Normally we regard NIMBY problems at least vaguely as moral problems — folks want to use a bunch of electricity, but they don’t want the nuclear plant in their back yard. I don’t know how much dairy the folks in Union County are consuming, but I still don’t blame them for not wanting the Union Go Dairy in their back yard.

The problem of the day seems to be a bubbling 20 million gallon manure lagoon. One possibility is that the methane gas has gotten under the lining. The Dairy recently settled a claim related to discharging manure into a local creek and has been cited twice by IDEM for failing to maintain the minimum freeboard in the lagoon.

It can’t be a good feeling when your neighbor is prone to, or at least capable of, discharging literally rivers of shit.

Environmental discharges have always seemed to me to be one of the weaker points of the anti-government, strict property rights model of government. (The corporate form is the other primary one in my mind). We just don’t have good mechanisms for monitoring and valuing the damage done through pollution of various sorts, particularly on the individual level. Government regulators do an indifferent job, but they at least have resources and expertise not available to individuals who might ingest water or air contaminated through the actions of another.