New York is Burning

When the marquee signs on Broadway light up, a signal will
most likely be sent from the New York Independent System Operator grid
to the Lovett coal-fired plant, where the facility service will shovel
in coal strip-mined from West Virginia mountains that have been clear
cut, detonated with tons of explosives and toppled into the valleys.

In effect, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his borough constituents,
like acclaimed New Yorker author Malcolm Gladwell, will participate in
one of the most egregious environmental and human rights disasters in
American history - the employment of mountaintop removal mining methods
in Appalachia that have literally blown up more than 500 mountains,
wiped out 1.2 million acres of hardwood forests and sullied 1,200 miles
of streams with toxic mining waste. In the process, scores of historic
communities have been depopulated, left in ruin and saddled with
unsparing poverty. Relying on heavy machinery and explosives,
mountaintop removal operations have also stripped the region of needed
jobs and any possibility of a diversified economy.

New York's connection to Appalachia dates back to Washington
Irving's 1819 classic, Rip Van Winkle - the forgotten Appalachia, then,
referred to the Catskills. Nearly 200 years later, the New York Loves
Mountains Festival May 29-31 calls on all New Yorkers to awaken to
their connection to this national scandal in the southern Appalachian
mountain range.

More than 240,000 tons of coal stripmined through mountaintop
removal operations are consumed by New Yorkers every year. Thirteen
power plants in 11 counties burn mountaintop removal coal. And every
day in the lush green coalfields of the central Appalachian mountains,
at least three million pounds of ammonium nitrate and fuel-oil
explosives are detonated to blow off the tops of mountains and topple
the rocks and waste into valleys and streams.

While dramatic moves by the new U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
administration to scrutinize and suspend select mountaintop removal
operations in Appalachia are laudable and deeply appreciated by those
who have endured the helter-skelter of unchecked strip-mining
operations for decades, and while the deliberate move by the U.S.
Department of Interior to rescind the Bush administration's mishandling
of the 1983 stream buffer zone rule is admirable, one indubitable fact
remains: Mountaintop removal is an immoral crime against nature and our
citizenry, and it must be abolished, not regulated.

As former Vice President Al Gore has stated in public, "Mountaintop removal is a crime, and ought to be treated as a crime."

Even more outrageous: Mountaintop removal coal, which provides less
than 7 percent of all coal production in the United States, could
easily be replaced with underground coal or energy efficiency
initiatives, or renewable energy sources.

But it endures.

All well-meaning intentions by the Obama administration aside, this
is what is happening under our current policy: An estimated 400 million
pounds of ammonium nitrate/fuel oil explosives will have ripped across
and devastated our nation's oldest and most diverse mountains since
President Obama took office in January.

So, here is where Malcolm Gladwell, the celebrated New Yorker author
of the bestseller, "Outliers," can help New York break its Appalachian
connection to feuding. In his "Outliers" chapter on eastern Kentucky
hillfolk, Gladwell explored the coalfield feuds as "products of
particular places and environments." Nothing has been more divisive and
tragic as mountaintop removal mining. As a first step toward an
armistice in the coalfields, a proposed industrial wind farm in upstate
New York could easily replace the 3 percent of New York's electrical
needs generated by mountaintop removal coal.

Secondly, Gladwell needs to learn more about Appalachia's
progressive coal mining heritage. The New York Loves Mountains Festival
will kick off on Friday, May 29, 8pm, at the Philip Coltoff Center in
Greenwich Village (219 Sullivan Street), with a reading by the New
Mummer Group of "Light Comes," the first national-touring original play
on mountaintop removal in eastern Kentucky. As a sweeping epic on
Appalachia's historical entanglement with Thomas Edison and New York
City's first coal-fired plant, "Light Comes" is written and directed by
Steinberg-Award winning playwright Sarah Moon, and includes a special
appearance by Appalachian actress Stephanie Pistello, and acclaimed
Kentucky cellist Ben Sollee.

