Fragments From Floyd

Power: to the people. Power–electrical power. It comes at too high a cost when you factor human and forest community destruction of MTR–mountain removal mining–in the debit column. Coal companies mostly haven’t.

But because of the democratizing technologies now in wider use, average citizens have the power to learn, to understand and to have their voices heard, to tell the true cost of MR coal in terms of human health, fragmented communities and buried mountain streams. And it is making a difference. Consider this one major effort by ilovemountains.org to use Google Earth to experience what otherwise might be simply one more abstract catastrophe:

While the site first launched in September 2006, its most recent upgrade this November, which connects coal-burning utilities to residential zip codes, has succeeded in motivating thousands of citizens to write letters. “The reality now is that a lot of people have been calling, and it’s sort of a non-stop rush to keep up,” says Matt Wasson, conservation director of Appalachian Voices, the non-profit overseeing the site.

Google Earth agreed to partner with I Love Mountains and included the site’s National Memorial for the Mountains, the project’s first phase, as part of the Google Earth map software. The Memorial appears on a map of the eastern states as a field of 450 American flags spanning the Appalachian Mountains, each commemorating a ‘decapitated’ mountain. Zoom in close to a single mountain and there’s a step-by-step explanation of how machinery literally scrapes away peaks, and aerial photos of a site the size of Manhattan.

People power. Individual voices have come together–more than 43,000 of them–to say that mountaintop removal mining as it is practiced cannot go on. Yes we need power, but the bigger-hammer approach favored by Mr. Bush and by almost half of those in his party must end. The battle has only just begun.

“The public has clearly spoken: Mountaintop removal is a national disgrace and Bush should not change another rule in order to help Big Coal blow up more mountains and bury more streams,” said Chuck Nelson, a former deep miner and volunteer with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, the West Virginia citizens’ group at http://www.ohvec.org .

The strong opposition to OSM’s proposed SBZ rule is consistent with the findings of a September 2007 survey sponsored by 700Mountains.org project of the nonprofit and nonpartisan Civil Society Institute (CSI) think tank. That survey conducted by Opinion Research Corporation that two out of three Americans (65 percent) oppose the Bush Administration’s proposed rule “to ease environmental regulations to permit wider use of ‘mountaintop removal’ coal mining in the U.S.” The survey also found that the Bush Administration plan to permit wider MTR coal mining is favored by only about one out of four Americans (26 percent), including just 14 percent of Democrats, 27 percent of Independents, and 42 percent of Republicans. Full survey findings are available online at http://www.700Mountains.org.

Yes, it will take you about 20 minutes of your time. But reading the entire text or watching the video of Al Gore’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech will be worth your investment. (Please consider signing the MoveOn.org petition to be presented by Mr. Gore to the assembled delegation at the Bali UN Climate Change Conference Dec 10 - 14).

It is the kind of historic moment in the life of our planet and species that I hope our great, great grandchildren will look back on and see as a turning point where we–at the eleventh hour–took on the daunting task of looking our demons in the eye.

Or will those future generations, such as they might be, look back on Mr. Gore’s words knowing sadly that too few cared too little to put aside their territorial and ideological differences long enough to avoid following to the death our misguided notions that we live more within our national boundaries than within our common planet’s atmosphere.

Do read or watch; bookmark or copy the speech text page, and send the links along to your children and others you love.

Yes, mom and dad, it might mean turning off your favorite weekend sports show or afternoon soap. It may require that you put off that nap or cleaning the gutters or the 101 other to-do’s you’ve given a little checkbox in the ordering of your daily life. But you could do no better (a possible equivalent might be to read to your child) than taking him or her outdoors for a Green Hour.

We’ve probably missed the mark in our narrow focus on “exercise” and “physical fitness” and organized sports when we should have been looking instead or at least in important addition at promoting pure and plain ol’ play. Some play is physical and burns calories, but some of the best is for the sheer joy of creating adventures and finding patterns and using the imagination outdoors. The latter may be more important than we’ve realized in helping shape our little one’s values and understanding and in the end, their care for our world that they will inherit.

Green Hour is an effort by the National Wildlife Federation to encourage parents, grandparents (and other kinds of grown-up children) to take the time to take their kids out under the sky. I encourage you to join the “Community Corner”–a growing resource of connected adults concerned about the consequences of “nature deficit disorder” on our increasingly denatured kids. See you there!

