The East, A Movie That Keeps the Term "Eco-Terrorism" Alive

Today the movie “The East” makes its premier. If I hear that it’s good, I’ll probably go see it.

            As the trailer to the film suggests, the movie is about an “eco-activist” group. From the rest of the preview I got the impression that this group, whose members refer to as “The East,” participate in anti-corporate sabotage and are possibly involved in activities that pose dangers to others. C’mon, it’s a thriller. There has to be some real danger in there somewhere.

            My problem with this movie is that it helps to keep alive the term “eco-terrorism.” Although a number of reviewers are not using the term when they discuss the film, other television shows and newspapers are quick to label the movie as an “eco-terrorism thriller” or thriller about eco-terrorists.

            The persons who made the movie involved themselves with some pretty fringy folks as research. For two months, writer and director Zal Batmangij and writer and actress Brit Marling went dumpster diving with freeganists, people who,as a matter of principle, find and eat some of the 40 percent of the food that is discarded in this country. Freeganists are like folks who live off the grid, or the people who publish Adbusters, or the followers of the anti-consumerist preacher Reverend Billy. They are people who see themselves as living in opposition to and as a correction to the materialist and prodigal culture that 98 percent of us buy into.

            Now it’s fine that Batmangij and Marling did some dumpster diving for cantaloupes and rutabagas for a couple of months. And I understand that if you want to make a movie that makes a whole bunch of money, you get a star like Ellen Page, throw in some guns and a car chase or two, and make a blockbuster thriller. To do some real research on a group that wants to or actually does go out and commit acts of terrorism would have been extremely unethical, but it’s a long way from urban foraging to blowing up things and threatening people’s lives.

            There are a number of groups who are pretty radical in their efforts to preserve the environment. And there are similar groups allied in anti-consumerism who participate in culture jamming, civil disobedience, and yes, even sometimes vandalism and sabotage. But there is not a group like The East out there, environmentalists who are also terrorists. My fear is that this movie could very well serve to confirm some wrongly held prejudices and further justify the surveillance that these groups receive and was the topic of may last blog.

The term eco-terrorism, a manufactured neologism that was created to smear the environmental movement, is loosely applied to almost any act of civil disobedience in the name of the environment and has even been used to describe people trampling a field of grain. The term had almost completely died out, as it should. But with this Hollywood blockbuster coming out today, this word receives new life that it doesn’t deserve.

Government and Industry Trample On the Rights of Environmentalists: Ho Hum

I just ran across this bit of news, although I have to admit that I fully expected to find a story sooner or later detailing how government and industry are spying on groups who oppose fracking or are otherwise working for a better environment. It was completely unsurprising to me that Monsanto contracted with a subsidiary of Blackwater to spy on environmental groups. I expected that the FBI would investigate organizations opposed to hydraulic fracking, even with no evidence of criminal activity. It is no surprise to me that Americans for Prosperity, a Koch brothers backed organization, would make harassing FOIA requests for the emails of a college professor who had formed a group opposed to fracking.

            And I guess I’ll continue to be unsurprised as Congress holds hearings on Benghazi and the IRS’s handling of 501(c)(3) filings of the tea party and ignores the trampling of the rights of people working for a better environment.

RAMPS Protests Mountaintop Removal at Alpha, But the Local Press Slants the Story to King Coal

Reading some of the posts to United For Coal’s Facebook page, I am sometimes flummoxed by the amount of support that folks in Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky have for the coal companies. Despite the great harm that these companies are doing to the land and people of Appalachia, and despite of the inability or unwillingness of the coal companies to economically benefit the communities of Appalachia where coal is mined, many of the residents voice unwavering support to Arch, Alpha, and other big coal companies.

            True, there are the three important things that the coal companies provide: jobs, jobs, and jobs. But that still doesn’t explain the blind devotion that has Appalachia residents supporting even some of the most egregious mining practices like mountaintop removal.