Malcolm Gladwell, like all New Yorkers, needs to see this play in
the Village to glean another vision of Appalachia's coal wars.

When I read Gladwell's "Outliers" recently, my mind drifted back to
an evening at the Village Gate jazz club in 1961, when a striking
contralto took the stage. All the hep cats of jazz were there; front
row was probably lined with those Carolinian hilljacks like John
Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Billy Strayhorn. The Stray actually knew the
diva; had exchanged stories of the backwoods life in the Blue Ridge,
and those revivals straight out of Africa.

When Nina Simone finally sat down at the piano, she dazzled the
crowd with her jazz ballads, pop tunes, Broadway musicals, and those
haunting piano riffs that tailed off with a Bach motif. Then, she
turned to the audience and announced she was going to play a little
folk song - "probably something you'd never heard before"-that she had
learned in the Appalachian woods of western North Carolina. She
performed, "House of the Rising Sun." Before long, Bob Dylan and the
Animals would be covering her famous recording.

Simone, the high priestress of soul, didn't know that the classic
English ballad had actually been recorded by another Appalachian in the
1940s, a coal miner in eastern Kentucky.

Appalachian literary critic Jim Wayne Miller liked to recount an old
tale about flatboaters who trundled down the Tennessee River, passing
house after house at night with a "great fire burning, people dancing,
always to the same fiddle tune." The boaters didn't realize they were
caught in the "Boiling Pot" eddy, going in circles around the same
house, unaware of the greater wonders in the Appalachian mountains.

For Gladwell, the eastern Kentucky coalfields are the poster
children of environmental neglect, victims destined to fail, trapped in
a tragic Scot-Irish destiny of war.

In the 1930s, as coal goons busted into her home and disturbed the
peace in her near famine environment in Harlan County, threatening the
life of her husband, a union organizer, Florence Reece simply tore a
sheet from her calendar on the wall, hummed a Baptist tune, and wrote
down the same words that echoed in Chicago in May, as strikers demanded
severance pay from their morally bankrupt employers: Which Side Are You
On?

Reece, like Nina Simone, was not alone in drawing from the conflicts
in Appalachia to provide a quintessential American form of nonviolent
achievement.

Black History Month was started by former West Virginia coal miner -
the historian Carter Woodson - who at one point could find a teaching
job only in West Virginia. Booker T. Washington rose out poverty in
Appalachia, as did the pioneering black nationalist Martin Delany;
Nikki Giovanni, the godmother of black-arts poetry has hill roots; the
legendary novelist William Demby, the last living writer of the Harlem
Renaissance, wrote about his native West Virginia and its
"beetlecreek"; the jazz and blues legends W.C. Handy, Bessie Smith, and
country legend Leslie Riddle, who transcribed songs for the Carter
Family for years, drew from the forests; Harvard literary critic Henry
Louis Gates Jr. invoked the environment of his West Virginia past in
his memoir, Colored People.

Four months before Sister Rose Parks refused to give up her seat on
a Montgomery bus in 1955, she took a seat at a radical folk school in
Appalachia, where she learned a ballad - "We Shall Overcome" - and said
that for the first time in her life she had met white people she could
trust. The Highlander Folk School trained the shock troops of the Civil
Rights Movement.

In fact, "All the News That's Fit to Print" came from Appalachia, a
motto applied by a young Jewish publisher from Knoxville and
Chattanooga, who resurrected The New York Times in 1896 and set its
course for world success. Adolph Ochs, like Cormac McCarthy, thrived on
all of those hill stories.

As Gladwell writes, "Cultural legacies are powerful forces."

Or, in the words of the Asheville novelist Thomas Wolfe, one of the
greatest literary successes in New York City, hill folks have come down
from these hills and "changed the great American destiny."

The first step in this process in the 21st century is for New York
to end its use of mountaintop removal coal, and allow Appalachia's true
cultural legacies to rise again.