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Warning: Shopping May Prove Deadly to Miners
Miners from Utah to sub-Saharan Africa to China's Shanxi province die, in part, for us.
Anderson Cooper is talking to coal-mining families and politicians in West Virginia again. Ever since that explosion ripped through an underground mine in Montcoal, it seems people all across America are discussing the dangers of mining.
If you watched the news during the recent disaster, you may have heard television anchors and reporters speaking about an "exceptional" tragedy, a once-in-40-years catastrophe that took the lives of 29 coal miners in southern West Virginia. Yet if we look at this tragedy from a global perspective, the tragedy in Montcoal looks, unfortunately, all too typical.
Since the Sago, West Virginia disaster over three years ago, I've been tracking deaths in the global mining sector on my blog, Coal Mountain. Rarely does a day go by when I don't have to add more names and stories to this death roll. Mine collapse kills 16 in northwest Tanzania. Six bodies found in Xinjiang mine collapse. Worker dies in Australian nickel mine. And these are just a few of the headlines from the days since the Montcoal disaster.
What happened earlier this month happens almost every day somewhere in the world: Miners are killed at work. And why do they die--or for whom? Miners from Utah to sub-Saharan Africa to China's Shanxi province die, in part, for us. As consumers who walk the aisles at WalMarts, dollar stores, and suburban shopping malls, we fuel the extraction of coal and other minerals every time we purchase items that are intimately connected to miners around the world.
Every time you purchase something made in China, your item more than likely was made not only in a factory with its own horrific labor conditions, but a factory powered by electricity produced from coal. And each year in China, several thousand miners are killed as they extract that "black gold" from deep inside the earth.
Similar stories can be told about objects in almost every room in your house. To extract precious minerals like diamonds and gold in South Africa, for example, miners risk their lives every day--including 76 miners whose bodies were found in an abandoned Harmony Goldmining Co. mineshaft in Free State last year. And tin? From the precarious and brief lives of Indonesian "tin divers," to the five child miners killed in a collapse in southeast Congo earlier this year, tin extraction is likewise written in blood.
One of the many lessons we must learn from the 29 miners who lost their lives in Montcoal, West Virginia is that our patterns of energy use, as well as how we shop, are intimately tied to those who risk their lives each and every day deep beneath the Earth's surface. As we begin to discuss the changing economy and our spending habits in the post-boom period, it's also time to think more about where the products that clutter our bedrooms and basements and boardrooms come from. And who is risking and losing their lives so that we can have them.
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10 Comments so far
Show AllAnd the alternative to Deep Rock mining, Mountaintop Removal, while safer for the miners is a disaster for the mountains and all who live on them.
We need to move away from Fossil Fuels completely, for a range of reasons, including the human cost of mining.
Moving away from consumerism will move us away from coal mining.
Shopping is hazardous to more than just miners.
I say that it is past time to address the human population of almost 7,000,000,000 people and what it will take to keep this population size viable in view of the fact that resources will not sustain such an irrational number of members of the species of the biggest drain on natural resources, be it in the extraction industries of mining or deforestation or the hunt for more food to foolishly keep trying to maintain an ever growing number of humans.
Zero Population Growth (ZPG) was a very strong movement when I was in college 40 years ago. Today you would be convicted of treason if you mentioned ZPG.
Worse though, would be an inquisition for proposing such heresy and blasphemy of far more rationale than anything that any of the current superstitions try to uphold as truth and duty to that old man in sky watching all our every moves. And as long as the swarming masses don't question, that insures the integrity of the esoteric information over the exoteric that is doled out to those swarming masses. Quite revealing what these clowns through the ages have managed to dupe the people with to gain a stronger hold and control of those blindly following the Pied Pipers.
It is being addressed They are denying Climate Change and amassing great wealth and military power. Then when the crap hits the fan they will be ok. That is why all the world's resources are being gobbled up. The wars for oil and other valuable resoorces. Just my opinion.
It is hard to fathom which is deadlier, the materialistic belief that "you only live once" providing an excuse to grab as much as you can as many times as possible without worry or concern about the indirect consequences of such selfish and spiritually bankrupt behavior. Or the belief that because God created the world only God can end it, in effect downplaying the grave and deleterious effects human activity can (and all too often does) have on the planet. Either belief effectively serves to perpetuate an estranged relationship from a living, breathing, vulnerable planet to which the human species owes its own existence. Unfortunately those who subscribe to such ignorant and egocentric beliefs seem very much to be in the majority.
Environmental justice <-> economic justice <-> social justice ... that is the revolving door we humans need to embrace. Stop the imperialist revolving door(government <-> corporate <-> lobby) that gets its life blood from the struggle, sweat and death of slave labor. Mindless consumerism and mindless procreation are constantly and consistently furthering the corporate control. Just say NO. Buy only what is necessary. Use only what is necessary. Find alternatives that have the least impact on the environment and humanity. Give all miners, all people the necessary opportunities to work and live without destroying themselves, their families, their communities and the environment.
I remember a comment from British radicals from the 1960s that mining was among the occupations that it was wrong for humans to ask other humans to do.
For President Obama to memorialize the 29 dead miners as Americans in the pursuit of the 'American dream' is simply ghastly! Such incredible denial of the reality of America. Mining for the laborers is simply survival. It's a job. Mining supplies jobs when no other options are available. Does President Obama even have a clue as to what it is like to be a miner? Does President Obama understand what is going on in reducing people's lives and the environment to corporate profit?
There is no 'American dream' for ordinary people. It is all simply reduced to survival for the miners and the 29 who died in Montcoal don't even get that!