Bush — carte blanche to blow away the Appalachian Mountains
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Posted on September 4, 2007
Filed Under Uncategorized, Justice, Global warming/Climate change, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
President George Bush and his coal company cronies hate mountains, I guess. They especially hate the inconvenience of mountains that sit annoyingly on top of coal seams. They especially hate Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia, Kentucky, and parts of Virginia, rich in coal as they are.
Sen. Byrd hates mountains, too, and a lot of other local politicians in those states. They see ‘investment’ in the economies of their states. They see ‘development’ for private investors. They see the new Wal-Mart going up. They see contributions for their election campaign war chests.
The Bush administration wants to wean this country from foreign oil. The coal companies want to make profits. The US has coal to last many generations into the future. We can wean ourselves from foreign oil; we can develop liquified coal to help power automobiles and fighter jets; we can build more coal-fired power plants to cool our houses on hot summer days and to provide energy for ethanol plants in the midwest.
We can do this by putting vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We can do this by destroying Nature.
I missed citing this story because of traveling, but on August 24th, George Bush was set to issue a new regulation that would give away our mountains to coal companies to blast to smithereens – 
taking the tops off mountains and dumping the mess into valleys, rivers and streams, all across this part of our once-beautiful nation.
I hope you can access this NY Times article about it. It earned the front page, which it deserved, then the story simply went away.
Another little blip on the radar, here today, gone tomorrow, while we rip up more and more of the natural wonder and beauty of this land to feed this country’s insatiable thirst for energy.
“This is a parting gift to the coal industry from this administration,” said Joe Lovett, executive director of the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment in Lewisburg, W.Va. “What is at stake is the future of Appalachia. This is an attempt to make legal what has been long illegal.”
But there is no shame in this administration about these things. So why should we be surprised?
Trouble is, in an effort to build national security through this means of energy self-sufficiency, through the destruction of whole ecosystems, we will end up destroying ourselves, because we don’t exist outside of nature. This course is sending us to a very bad end on this planet – it will lead towards ecosystem breakdown, runaway global warming, and economic ruin in the long term.
It also involves the murder of the human spirit, the killing of the soul. It means the destruction of human communities in Appalachia.
Among the outraged letters to the editors printed by the Times a few days later was this one from a man named Gabriel Fenigsohn:
Let President Bush’s latest surge in his war on the environment serve as a wake-up call to the American people as we witness the razing of our forests, the blasting of our mountain ranges and the decimation of communities.
The president and his coal lobby are on the verge of a victory over the very landscape of our nation. The future is unrecognizable.
Couldn’t say it better myself. Is this really what we want?
I have posted about this numerous times, and it gets harder each time – because each time I do it’s because of yet more gaping wounds being torn into the fabric of life that is our biosphere. But we don’t have to accept this. However, and this is a big ‘however,’ without our determined action to change how we live, to get politically active, to DO something to stop this, it will continue apace.
Ultimately, this is completely up to us. And maybe as one little exercise, while we struggle with the need to alter our lifestyles and consumer ways, reduce our energy consumption, give up our privileged ways of life – while we hesitate to see the connection between our electricity and these atrocities of mountain-topping and strip-mining, we might have a look into the eyes of the children in our lives and ask what kind of world we want to leave for them. Ask ourselves what our responsibility is before their future.
For more info, I recommend these websites:
Mountain Justice Summer
ilovemountains.org
Ohio Valley Envrionmental Coalition
Kentuckians for the Commonwealth
Applachian Voices
Found this on the Kentuckians for the Commonwealth website. Hope they don’t mind my using it:
“When I first saw strip mining 40 some years ago, I couldn’t believe it.
I couldn’t believe that grown up responsible people could do a thing like that. I’m having trouble believing it still.
[The land] … You get it and your children get it and it belongs never to you and never to them, but it belongs always in human terms to whoever is yet to come. And to fail to protect it for whoever is yet to come is a grievous fault — I don’t think the word sin is too strong a word for it. It’s a terrible sin to destroy a gift that you cannot make or replace yourself, that is not given to you except in trust for those who are still to come.”
Wendell Berry, farmer and writer
Photos credit:
Ohio Valley Environmenmental Coalition and Southwings.org
Technorati Tags: Mountaintop removal, MTR, Bush coal industry regulation, Appalachian Mountains, dirty coal
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