            Two days ago, five persons associated with the Radical Action for Mountain Peoples' Survival (RAMPS) protested the practice of mountaintop removal coal mining and the building of gargantuan coal slurry impoundments by blocking the entrance driveway to Alpha Natural Resources, a coal company that extracts coal through mountaintop removal. The protesters chained large industrial equipment and themselves to guard railing. They also placed a 250-gallon container of nontoxic black colored water to symbolize the water held in slurry impoundments. All the protesters were freed from the chains by police and arrested. Traffic was restored to the driveway by 10:00 am.

            Now, looking at the reportage of the arrests by a local television station, it’s easy to see the slant that favors the coal companies. Lindsey Price, the journalist for WCYB in Bristol, Virginia, states in her news report:

The five protesters who were strung across the bridge were from a group called Mountain Justice, a group who protests what they refer to as 'mountain top removal' mining.

“What they refer to” designates a word or phrase not used in general parlance but is used by a particular group, such as, “What Catholics refer to as a Holy Day of Obligation.” or “What scientists refer to as a control group.” Some groups will have terms like these to convey a connotation that they want to communicate to the broader populace, such as when the tea party refers to the estate tax as a death tax. Estate tax sounds neutral; death tax sounds bad. You get the idea.

By using this phrase and putting mountain top removal in quotation marks, Price seems to indicate that it is some sort of value-laden bit of rhetoric. This is wrong. The term mountaintop removal has been used by a wide range of folks for years, from those who oppose it to those who favor it, to describe this efficient but destructive mining practice. The term goes back at least to 1997, when Penny Loeb wrote about mountaintop removal in her August 3, 1997 story “Shear Madness” for US News and World Report.

Price failed to mention that the action of civil disobedience by the individuals was additionally to protest the building of coal slurry impoundments. I don’t know why this aspect of the story was left out of her piece of journalism. Slurry impoundments have failed in the past, flooding valleys with toxic slurry to great ecological damage. People have died when coal slurry dams have failed. With that in mind, near the town of Whitesville, federal regulators recently approved the expansion of a slurry dam that would allow it to grow taller than the Hoover Dam. To me, it is a serious omission to her news story.

Also Price limits the narrative of the protest, the bigger picture of the conflict, to one in which a the spokesperson for RAMPS, Emily Keppler makes a statement about the water pollution or the health consequences due to mountaintop mining, only to be answered by the vice president of Alpha, Ted Pile.

"This exact action was to bring, symbolic of course, the impacts of mountain top coal mining to the headquarters to the people who are causing it, but don't have to suffer the consequences of it," said Mountain Justice supporter Emily Keeppler.

Protesters filled a barrel full of concrete, then put a pipe through it and connected themselves all the way across the bridge with chains. When firefighters cut the protesters free it left piles of concrete on the bridge. "They locked themselves to a giant barrel of dirty water to symbolize how Alpha coal is locking Appalachian to dirty water," said Keppler.

Pile told me last year Alpha had a 99.7 percent compliance rate with the water, and they are constantly monitored at the state and federal level. "We're also a highly-regulated industry, probably one of the most regulated industries in the country," said Pile.

The five protesters were arrested, but Keppler says it was worth it because this protest was personal for those who were arrested. "Their health is being compromised, their communities are being compromised, so they're absolutely willing to risk arrest in order to engage in non-violent action to stop this," said Keppler.

Pile tells us they have not received any complaints or science to prove there are health issues. "Out of about 86 million tons of coal we expect to mine this year, only 22, tons come from the type of mining they're objecting to. That'll probably be close to zero next year," said Pile.

This boils the conflict down to a “he said, she said” scenario, in which the truth of the matter—the science being done points to irreparable damage to Appalachian waterways and dire health consequences for those who live in proximity to mountaintop mining— is left out of the picture. Watching the video that was broadcast for this story, the reporter gives a bit of an upper hand to the coal company. After each statement by Keppler, Price begins the retorts by the coal company vice president with “But Price said…” This gives the impression that the vice president is correcting a misstatement or misunderstanding by the RAMPS spokesperson.

