Earthbytes

Continued Bombing of Appalachia Is Not Okay

As I sat watching yet another video of a West Virginia mountain being pulverized, I found myself thinking of the final scenes of V for Vendetta...

In particular, I thought of the scene in which thousands of people in identical masks surround the headquarters of government corruption from all directions. As fireworks erupt over the city, they take their masks off. And who is revealed? Terrorists with wild and crazy looks in their eyes? Nope. Women, men, old people, kids...just ordinary folks like you and me. I'm wondering if it will take something like this to end the insanity of the ongoing war against communities of Appalachia.

Massey Energy blasts another chunk off of Cherry Pond Mountain in West Virginia (Bo Webb photo).

I feel compelled to replay the images, to look again through the flying boulders and swirling dust, to listen around the edges of Bo's voice.

Dust -- miniscule flakes of silica, really, with arsenic, selenium, mercury and any other element that happens to live in the rocks up there -- drifts down through the hollow. You can hear Bo start to clear his throat and cough. That's what people do when they breathe in pulverized glass.

Here's something I don't get: How come Massey Energy's (or any other mining company's) detonations aren't considered a criminal act? Every time they set these things off, a microcrystalline death cloud spreads out from the charge's epicenter and into living, breathing communities of people and wildlife.

Coalfield residents (including miners and their families!) all across the United States are breathing this stuff. So are the people near ground zero of TVA's coal ash disaster. And who knows how many others?

Toxic silca dust from a dynamite blast on Cherry Pond Mountain settles on Clay's Fork and Peachtree communities in West Virginia. (Bo Webb photo)

This is genocide, and it's not okay. If anything needs to be killed off, it's the practice of mountaintop removal coal mining.

Coalfield Activists Pitch Green Futures for Mining Communities

With each foot anchored in a different paradigm, coalfield activists step into a third day of meetings in Washington to end mountaintop removal coal mining

In some ways, the 2009 Week in Washington to End Mountaintop Removal could have ended on Monday and still been a success, but the 150+ folks who showed up just keep on truckin' for clean water and green futures for all.

Any path forward -- out of the environmental trainwreck perpetrated by the coal mining and utility industries -- will require a natural evolution from what we had, to what we have, to what we want. That's why many of us pursuing social and environmental justice realize that our action has to be multidimensional.

When we work to add cosponsors to the Clean Water Protection Act (H.R. 1310) and get the thing passed, we're basically dealing in the paradigm of regulation and enforcement. Like many other folks, I've had a lot of trouble with this over time because I came to see its limitations. Martin Luthur King found words about this that have given me some peace:

"Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless."

One has only to look at the desecration in the wake of mountaintop removal mining operations to know that such is an act of heartlessness. So we're not afraid to take these people on through legislation, rules and enforcement of the law. I think our own hearts tell us that without such restraints we might have little hope of a future to plan for.

Photo: Three-fifths of Team Tennessee (Vickie, Jean and David) at the Tennessee Tuesday breakfast sponsored by Senators Alexander and Corker.

Keeping one foot in the realm of regulation and enforcement gives us some time to simultaneously move the other foot in the new directions toward a green economy that is just, inclusive and rests on a foundation of respect for the Earth, including its communities of non-human beings.

When they leave Washington this week, many of the participants will go home to continue projects focused in this vision of the future. So, it was important that some of the activities in DC to stop mountaintop removal were complemented with networking to build a foundation for this new paradigm in Appalachia and all of the United States. 

One of these was a meeting with staff of the Council on Environmental Quality that included this photo op with Van Jones, CEQ's new Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation.

(WIW Team members with Van Jones: Ann League, Carl Shoupe, Van Jones, Mary Ann Hitt, Bob Mullins and Maria Gunnoe.)

Van Jones has (in both heart and mind, in my opinion) a strong vision for the future that is informed by successes and failures of the past. Because of his understanding of the present in historical context, this vision-- embraced with much hope by many in U.S. coalfields -- has great potential for unifying people who have even one heart cell attuned to the Earth that sustains us. I can't think of a better person to be in a position to help us all shape energy and climate policy that will protect both people and nature, and allow us to move forward toward a national life that is more equitable and sustainable.

I'm pretty sure that life will give us clean water and won't have mountaintop removal mining in it.

Mountaintop Removal Mining & Clean Water: A Marriage From Hell

Some relationships take a long time to go to hell, but when mountaintop removal mining moved in with Dan Branch on Zeb Mountain in 2003, it only took two months.

