Poor Mojo's Newswire

Five years ago, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization published a report called “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” which maintained that 18 percent of greenhouse gases were attributable to the raising of animals for food. The number was startling. A couple of years later, however, it was suggested that the number was too small. Two environmental specialists for the World Bank, Robert Goodland (the bank’s former lead environmental adviser) and Jeff Anhang, claimed, in an article in World Watch, that the number was more like 51 percent. It’s been suggested that that number is extreme, but the men stand by it, as Mr. Goodland wrote to me this week: “All that greenhouse gas isn’t emitted directly by animals. ”But according to the most widely-used rules of counting greenhouse gases, indirect emissions should be counted when they are large and when something can be done to mitigate or reduce them.” The exact number doesn’t matter. What does is that few people take the role of livestock in producing greenhouse gases seriously enough. Even most climate change experts focus on new forms of energy — which cannot possibly be effective quickly enough or produced on a broad enough scale to avert what may be the coming catastrophe — and often ignore the much easier fix of adjusting our eating habits. It’s good that we’re eating somewhat less meat, but it still amounts to something just shy of a staggering 200 pounds per person per year. And no matter how that number changes domestically, on the world scale there’s troubling movement in the wrong direction.

At least twenty-five former truckers are currently serving time in American prisons for serial murder. There’s Robert Ben Rhoades, who converted his truck cab into a torture chamber, now serving a life sentence in Illinois. There’s Scott William Cox, a trucker who pled no-contest to two murders in Oregon. There’s Dellmus Colvin, who pled guilty in five murders to avoid the death penalty in Ohio; Keith Hunter Jesperson, serving life sentences from four different states; and Wayne Adam Ford, who finally got sick of killing and walked into a California sheriff’s office carrying a woman’s breast in a plastic bag. When trucker Sean Patrick Goble was arrested in North Carolina and confessed to several murders, ten states lined up to question him about their cold-case highway homicides. It seems our interstate highway system has become our Whitechapel, with truckers its roving Rippers. A soft-spoken woman from Oklahoma City first saw the pattern. Terri Turner is a Supervisory Intelligence Analyst with the Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation. In September of 2003, a homicide case landed on her desk: a body found along I-40. Turner immediately put out a teletype seeking other female bodies found, like hers, nude, near interstates, and with signs of having been bound. Within 72 hours, two responses came back from Arkansas and Mississippi. At that point, Turner knew she might be looking at linked crimes. She had her communications specialists monitor the teletypes for further cases. In seven months, they had seven homicides. She calls them “my seven girls.” Eventually investigators identified two of the women. Both had worked as truck stop prostitutes. This was the breakthrough moment for Turner. “The vast majority of truck drivers are good hardworking people and without them our nation would come screeching to a halt,” she told me. “But there are very few who have found that that particular job is very suited to this particular type of crime.” In the spring of 2004, Turner decided to have a meeting in Oklahoma City for all the investigators working on her seven cases—and any others that might be related. “I anticipated maybe 20, 25 individuals,” she told me, “but by the time word got around about the kind of cases we were going to be talking about, I ended up having 60 investigators from seven different states show up for that meeting. That was really the beginning of the initiative.”