Hope you’re having a solid week! If you have any suggestions for long reads for tomorrow’s newsletter (or beyond), please reply to this email with them! Thanks. 🙂 — Dan

The Farmer Strikes Back

Pictured above, via the South China Morning Post, is a picture of farmland. But it doesn’t look like most other farmland. Instead of crops growing there, a huge swath of land is overtaken by what looks like blue-tinted snow, and the lands surrounding that area are barren. If you’re looking to grow food there, well, it’s not going to happen.

But that’s what happened in the rural village of Yushutun in China’s Heilongjiang province. (Here’s a map of the province’s location.) The Qihua Chemical Group obtained a large area of land from the village to create PVC and unfortunately, Qihua wasn’t all that concerned with being a good neighbor. As Modern Farmer explained, “Starting in 2001, the town flooded with toxic waste and the land quickly became unable to be farmed; calcium hydroxide residue took over 71 acres of land and huge mounds of white sludge piled up. Qihua uses the mostly abandoned method of using calcium carbide to make its PVC. This method requires massive amounts of energy (which, in China, is coal) and creates huge amounts of waste, in addition to resulting in an inferior product.”

And they would have gotten away with it, too, except for one farmer who decided that it was never too late to learn something new.

In 2001, Wang Enlin was a 48-year-old with a limited education — he dropped out of school at age 10 — and had made a meager life for himself growing corn in Yushutun. His farm and his home were impacted by the toxic waste from the chemical plant; as the Independent reported, “it is claimed that Qinghua first dumped hazardous wastewater near Mr. Wang's land in 2001, preventing him from growing his crops. Mr. Wang claimed he was playing cards and cooking with neighbors on the eve of the Lunar New Year when water began leaking into his house.” So Wang tried to do what many people in this situation would do — he went to the legal system for help.

But what Wang found was a system well beyond where his education and means could take him. He was barely literate and certainly didn’t know the ins and outs of the law, and couldn’t afford an attorney to represent him. As he told the press, “I knew I was in the right, but I did not know what law the other party had broken or whether or not there was evidence." And there was no one to help him figure it out.

So Wang decided to teach himself the law — very slowly. Unable to afford the textbook and dictionary he needed to do that, he made a deal with a nearby bookstore — he’d get to use the store as a library in exchange for some of the corn he was still able to grow. Five or six years into his studies, people in his community began taking notice, and according to Modern Farmer, “he became known locally as the ‘Soil Lawyer.’” In 2007, a local law firm found out about his efforts and decided to help him pro bono as well. But that assistance was not enough to overcome the expertise and resources of Qihua, and it would still be the better part of a decade before Wang got his day in court.

Wang’s lawsuit finally reached the courts in 2015, nearly fifteen years after his farm was all but destroyed by what Qihua had allegedly done. And in 2017, the court ruled in Wang and his fellow farmers’ favor. Per EcoWatch, “Wang and the other residents of the Yushutun village won an initial judgment against Qihua in the Angangxi District Court of Qiqihar. This court awarded the victims financial compensation amounting to about $119,000,” or about $2,000 for each of the 55 impacted farmers. That was a huge victory for Wange — he had been living on only about $10 a month. And while that probably wasn’t a huge amount of money for Qihua to fork over, they weren’t willing to do so, at least not immediately. The chemical company signaled their intention to appeal the decision, but Wang wasn’t concerned — he told the media that even at 64 years old, he’d continue on the fight he spent a quarter of his life on. (The outcome of any appeal has not been reported in the English-speaking press.)

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More About Pollution

Today’s Bonus fact: A decade and a half ago, the San Francisco Bay area was struggling with smog, and China — an ocean away — was producing a lot of its electricity by burning coal. Scientists in California wondered how much of San Francisoc’s air pollution was coming from China, and in 2010, they found a way to get that answer. As the American Chemical Society reported, “The coal and metal ores mined in China and eastern Asia have a significantly higher proportion of 208Pb, which forms from radioactive decay of thorium than do coal and ores used in America,” and researchers were able to measure the amount of 208Pb in San Francisco’s air. Their conclusion? Per the ACS, “29% of the San Francisco area's particulate pollution comes from eastern Asia.”

From the Archives: Water Safety That Uses Your Mussels: The seafood that’s also the canary in the coal mine, so to speak.

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And thanks! — Dan