Earthbytes

Leveling Appalachia: The Legacy of Mountaintop Removal Mining by : Yale Environment 360

via e360.yale.edu

Hawk's Notes: This is one of the more awesome film documentations of the war on Appalachia that I have seen.

As I was watching, the nagging question came back to me as it often does when I see such things or hear people in such utter denial of the horrid consequences of mountaintop removal mining: how can people do such a thing to their homeland?

It occurs to me that the murder of mountains can only happen under the same circumstances that one human being can kill another -- somehow that other being must become an enemy, less than human, worthless.

I think this must at least unconsciously be how human beings could justify blowing up mountains: the Earth, nature itself, becomes an enemy that must be devalued and destroyed to save one's own life. Stuck in this imaginary, sometimes even psychotic, relationship to our planet, such people become blind to the fact that the opposite is true: to live, to preserve human life, we must cherish and love the life of the Earth as much as our own.

Celebrating Biodiversity in Unexpected Encounters

Living beings are definitely in a wind-down phase here in Frog Pond Hollow, but I still take my camera on walks with my dogs and cats. While they run around, I take pictures of bugs, plants and anything else that looks interesting. With fewer flowers around and colder temperatures, it seems that creatures are more willing to keep feeding while I photograph them. Here are the images of recent unexpected encounters:

A crab spider hangs out on some goldenrod.

This bee had his head buried in a Great Lobelia flower...

So did this little bee-like thing. He was moving much faster, though.

I walked over to get a quick photo of a squash blossom in my neighbor's garden and found this bug deep inside. Is it a squash beetle?

I started photographing a bumblebee down inside another squash blossom. While I was snapping away, another bumblebee flew in. You can see his bottom. Way down below is the other bee who is pretty much coated with pollen (he's partly obscured by a flower part). I thought at first that he was part of the plant -- until the plant part started crawling around!

Flickr: Amazing Nature Photography of Thomas Shahan

via www.flickr.com

Holy moly! I'm pretty proud of my amateur bug pictures but this guy's work is absolutely awesome! He is seriously tempting me to upgrade to a camera with greater macro capabilities when it comes time to replace the one I have. What a truly amazing planet we live on. I'm really grateful to Thomas Shahan for his view of it. Please check out his Flickr photostream for more of his work.

I also found this interesting interview.

The Politics of Enchantment -- In These Times

The premodern cosmos possessed a kind of enchantment. Humans were never alone: The crane flying overhead, the ground beneath one’s feet, the great oak tree near the creek, the creek itself, could all be addressed as kin by those who knew the right words and rituals.

Modernity, as has been widely noted, drained the cosmos of that magic. In Max Weber’s formulation, the West’s elevation of “rational empirical knowledge” led to the “disenchantment of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism.” Radical and utter isolation followed. Carl Jung, a contemporary of Weber, grasped that loneliness had tragic implications: “Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos. He is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional participation in natural events, which hitherto had symbolic meaning for him.”

Yet, the idea of the human world as separate from the rest of nature never gained complete acceptance. A few mavericks and romantics have always seen such isolation as wrong in substance and unbearable in spirit. Over generations, they repeatedly fought back, launching waves of protest, both cultural and political.

via www.inthesetimes.com

Hawk's Notes: This should be a great read for environmental philosophers, deep ecologists, panarchists, social-uplift environmentalists, and for all "who experience an attachment to animals and places so overwhelming that they feel morally compelled to protect them, and who look to nature for psychic regeneration and renewal."

Hmmm...sounds like me and a few other people I know.

I hadn't heard of Gibson's book (from which this piece is adapted) but I think it just jumped onto my must read list: A Reenchanted World: The Quest for a New Kinship With Nature (Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 2009).

Companies Like Monsanto and Dupont Practically Own the Meal on Your Plate | | AlterNet

Seeds are the bedrock of our food chain, the basic element of our sustenance. If they were to disappear tomorrow, we would follow them into oblivion with lightning speed. And, the most pressing issue people are often unaware of is that they are currently under grave and direct threats.

Sounds ominous, huh? Wondering why? Well, the answer is two-fold. First, we have witnessed a staggering loss of genetic diversity. In the past century, world agriculture has lost 75% of its genetic diversity to globalization, standardization and monoculture farming; 95% of the tomato varieties that existed in 1909 have become extinct; 91% of corn – gone. In addition, 95% of the cabbage varieties your great-great grandma grew have been consigned to oblivion. And though this may not seem on the surface to be a big deal, in reality it could mean the difference between full bellies and famine.

via www.alternet.org

Hawk's Notes: Yet another warning about loss of biodiversity. I think it's remarkable that people assume that messing around with the smallest elements or systems doesn't matter simply because they're so small and numerous. This article talks about how this has happened with seeds, even the largest of which is not that big.

I write often about headwater streams that so many people assume are insignificant because they are small. Corporate coal barons kill them off everyday in mountaintop removal mining operations, and apparently think nothing of it. The Tennessee Legislature considered more than a dozen bills last session that would have resulted (or will?) in ferocious assaults on the state's headwaters.

And then there's atoms -- need I remind anyone of the explosive results of messing around with those small particles?

We really need to get as many ordinary Earth citizens as possible to understand nature and man as a system. Large parts or small, all parts are inter-related. To mess with one is to mess with all. Then this mass of informed, engaged citizenry could stop the mess being made of our planet.

Understory: Cultural Genocide in Appalachia

via www.youtube.com

Hawk's Notes: I found this video of Goldman Prize winner Maria Gunnoe -- talking about all the mountaintop removal mining that surrounds her home in Bobwhite, WV -- in a great article posted by Brandon at The Understory, the official blog of the Rainforest Action Network (RAN).

