The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (65 page)

“When we look at our children and the blight that has come to our communities, how
can you continuously attack good-paying union jobs, like the jobs we lost at Packard
Electric? No one ever could have told me I would not have retired from that job. We
need jobs in Ohio. We need jobs that pay a living wage in Ohio. Jobs are the connective
tissue to everything surrounding us.”

In 2012, jobs were slowly coming back to Ohio, some of them in the area around Youngstown:
jobs in natural gas exploration of the Utica shale, which ran right under the Mahoning
Valley; new shifts at the GM plant northwest of town; manufacturing work in auto parts
factories; even a few jobs in steel mills. So far, though, the new opportunities had
hardly reached the people who needed them most, such as the poor and chronically unemployed
men and women who still lived in Youngstown, especially those—like so many at the
Front Porch Café—who had done time in prison. MVOC did not have an economic development
strategy. Its jobs campaign simply called for private employers to hire local people
first and give felons a chance, and for government to be the employer of last resort.

“When I got pregnant, it broke my grandmother’s heart,” Tammy said, winding up her
speech. “I wanted to make sure I graduated from high school because I knew that was
the only way I could give my daughter a better life. I have three adult children that
I raised in our community, and they all moved away. Youngstown could be a wonderful
place to live again—it should be.”

Tammy was so busy with her organizing work that she hardly had time to canvass for
the election. But on November 5, she spent two hours going door-to-door with Kirk
Noden around Lincoln Park on the east side, the part of the city where she had grown
up. There was a rumor that a misleading piece of paper was circulating in the neighborhood,
telling people that they could sign it as a substitute for voting. So Tammy asked
everyone she met whether they had already voted, or intended to vote the next day,
or needed a ride to the polls. To her surprise, the enthusiasm for Obama was even
higher than in 2008, with none of the concerns about whether the country was ready
and a black president would survive.

And when he was reelected the next night, Tammy found herself even more emotional
than the first time. She had gotten caught up in the daily mechanics of the race,
the close polls in Ohio, the fear that Obama might lose. She had been thinking about
the election negatively: if he lost, the people she had helped to recruit and train,
people like Miss Hattie and Miss Gloria and the men at the Front Porch Café, might
feel that the work was in vain, and a few years of her life might have been lost.
Tammy hadn’t allowed herself to think about what it would mean if he won. And when
it was over, she thought: “My God, it means we’ve got a chance to do something for
real.”

DEAN PRICE

One day in the spring of 2011, around the time he stopped going up to Red Birch, Dean
was sitting in the Rockingham County economic development office, looking through
the literature on display there, when he found a study by a professor at Appalachian
State University, in Boone, on waste cooking oil in North Carolina. A chart showed
the population of each of the state’s one hundred counties, the number of restaurants
in each county, and the gallons of cooking oil that those restaurants got rid of.
It turned out that in each county, even the smallest and poorest ones, the amount
of oil for every man, woman, and child was about three or four gallons a year. There
was a direct correlation between the amount of waste cooking oil a county created
in a year and the amount of fuel a county’s school buses would use in a year.

Dean stood up at his chair. Just like when he first read about peak oil, his knees
went weak and he stumbled back. Ever since leaving Red Birch and going off on his
own, he had been looking for alternatives to canola oil, which was unprofitable as
long as gas stayed below five dollars a gallon. That was why Red Birch had a failed
business model—Dean said it to anyone who would listen. On the other hand, waste cooking
oil was cheap: some restaurants charged fifty cents a gallon to pump it out of the
barrels in back and take it away, some gave it away for free, and some even paid to
have it removed. Fried chicken, livers and gizzards, pulled pork, fish, corn fritters,
fried okra, french fries—just about everything eaten at restaurants in North Carolina
was cooked in shiny reddish-brown vegetable oil that sat bubbling in deep metal fryers.
And all that oil had to be thrown out.