The ink is dry on history’s page. When it comes to our relationship to the planet, it is by and large a sad legacy of deferred responsibility, nurtured ignorance, haughty indifference and willful inaction that we leave in the environmental record of our race.

But maybe it is not too late for us to change. Maybe we are beginning to know our limits and consider how we might live within them in a sustainable future. And one of those limits that we will be thinking more about is the planet’s fresh water.

Though we live on what Jacques Cousteau called “the Water Planet”, less than 1% of the world’s fresh water is accessible for direct human use. With the exception of local droughts over modern history, there has generally been enough water. There will not likely be enough any more.

There are far more of us now. Too much good water has gone bad. Worldwide rain distribution patterns are likely to change on a massive scale in our lifetimes. Australia is in the midst of an unprecedented drought even now.

So what does this have to do with us in southwest Virginia? To me this looming crisis suggests that now is a good time to miss the water.

At a recent “Green Infrastructure” meeting at the Floyd Country Store, someone asked an expert panelist: “what is the storage capacity for water in Floyd County’s geological structure?” and “how will that supply hold up to future demands as the county population grows?” The expert’s answer: nobody knows the answer to that.

We just don’t have the studies to tell us. He did say that, because of our hard-rock geology, we lack the limestone caves and rivers that sustain towns along the I-81 corridor to our north. He noted too that in a recent sample of 101 wells, 37 were contaminated by fecal coliform bacteria.

The take-home message is that we need to better at treating water as a multiple reuse resource. And in Floyd County, we should keep in mind that we get no water from outside our plateau-situated home ground. We could begin to think of harvesting water in barrels and cisterns and by creating “rain gardens” to keep more of what we get and then use it wisely.

The world may soon see inadequate water for drinking and agriculture leading to starvation and dislocation on an unprecedented scale. This threat is already looming in places like India and Pakistan where ground water is falling as much as twenty feet per year. In parts of our grain-producing states, the water table has dropped more than 100 feet.

The century-long gold rush for cheap groundwater is almost past, the vein played out. And for all the schemes of empires and regimes, all the machinations and treacheries of cartels and armies of the world for control of oil, in the end it will be water that we come to see as the most valuable and necessary liquid of all.

Suggested Reading:
Water Worries
Emerging Water Shortages

It’s time to go to the source. Who are the chief offenders in Mountaintop Removal pollution and violations, and where does their money come from?

Washington, DC — The Sierra Club is seeking to join federal prosecutors and other environmental groups in a lawsuit to hold Massey Energy Company accountable for thousands of Clean Water Act violations associated with their mining operations. Massey has been charged by the government with illegal dumping of coal slurry waste, rubble, wastewater and other pollutants into Appalachian waterways. Representing Sierra Club in the challenge are the Appalachian Center for the Economy & the Environment and Earthjustice.

… The government has documented over 4,600 cases of pollution being illegally dumped into local waters by Massey and its subsidiaries, which operate dozens of mountaintop removal and other large-scale surface mines in Appalachia. On the heels of the administration decision to open the door for new, expanded mining, Massey needs to be held accountable before more damage is done.

Massey (and Peabody) are bankrolled by Bank of America. And that’s not okay. Read about protests last week against BOA at Virginia Tech, Harrisonburg, and Asheville.

The VISA that we’ve used for a decade is drawn on Bank of America. I am prepared to take the sissors to our plastic (anybody got a camera?) and mail the pieces to BOA headquarters with a letter explaining WHY.

If a few tens of thousands of us did the same this month, you suppose we’d get their attention?  If the federal government feeds these people, we can starve them. Think about it.

And have you left your comment against the pending (DE)regulation that fatally weakens the Clean Water Act’s enforcement in MTR areas?  To remain silent is a choice. We have the means to be heard. Let’s use it, bloggers.

I ain’t saying…just listen carefully in the weeks ahead. You might hear the neocons rumbling to “bring it on”. Again. From George Packer at The New Yorker

If there were a threat level on the possibility of war with Iran, it might have just gone up to orange. Barnett Rubin, the highly respected Afghanistan expert at New York University, has written an account of a conversation with a friend who has connections to someone at a neoconservative institution in Washington. Rubin can’t confirm his friend’s story; neither can I. But it’s worth a heads-up:

They [the source’s institution] have “instructions” (yes, that was the word used) from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don’t think they’ll ever get majority support for this—-they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is “plenty.”

