Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

It’s been and continues to be a busy week.  But I just need to vent this quickly.  I mentioned the other day that coal ash ponds are all over the place, poisoning communities, threatening life of all sorts.  Yesterday the NY Times gave this story the space it deserves — front page above the fold:

Hundreds of Coal Ash Dumps Lack Significant Regulation

Check out this map from the web page.  You see right there — I live in an area where there is water contamination that poses a risk to human health.  This really cheers me up.

As the article says, the reason for this growing threat is our growing demand for electricity.  We are creating the risk.  Now, since it is rare to find mainstream institutions addressing our ecological crisis, most people do not know just how bad coal is.

Folks, it is bad!  And our erroneously named agency, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), allows this massive dumping to take place because it simply does not know what else to do with it.  So it is being spread all over the place, into our landfills and water systems.  Reports the Times:

…most of these dumps, which reach up to 1,500 acres, contain heavy metals like arsenic, lead, mercury and selenium, which are considered by the Environmental Protection Agency to be a threat to water supplies and human health. Yet they are not subject to any federal regulation, which experts say could have prevented the spill, and there is little monitoring of their effects on the surrounding environment.

So this is my plea.  Everyone is talking about the need to break our dependence on foreign oil.  Equally, if not more important, is our need to break our dependence on coal.  What do we know about this dirty industry?  It is the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it is mined by committing vast environmental damage, it has been responsible for the deaths of more than 104,000 miners over the past century, and now contaminates the towns and communities of miners’ families.  Its waste product is stored in ponds known to collapse from time to time (the recent TVA collapse in Tennessee is hardly the first one), and now we know that the ash waste is in our soil and water and loaded with toxic contaminants.

Do we really want to bear this cost for electricity — when other sources are available, ready to be developed?

To break our addiction to coal, we have to break the stranglehold of the coal industry over our politics.  All of us need to be a part of that, from the point of our personal lives and how we get and use energy, to our community lives and our political lives.

Please visit our ‘Campaign‘ page to find groups that have resources and leadership to offer in this cause.  Visit ilovemountains.org for updates on the Kingston spill.  And let the Obama transition team know that this matters to you!

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Below is a video on the contamination around the Kingston site.  If it does not appear on your computer, you can view it be going to the ilovemountains link above.

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Photo credit: Antrim Caskey