Off the coast of Louisiana, in an 8,000-square-mile swath of ocean, the marine life is suffocating to death. Nutrient pollution, flowing from the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico, is birthing huge clumps of algae that are sucking oxygen from the water. Without oxygen, fish are struggling to respirate, and fleeing the scene en masse. Plants and worms, being unable to flee, are wasting away. This so-called “dead zone” in the Gulf has been appearing every spring and lasting until the winter since monitoring began in 1985, but this year it grew to the size of New Jersey—the largest dead zone ever recorded in the world. Next year it will probably be bigger.

If you missed this news, that’s probably because this year’s news read like the script of a cli-fi drama. The U.S. had a record-breaking hurricane season, which begat yet more environmental destruction: Hurricane Harvey caused a toxic Superfund site overflow, excess carcinogenic air pollution, and a chemical plant explosion in Texas. Hurricane Irma caused millions of gallons of sewage to overflow all over the state of Florida. Hurricane Maria created a drinking water crisis in Puerto Rico (and may have killed more than a 1,000 people). California, meanwhile, is still dealing with the deadliest and most destructive wildfire season on record, also with environmental after-effects; in the Bay Area, toxic ash laden with heavy metals infiltrated the soil and made air unbreathable.

These catastrophes deservedly got wall-to-wall coverage on cable news, and front-page treatment in major newspapers. But in focusing on one kind of environmental disaster—extreme weather—many outlets overlooked another kind that’s destructive in its own right. About that dead zone in the Gulf, University of Michigan professor Don Scavia said, “Meat production is directly causing it.” This year, the meat industry has also been blamed for contaminating drinking water across the Midwest, destroying native species’ habitats, and increasingly for its role in causing global warming.

The meat industry’s main problem is its reliance on corn to feed animals. In 2016, corn crops caused most of the 1.15 million metric tons of nutrient pollution—excess nitrogen and phosphorus, mostly from fertilizer runoff—that was released into the Gulf. Thirty-six percent of those corn crops are used to feed chicken, cows, and pigs, most of which are eventually eaten by humans. As meat production increases, corn demand rises, producing more nutrient pollution and a bigger dead zone. The dead zone is bad for obvious reasons—as a concerned citizen once told Scavia, “8,000 square miles of no oxygen has got to be a bad thing”—but it also has consequences for humans, as it could decimate the Gulf shrimp industry.

This map provided by NOAA shows how water pollution from farmland flows downstream into the Gulf of Mexico, creating a “dead zone” that cannot support marine life. The red dots indicate cities; lime green areas indicate farmland; and the yellow area is the dead zone. NOAA

Nutrient pollution has caused drinking water problems, too. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, “more than 100,000 miles of rivers and streams, close to 2.5 million acres of lakes, reservoirs and ponds, and more than 800 square miles of bays and estuaries in the United States have poor water quality because of fertilizer pollution.” Because of this, and how much meat contributes to nutrient pollution, the environmental group Mighty Earth released an investigation in August deeming the U.S. meat industry the largest source of water contamination throughout the Midwest. The pollution is “linked to cancer, birth defects, thyroid problems, as well as a serious condition called Blue Baby Syndrome, which lowers the amount of oxygen in infants’ blood,” the group claimed.