ECONOMY: Middle English yconomye, management of a household, from Latin oeconomia, from Greek oikonomia-, from oikonomos, manager of a household : oikos, house + nemein, to allot, manage.

ECOLOGY: German Ökologie : Greek oikos, house + German -logie, study (from Greek -logia-, -logy).

Both words much in the news these days come from the Greek root OIKOS for house. Ecology: to study the house. Economy: to manage the house.

We’ve so far mis-managed and mis-understood the workings of our one and only house, the oikos that is our Commons, the basic stock of necessary supplies from which we draw our living.

We’ve failed to bring humankind in any active way into the economy of the ecology. Our economies have been short-sighted, linear, and for the relative few with no consideration of their impact on the other house within which, rich and poor, now and centuries hence, we must all live. We have imperiled our ecology in a thousand ways by a mistaken dualism that sees economy as something separate, other, and independent. It is not.

I encourage you to read how Kentuckian Wendell Berry appraises the relative values of forest, soil and water of the OIKOS against coal extraction. We are selling our birthright for a pot of soup.

Here’s a page I’ve put up that has the information you need (as hard as it has been made to access) to speak out against the weakened protections of watersheds in the process of mountain top coal extraction. Below, the letter I’ve sent via the comments page (see link above) as well as to my congressman.

Please feel free to cut and paste to your blog or web page the whole message from the linked page above. Or just use the letter I sent as a model, editing as you see fit. AND DO IT SOON.

____________________________________________

I am writing in regard to DOCKET ID OSM-2007-0007 which if allowed would further weaken environmental protection of the natural and human environments in the coal-bearing portions of the Appalachian states where mountain top removal coal extraction is currently taking place.

I support as rapid a transition as possible away from our dependence on coal to provide electricity. I support a significant increase in our national budget toward alternative sources of clean energy such as geothermal, wind, solar and other methods.

I support a national effort mandated from the Presidential office and sustained across successive administrations to significantly reduce our inefficiencies and waste of electrical energy and to support and require significant conservation measures that would obviate the purported need for numerous additional coal-fired facilities in the coming decades.

I am strongly opposed to mountain top removal as a means of obtaining coal at the expense of our mountains, the headwaters of our streams and for the health and safety risks that kind of mining poses to families and communities.

I am opposed to this pending regulation that serves those who financially profit from extraction efficiency and punishes all of us who share the harm brought to the commons of the natural communities we call home.

Calling for no conservation measures that might obviate the mandate for ever more coal use into the foreseeable future, this abrogation of the “Stream Buffer Zone Rule” gives Big Coal access to anything it wants, any way it wants to get it. We can carry on with our profligate use of electricity as if West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee did not exist. This is unconscionable. It is the Bush way. History will never forget him. His legacy will be written in the very mountains by their absence. (Emphasis below is mine.)

WASHINGTON, Aug. 22 — The Bush administration is set to issue a regulation on Friday that would enshrine the coal mining practice of mountaintop removal. The technique involves blasting off the tops of mountains and dumping the rubble into valleys and streams.

It has been used in Appalachian coal country for 20 years under a cloud of legal and regulatory confusion.

The new rule would allow the practice to continue and expand, providing only that mine operators minimize the debris and cause the least environmental harm, although those terms are not clearly defined and to some extent merely restate existing law.

The Office of Surface Mining in the Interior Department drafted the rule, which will be subject to a 60-day comment period and could be revised, although officials indicated that it was not likely to be changed substantially.

The regulation is the culmination of six and a half years of work by the administration to make it easier for mining companies to dig more coal to meet growing energy demands and reduce dependence on foreign oil.

… A spokesman for the National Mining Association, Luke Popovich, said that unless mine owners were allowed to dump mine waste in streams and valleys it would be impossible to operate in mountainous regions like West Virginia that hold some of the richest low-sulfur coal seams.

All mining generates huge volumes of waste, known as excess spoil or overburden, and it has to go somewhere. For years, it has been trucked away and dumped in remote hollows of Appalachia.

“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 long been illegal.”

…If current practices continue, another 724 river miles will be buried by 2018, the report says.