The companies that hauled the oil away were called renderers. Besides restaurant oil,
renderers also collected animal carcasses—pigs and sheep and cows from slaughterhouses,
offal thrown out by butcher shops and restaurants, euthanized cats and dogs from the
pound, dead pets from veterinary clinics, deceased zoo animals, roadkill. Mounds of
animals were trucked to the rendering plant and bulldozed into large pots for grinding
and shredding; then the raw meat product was dumped into pressure cookers, where fat
separated from meat and bones at high heat. The meat and bones were pulverized into
protein meal for canned pet food. The animal fat became yellow grease, which was recycled
for lipstick, soap, chemicals, and livestock feed. So cows ate cow, pigs ate pig,
dogs ate dog, cats ate cat, and human beings ate the meat fed on dead meat, or smeared
it over their faces and hands. Rendering was one of the oldest industries in the country,
going back to the age of tallow, lard, and candlelight, and one of the most secretive.
A book on the subject was titled
Rendering: The Invisible Industry
. It was the kind of disgusting but essential service, like sewers, that no one wanted
to think about. The companies pretty much regulated themselves, and the plants were
built far from human habitation, and outsiders were almost never allowed into one,
or even knew it existed unless the wind blew the wrong way.

Renderers turned the waste cooking oil they collected into yellow grease, but it had
a different use than animal fat, one that the companies were only just starting to
figure out: because it jelled at lower temperatures than animal fat and burned clean,
the oil was ideal for making fuel.

When he read the study from Appalachian State, and saw the chart showing county-by-county
population and gallons of waste cooking oil, Dean suddenly put it together. Every
little corner of North Carolina had the seedlings of a biodiesel industry. And if
it was true in North Carolina, it was true in Tennessee, and Colorado.

“This goes back to Gandhi,” Dean said. He had bought a book called
The Essential Gandhi
and read about
swadeshi
, which meant self-sufficiency and independence. “Gandhi said it was a sin to buy
from your farthest neighbor at the neglect of your nearest neighbor. It’s not about
mass production, it’s about production by the masses. Every community college I talk
to wants to start a biofuels project but can’t because they don’t have the feedstock—every
stage is hog-tied by major corporations. It’s going to take disruptive technology
in the weakest link of the chain as the point of attack. Waste cooking oil is the
weakest link. It’s an archaic, antiquated industry, a hundred thirty years old, modern-day
buggy whip makers. They know the shelf life on their old business plan is coming to
an end—because they’ve got the only source of energy in every community for biofuels.”

On his bookshelf there was a volume called
The Prosperity Bible
, an anthology of classic writings on the secrets of wealth. Dean’s second favorite
after
Think and Grow Rich
was
Acres of Diamonds
, a lecture that a Baptist minister named Russell Conwell first published in 1890
and that he gave at least six thousand times before his death in 1925. Conwell had
been a captain in the Union army, dismissed for deserting his post in North Carolina
in 1864. He went on to write campaign biographies of Grant, Hayes, and Garfield, and
later became a minister in Philadelphia. The lecture that made him famous and rich—rich
enough to establish Temple University and become its first president—was based on
a story Conwell claimed to have been told by an Arab guide he hired in Baghdad in
1870 to take him around the antiquities of Nineveh and Babylon. In the story, a Persian
farmer named Al Hafed received a visit from a Buddhist priest, who told Al Hafed that
diamonds were made by God out of congealed drops of sunlight, and that he would always
find them in “a river that runs over white sand between high mountains.” So Al Hafed
sold his farm and went off in search of diamonds, and his search took him all the
way to Spain, but he never found any diamonds. Finally, despairing and in rags, he
threw himself into the sea off the coast of Barcelona. Meanwhile, the new owner of
Al Hafed’s farm took his camel out for water one morning and saw in the white sands
of a shallow stream a flashing stone. It turned out that the farm was sitting on diamonds—acres
of them—the mine of Golconda, the greatest diamond deposit in the ancient world.

