At hearings last week on the Cape Wind project, some of the witnesses spoke in a mountain twang that had no hint of Yarmouth to it. They hailed from coal-mining country in West Virginia and had come north to plead with New Englanders to find a renewable energy alternative to mountaintop-removal coal mining - a practice that is making a moonscape out of their countryside.
Each week, coal companies use explosives equal to the Hiroshima bomb to turn mountaintops into rubble and expose coal seams. The consequences are ghastly. Often, the blasts destroy wells or allow them to be poisoned by contaminants that decades of surface and underground mining have created. Residents say the earth-moving has also caused more flooding. And in 2004, a boulder dislodged by coal company blasting killed a 3-year-old Virginia boy in his bed.Coal accounts for just 15 percent of New England’s electricity, so even Cape Wind, which would use offshore wind turbines to supply power equal to three-quarters of Cape Cod’s demand, would not stop much of the devastation of Appalachia. But activists such as Janet Keating and Chuck Nelson of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition hope that Cape Wind will usher in a whole new era of energy production that lessens the nation’s dependence on coal. The country gets 50 percent of its power from coal, the biggest carbon emitter among fossil fuels.
Short of a nationwide shift away from coal and toward renewable sources, the Appalachia activists would like to see Congress pass the Clean Water Protection Act. This bill would reverse one of the Bush administration’s most damaging concessions to industry on the environmental front. The Environmental Protection Agency decided in 2002 that mountaintop-removal miners’ practice of dumping their waste into stream beds did not violate the Clean Water Act of 1970. The EPA decided the material was “fill,” not waste.
If Congress passes the new bill, the material would correctly be defined as waste again, and coal companies would be forced to return the waste onto the original site. This would not necessarily stop this form of mining, but it would change its economics, which now make coal the least costly source of electricity. “They call this cheap energy,” Nelson told the Globe, “but it’s extremely costly to the people who have to live there.”
The activists are controversial figures back home. Although coal employment in West Virginia has declined from 150,000 in 1970 to fewer than 15,000 now, coal is still seen as the area’s economic mainstay. Tellingly, none of the state’s members of Congress has signed on to the Clean Water Protection Act. But Keating and Nelson see a noncoal and environmentally benign industry for their region: wind turbines on the ridges. Approval of Cape Wind and passage of the water protection act would help usher in that new era.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company
Don’t expect any-such-thing from this (or any near-Future) Congress…
The mountaineers need to lock and load their guns and take the kind of forceful action that corrupt mining executives and their hired agents understand–force of arms.
I imagine if some big wig executives or their spouses and/or children ended up dying in sudden and violent ways it might make them a little more reluctant to venture into “them thar hills”.
I remember a 60 Minutes story years ago where a courageous and spirited young lawyer sued the EPA for NOT enforcing the rules as per clean water. Under Bush or another “business friendly” regime, we see the rules in place gutted to suit the corporate mandate of profit above all else.
The way forrests in their entirety are felled, mountain tops blasted away, ecosystems left in ruin shows the complete and utter disregard too many people have been taught by the false religious credo that “God gave man DOMINION over nature.” Far far better would be adapting the Indigenous creed that the land does not belong to us, we belong to the land; and through this awareness of synergy, enact ecologically sustainable policies that teach people the value of living simply that others might simply live.
I remember watching the churches begin to embrace the corporate mantra of prosperity… note how this religious endorsement worked very well for the sale and desire for huge homes, huge vehicles, obese bodies, and all this MORE is good bull shit. One lesson that all must master in Earth School 101 is balance. The Biblical parables about how resources were utilized hold symbolic value: the lords of karma hold us to account for how we used the resources (including personal talents) we were given. “To the one much is given, much is expected.” With current tax policies that reward the rich and burn everyone else, as nature is being abused for fast profits is a recipe for disaster in slow motion. I agree with the poster who said he felt like the passenger in a vehicle being driven by a person out of control… with no exit.
Where’s Edward Abbey when you need him?
http://www.amazon.com/Monkey-Wrench-Gang
If those in WV cannot recruit the AG to their cause, with a willingness to take on both the mining cos. and the feds with criminal charges, then I think Poet March may be right. It is unfortunate the cost would be so high.
