Makayla Urias, 8, from Pike County, Kentucky holds contaminated water samples taken from her home which is surrounded by mountaintop removal coal mining.
If you haven't played with the new interactive map at iLoveMountains.org, please go check it out.
Over the past few years, several health studies on the interrelationship of human health and mountaintop removal coal mining have added to the urgency -- an urgency understood by citizens of Appalachia for many years -- to keep the mountains intact. Scientific evidence that this destructive mining practice hurts people and nature is piling up just about as fast now as surface mine operators can blow up the mountains and pile mining waste into Appalachian waters!
The interactive map will allow you to explore the relationship of mountaintop removal coal mining to poverty, changes in life expectancy, birth defect rates, or deaths from cancer, heart or respiratory diseases. The map allows you to view the data at various scales, from regional to state to county-level correlations.
You can also view summaries of the studies that correlate mountaintop removal coal mining with human health consequences.
After you play with the map, please visit the iLoveMountains action page. It lists several things anyone can do to make sure Makayla Urias and every other child in Appalachia has a fair chance for a long, happy and healthy life.
Aerial view of TVA's Bellefonte Nuclear Generating Station, Hollywood, Alabama
On August 18th, 2011, the TVA Board of Directors will decide whether or not to raise Bellefonte from the near-dead. It will cost around $12-billion to do it -- if ratepayers are lucky. TVA had already dropped $6-billion into construction of the facility when they decided to pull out (with each reactor more than half-finished) in 1988. Then, almost one year ago, on August 20, 2010, the TVA Board of Directors authorized $248 million for continued developments of one of the abandoned Bellefonte units.
If money-talk doesn't already have you on edge in these days of debt ceiling and budget squabbles that have pre-empted a more critical discussion of getting people back to work, there are other worrisome elements of the plan to bring Bellefonte back from the living-dead. The Babcock and Wilcox Mark C 205 reactor design is an old one, dating back to the 1960's. This particular design has never been operated in the United States. And it has never even been lisenced by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. After Bellefonte was abandoned, the reactors were targets of asset recovery in which reactor parts were "cannibalized" for use elsewhere.
Some people who live near Bellfonte are -- like many others in the jobless states of America -- less concerned about safety than finding work in the revival. The nuclear industry, along with their brothers in fossil fuels, know that the promise of jobs is cheap leverage in the process to gain support for their ill-advised projects.
In a recent post at EnergySavvy, some pretty convincing number-crunching suggests that for the cost of replacing just one nuclear plant that would create around 2,400 jobs, you could get 1.6-million energy-efficient homes and create around 220,000 jobs. Other studies speak to the promise of clean, renewable and sustainable energy development to revitalize both the economy and the environment. (See articles/reports here, here, here, here and here.)
Many groups in Tennessee are organizing to oppose expansion of Bellefonte and plan to be at the TVA Board meeting on August 18th. But the fun begins on August 5th with a press conference and rally.
Here's a great video invitation to the Zombies Unite Rally on Friday, August 5th at Market Square in Knoxville, Tennessee:
You can also find information on the Zombies Unite Rally event page on Facebook.
Among the groups uniting with the Zombies against Bellefonte are United Mountain Defense, Students Promoting Environmental Action in Knoxville (SPEAK), Statewide Organizing for Community Empowerment (SOCM), Bellefonte Efficiency and Sustainability Team (BEST), Sierra SCENE, Mothers Against Tennessee River Radiation (MATRR), and Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League (BREDL).
See also articles from the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy SACE:
Prevent TVA's Bellefonte Reactors
Bellefonte Nuclear Plant Factsheet
I have no doubt that my first and perhaps strongest connections to nature were anchored through my earliest years of life on a farm in eastern Kansas. Those experiences are part of what led me to start this blog, and from the first post on I have kept the No Farms, No Food, and Friend of Farmland action campaign badges from American Farmland Trust in the sidebar.
When I got the most recent AFT newsletter I decided to see if there was a story that would make a good update on Earthbytes for the work this organization does. That's when I found a great blog article by Julia Freedgood, the managing director for Farmland and Communities at AFT.
In her post, Reconnecting Farmers and Consumers Makes Dollars and Sense, Freedgood talks about a study on Ohio's food systems by Ken Meter that speak to the potential for localization of food markets to boost local economies:
Food is an important industry in the Buckeye state. Ohioans purchase $29 billion of food per year, and the food industry accounts for 13 percent of the state’s economic activity. According to Meter, state policies that focus on distant markets rather than local consumers are detrimental to the economy—resulting in a $30 billion economic outflow each year, more than four times the $7 billion of total farm production in the state.
Recapturing these dollars would create significant economic opportunities, especially in Ohio where personal income increased 70 percent and food consumption increased 32 percent over the past 40 years. In recent years, direct sales from farmers to consumers rose significantly: 45 percent in Ohio (just shy of the 49 percent national average). The value of those sales rose 70 percent in the state. While the total sales figures remain small, farmer-to-consumer sales are one of the fastest growing sectors of the food economy, offering valuable opportunities to keep farmland in farming, especially in areas where farmers have close access to consumers. Indeed, a report on Northeast Ohio proposes that a 25 percent shift to local products could result in the creation of more than 27,000 jobs!
Some of the goats just down the lane at A Place of the Heart Farm. You can find Mac and Adrienne at the Market Square Farmer's Market in Knoxville. [Photo credit: Cathie Bird]
Everytime I drive past my neighbors' organic farm on my way out of the holler, I can't help but think what a great example it is of how localization of food markets could work for Tennessee. It's at least one way we could move beyond economies that require tearing down mountains and eliminating productive farmland.
Freedgood's full post has links to at least three full reports on localization of food markets and the economic activity it brings. There were other interesting articles in AFT's July newsletter that is available online.
Here's a short video from AFT, Saving the Land that Sustains Us:
