The Depths To Which Men Will Sink Themselves For King Coal

It amazes me how shamefully some people can act, even when they are in public, even when they know that there are microphones and cameras running, even when they are in a House Subcommittee hearing room.

This video shows Representative John Fleming, a GOP representative from Louisiana, questioning Dr Michael Hendryx during a hearing of the House Energy and Minerals Resources Subcommittee today. Hendryx is  the former Director of West Virginia Rural Health Research Center and Founding Chair of the Department of Health Policy Management and Leadership in the School of Public Health at West Virginia University. Among his dozens of published scientific papers are studies of the health effects of mountaintop removal on the residents of Appalachia. In this “hearing” Fleming badgers Hendryx about one of his studies that found cancer rates among residents who live near Mountaintop mining to be twice that of their fellow Appalachians.

            This video is embarrassing. It shows you, like a drunkard lying in a trash strewn ditch, the depths to which men will sink themselves just for that next campaign contribution from King Coal.

Pulling the Plug on Mountaintop Removal Health Research

The saying goes that coal keeps the lights on, but in at least this case the lights are going out. Apparently without much fanfare, the Obama administration pulled the plug on a research project being conducted by the USGS that had been looking into the health effects from mountaintop removal.

            In February of last year the USGS Energy Resources Program discontinued the funding for a study of the air quality in Artie, West Virginia, a very small community that has the misfortune to be surrounded by mountaintop removal mines. You can see Artie pinpointed below in the Google map. The expansive blotches across the landscape are the mountaintop mines.

The study is in its second year and had already resulted in some better understanding of how these large mines hurt the air quality around them and subsequently hurt the health of nearby residents. Folks who live close to mountaintop mining have higher rates of respiratory diseases, including lung cancer.

            The team working on this research has been told that they will be investigating health concerns over fracking. As all agencies have to prioritize their activities around limited budgets, this shift might be seen as a wise move, as fracking, being widespread across the country, has the potential to affect a lot more people than those living in Appalachia around mountaintop removal operations.

            But some folks think that politics may have played a part in the scientific switcheroo, among them Michael Hendryx. Hendryx is a former West Virginia University researcher who has more than two dozen peer-reviewed papers published that establish a link between mountaintop removal and poor health.

            Is this politics or prioritizing? The USGS is continuing other research on MTR, so I really can’t say. I just know it’s a shame that funding gets pulled on needed research, no matter what the reason might be. On the other hand, the science that has been done so far shows mountaintop removal to be harmful to salamanders, fish, people, and other creatures that live in the mountains. We know enough already to see that it should go on no longer.

Increased Risk of Depression for People Living in Coal Mining Areas of Central Appalachia: Calculating the Psychological Costs of Mountaintop Removal

When I ran across this study this morning, I thought, “Well, duh. You needed a scientific study to find this out?” Michael Hendryx, who is at the School of Public Health at Indiana University but spearheaded research into the health effects that mountaintop removal while he was at West Virginia University, and Kestral A. Innes-Wimsatt, a researcher at WVU, looked into the prevalence of depression among those who live among the holocaust of mountaintop mining. Big surprise, removing the mountains for the coal inside leaves folks depressed.

            Overall, around seven percent of the U.S. population suffers some form of depression. Hendryx and Innes-Wimsatt found that around 10 percent of residents in the coalfields of Appalachia suffer from depression and that around 17 percent of folks who live around mountaintop mines have some form of depression. Even after adjusting for other factors that might affect a person’s susceptibility to depression, such as race and poverty, Hendryx and Innes-Wimsatt still found that mountaintop removal coal mining affected the mental well being of the people who live around the mines. From their research the authors conclude:

The odds of a score indicative of risk for major depression were 40% higher in MTR areas compared to non- mining areas after statistical adjustment for other risks. After control for covariates, the risk of major depression was statistically elevated only in the MTR areas and not in the areas where other forms of mining were practiced, compared to the non-mining referent.

Increased Risk of Depression for People Living in Coal Mining Areas of Central Appalachia was published in the online peer-reviewed journal Ecopsychology.  Explaining their findings, the authors suggest that the mountaintop removal depression might be due to solistalgia, a condition of distress during periods of environmental change. This distress is most acute for people who feel particular connections to their environments, as many folks in Appalachia, who can trace their ancestors back for generations, feel.

            Some of the factors associated with depression, such as obesity, binge drinking, smoking, and poverty were adjusted for in this research. In the real world it is difficult to actually separate all this from mountaintop removal. As mountaintop removal reduces the amount of jobs and the economic well being of a community, people feel abandoned by friends and family as they move away. They also feel trapped into an economic system that offers them little chance for secure employment. All of these things depress people, and all of them are caused by mountaintop removal. What I’m suggesting here is that the scientific controls that Hendryx and Innes-Wimsatt imposed on their research, which researchers have to do to maintain scientific integrity, actually winds up underestimating the amount of mental distress caused by the mountaintop mines.

A cemetery left amid the destruction of mountaintop removal. Would you feel good living around this?

            

Hendryx leaving WVU, but research will continue

Hendryx leaving WVU, but research will continue

This just in from Ken Ward's Coal Tattoo blog: Dr. Michael Hendryx is leaving West Virginia University for a new position at Indiana University. Hendryx is presently the Director of the West Virginia Rural Health Research Center and Founding Chair of the Department of Health Policy Management and Leadership in the School of Public Health at WVU. The move, he says, is prompted by his wife getting a great job offer.
          Although mountaintop removal had been a mining practice since at least the eighties, no scientific studies had been performed on its health effects until 2007, when Dr. Hendryx published a study on hospitalization patterns among residents of coal country. A health expert with dozens of other peer reviewed scientific papers published, Hendryx has gone on to produce a number of other studies on the health consequences of large-scale surface mining. The findings of his work are staggering and scary. One study of mountaintop removal published last year found that folks who live close to mountaintop removal mines have cancer rates that are twice that of their fellow Appalachians who do not live close to these mines.
          Hendryx says that his work will continue. Let us hope so.