How Sense-able is Fecal Dust Pollution?
For my fieldwork I chose to explore the concept of making things sense-able and specifically wanted to find out how sense-able my topic already is and what more can be done to make it more sense-able. This idea of sense-able means how easy it is for people to recognize it as a problem or connect to it on an individual level so that it is easier for them to care about fixing the problem. My problem specifically being pollution caused by dairy and beef farming. I wanted to find out if my problem was sense-able, were people already aware of this problem, did they feel that it affected them, was it being talked about? To do this I interviewed both a person and a place.
The person I chose to interview was Siddha Sannigrahi, a director of the Campus Environmental Center at UT. I wanted to find out how much someone who was dedicated to environmental issues knew about my issue in particular. If she did not know much about my topic then I would know that there were some major issues in how sense-able it is. Turns out, while she knew some of the issues surrounding cattle farming such as the lack of sustainable resources for feeding the cows, the lack of space, and the carbon emissions associated with growing cattle. When I explained the concept of fecal dust pollution she was shocked and was not aware of it at all. She immediately wanted to know more which was a good step in making the issue more sense-able, if she wanted to know more as soon as she heard about the issue, this meant that hopefully many people would feel the same.
I also interviewed a place to see how physically sense-able this issue was. I went to Bastrop Cattle Company outside of Austin. I would have rather gone to a cattle farm in more Eastern Texas where the land is a little less green to get a full sense of the problem but I was not able to do that so this had to work. I wanted to see if just by going to the farm if I would be able to tell with no background knowledge that something wasn’t right. It would be much harder to make people care about this issue if they can’t physically sense it. From my interview of the farm, this issue was not very sense-able. If people didn’t do any research on the dangers of cattle farms, they wouldn’t necessarily know there was a problem. The land was luscious enough that the manure could easily be consumed by plants and had less risk of being blown around into the air or the water. There was a smell but people would expect that from a cattle farm. This was very different from the articles I had read about the terrible brown cloud of dust hanging over cattle farms out in East Texas. It made me wonder if it really did matter that much on the location of the farm. This experience also made me question my research more. Nothing I had read had described the peaceful green meadows with the cattle quickly grazing that I had just witnessed. It makes me wonder if maybe there are more sides to this story than most writing about cattle farming makes it seem.
In terms of how sense-able this topic is, as I first set out to find out, I have not come to a concrete answer. The fact that Siddha didn’t know anything about fecal dust from cows is kind of concerning because she is someone that is so involved in environmental issues so if she doesn’t know about it then the average person probably doesn’t as well. However, she also showed great interest in it as soon as she was introduced to the topic which bodes well for how easy it might be to convince people to care about the issue once they are exposed to and educated about it. This makes the problem somewhat sense-able. Almost everyone eats beef and especially in Texas people live near cattle farms and ranches. This means that they are all connected to this problem in a fairly significant way and would hopefully respond like Siddha when educated about it.
On the other hand, the problem is not as easy to physically sense as I went in believing it would be. How can an issue be sense-able and people be able to connect to it if many of the physical farms appear to be so pristine. This would make it much harder to convince people they are being poisoned by these farms when the farms look completely harmless in many cases. This makes me wonder if maybe making this issue sense-able is going to be harder than I initially thought.
All of this fieldwork really gave me a new perspective on my research and my work as an environmental writer. I took many things that I read in my research at face value and during this fieldwork realized that some of it may have been exaggerations or very one sided. I definitely need to do a better job seeing the issue from multiple sides and being completely researched on the areas that i’m writing about before publishing or my readers will not take me seriously. If someone read my previous work on fecal dust created by cattle farms and that person lived near a cattle farm similar to the one I interviewed, they would probably think I was crazy and radical. I was thinking in terms of generalizations and that won’t always be the best method for educating people on such an intense and not super sense-able topic.
Overall this fieldwork definitely opened my eyes to all the different things I need to explore further and continue thinking about if I want to continue writing environmentally. It made me realize how one sided some of my research had been and that to connect to people and make my issue sense-able I need to fully understand the issue not just from a scientific viewpoint but also from a more holistic perspective.