Right: Aerial photo of the Zeb Mountain mine 2 months after mining began. (Doug Murray photo/Southwings flight)

Mountaintop mining at Zeb Mountain in Campbell County, TN was my first encounter with the heartbreaking consequences of this deadly practice. It takes little imagination to understand that when the first trees go down to clear a new mine site, the whole watershed is disrupted...just a little disturbance at first, but it grows.

Less than 2 months after permit approval for a mine at Zeb Mountain in July of 2003, the Office of Surface Mining (OSM) issued a notice of violation to Robert Clear Coal Corporation on September 11: "Permittee has failed to place excess spoil material in a controlled manner to ensure mass stability and prevent mass movement during and after construction. Permittee must remove slide mass."

By November of 2003, the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) had also issued a notice of violation of the Clean Water Act. TDEC inspectors noted discharges from one particular sediment pond on every one of their visits between August and November, 2003. They issued the violation when they found this basin to be discharging water that was not in compliance with Clean Water Act standards required by the mine's NPDES permit. Readings both upstream and downstream from this sediment basin showed violations of in-stream water quality standards.

By January of 2004, less than 6 months from the initial assault on Zeb Mountain, Dan Branch, whose water supplies larger streams supporting the endangered blackside dace and other aquatic species, was pretty much a wreck. TDEC issued a Commissioner's order to the operator, Robert Clear Coal Corporation, for damage done to this headwater stream.

A short time later, Robert Clear's operation was taken over by National Coal Corporation. It took years for the required work to restore Dan Branch to be completed. And lucky we are, I suppose, that anything was done at all, for, you see, it was "an Act of God" (according to the new operator)and I guess no mere mortal should be held accountable for any of it.

This is the kind of baloney that goes on every day in the coalfields of the United States. This is why 150 people from nearly 30 states showed up for End Mountaintop Removal Week in Washington 2009. They will meet with staff, Representatives and Senators to deliver a simple and heartfelt message: co-sponsor and pass the Clean Water Protection Act (H.R. 1310).

Stay tuned for more blogs over the next few days and please visit iLoveMountains.orgfor more information on the Week in Washington.

Support an Act of Common Sense to Protect Waters of the United States

 Clean Water Protection Act  Flows Back Even Stronger in 2009

Lots of Appalachian coalfield citizens were disappointed when the Clean Water Protection Act (CWPA) failed to make it to a vote in Congress last year. We had to feel good, though, when Reps. Pallone (D-NJ), Reichert (R-WA) and Yarmouth (D-KY) reintroduced the bill on March 4th, 2009 with 117 bi-partisan cosponsors, more than twice the number who signed on in the previous session.

The idea behind the original introduction of the CWPA was to challenge an executive rule issued early in the Bush Administration to change the definition of "fill" in the Clean Water Act in a way that allowed tons of mine waste to be dumped into waters of the United States. Appalachian watersheds have lost about 2,000 miles of streams to this deadly practice because of huge amounts of fractured rock generated by mountaintop removal coal mining.

Today, a hundred or more coalfield citizens and activists have gathered in Wasgington, D.C. to coordinate an effort to meet with their Congressional representatives and encourage more of them to sign on as cosponsors of the CWPA. Many of these folks literally live at the heart of the most savagely brutalized landscapes in Appalachia, while others are just a few more detonations away from it. Too many already suffer the consequences of water befouled beyond fitness for human or animal use because of mountaintop removal and valley fills. Others live below coal slurry impoundments that leak black sludge into aquifers, impoundments big enough to wipe out whole communities if they break.

These people are in their Nation's Capitol this week because they believe that passage of the CWPA will go far to end destruction of Appalachian headwaters, whose health and character ultimately configure the chemical, physical and biological functioning of the larger river systems into which they flow. These folks' efforts will impact their homes first, but if you live somewhere between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River, chances are that their efforts will also impact a river near you. But no citizen of the United States is really off the hook for this Act of kindness toward our nation's waters. If you need water for any reason, wherever you live, you need to help pass this bill. That's an act of common sense.

You don't have to be in DC to help out:

Check to see if your Representative has cosponsored HR 1310, The Clean Water Protection Act by going here: http://www.iLoveMountains.org/action/write_your_rep/. 

If they've signed on, please thank them; if not, please write or call them and ask that they cosponsor the Clean Water Protection Act.

On Tuesday, March17th, you can participate in a National Call In Day for the CWPA. You can use a Call Your Rep tool that will connect you to your Representative without charge. Make your call here.

I'll be blogging and tweeting updates from the Tennessee team and others. You can follow me at Twitter. (If you are familiar with hashtags, we'll be using #CWPA.)

On Facebook, you can follow updates by attending the Week in Washington event at http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=70136997528 Invite your friends!