So is this why there is so much support for the coal companies in Appalachia? Folks there turn on their televisions and get new reports like this one?

Global Warming Has Slowed: Is This Good News?

This falls under the “This is not good news, but at least it’s not really bad news” category. Some of the latest research finds that global warming has slowed in the last ten years or so. Apparently the ever increasing temperatures of the nineties have leveled off, at least for a while. No one knows the cause of this slow down. The sun’s activity may have changed, or a lot of that heat may have gone into the ocean. It could very well be a combination of factors.

            This seems to be giving us a bit more breathing room to mitigate carbon emissions and make adaptations to warmer weather and higher sea levels. On the other hand, this leveling off could be temporary, and warming could resume to that rate that we experienced in the nineties. Or, in a worse case scenario, the earth could experience a “rubber band” effect, in which the present period of relatively slow warming gives way to accelerated warming as the atmosphere catches up to what has been predicted.

             The link where I found this news is from Scientific American, a publication that understands that science is complex and often comes to conclusions and observations that cannot fit into a simplistic model. It will be interesting to see how this discovery might play out in the popular press and the “think tanks” that do the PR work for energy companies and big business. I imagine that the narratives that these folks will give to this scientific work may vary from “Scientists Find That Global Warming Has Stopped” to “Climate Scientists Still Confused As Ever.”

            And that could be considered part of the “Bad News” of this story.

OK, Temperatures are rising more slowly. It's still hard to argue with the science. graph from NOAA

From New York to Newtok, Global Warming Affects the U.S. But You Wouldn't Know It From the U.S. Press

The Headline in the Tehran Times spells it out, “Alaska town will likely end up swallowed by the Bearing Sea in 2017.” The story ran about a week ago and describes the plight of Newtok, a small coastal town, due to sea level rise. The story also appeared in the Guardian and is part of a series that the British newspaper is publishing on Newtok and other coastal towns in Alaska that are threatened by climate driven sea level rise.

            Besides The Tehran Times and The Guardian, I found the story in a few Alaska newspapers, but otherwise the story of this town and the assault it is receiving from an ever-rising sea did not appear in any other major news outlet, even news outlets of the U.S.

            OK, news editors may have passed on this story because there are fewer that 500 residents in Newtok, and the town is, despite being in the United States, pretty far away from most Americans. Sitting on the Bearing Sea, it is way closer to Russia than it is to any other state of the union. Even still, Tehran and London, which are way, way far away from Newtok, chose to run this story about America’s first climate refugees. And despite the small number of people affected by sea level rise in Newtok, it is a significant story. These are the very first Americans to be affected by global sea level rise. Besides the human interest of their situation, the story of their town is a harbinger for Seattle, San Diego, and any other city that will be affected by the rising oceans.

            In more than one way, New York City is a world away from Newtok. The city of skyscrapers nonetheless shares in the effects of climate change with the small village. According to this story in the Guardian, in the next ten years New York will experience a 22 percent rise in heat related deaths due to global warming. This is a story of people dying in America’s largest city due to climate change, and, so far, no American paper has this story, even the New York Times.

             I understand that the press is hyperventilating over stories such as Benghazi, the IRS scrutiny of tea party organizations, and I would be loath to suggest that there is any type of conspiracy among the press and big business to keep the coverage of global warming to a minimum. But these climate change stories are significant, and it is disquieting to think that I can be better informed about the effects of global warming on Alaska and New York by looking to London and Tehran.

Update on Eradicating Algerian Sea Lavender: Month Two

It’s now two months since we began our trials of differing eradication methods for the Algerian sea lavender in the estuary at the mouth of the San Diego River.

Algerian sea lavender after receiving two months of solarization treatment

Solarization is not having the desired effect on the sea lavender. Perhaps we might have had better results had we begun the solarization later in the year, with longer, hotter days.

