Elizabeth May, Sierra Club of Canada

Elizabeth May is the executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada and a lifelong environmental activist. She is also a lawyer, educator, writer, and mother. Her most recent book, coauthored with fellow Canadian activist Maude Barlow, is Frederick Street: Life and Death on Canada's Love Canal.

Canada is still reeling from the deaths earlier this summer in Walkerton, Ontario. At least six, and possibly as many as nine, people were killed by E coli bacteria contamination in the town's water supply. It was a tale of government cutbacks, less money in the provincial environment ministry, and the shifting of responsibility for water testing to lower-funded municipalities.

Compounding the risks of less regulation has been a stunning and dangerous increase in intensive livestock operations. Rural areas in southern Ontario have seen farming change from relatively small family operations with several hundred animals to factory-scale production with tens of thousands of animals in each barn. The increased cattle operations have led to widespread complaints from local residents concerned about water quality. But government at all levels responded with indifference to the complaints -- until Walkerton, that is.

The public health officer for the region has stated the probable cause of Walkerton's water contamination was cattle manure in surface water. The wells had been tested, but not by the government. The whole system was privatized. The private lab used by the town of Walkerton identified E coli, a deadly bacteria, and notified the town by fax, but told no one else. An inquiry is underway, but concern about water safety has never been so high.

The increase in intensive livestock operations has not been restricted to Ontario. The manure factories are booming in Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Quebec, and New Brunswick. Having visited one of these horrors -- a 10,000-hog operation in New Brunswick -- I've been haunted by it. I went because Sierra Club is concerned about water quality and environmental damage. But what I learned about the unethical, barbaric treatment of the animals has stayed with me. They pull out the teeth of the piglets and cut off their tails, knowing that the life they'll live (although it cannot be called "living") will make the animals crazy, so they must be unable to attack each other. They are kept indoors all their lives. They eat food dumped by a computer-operated feed auger. Their wastes fall through a slatted floor into a huge manure lagoon. In an age of corporate globalization, there is massive hog "production," but no jobs. No farmers. This is not Charlotte's Web. No spider could write "Some Pig" and make a difference. No one would see it. No animal should be treated as these animals are.

Meanwhile, more Canadians have been poisoned this summer in locations across Canada from E. coli eaten in meat. Cutbacks have also occurred in food safety inspection, and our food testing bureaucracy has been partially privatized as the Canada Food Inspection Agency.

Today's news was of trials of a vaccination that might be able to inoculate cattle against the bacteria. So a TV news reporter interviewed me as I tried to strike the right balance between concern for public health and pointing out that a bacteria-specific "fix" is not nearly as important as rebuilding regulatory and enforcement capacity in testing Canadian water and food.

It's a shock for Canadians to realize that cutbacks in environmental protection have been so severe that our lives are at stake.