…using the atmosphere like a municipal dump
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Posted on February 26, 2007
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today form Margaret Swedish:
The headline comes from a great NY Times editorial in yesterday’s Week in Review Sunday section. It is encouraging to see the mainstream press take such a strong position on the issue of coal-fired power plants and carbon emissions — that this has got to stop. In the US right now, there are plans to build 150 more coal-fired plants, most of them with old technology, which means these companies will be responsible for spewing millions more tons of CO2 into our already over-cooked atmosphere.
Since yesterday, the editors added an addendum commenting on the very big deal involving the buyout of TXU. TXU is the big Texas energy company that was planning to build 11 more coal-fired plants for that energy-hungry state, now in the midst of a population boom
This deal is interesting since it was negotiated with a couple of environmental groups. You can read about it here. It shows the growing clout of these organizations in the business of energy, which in turn represents the growing fears in the corporate world about what climate change will do for their bottom line.
Coal is, as we have written previously, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, as well as one of the most destructive ecologically. This is not just a matter of the CO2 that the production and burning of coal puts into the atmosphere, it also also about the mind-numbing and heart-breaking damage done to the land where it is mined. 
Hundreds of coal-miners tunneling underground to dig the stuff out has given way to a more ‘efficient,’ cheaper, and less human labor intensive mode of production — simply stripping away the land to get to the coal veins, using enormous machines.
I remind us once again of the mountain-topping form of mining going on in Appalachia (PLEASE read this stuff and, if you can, get involved in campaigns to stop the practice) or the surface mining in places like Texas. In the mountains, one result is the dumping of toxic waste material into the beautiful valleys, rivers and streams that communities depend upon for their water — not to mention the gross violation to the spirit as we ravage this Earth that gave birth to us.
We should see each lost mountain, each ripping into the Earth by these machines, as a ripping into our own hearts, our own biology, our very beings. It is that important. And unfortunately, it is these practices in which we are complicit every time we turn on the lights.
We need a new way of life. We need a new way of life.
We have used the atmosphere like a municipal dump, spewing the enormous waste product from the fossil fuel burning that supports our way of life into that dump. Problem is, unlike some toxic landfill where our garbage goes — bad enough in itself — this dump is one that contains within it what we need in order to be alive.
That’s why we insist that this is a moral question, the biggest of our time — how we confront the multiple ecological crises coming at us all at once — global warming and climate change, living beyond the Earth’s capacity to sustain and renew life, making a toxic dumping ground of our lands and waters.
Technorati Tags: carbon emissions, coal-fired power plants, greenhouse gases, global warming, mountaintopping, surface mining
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