Scraping treatment after one month

Scraping treatment after two months 

Hand pulled treatment after one month

Hand pulled treatment after two months

One month ago, the growth of native flora in the plot where the Limonium ramosissimum had been hand-pulled had been about twice that of the plot that had been scraped. Now it looks like the natives in the scraped plot are catching up. Cover of natives in the hand-pulled plot is now about 35 percent, while native cover in the scraped plot is about 25 percent. Regrowth of the sea lavender in both the scraped and hand-pulled plots is about the same, with each plot having about 20 of the invasive plants.

            Considering that the results of treatment are virtually the same and how much more labor intensive hand pulling is than scraping, scraping might prove to be the favored method for removing the sea lavender. Stay tuned for updates on the Sea lavender.

With Amendment 846 Senator Joe Manchin Does the Time Warp For King Coal

With a couple of legislative amendments, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin hopes to make a big time warp to benefit King Coal.

            Recently, a federal court ruled that the EPA does in fact have authority over issues of water quality and could deny a permit to pollute streams with valley fills from the Spruce Mine No. 1, a mountaintop removal operation in West Virginia, even after those permits were granted by the Army Corps of Engineers.

Manchin, in the position of helping the coal industry as best he can, is offering amendments 846 and 850 to the Water Resource Development Act, a bill that is receiving a lot of pressure for passage because of the generous amounts of pork that lies within its legislation. These amendments would strip the EPA of its authority to deny fill permits, as the agency had done with the permit for the Spruce Mine.

            Manchin’s Amendment 850 would, among other things, reduce the time that the Secretary of the Interior could comment on a valley fill permit from three months to one month, making the task impossible to adequately administer. The truly astounding thing about his other amendment, Amendment 846, is that it has an effective date of October 18, 1972, the date on which the Clean Water Act was passed into law. Backdating this amendment, Manchin is attempting to make a legislative WABAC machine to a time when mountaintop removal was but a gleam in the eye of King Coal. According to the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, the backdating is intended to give the green light to a handful of mining operations whose permits were denied by the EPA over the decades. (The Coalition is waging a campaign for folks to call their Senators demanding that these amendments be stripped from the pending legislation.)

UPDATE 5/14/13: neither of Senator Manchin's amendments made it into the final bill, the Water Resources Development Act. The mountains and people of Appalachia are somewhat safer, as well as the fabric of the space-time continuum that were threatened by these amendments.

The Press Yawns During the End Mountaintop Removal Week in Washington

For the last five days Appalachians, as well as others, knocked on the doors of congressmen and talked to federal agency representatives and members of the Obama administration in an annual event that is has become known as the End Mountaintop Removal Week in Washington, which is sponsored by two organizations working to end mountaintop mining, Alliance for Appalachia and Appalachian Voices, and has been going on for eight years.

            On Tuesday, the Washington Post and the Seattle Post Intelligencer ran news stories about activist groups petitioning the EPA to set more reasonable conductivity standards, which are used to measure pollutants, for Appalachian waters. Both papers devoted about 75 words to the subject and neither of them mentioned mountaintop removal or the Week in Washington shindig.

            Beside these brief dispatches, there was no other news coverage of the campaign. There was nothing in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on the event, and no mention of it on CNN. Along with all the Volvo-driving, wine-sipping, and brie-eating liberals, I listen a lot to NPR, and I didn’t hear a mention of the Appalachian Week in Washington. The New York Times had no story either.

            There were, admittedly, some headline grabbing stories this week. Three young women thought to be missing in Cleveland for the last ten years were found imprisoned in a suburban house. On Capitol Hill Congress continues to hammer out immigration reform. There were also manufactured stories, like the GOP trying to turn the Benghazi tragedy into a scandal that received front page attention in my local paper and plenty of time on television news, particularly Fox News.

            But all that the End Mountaintop Removal Week in Washington received was a total of 150 words, less than half of the length of this entire blog, for the efforts of people trying to ameliorate the living conditions of Appalachians and keep some of the ecosystem of the mountains intact.