How about a march on Washington. Environmental march. Now would be a good time right before the election.
The press touts John McCain as Environmental friendly. Nothing of the sort. He rates a big goose egg–zero on the League of Conservation Voters scorecard. He just decided NOT to vote on ANY important environmental matter. He is not a friend of the environment and having him as president would continue the policies of the corporate-run EPA. http://capwiz.com/lcv_stage/bio/keyvotes/?id=192&congress=1102&lvl=C
And wind turbines are a good thing but the real culprit is our wasteful use of energy. Conservation is the single best way to deal with the energy crisis. Unfortunately, Americans don’t conserve unless their pockets are impacted. Cheap Dirty coal needs not to be cheap or dirty.
“The land does not belong to us, we belong to the land”
“Oh daddy won’t you take me back to Mullenberg county, down by the Green River where paradise lay. Well I’m sorry my son but it’s too late in asking. Mr. peabody’s coal train has hauled it away” “…the progress of man..” John Prine
One way fascism vs. environmentalism will play out is that fascists will pollute, sicken, kill, imprison, defame, destroy and impoverish environmentalists, already no. 1 on the Feds enemies list.
When the fascists start feeling the heat, they will dictate environmental rules while trying counter-productively to keep the growth machine going.
As technology grows in response, so will its accompanying pollution, resource depletion, species extinctions and overpopulation.
Environmental problems will move appropriate technology to the forefront, but seemingly not until the world becomes a chemical, bomb pocked, barren radioactive wasteland.
Our remaining children will have to deal with the problems ignorant, fearful, superstitious and greedy conservatives have caused.
If the Internet survives, so will our growing knowledge. Then we may leave behind our bestial past.
Nicely put Siouxrose. Waste, and those who profit from waste, may be our only enemy.
and the only solution to that lies in the hands of we the people. Live simply and starve the beast that is oppressing us. And reject the idea that all is disconnected.
I frequently visit these devastated areas of West Virginia, and I can vouch, most people who actually live in the Coal or Big Sandy river basins, or Wise County Virginia (where the rock killed the sleeping child) oppose Mtn. Top removal.
One would think that they would welcome the mostly nonunion but still (for now) good paying jobs at these mines. But then I noticed something, except for some low-wage and dangerous truck driving or other contractor jobs, nearly all the workers of these mines commute from at least 2 hours away in Kentucky, far from the mines.
At first, first didn’t think much of this, but now I am beginning to suspect that the big union-busting operators - Massey and IGC, in a clever scheme to divide those benefiting, from the greater number that are hurt, are deliberately NOT hiring local residents at the mines.
One thing for sure, for all the destruction of the streams and forests, no one in SW West Virginia or E. Kentucky is getting rich - quite the opposite.
“West Virginia - Open for Business!” - slogan on huge interstate highway signs at the state line.
Footprint
What’s your impact
on our spaceship?
What’s your footprint on our home?
Where’s your footprint on our living Gaia?
Is it soft?
a footpath to a garden….?
Or a searing film of rubber
on the pavement of desire.
What’s your footprint on our living Gaia?
Will a soft wind erase it?
Or is your mark
the heap of hulks of worn out pleasure
from sea to poisoned sea.
Think of all the things you’ve used
Think of what it takes to make
the things you’ve used, discarded, and forgotten.
Is it style you strive for?
Do you have a pact with plunder?
Are you just another corporate number…
that bought the ‘good life’
What’s the half life of your plunder?
What’s your impact? Don’t you wonder?
Thank you, Randolphski. Waxing sometimes lyrical in this forum keeps me sane… there is so much beauty to preserve, and those in power forfeit the long-lasting for the temporal, and waste our futures on their intemperate ill-fated choices today. With most media outlets making TRUTH verboten (spelling?), at least here wise, caring, informed and vex’d souls can gather. Would that our collective energy start the wave that would wash away the sins of this nation, starting with its bogus “leaders.”
“The mountaineers need to lock and load their guns and take the kind of forceful action that corrupt mining executives and their hired agents understand–force of arms.” (quote from the top of page)
Maybe now they can rise up, last night someone from W. Virgina won the PowerBall Lottery for more money than has ever gone INTO that state!
