I. Horses
While driving near Burns, Oregon on Highway 20 I passed the Bureau of Land Management’s wild horse corrals, where they keep all the wild horses that they round up from the vast surrounding rangeland. Some of the horses are allowed to stay in designated areas, but numbers are tightly controlled. The corral facility offered an “auto-tour,” so I drove slowly around the holding pens for mares, studs and young horses, watching them kick around in the dirt and whinny at each other.
They have an adoption facility on site. Horses that aren’t adopted can be sold by the BLM, but many are also killed.
II. Cows
In Idaho, I saw my first CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation). Si-Ellen Farms in Jerome, Idaho is a dairy operation with thousands of cows that stand around on a brown, empty expanse, some of them poking their heads through the fence to munch on feed. Big stacks of hay divide up the lot. At another CAFO I saw later in the day, young cows were separated into individual doghouse-type shelters. With all the negative stuff I’d heard about feedlots from Michael Pollan and others, it was a bit of a shock to see them in real life. Residents of Idaho’s Magic Valley area are largely supportive of feedlots—that’s how they make their living—but the incredible amount of manure generated has led to waste management concerns, as Scott Weaver discusses in this week’s feature in Boise Weekly.
III. Toxic Waste
On Interstate 84 near Mountain Home, Idaho, I noticed signs pointing down a country road: US ECOLOGY IDAHO WASTE SITE. This sounded too enticing to pass up, so I ended up following the signs like breadcrumbs down 20 miles of tumbleweed-strewn desert road. I lost the signs when I got to the town of Grand View, and I had no idea what I was missing.
US Ecology, a division of American Ecology, is one of just a handful of companies in the United States that will happily dispose of virtually any toxic or radioactive waste, no matter how hazardous. Their biggest customer by far is the US Military, though they take truck and railcar deliveries from all kinds of clients.
The Grand View, Idaho waste site is a hundred-acre pit in the desert that’s surrounded by another 1,000 acres and a security fence. It’s lined with what the company says is a state of the art combination of materials designed to prevent leaching, which is a good thing since the site is just uphill of the Snake River, which provides drinking water for 20,000 Idahoans (as cited in the feedlot article).
US Ecology boasts that this facility is one of the only ones in the nation that accepts PCBs (that’s the toxic goop that leaked out of the old General Electric factories, contaminating the Hudson River). They also recently accepted a shipment of sand from a former American base in Kuwait, which was irradiated in the firebombing of vehicles armored with depleted uranium.