Give Me the Child at Seven and I will Give You a Coal Industry Supporter: CEDAR in the Schools of Appalachia

The headline of the Logan Banner, the paper of record for Logan West Virginia, reads Logan Middle School first at CEDAR of Southern West Virginia. Beneath the proud headline the news story goes on to explain that a group of eight graders won a first place award at a “coal fair” for producing this rather clever video found here.
              CEDAR stands for Coal Education Development and Resource, a program developed by the coal industry 20 years ago and whose somewhat wordy goal is “to facilitate the increase of knowledge and understanding of the many benefits the Coal Industry provides in our daily lives by providing financial resources and coal education materials to implement its study in the school curriculum.” CEDAR started in Kentucky, but has since spread to other coal producing states.

The targeted curricula are K through 12. The financial resources are grants given to teachers. It’s basically dollars for school supplies, a seductive offer for many teachers in cash-strapped schools. The “coal education materials” are booklets, pamphlets, and DVDs with titles like “What Everyone Should Know About Coal” and “America’s Fuel.”

As you can see in this video, these fairs are not small. They may be some of the biggest things going on for weeks in some of the smaller communities of Appalachia.

Though some of their materials encourage teachers to “form an informed and unbiased opinion of the coal industry,” the goal of the coal industry’s pamphlets, posters, and DVDs is to instill in young minds a positive outlook of the coal industry, even using junk science to do so. One of the DVDs offered by the organization is called “The Greening of Planet Earth” that makes the assertion that “our world is deficient in carbon dioxide, and a doubling of atmospheric CO2 is very beneficial.” CEDAR reviews the teachers’ lesson plans of their curricula, particularly if the organization feels that lesson plans have unsupported bias against the coal industry. Could it be considered an unsupported bias against the coal industry to point out that CEDAR is completely wrong about the world having a deficit of CO2?

Bad science, aside, is CEDAR something that we want allowed in our schools? Or is the captive audience of a school classroom a place where any industry or business is allowed to hand out pamphlets and posters to schoolchildren? Even if you think that is perfectly fine for an industry to gain a large presence in schools, shouldn’t there be some sort of academic fairness doctrine that says that if you’re going to have a coal fair one week, you have to have an alternative energy fair the next week, or a fair that concentrates on environmental consequences of coal mining?
                Or maybe they could have a fair that encourages critical thinking, coal or no coal.

Why I Rant So Much: A Primer on Mountaintop Removal

Just a couple days ago I talked to a friend who reads this blog. She said that she appreciated the post about locavores and why I am not among the geographically restricted dieters, but she confessed that she doesn’t always “get” what I write about, specifically why I so oppose mountaintop removal coal mining.
          I grew up around coal mining. I remember seeing strip mining and am familiar with the effects that surface mining can have on the land and streams. I’ve written about my memories of passing over Simpson Creek, the one whose pollution was made infamous in song, on my school bus. I have read and researched a great deal about the development of surface mining into mountaintop removal and seen the films such as On Coal River that describe the suffering of people who live around mountaintop mining. I guess I forget that other folks aren’t as obsessed with this as I am and may not know some basic stuff about mountaintop mining. So here is a quick primer on some of the practices of mountaintop mining and their effects on land, streams, and people.

Mountaintop Removal is Big

Mountaintop removal is so big that people have a hard time imagining it. The Hobart Mine in West Virginia stretches for about ten miles from one end to the other. To get an idea of the scale of the mines, images below from Google Earth, show the footprint of the mine compared to the cities of New York and San Diego.

The Hobart Mine would dominate Manhattan

The Hobart Mine would swallow up all of downtown San Diego, a portion of Balboa Park, and stretch into National City

The Hobart Mine is just one of the more than 500 mountaintop removal mines across Appalachia. Below are Google Maps satellite images of southern West Virginia and Kentucky. The mines are so large that they can be seen from space. There are towns and cities among the hills in these images, but they are unnoticeable compared to the images of the mines. The Environmental Protection Agency estimated years ago that by now, 2013, the total area to be deforested and destroyed by mountaintop mining would be as large as the state of Delaware.