Paradise, words (and music) by John Prine
When I was a child, my family would travel
Down to western Kentucky where my parents were born
And there’s a backwards old town that’s often remembered
So many times that my mem’ries are worn
(refrain:) And daddy won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay
Well, I’m sorry, my son, but you’re too late in asking
Mister Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away
Well sometimes we’d travel right down the Green River
To the abandoned old prison down by Adrie Hill
Where the air smelled like snakes and we’d shoot with our pistols
But empty pop bottles was all we would kill
(refrain)
And the coal company came with the world’s largest shovel
And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land
Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken
Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man
(refrain).
GHW Bush (#1) wanted to decapitate some of the White Mountains(National Forrest) of New Hampshire to have at Gold Silver and other minerals.
These people are sick, if anyone does the work of the Devil it is the Bush’s and Cheney.
Localism relieves urbanites from the guilt of knowing that their electricity consumption is wrecking the Appalachian mountains without their consent. And this is on top of all the many other problems fixed by localism and all the many benefits localism provides to people. Localism solves MOST human induced problems with a single policy that may be practiced by each individual. But HOW does localism solve MOST problems? By taking the economic and political power away from concentrated capital.
Remember that 3/4 of the coal is being wasted. How? The steam cycle at the electric plants are only 25% efficient with the remainder of energy lost to waste heat. Cogeneration allows utilizing most of this waste for other industrial purposes for a savings of that amount of energy that would be additionally consumed in those industries without cogeneration. “free market” capitalists are against cogeneration because it constrains the Executive Chimp in the corner office from exercising “unfettered capitalist freedom”. Also the preservation of resources is not on the capitalist agenda when it “seems” more profitable to to just waste 3/4 of the coal. Later the Milton Friedmanites decided that wasting 3/4 of the coal is better still because the extra activity in its mining benefits the economy. Can you please waste more of it, asked Uncle Milton. This is a central feature of the “American Way” recognized worldwide, with people like Winston Churchill saying things like “Count on Americans to do the right thing after first exhausting all other possibilities”.
We need the wind farm, the Cape Wind Project. But,the wind that will turn the generators is wind that belongs to us all. Deregulation has shown us the fallacy of the private sector being more efficient in terms of the cost to the consumer or in terms of environmental stewardship.
With the current state of our economy and with government looking for solutions to our infrastructures decay, why are we even considering a plan that would let a ‘for profit’ corporation takeover a public resource? Without an unlikely and onerous shift in tax policy, the goal of the corporation doesn’t match the public interest. We can and should form a public corporation to make this windfarm happen and make certain it works in the public’s best interest.
My mother’s family all lives in WV and my grandfather was a coal miner (he died of a Black Lung related illness). The mountaintop removal is ugly. Unfotunately, these folks in WV seem to get all news from FOX and continue to be staunch supporters of the right, who has no desire to help them. My family are mostly Mennonites who are deeply rooted in their christian beliefs, yet they have bought into the right’s garbage.
Clearly, coal mining has not brought prosperity to the Appalachian region, one of the poorest regions in the United States.
Excellent comments from jallan. You said it all.
These folks in WV seem to get all news from FOX and continue to be staunch supporters of the right, who has no desire to help them…
And I am always stunned at how the people of the Appalacian Coal Fields have completely thrown away their culture and all local economic relations. When I travel down there, you can go all through the towns there - Madison, Logan, Matewan, even Beckley, and find the downtown areas largely abandoned - no local-ownded shops, not as much as a diner. Everything revolves around the Wal-Mart and “Lowes” build on a man-made asphalt covered flat spot that required moving half a small mountain to build (no doubt the developer sweetens the deal taking a few coal seams out in the process), out by the “Corridor X” four lane. When I ask where I can get good food, they point to said flat asphalt area with its compliment of Mcdonalds, Pizza Hut up to the Reno’s steak house. A place with home cooking? I ask. I get a confused look in return and the remark: they have a “Reno’s” there! Whatever else would you want?