The article includes several videos shot in a lengthy interview with Maria. What struck me as important about this post is the story it tells about intimidation, vandalism, dirty politics and outright violence against coalfield citizens who are brave enough to tell the truth about what's happening in Appalachia at the hands of corporate coal.

Add to this the poisoning of streams and wells, high cancer rates and health stressors, obliteration of forests, native plants and aquatic species that happen when mountaintop removal comes to the neighborhood -- all happening under federal SMCRA permits, by the way -- and I have to stand with Brandon, Maria and many others who see this as no less than cultural genocide.

Please check out the Understory article -- read it, watch it, then share it widely.

Jeff Biggers in The Nation: The Coalfield Uprising

When the Environmental Protection Agency declared this year on September 11 that all pending mountaintop removal mining permits in four Appalachian states stood in violation of the Clean Water Act and required further review, Lora Webb didn't have time to join in any celebrations. As she and her husband, Steve, a coal miner, packed up their possessions and left his family's ancestral property outside Lindytown, West Virginia, Lora was more concerned about finding a place to sleep that night.

via www.thenation.com

Hawk's Notes: Jeff Biggers article in The Nation takes a long, hard look at real impacts of mountaintop removal coal mining to real people, and a grassroots "coalition of the willing" to take on corporate coal.

This is an AWESOME article! Please use the link below the excerpt or go here.

EPA Takes Another Step in Review of 79 Mountaintop Removal Permits

On September 11th I posted an article of EPA's announcement that it would review 79 mountaintop removal mining applications, and summarized the steps in the ongoing review process. Yesterday, EPA notified the Corps of Engineers that -- in light of available project data, existing environmental conditions in the watersheds, and the nature of impacts predicted -- all 79 permit applications continue to raise "potentially significant environmental and water quality issues."

EPA says their concerns fall into 4 key areas having to do with avoidance and minimization of impacts, potential water quality violations, inadequate information regarding cumulative impacts and inadequate evaluation of mitigation plans to compensate loss of headwater streams.

Many of the points made in EPA's September 30th letter to the Corps echo concerns that grassroots and environmental activists have been yelling about for years, hoping somebody was listening.

Now that I see some of those arguments smiling back at me from an real EPA document, I'm sensing some light at the end of the corporate mountaintop mining shaft that Appalachian mountains, watersheds and communities have endured for way too long.

While coalfield activists may pause for a breath, nobody that I know plans to hibernate or hold a victory dance. Yesterdays announcement is still just one more step toward protection of people and nature through adequate assessment of impacts and consistent enforcement of the law.

Lots of folks have been writing about all this since the news broke yesterday. Here are some links to other articles and documents:

Letter from EPA to Corps of Engineers on 9/30/09

EPA finalizes list of 79 permits for further reviews

EPA: All 79 mining permits need further review

The Alliance of Appalachia Praises EPA Decision

EPA Concern Over Mining Permits -- 49 Are in Kentucky

Advocates Fight Mountaintop Removal --IPS

EPA Holds Up Coal-Mining Permits as Firms Fume

Be sure to let EPA and President Obama know what you think. For more information and to take action, go here.

The War on Appalachia and Hedges' "War on Language"

AP / Mohammed Ballas

A Palestinian boy aims a toy gun as he stands next to a mural of militants in the West Bank’s Jenin refugee camp. The Arabic graffiti reads: “Many people held weapons but few used them against their enemies.”

via www.truthdig.com

"Those who seek to dominate our behavior first seek to dominate our speech," notes Chris Hedges in his great article today, The War on Language.

I'm working on a paper at the moment that speaks to this very issue, though from the perspective of psychoanalysis and my experiences as a grassroots social and environmental justice activist. When I read this article, I snagged it for my archives as a possible reference for my paper.

Hedges uses graffiti on walls in Gaza as an example of impoverished language that traps us in "a binary world and renders us children with weapons."

To me, the language of engineering and politics is impoverished with respect to the rich, multi-faceted, multi-dimensional language of headwater streams or watershed ecosystems.

A point that I'm developing in my paper is that this is essentially a restriction on the language that citizens can bring to the defense of nature and our communities. And that puts limits on what we can do or how fast we can do what's needed to avoid the tragic consequences of poverty-stricken language being played out on Appalachian mountaintops.

With this article Hedges shines a light on these language wars from a different arena of human interaction. The situations he talks about ring a bell for me as I think about people trying to protect their homelands from the coal barons.

Stop Work Order Halts Fracking Operation in Pennsylvania

The stop-work order, which was accompanied by new citations issued for the third spill, will interrupt development of seven new wells that Cabot is currently drilling, and intending to fracture, in Susquehanna County. The citations were similar to those levied earlier in the week, including a failure to contain fracturing fluids.

    The state's order gives Cabot two weeks to re-submit an "accurate" Pollution Prevention and Contingency Plan and Control and Disposal Plan for its well pad sites in the county. It gives the company three weeks to complete an engineering study of the equipment and practices used for hydraulic fracturing.

via www.truthout.org

The people of Dimmock, in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania finally got some big help from the state to stop Cabot's hydraulic fracking in their community until those operations undergo an intensive review.

I really appreciate Abrahm Lustgarten's ongoing reportage of this important issue. I can't imagine living with a threat of exploding water faucets in my house. I hope lots of folks will stand strong in support of this community and others where this underground assault on water quality and homeland security is coming to light.

Please see the whole article here. You can see the DEP's press release here.