The grey splotches among the trees are the mountaintop mines. More than 500 of these stretch across Appalachia

When the coal miners blow up a mountain, removing the topmost portion to get to the coal beneath, they take all that was once a mountain and dump it into adjacent valleys in what is appropriately called valley fills. A mountaintop removal mine might have a permit to fill five, six, or seven miles of streams with these valley fills. In the last 35 years valley fills have destroyed 2,400 miles of Appalachian streams. If you were to take all those streams and lay them end-to-end, they would stretch almost the full length of the Mississippi. Of all the practices of mountaintop mining, scientists think that valley fills are the most destructive, because they destroy headwater streams and the surrounding forests, severely affecting the mountain ecosystems.

A valley filled with rock from a mountaintop removal mine in Appalachia image from biologicaldiversity.org

Valley fills may be hundreds of feet deep image from windpub.com 

Before coal is shipped off to power stations it is first “washed” to remove impurities, some of the material that is washed from the coal, a combination of clay, silt, water, and bits of coal is called slurry and is stored in impoundment ponds and reservoirs. Impoundments contain toxic residue, some from the constituents of the rock and coal that has been mined and some from the mixture of chemicals that are used when coal is washed. Slurry and impoundments have been around for about as long as folks have mined coal. There are at least six in Harrison County, West Virginia, where I grew up, with plenty more across this country’s coal mining region.

The impoundments can be dangerous. After heavy rains an impoundment dam at Buffalo Creek, West Virginia failed releasing a 15 to 20 foot black wave of water and slurry into the hollow below. More than 1,400 houses and mobile homes were damaged or destroyed. There were 125 residents killed and more than a thousand were injured. In 2000 an even larger impoundment failure occurred in Martin County, Kentucky, releasing 306,000,000 gallons of slurry, more than 30 times the volume of the oil released by the Exxon Valdez, into the valley below, making it the worst environmental disaster ever to occur in the South.

The increased size and volume of the mining operations increases the size, volume, and risk from the impoundments, increasing their risk. Below is an image of the Brushy Fork impoundment, made infamous in On Coal River.

Image from ilovemountains.org

Just to give you an idea of the size of the impoundment, If France decided to bring a little savoir faire to the Mountain State and build an Eiffel Tower next to the Brushy Fork impoundment, the dam and the slurry behind it would dwarf the Parisian structure.

Mountaintop Removal Relies on a Bad Interpretation of the Law

Mountaintop removal relies on a legal fiction created by a court ruling in Kentuckians for the Commonwealth v. Rivenburgh in 2002. Clearly, filling up valleys with the rock permanently destroys the valley, its ecosystem, and stream at its bottom. Mining companies are allowed to get permits to fill up valleys with rock from their mines under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act. The original purpose of the 404 permits was to allow for the placement of fill or dredge for the construction of bridges and other construction in and around rivers and lakes. The valley where the mining companies in Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia are thus allowed the fiction of considering the filling of a valley with debris as being like that of a construction site, as though a bridge or levee were being built next to their mountaintop mine.

            Another fiction of mountaintop mining is that one of the original rationales for the practice was that is would create flatland for Appalachia and provide areas where there could be civic and industrial development. But places where mining operations have ceased have not seen the development of towns or industrial parks on the former mine sites.

Mountaintop Removal Does Not Help People

Appalachians have not benefited from mountaintop removal. Southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, where mountaintop removal is most prevalent, has some of this nation’s highest rates of poverty.

Image from the Appalachian Regional Commission arc.gov

Mountaintop Removal is Harmful

Besides not benefiting financially from the mines, Appalachians suffer when mining afflicts their towns and homes. As depicted in the documentary, On Coal River, mountaintop mines despoil the wells that Appalachian residents rely on for drinking and bathing. Recent scientific research has found that mountaintop mining severely affects the health of the people who live around the mines, with increased incidences of cancers, birth defects, and other health problems. Science also indicates that creatures that live downstream from mountaintop mines are adversely affected by the runoff from the mines. Bird populations also decrease around these huge mines.