There is a place run by the state called “Tamarack” near Beckley with supposed West-Virginla made crafts. I don’t know why it is calle “Tamarack”; there is a huge variety of trees in West Virginia, but no Tamaracks. There are local crafts there, but neatly all of them are made by folk-hippie-artist types who immigrated to West Virginla from up north somewhere. Very few actual West Virginians anymore can play old-time fiddle or make a quilt.
There is a growing resistance to the devastation of mountain(top) removal in Kentucky–where the practice is widespread, and where I was born, raised, and live now. It is thoroughly grassroots, and born of necessity. Our Appalachian ridgetops are leveled for a few seams of coal; our waters are polluted with mercury from coal processing; the air is dangerous, the soil irrevocably removed and eroded for miles. Coal slurry “ponds” are precariously located above hollers with schools and homes. Coal execs such as Bill Caylor of Massey drown out the rising tide of frustration, anger, and grief among local people and communities with astounding comments like: flat land is easier to develop (more conducive to prisons and golf courses literally). Appalachian communities have been denigrated as the “throw-away” people for way too long. This heritage of extraction-as-usual for cheap energy for the eastern sea board must and will stop. The people of Kentucky are resisting. Two thousand arrived on the capitol steps in Frankfort last month to demand a moratorium on the travesty–in a huge, completely grassroots lobbying effort to support the Stream Saver House Bill. Local hero Wendell Berry called us to direct action, called us to get in the way of the law if it was destroying out mountains, our water, our world. Do hear this **historic** call to action: http://www.appalshop.org/ccc/?p=87
Also, Mountain Justice Summer, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, Kentucky Heartwood, Kentucky River Watershed Watch, Kentucky Waterways Alliance, Christians for the Mountains, Appalachian Festival of (Inter)Faiths, Kentucky Resources Council, and soooo many other community organizations are strengthening this critical campaign to end the environmental injustice of mountain destruction. Old time musician singers, quilting circles, seed savers, fishermen, ginseng hunters, hunters, people who love the extraordinarily beautiful mountains, mixed-mesophytic forests, abundant fresh water creeks of Eastern Kentucky are banding together to oppose King Coal (which has only brought money in to the rich in all its years) and also to oppose the painfully oxymoronic sham that is “clean coal.”
Join the movement. If you live anywhere in the Eastern seaboard of the US, the very coal that is firing your laptop and your clothes dryer has been ripped from an ancient mountain in Eastern Kentucky (or West VA). This is a reckoning happening: it is time for alternative energy.
thanks.
Thanks Garrett. The only time I was ever in Eastern Ky was back in the mid-60’s (in Buckhorn, near Hazard)and what struck me most was the contradiction of the poverty of the peoples in the midst of such a beautiful rolling green hills landscape. From the sounds of your report, the poverty still remaIns and now even the land’s beauty is vanishing.
You can check out the flattened, bare mountains in SE West Virginia on Google Earth.
Pretty ghastly sight.
Sorry, error. Should be southwest W. Virginia.
Having traveled in West Virginia, i’ve seen the type of destruction wrought by mountain top removal coal mining. There is an excellent
dvd documentary on the impacts of this called “Black Diamonds” which is available from Bullfrog Films. Recommended viewing for anyone who has not yet been to those parts of Appalachia which have been ravaged by this practice. I wish Ms. Keating and Mr Nelson would travel to northern New England and New York, where proposals for on-shore, ridgeline wind farm development often generate fierce opposition from some local residents. One of their oft-repeated claims is that windfarm development comes at the cost of “massive destruction” of mountain ridgelines, among other impacts. And yet the damage done by coal mining doesn’t seem to bother them, mostly becasue they can’t see it from their backyards, and they are not usually thinking about the greenhouse gas / acid rain / and mercury desposition issues that result form coal fired generation. Knowing more about the true impacts of our continued reliance on coal might give them a better perspective on the comparatively minimal impacts of wind development, properly sited. There are better alternatives available than coal, but we need to act on those alternatives before we screw things up beyond repair…. Continued opposition to the development of wind and other renewables is costing us in so many ways….
On this subject, exactly, an important wake-up call for all of us from splendid Wendell Berry. It’s to us to take responsibility. There is no “somebody else.”
www.grist.org/comments/soapbox/2004/10/20/berry/