By K.C. Cayo
Case studies within any field are often structured like a thesis or standard scientific research paper with separate sections for the theoretical framework, the methods, the results, and the findings. Environmental research and environmental justice are not different in this regard. Case studies are good for recounting, comparing, evaluating, and understanding different aspects of a given research problem. Though they can be narratively driven, this is not usually the case in the field of climate justice, and yet it is an increasingly prevalent technique used to build rapport with an audience.
“Hogwashed, Part 1: Hundreds of Poor, Mostly African-American Residents of Eastern North Carolina Say Big Pork Is Making Their Lives Miserable” by Ken Fine and Erica Hellerstein is the first of a three-part investigation into North Carolina's hog-farming industry. Using story-banking as the primary way to set the scene, they assess the claims made by lower-income Black residents of eastern North Carolina that hog farms have polluted their properties and efforts by lawmakers to shield pork producers from litigation. The study also examines the environmental impacts that hog farming has had over the last two decades as well as ways to make the industry itself more sustainable. The authors introduce us to the Miller household, focusing on Rene Miller, a sixty-six-year-old Black woman who lives in a home she inherited from her grandmother as part of a post-slavery grant. She shows us the family cemetery where her nephew is buried, having died of cancer years earlier. The most striking part of this narration is that the land with its sprawling hills and greens and wildflowers smells like death and decay because of the “cesspool of pig waste” not even fifty yards away—and that, according to the Millers, is the smell of hog country, and stretches for miles.
After offering cited sources and data statistics from other sources and studies, the authors explain not only the environmental impacts of the hog industry, but how the impacts are tied to environmental racism, or the idea that environmental problems are more harm Black and Brown bodies (and, often, this is intentionally and wittingly done). Hog farms disproportionately affect African-American households. The houses smell like manure, which lowers the property value of their homes and makes it impossible for them to sell, so even if they can afford to move to a cleaner area they are tied down. It has been shown that there is a correlation between air pollution from hog farms and “higher rates of nausea, increases in blood pressure, respiratory issues such as wheezing and increased asthma symptoms for children, and overall diminished quality of life for people living nearby.” These farms are well-documented to be a public health crisis, as well as a clean water crisis.
Though this study is undoubtedly written in the official style (e.g. legalese, research papers, etc.), with lots of compound-complex sentences, appositives, passive voice, and prepositional phrases that lengthen and complicate sentences, it somehow manages to be a simple read. In fact, the introduction to the aging Rene Miller, followed by a data-driven analysis that supported all the Miller’s claims, provided not only a seal-tight argument, but invokes a certain protectiveness from readers. The audience, whether they be scientists, lawyers, farmers, environmental justice researchers, or students will read this and empathize with the people who are forced to live this way. The narrative is daunting and horrific, especially with the added lens of the multitude of times the law did not protect citizens over corporations, or how the government continues to prioritize the booming economy that is the hog industry over human lives, and it is surely improbable for any level of researcher to read this without wanting to take action. Despite the detached technique that is often attributed with the official style of writing, this case studies, and others like it within the environmental justice field, are proof that not only does this style not need to be impersonal, but that it does not necessarily benefit from being impersonal, either.
This
research manages to be both professional and engaging, intrinsically linking us
with the plight of the Miller family and other Black households while still
informing, while still providing the audience with possibilities for how to
alleviate this climate emergency for ourselves and others. At no point is it
implied that the authors do not understand the subject material, or that they
are too emotional, or that their research is anything less than perfect. This
narrative-driven study humanizes an issue that, at face value, might have
appeared as a very distant issue. We are given no opportunity to distance
ourselves from this problem that affects not only the majority of folks in
North Carolina, but people in other states and countries as well. This form of
injustice is not unique, and there are proposed measures to combat it in a
meaningful way that could save lives. Straying from the strictly-set
instructions that come with the official style was a benefit for this case study,
and taking elements from non-official spaces, even when writing in the official
style, will make your text more accessible.
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