on his microwave said, "Teach Kindness. Donna Phillips, the commission's local sludge team leader, sniffed out the problem, reporting that the goop piles "didn't smell like 'good' quality sludge.
Phillips tested a sample of the sludge two months later and found the pH levels were below federal standards. Meanwhile, the trucks kept rolling in. They rumbled down the gravel roads and dumped the sludge onto a staging area, where manure spreaders picked it up and trundled across the fields, whisking it left and right off conveyors. Or they shot it out in arcing blasts through pressurized water cannons. Complaints about the sludge mounted through the summer.
Truck drivers reported picking up loads that were dark and fetid.
- A Dance of Manners?
- Riders In The Chariot (Vintage Classics).
- Mieses Karma (German Edition).
According to the Herald Coaster , a local newspaper, residents described themselves as prisoners in their own homes. The stench was so bad that children were sometimes unable to wait outside for the school bus.
Been to Stack Restaurant and Bar? Share your experiences!
Yet the problems for Massey's family were worse. Fecal dust blowing from the open-bed sludge trucks and nearby fields caused his two young grandchildren to develop coughs and runny noses, he claims. And Massey says a doctor diagnosed him with a bacterial stomach infection and prescribed three varieties of antibiotics. He claims the physician likened his stomach to those of "kids in a third-world country that play in the sewer. Growing increasingly frustrated with the persistent stench, Massey resorted to threats, according to state records. On a tour of a sludge site with TCEQ and Synagro officials, he stopped his pickup along a road, climbed out and pointed to a Synagro office where a worker was sitting outside.
He called a high-ranking agency official and complained, saying he knew how to take care of the problem with "a bullet in the back of the head.
A truck driver with Enviroganics, another company that was applying sludge nearby, reported that the retired preacher pulled a gun and fired into the air to persuade him to stop working. TCEQ officials in Austin couldn't help him either. State officials say they never abandoned Massey or the residents of Guy. Massey eventually changed his approach.
He bought a dust mask to wear while mowing the lawn. But his family's health problems worsened. Less than two years after the sludge spreading began near his property, his daughter delivered baby Kade, who was born with cerebellum hypoplasia, an obscure brain defect caused by a buildup of fluids inside his head. Although the doctors who diagnosed Kade couldn't be reached for comment and there is no direct evidence pinning his medical condition on sludge, Massey cites anecdotal links.
A few months earlier, he discovered a stillborn calf in a pasture where sludge had been applied. Lawsuits in other states have claimed ties between sludge and health and reproductive problems in cattle. Some doctors have argued that sludge also could cause birth problems in humans. After his birth, Kade stayed in Texas Children's Hospital for six weeks, spending much of that time on a respirator or under an oxygen hood.
- Travelers who viewed Stack Restaurant and Bar also viewed.
- Anxiety Suite For Broken Speakers.
- The Problem of Pain.
- The Road Taken;
Doctors drained infections in his ears with plastic tubes. Pressure on his brain mounted, and the physicians eventually performed another operation when he was three years old. They cut his head from ear to ear, pulled the skin down and restructured his skull. Kade had barely talked before the operation. Afterward, his vocabulary was cut in half. For the other Massey grandchildren, life in the country resembled life behind an urban latchkey. When the wind blew across the pasture, they stayed indoors and watched television.
A five-month-old grandchild who moved in with the family later that year developed a degree fever. He had never been sick, Massey says, yet repeatedly ran fevers afterward and saw a doctor bimonthly. Massey might have been a rogue prophet at the time, but his plight didn't go unnoticed. Four months later, Synagro threatened to sue him for defamation based on his comments.
The Best Wretched Excess, Example of, in Boston
Massey obviously lacked the training to stand up to Synagro's scientists and lawyers. When I told him we were having some kinds of problems out here, he was more interested. Synagro was invited at his request to speak in defense of sludge. The company held a separate forum, along with the TCEQ. The headline in the Herald Coaster read: Lewis had emerged ten years earlier from a similarly massive debate over a very different sort of anal fixation. In the early s -- a time when public fears were running high about AIDS and gay sex -- he discovered that HIV could be transmitted through an unexpected pathway: The findings rocked the dental industry and thrust him onto TV screens across the nation.
Such a large discovery was typical for Lewis's EPA laboratory, which was known for producing cutting-edge science from its remote perch in sleepy Athens. But the same independent thinking that characterized the Athens lab also fueled its intransigence. The lab often bucked the EPA's top brass, and nowhere was that more evident than in the squishy sludge debate. Before the EPA released a new rule regulating sludge application, it asked Lewis's lab and several others to review it. The new rule would replace interim regulations dating from , which limited the levels of heavy metals -- such as mercury and cadmium -- that could be present in sludge.
Lewis testified in congressional hearings that the updated version set weaker standards for some substances and "was not considered to be scientifically sound by any of the laboratories that looked at it. Yet the EPA was under tremendous pressure to push it down the pipeline. The agency was concerned that sludge was polluting beaches, causing toxic algae blooms and killing fish, and thus had just banned the practice of dumping sewage sludge in the ocean, which had been standard procedure in many coastal cities.
And yet sludge had to go somewhere, and disposing of it in landfills or incinerating it was expensive. Sewage companies argued that a streamlined rule would make the spreading of waste on farmland a more practical option. The EPA issued the new rule in based on a compromise: Hardly any of that research happened. Offered a small fraction of the promised funding, Lewis's lab dropped out of the effort. Meanwhile, the EPA was actively promoting the spreading of sludge on farmland, releasing a brochure in showing the verdant lawns of Mount Vernon, which it said sludge had helped to make abundantly green.
Lewis initially stayed in the background in the sludge fight, watching other critics take flak. He wears large glasses and speaks like an unassuming Atticus Finch, in the soft, rounded accent of the Deep South. But two years later, he slammed the top management at the EPA in a fiery op-ed in the highly prestigious journal Nature. He blamed the agency for making rules before it could back them up with science, and cited the sludge rule as a perfect, sordid example.
The EPA went after Lewis immediately. It nitpicked over a disclaimer printed beneath the article -- "This commentary represents the author's personal views, and not those of the U. EPA" -- saying it appeared in too small a font. Japan Pets Wretched Excess. Related Content on Treehugger. These sassy little seahorses are the size of a grain of rice. House of Furniture has a place for everything. Multi-level lakeside cabin recomposes relationship to nature.
Can't get enough TreeHugger? Sign up now and have it sent straight to your inbox.
There are lessons to be learned from these soulful snow monkeys vi The first in a series of split 12" releases pairs experimental veteran K. Leimer with the ambient soundscapes of Like A Villain. Faded Covers by Paperbark. Paperbark buries short sample snippets in a deep ocean of electronics, to mesmerizing effect. Fathoms by Tapes and Topographies. Lush, expansive electronic music that's alternately tranquil and stormy. Paying supporters also get unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app. Purchasable with gift card.