MISSOURI WATCH: HOG FALLOUT RAISES AGENCY'S IMAGE (FIRST OF TWO PARTS)

JEFFERSON CITY -- Until just a few years ago, most Missourians believed they lived in an environment that was relatively free of the pollutants caused by highly industrialized areas, mega-sized traffic patterns and deteriorating natural resources.

Driving through miles of the state's seemingly undisturbed forest land, it was difficult to imagine that pollution could invade many of Missouri's free-running, clear-water rivers and lakes nor was it apparent even in such high-traffic regions as metropolitan suburbs. As bypassers traveled through intensive farming areas, it was impossible to see any visible evidence of pesticide and herbicide pollution.

Indeed, officials of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources say this absence of visible pollution damage and easily recognizable evidence of climatic change has made their job more difficult, although they quickly note they're not advocating the kind of tell-tale signs in nature that would accompany a breakdown of the Earth's ecosystem.

Perhaps the most visible, and distressing, evidence of Missouri's growing pollution vulnerability can be found in many of its rivers, both large and small. This pollution became even more apparent with the advent of commercial hog and poultry farms, most of them located in the northern part of the state. Called CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations), these farms provide the state not only with more than its share of pork and its regions with expanded employment opportunities but our environment with unbelievably monstrous volumes of waste.

Although CAFOs have been concentrated in Missouri for only the past five or six years, they have until recently received scant notice from the public at large. These new production facilities, however, raised public concern last year when 10 hog manure spills, with over 400,000 gallons of excrement, were dumped in Missouri's rivers and streams. The result was more than 268,000 fish killed and more than 25 miles of state waterways highly contaminated.

As David A. Shorr, director of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, notes, "In terms of waste, farm animals in the state equal more than 80 million human beings." Missouri's population is only 5.3 million. State another way, the state's largest pork producer, Premium Standard Farms, alone produces hog waste that is equivalent to that produced by five times the human population of the city of St. Louis.

Several bills have been introduced in the current legislative session to regulate pollution generated by the recent advent of mega-farm pollution. A mega-farm is any commercial activity engaged in producing at least 17,500 head of livestock.

While huge hog-farm operations may be the culprit in the fouling of the state's rivers and streams, Missourians are both responsible for and the victims of an even more insidious form of pollutions: increased amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air we breathe. As a matter of fact, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has increased 25 percent in the past couple of generations, but then, scientists only started measuring air particles some 50 years ago.

Seven years ago the General Assembly created a commission to study sources and consequences of so-called greenhouse gas emissions in the state. Although coal-burning industries on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River had created clouds of low-hanging pollution in St. Louis since the 1930s, most Missourians believed they were safe from any of the consequences of atmospheric pollution. They were wrong.

Officials in the Division of Energy in the Department of Natural Resources only recently completed a comprehensive inventory of greenhouse gases emitted in the state as a result of human activities. On the plus side, the state's abundant forests remove some of the atmospheric carbon dioxide, sequestering between an estimated 19 to 26 million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. On the other hand, because the state derives more than 90 percent of its energy from fossil fuels, this consumption creates about 113 million tons of carbon dioxide.

Next: Missourians hoisted by petroleum petard.

~Jack Stapleton of Kennett is the editor of the Missouri News and Editorial Service.