OK, there are plenty more details, but that's the primer. I hope that it makes a little clearer the enormity of mountaintop mining and the effects that it has on the people and land of Appalachia.

No Thanks, No Eco-Friendly Light Bulbs For Me, I'm a Conservative

A couple generations ago, concern for clean air and water and a desire to preserve open spaces and living things had enjoyed wide support across the political spectrum. Starting with the Reagan administration, however, the idea that you could be both a conservative and an environmentalist became as rare as Birkenstocks on bankers.

Reagan got the ball rolling, labeling environmentalists as extremists. And places like the Heritage Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and other “think tanks” that do the PR work for large corporations and GOP politics have continued to shoe horn concern for the environment into a politics of left-right. Now we have more evidence of the success of their work.

            In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, people were given information on the benefits of compact florescent light bulbs over incandescent bulbs. In a shopping situation created by the researchers, the more conservative individuals in the study were less likely to buy a costlier florescent bulb when it was labeled with an environmental message than when it was unlabeled. In other words, the environmental label motivated the conservative shoppers to not purchase the more environmentally friendly product.

            So what is going on here? What are the motivations of people wanting to avoid buying a more environmentally friendly product? Although in some ways I might be considered to be politically conservative, I don’t believe that would be a term to describe my entire political outlook. And I cannot claim to have the ability to climb inside the minds of these conservative shoppers. My guess—and that is all it really is, a guess—is that the rhetoric of Reagan, conservative “think tanks,” Fox News, and talk radio has so poisoned the idea of environmentalism for people who identify themselves as conservative that many of these folks will avoid anything to do with eco-friendly anything, even if it is at a cost to them.

            For these conservatives environmentalism is anathema. It is comparable to the way people in this country felt about communism or the way segregationists thought about black people. It goes way beyond anything that they have experienced or what they may be able to reason and has gone into the deep-seated realm of prejudice. So as they are weighing the costs and benefits of buying a new light bulb and they see an environmental sticker on the product, that strong feeling in the gut goes off that says environmentalism = bad.

            So they buy the incandescent light bulb.

            Of course the implications go beyond what people screw into their light sockets. When you have enough folks to have these sorts of prejudices, as long as you have organizations like the Competitive Enterprise Institute carrying on the legacy of Ronald Reagan, it means that any sort of progress on energy policy or fighting climate change is a difficult uphill battle.

UN Human Rights Group Examines Human Rights Abuses Associated With Mountaintop Removal

When we hear the phrase “human rights abuses” we think of war torn regions of the world, the “Disappeared” of Chile’s Pinochet regime, the mangled limbs of those tortured by SAVAK when the Shah ruled Iran, and other numerous atrocities.

            Well, add to the list West Virginia and its citizens affected by mountaintop removal. The United Nations Working Group on Business and Human Rights has just recently visited communities that are close to mountaintop mines in the Mountain State and is now calling for an investigation into allegations of human rights abuses related to mountaintop removal.

            The group did not cite specific examples of rights abuses, but increasingly scientific evidence is linking mountaintop coal mining with cancers, birth defects, and other ailments. As seen in the movie, On Coal River, mountaintop removal threatens the safety of Appalachian residents and disrupts their lives. A report from the working group is expected in June of next year.

            Besides visiting communities affected by mountaintop mining, the UN group also met with officials from the West Virginia Coal Association, a trade association that represents the coal industry, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, and members of the Blair Mountain Heritage Alliance, Keepers of the Mountains, the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, Coal River Mountain Watch, and the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, all of which are organizations opposed to mountaintop mining.

            I am uncertain if the work of this group will make much difference to the lives of West Virginians affected by mountaintop mining. The UN does not have the authority to do anything about mining practices in West Virginia, and even if they did, we wouldn’t listen to them. It’s still disturbing to read the words “West Virginia” and “human rights abuses” in the same sentence.

