The Unwinding

by George Packer

  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 t
he 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.

  Dean paid thirty-five hundred dollars at a local used car lot for a 1997 Honda Civic with 196,000 miles and a broken air conditioner, and he began taking his idea around the state, seeking acres of diamonds from the Appalachians to the coastal plain.

  * * *

  Dean had an apartment in his basement that he rented for $225 a month to a twenty-five-year-old named Matt Orr. Matt had grown up in the area, done more than his share of drinking and smoking and partying, then joined the army for the discipline and served a tour in Iraq in 2006–2007. America looked beautiful after Tikrit—on the drive into Stokes County from the Greensboro airport with his dad, Matt saw trees, hills, and green grass, and he felt he was waking up from a bad dream. But he came home with a thousand-mile stare and no prospects of gainful employment. He was hired by an auto parts store—he’d been a mechanic with the 25th Infantry Division—but they never raised him above $7.75 an hour. He quit and worked briefly at a copper tubing factory, the same one where Dean had a job after high school, but Matt was paid eight dollars an hour—less than Dean had made in 1981. After quitting that, Matt got a job at the Kmart in Madison as a “loss prevention manager,” which meant that he spent ten hours a day looking for shoplifters and placing the ones he caught in nonviolent restraint, including a forty-year-old jobless man who was trying to steal a tent because his mother had kicked him out of her house. This was not what Matt had wanted to come back to—he had hoped to make more of a difference—but he couldn’t turn down ten dollars an hour. Then Kmart knocked him back to $8.50.

  What really depressed Matt was how monetary everything had become in America, how it was just the biggest profit at the lowest cost. It was all about me, me, me, and no one wanted to help anyone else. The lobbyists, the politicians—they were all corrupt, taking everything from those who had the least. His favorite thing to do when he was alone in Dean’s basement relaxing with a beer was to watch old episodes of The Andy Griffith Show. It was a better America back then. If he could have grown up at any time it would have been in the fifties, which was the last great time in America. He hated to say it but it was true.

  Dean tried to do anything he could for Matt, but after Matt went five months without being able to pay his rent, Dean had to ask him to move out.

  The Andy Griffith Show was still popular in the region (even after Andy made an ad for Obamacare), with reruns every afternoon, because the original for Mayberry RFD was the town of Mount Airy, up at the Virginia border—now just another hard-hit textile town trying its best keep up a quaint appearance on Main Street for the sake of the tourists, shop windows displaying posters and photos and memorabilia with those goofy, reassuring, all-white faces from the show. At the end of July, a few days after his bankruptcy hearing in Greensboro, Dean made the hour’s drive to Mount Airy to see a woman on the city commission. He had been trying for four months to get a county to sign on to his proposal, driving all over the state, talking to officials in at least thirty counties, without success. They were like lemmings, just waiting for the first one to jump, but something held them back.

  Dean hadn’t spoken to Gary in months. He didn’t want Gary to find out about this new idea, because in Dean’s mind Gary was a pirate, a modern-day pirate. Any idea Dean ever gave him, Gary would steal and claim as his own. It went back to what Napoleon Hill wrote about the “Mastermind alliance”—he and Gary never had it. Gary didn’t believe in what Dean told him about the third mind. And Gary was a Tea Party Republican. Once, when Dean was having beers with a tobacco farmer, the subject of partnerships came up. “Partnerships are good for two things,” the farmer said. “Dancing and fucking.” For now, Dean was on his own.

  The woman in Mount Airy was named Teresa Lewis. They met at her office in a shopping mall outside the center of town, where Teresa ran a temp service. She was in her early fifties, dyed blond, wearing a blue suit and pearls. There was a poster of Elvis on the wall, and pictures of John McCain and the state’s Republican senator. Dean put his jars of canola seed and oil on Teresa’s desk and explained his concept.

  “It’s really a grassroots community effort,” he said, “where not only are the farmers involved, but the restaurant owners, the school system, and the government.”