There were two morals in Conwell’s lecture. The first was provided by the Arab guide:
instead of seeking for wealth elsewhere, dig in your own garden and you will find
it all around you. The second was added by Conwell: if you are rich, it is because
you deserve to be; if you are poor, it is because you deserve to be. The answers lie
in your mind. This was also the thinking of Napoleon Hill, the belief that there was
divinity in the human self, that sickness came from the mind and could be healed by
right thinking. It was called New Thought, a philosophy of the Gilded Age of Carnegie
and Rockefeller, an age of extremes in wealth just like the age Dean lived in. William
James called this philosophy “the Mind-cure movement.” It appealed deeply to Dean.

After traveling in search of wealth, Dean had returned to his farm—unlike the ancient
Persian—and dug for his fortune there. Acres of diamonds! They had to be all around
him, right under foot—behind the counter of the P&M diner on Route 220 where he stopped
for breakfast, and in the kitchen of Fuzzy’s Bar-B-Que in Madison, and in the fryers
at the Bojangles’ right next to his house, the one that he had built and then come
to hate.

Acres of diamonds!

Dean began to think about how he could separate those archaic and secretive rendering
companies from their waste cooking oil. A lot of the bigger restaurants and chains
around North Carolina and Virginia had long-standing contracts that paid one giant
company, Valley Proteins, to take their oil. Others just gave it to whatever local
renderer would remove it. Dean would have to find a way to make all those restaurants
give it to
him
.

When Katrina had hit the Gulf Coast, the public schools in North Carolina came within
a couple of days of shutting down for lack of diesel in the school buses. Every county
in the state relied on a fleet of buses, and every one of those buses ran on diesel.
At the start of the new century it had cost fifty cents a gallon; by the spring of
2011 it was over four dollars. Was that sustainable? Millions of dollars burned up
in fuel costs for schools that were suffering the worst budget crisis in decades,
laying off teachers and teacher’s assistants in the middle of the recession? Dean
read an article about a nine-year-old girl who lived with her mom down a country road
in Warren County and who had to walk a mile to catch the school bus after it could
no longer afford to drive down that road and pick her up.

Public schools were often the biggest employer in the county. They offered the gateway
to the American dream. They were the country’s entire future. Dean came to see that
if he could get the schools on his side, he could lay his hands on all that waste
cooking oil. And he thought up a way to do it.

What if every county in North Carolina made its own biodiesel for its school buses?
Think how much taxpayer money could be saved, how many teachers could stay in classrooms,
how much healthier the kids would be, how much cleaner the environment. All it would
take was a reliable feedstock and a relatively inexpensive refinery. What if Dean
went from county to county and offered to collect the local restaurant oil and process
it into fuel for school buses at a facility that the county would build? Eventually,
with the right equipment, he could crush canola seeds into food-grade oil, sell that
to the restaurants for frying, collect the waste oil, and convert it into fuel—thereby
bringing local farmers into the loop and putting the oil to use twice.

It would be like handing buckets of money over to the schools. The restaurants would
all want to sign on and get credit for helping out kids. One day Dean came up with
the perfect metaphor for his project. He would call it “the ultimate school fundraiser.”

He started close to home. It wasn’t easy getting hold of the Rockingham County commissioners—the
people under them were there to keep you away—but with persistence, on the hundred
and first blow of the hammer, he was able to set up a date for his presentation. The
commissioners were enthusiastic, and a little item about it ran in the Greensboro
paper, but afterward Dean didn’t hear anything and figured they hadn’t bought into
it. A few weeks later, he ran into the chairman of the commission at the P&M diner
on 220. The chairman told Dean, “I got a bunch of e-mails from local businessmen telling
me now isn’t the time for us to do this.”

“Who are the businesses?” Dean asked.

“You know I can’t tell you that.”

“Why can’t you tell me?”

It had to have been his nemesis, Reid Teague, the local oilman who had cut off his
fuel up at the Bassett truck stop, driven him out of business, then come after his
house. Teague probably saw the article in the paper and got on the phone to the commissioner.
Dean didn’t know this for sure, but he believed it. A prophet was always an outcast
in his own land. Thank God there were ninety-nine other counties in North Carolina.