So Where Did That Rutabaga Come From? Why I Am Not a Locavore

Just a few blocks from where I live there is a farmer’s market every Sunday. From nine in the morning till early afternoon a parking lot and adjacent city street are transformed into a fresh food Mecca. There are a few vendors selling jewelry and tchotchkes, and booths where you can buy a cup of coffee or a hot tamale, but the greater majority of the market is taken up with farmers selling tomatoes, lettuce, beets, avocadoes, and lots of other fruits and vegetables. Some things are very seasonal. It’s only for about a month in the fall that you can find persimmons for sale, and corn is a late summer item.

A few of the vendors truck in their wares from quite a distance, but most of the farmers have their farms within the county. The distances these growers travel are usually in the range of around 50 to 60 miles. There is no set definition and no organization that sets standards for what a locavore is, but as I understand it, this food that comes in from local farms would be considered the table fare for a locavore.

Locavore dieting has cropped up (excuse the pun) in the last ten years. It seems to have been spurned on by a study[i] published in 2001 that found, quite surprisingly, that the average distance traveled from farm to table for a morsel of food in the United States was 1500 miles. Apples, oranges, pork chops, onions, overall those items were shipped 1500 miles before people ate them at their dining room tables or at a restaurant. It’s as though every time folks in Boulder order a pizza for home delivery, they call up their favorite pizzeria in Pittsburgh.

Call any vegetable, no matter where it comes from

Because food travels less, eating locally is believed to cut down on pollution and the production of greenhouse gasses. Aside from supporting local, usually family farms, people become locavores to reduce their carbon footprint. I buy a lot of these fruits and vegetables from the local growers. I’ve even been to a farm or two where my food is grown. I now check the labels on produce at the grocery store, and I do not buy the grapes from Chile or the apples grown in Australia.

                But I am not a locavore.

I am not a locavore because the diet would deny me a lot of things that I’ve always enjoyed eating, like bananas. The second reason I don't hold to a local diet is that the carbon footprint of a cantaloupe or ear of corn depends on more than how far that bit of foodstuff traveled. It also depends on how that food traveled. A follow-up study[ii] to the one mentioned above found that the large semi-trailers favored by agribusiness had fuel efficiencies six times greater than the midsized trucks usually used by smaller farmers. This means that the Ralphs or Kroger supermarkets that ship potatoes on a semi-trailer 500 miles to your local store are using less fuel per pound of potatoes than the organic farmer who uses his pickup to take his wares 100 miles to the neighborhood farmers’ market.

Shipping food by rail is more efficient than using a semi-trailer, and cargo ships are the most efficient of all, about two or three times as efficient as rail. The least efficient mode of transport is using automobiles, particularly considering that cars are rarely filled to capacity. Using a car to transport food is even less efficient than shipping it by air. The fuel used to carry a five pound bag of potatoes one mile by car can fly those potatoes 43 miles by air, truck them 740 miles by semi-trailer, ship them 2,400 miles by freight train, and send them 3,800 miles—about the distance from Los Angeles to Guatemala—by cargo ship.[iii]

A tomato grown in California’s Central Valley and shipped across the country by rail releases less CO2 into the air than if you drove your car four miles to your local Whole Foods to pick up that tomato.

            I am not a locavore. I get a good feeling, knowing that I’m supporting my local farmers, when I buy produce at my local farmers’ market, but I don’t worry about picking up a watermelon grown hundreds on miles away in Mexico or a bunch of bananas from farther away. Those banana boats are not warming the planet considerably more than other ways we move food around.

And Harry Belefonte Can Still Sing Day-O

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[i] Pirog, R., et al. “Food, fuel, and freeways: An Iowa perspective on how far food travels, fuel usages and greenhouse gas emissions.” Ames, IA: Iowa State University, Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, 2001.

[ii] Pirog, R., and A. Benjamin. “Checking the food odometer: comparing food miles for local versus conventional produce sales to Iowa institutions.” Ames, IA: Iowa State University, Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, 2003.

[iii] Brodt, S., E. Chernoh, and G. Feenstra. “Assessment of energy use and greenhouse gas emissions in the food system: A literature review”. Davis, CA: University of California, Davis, Agricultural Sustainability Institute, 2007.