  “Well, Dean,” Teresa said, in a breathy drawl, “what would stop somebody from doing this? It doesn’t sound like there’s a downside.”

  “There is none.”

  “We’re a big agricultural community. Tobacco built every building in this city.” Teresa smiled. “Now, you used two words, Dean—‘sustainability’ and ‘green.’ People here don’t like those words.”

  Teresa gave Dean a lesson in local politics. She was a Republican, of course, but a Chamber of Commerce, United Fund, civic improvement Republican—not a Tea Party Republican. In 2010 she had lost the race for mayor of Mount Airy to a very conservative woman—a former textile worker and Glenn Beck fan—and the Tea Party had taken over the Surry County board of commissioners. On the city commission, a proposal to institute curbside recycling had inflamed passions on both sides, with some opponents describing it as a liberal, green, big government effort to impose a burden on the taxpayers of Mount Airy, and Teresa had cast the deciding vote in favor. She still seemed bruised by the year’s battles.

  “People here like ‘savings,’ they like ‘farming,’ they like ‘receiving income back,’” Teresa said. “And they like ‘alternative sources.’ ‘Alternative’ will not get the same reaction as ‘sustainability.’”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You’re running into five very conservative county commissioners from the last election,” she said. “I like you—I just want to warn you, these words are not popular.”

  Teresa said she would help Dean get his idea to the Surry County Commission, but weeks went by and he never heard anything definite.

  * * *

  Dean put fifty thousand miles on the used Honda. He drove the length and breadth of the state with his jars, wearing his red Coca-Cola baseball cap that was faded to pink. He talked to anyone who would listen. He talked to the hippies at Piedmont Biofuels, which was a worker-owned co-op near Chapel Hill—prosperous and progressive North Carolina, where people moved from out of state—and he talked to a school board member in Greensboro who was so right-wing that he wasn’t sure there should even be public schools.

  He talked to Eva Clayton, a retired black congresswoman from Warren County. They sat in her office in Raleigh and Dean said, “The way I look at it, this economy is demonstrating that it cannot provide the amount of jobs necessary for the current population. So therefore we have to start thinking differently, and I think that this new green economy is really a different mind-set, and I can’t see this economy starting any other way than with an energy source,” and Eva Clayton, who was tiny and elegant and unsmiling, said, “Mm-hmm. What is the ask?” and Dean said, “We ask the restaurant owners to be part of this movement, where they either donate or we get the oil at a discount. Second thing is to work with these school boards where they get these bus garage guys to introduce this new fuel to the school buses. That’s the seed, the starting point. From there we go to canola,” a
nd Eva Clayton said, “We’re asking farmers to grow?” and Dean said, “To grow canola. We’re going to build a small-scale crushing facility to get oil from that seed,” and Eva Clayton, taking Dean’s jars and sliding them on top of her conference table, said, “You’re going to get farmers to grow this,” and Dean said, “Yes, ma’am. In order to get them to grow this it’s all about money,” and Eva Clayton said, “I see a gentleman who has an idea that may help these distressed people, but the distress is right now—‘I need food now, I need to pay bills now’—and this idea is a year or two away.” Eva Clayton finally smiled. “But hope comes from these ideas, with people saying we can do better.”

  He talked at a green-jobs fair in a refurbished armory in Warrenton, before a crowd of three hundred people looking for work, 80 percent of them black. He had done some research before going to Warrenton, and he had read about Soul City, which was just five miles outside town. Soul City was started in the seventies by a black activist named Floyd McKissick, with help from Eva Clayton and her husband, on five thousand acres of dirt-poor tobacco fields. It was intended to be a self-sufficient, multiracial community, with housing planned for eighteen thousand people, and the Nixon administration gave a federal grant under the Model Cities program after McKissick joined the Republican Party—which infuriated Dean’s father, who hated the whole idea of Soul City—but the population never grew beyond a couple of hundred, and no businesses were established. Instead, Soul City died a slow death, and by 2011 there was just a vandalized health clinic and a few two-bedroom houses on streets named Liberation and Revolution, next to the red clay cornfields.