Photograph by Steven Higgs

Bloomington Alternative Reporter Amber Kerezman, left, learns about the impacts factory farms have on rural Indiana residents from Kathryn Petry, center, and Loretta Miller. They live in Randolph County, surrounded by 228,000 hogs. Their stories will appear soon in the new Alternative series called "Indiana Environment Revisited."

Anyone who has ever written for me knows that I am not a fan of first-person writing. I tell my reporting students that their keyboards should deliver electric shocks whenever they type shift-i-space. Journalists should use "I" only when it's the optimal voice for telling their stories.

So, because the "Indiana Environment Revisited" project I am introducing here is a personal journey back to my enviro-journalistic roots, the optimal voice is first. Expect an occasional "I" in these pages in the months leading up to the 2008 gubernatorial election.

The journey is not metaphoric. The series' name is derived from a newspaper I published while working for the Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) called Indiana Environment, a.k.a. IE. From 1996-2000, I traveled Indiana -- from East Chicago to Spencer County and Tell City to Fort Wayne -- peering into, and telling IDEM's side of, the disaster that is Indiana's environment.

Through the "Indiana Environment Revisited," journalist Amber Kerezman and I -- recorders and camera gear in hand -- will journey to the places and issues I wrote about for IDEM to learn what has happened in the eight years since my last Indiana Environment.

Or, more likely, what has not happened, at least for the good. This is Mitch Daniels' Indiana, after all. We're No. 49!

On Saturday, March 1, we began the "IE Revisited" adventure with a trip to the far East-Central portion of the state to spend the afternoon with Dan and Barbara Cox, from Randolph County, who introduced us to several victims of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), or factory farms.

We'll be sharing their stories soon in story, blog, image and video.

That we started "IE Revisited" with a focus on factory farms just feels right. Two of the stories I tell most often about my four years watching environmental policy being made in the Indiana Government Center involve CAFOs.

The first was a solo trip to a high-end, out-of-state, corporate operation in rural Northwest Indiana (NWI), White County, I believe. This outfit was cutting edge, so confident in its operation that it allowed a state flunky inside with a camera. It was a factory farm showpiece.

The stakes were high in the fall of 1998, and the emerging CAFO industry needed showpieces. Factory farms were the next big thing, and Commissioner John Hamilton's IDEM was preparing a new set of water regulations to address pollution from them.

I went to this particular facility on a brilliant, big-sky day and remember the place feeling more like a laboratory than a farm. The long, squat, shiny-clean buildings on a hill were nearly invisible from the road. The guy charged with taking me around had a high-priced veterinarian from Purdue on-site, and he made it clear that he had better things to do than baby-sit some tool from IDEM.

Since I had not been exposed to any farm animals in the weeks prior to my visit, my guide assumed I was not contaminated and allowed me into one of the buildings. I walked down the middle of two rows of pens, each filled with a dozen or so piglets, all of whom went berserk, in wavelike fashion, as I snapped their photos.

These piglets, I discovered, wouldn't live to see a year. They're born, raised and fattened for a few months and then sent off to slaughter. That, I learned, is how factory pig farms work -- teat to plate in less than a calendar year.

My other CAFO adventure involved an environmental criminal, a family operation north of Muncie that had had spilled a lagoon full of pig manure into an East-Central Indiana stream. I was spending the day with an IDEM water inspector, who made an unannounced inspection. The story is too gross to tell, let alone write.

While we are starting "Indiana Environment Revisited" with CAFOS, I have a stack of about 45 Indiana Environments -- 12-16 pages apiece -- each filled with articles about air pollution, water pollution, recycling, solid and hazardous waste, pollution prevention and enforcement.

So, as we begin this project, I can't say for sure where it will go. But the plan is to apply what we've learned with our Alternative multimedia projects to date, along with my historical knowledge and Amber's eagerness to learn, to tell these stories in ways they've never been told before.

"IE Revisited," in other words, will be two journeys: one of a grizzled veteran revisiting the scenes of the crimes, the other of a curious young journalist witnessing it all for the first time.

I will be photographing and videotaping Indiana's environmental victims, human and ecological, as well as writing stories about them. Amber will be conducting the interviews and writing from her experiences.

I think it's going to be a fascinating journey. But that's first person talking.

Steven Higgs can be reached at editor@BloomingtonAlternative.com.