Earthbytes

Al Cross | Mountain removal an issue in Senate race | courier-journal.com | The Courier-Journal

You probably didn't notice it, because it got the scant attention it deserved, but there was a fuss this month over coal and energy between the main Kentucky Democrats running for the U.S. Senate. The details of the scuffle are less important than the questions it raises about their relationship, and that of our state as a whole, with one of its most problematic products.

via www.courier-journal.com

I hope all political wannabe's are reading this.

NAACP Issues Call to Expose and Address Rampant Environmental Injustice

via naacpblogs.naacp.org

Hawk's Notes: Jacqueline Patterson, Director of the NAACP's Climate Gap Initiative put up this video with a blog post that calls out several intolerable situations in which communities are being poisoned by industrial wastes. The post was inspired by Patterson's participation in the Poisoned Communities Meeting organized by EPA Region 4 that includes Tennessee and other states in the Southeast. In addition to mention of the situation in Dickson, Tennessee that Sheila Holt Orstead speaks of in the video, she talks about the daily transfer of thousands of tons of coal ash from TVA's Kingston disaster to the Arrowhead Landfill in Uniontown, AL.

Click on the link below the video or here to read Patterson's complete post and related links on these issues.

Save Coal River Mountain!

National Day of Action to Stop the Blasting on Coal River Mountain

The Brushy Fork impoundment is near the new blasting on Coal River Mountain. Photo by Vivian Stockman, OHVEC, flyover courtesy of Southwings.

All kinds of grassroots groups and national organizations have joined together today in a mass appeal to the Obama Administration to use its power to stop the destruction of Coal River Mountain -- the last mountain in the area to be untouched by mountaintop removal mining.

Blasting at Coal River Mountain is especially dangerous because of its proximity to the Brushy Fork coal slurry impoundment that keeps 8.2 billion gallons of toxic sludge from flooding over the Marsh Fork community below it. If shock waves being generated were to knock the structure apart, citizens would have very little time to get out of the way, and as many as 1,000 people could lose their lives.

Perhaps the biggest tragedy at Coal River Mountain today is that new mountaintop removal mining will foreclose a community option for clean water, good jobs, clean energy and homeland security. A detailed study has shown that the ridges on the mountain could support a 328 megawatt wind farm, and many residents have energetically put forward such a proposal to anyone who will listen.

Once the ridges are diminished by blasting, their wind-catching capacity would be substantially disabled. The community would continue to live with the threat of killer sludge floods unleashed by new blasting. More headwater streams, springs, seeps and bogs will be ripped apart and buried. Wells and surface waters already impacted by intense surface disturbance and toxic slurry leachate will suffer further assaults. The oppression and poverty of coal-unconsciousness will pollute the possibilities for a socially just economy where risk, burden, benefit and reward are shared equally.

Wars like this against people and nature in the name of resource extraction for financial gain of an elite corporate minority rage daily across the face of the Earth.

We, the people, need to rage back. Daily.

Today lets do it for Coal River Mountain and our sisters and brothers who live there. Click here and go for it!

   

Knoxville Premier of 'Coal Country'

via www.youtube.com

Hawk's Notes: I hope lots of folks will join us to celebrate the Knoxville premier of Coal Country on Monday, November 2nd, from 6 to 9 pm at the Square Room in Market Square.

The documentary itself -- a look at the ongoing coal war in Appalachia as told by miners who are desperate for coal jobs and coalfield activists who just want their homeland back -- is only one piece of a large project that is underwritten and supported by Sierra Club Productions and the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal Campaign, with additional support from Adam J. Lewis, Earthjustice and the Park Foundation.

In addition to the film that will air nationwide on the Planet Green Network on November 14th, a Coal Country companion book, home video and CD also will be released this month.

Prior to the showing of Coal Country in Knoxville, the LoneTones will perform music from the CD, Still Moving Mountains. Following the film, a guest panel will lead a discussion and be available for questions on impacts of mountaintop removal mining, and other activities in the cycle of coal from extraction to coal ash disposal.

And, if you can produce appropriate photo ID, you can sip free beer (while supplies last!) provided by the New Belgium Brewery.

Tickets for the event sponsored locally by SOCM are $7 in advance or $10 at the door. See you there!