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.

Senator Mitch McConnell Wants to Fast Track Mountaintop Removal Permitting With the Coal Jobs Protection Act

Not to be outdone by Joe Manchin, his Democratic colleague from neighboring West Virginia, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell announced plans to introduce a bill similar to Manchin's EPA Fair Play Act that would restrict the ability of the EPA to protect our land and water. In his press release, McConnell was joined by West Virginia GOP Representative Shelly Capito, who is introducing similarly worded legislation to the House of Representatives.

            McConnell’s “Coal Jobs Protection Act” would place time limits on the EPA’s approval process. Under the bill, the EPA would have 270 days, or slightly less than nine months, to grant Clean Water Act 402 water pollution permits. The agency would have a year’s time to conduct environmental assessments on proposed valley fills under the Clean Water Act’s 404 permitting process, something that the EPA estimates to take, on average, about three years. The proposed legislation goes on to say that, “Failure to act within that time frame for approval of a 404 permit would mean the application is approved, the permit is issued, and the permit can never be subject to judicial review.” In other words, McConnell wants hastily approved permits for mountaintop mines or they will automatically be approved by default. And after that, they cannot be questioned.

            The bill would also disable the EPA from regulating carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants.

            Unmentioned in the press release is the recent court victory that allowed the EPA to revoke the permit for the Spruce Mine No. 1 in West Virginia, but it does include figures on declining coal production in Kentucky, stating that in 2012 the state’s total coal production fell by over 16 percent and direct employment from coal mining fell by over 22 percent, with 4000 miners in eastern Kentucky loosing their jobs. Of course by including these figures in the press release McConnell implies that the EPA is somehow responsible for this lowered productivity and job loss, when it is in actuality the extremely low prices for natural gas that have industry abandoning coal.

Teaching Southern Californians About Southern California

I’m a member of the California Native Plant Society. I haven’t been a member very long, only about eight or nine years. As part of our outreach and education efforts for our local chapter, I lead hikes through some of our canyons and open spaces in which I explain to folks about the native flora and plant communities here. This past weekend I conducted a hike through Florida Canyon, a fairly well preserved native area in Balboa Park.

            I grew up in Appalachia, a place where, even if you didn’t eat them, everyone took note of the Mayapples, whose broad green leaves would blanket forest floors in early spring. In late summer we picked blackberries and in fall we would gather walnuts.

Besides the fruits and nuts that we would harvest and eat, most folks had some notion of the flora around them. It would be impossible not to notice the azaleas and dogwood trees blooming in springtime. And people had some idea of the oaks, sycamores, and elm trees growing around them.

San Diego is far different. We have two plant communities that are native to the coastal area where the city is, coastal sage scrub and coastal chaparral. Whenever people talk about these plants, if they talk about them at all, they are usually just called “brush.”

The landscaping around our houses and along our highways is all from somewhere else. We plant eucalyptus from Australia, iceplant from southern Africa, palms from the south Pacific and Mexico, and scores of other plants from the Mediterranean and South America. What we have made is some sort of international never-never land and is ubiquitous in our landscaped environment. It is possible to wake up in the morning, drive through your neighborhood, fight traffic on the freeway, and make your way to the office park where you work without seeing a tree or any other kind of plant native to southern California.

So for a lot of folks, even for people who have lived in southern California all or most of their lives, it can be an astounding eye-opener when I explain to them about the native sunflowers and sages that live in the canyons and open spaces around them. Many of them have never been up close and personal with their natural environment.

For southern Californians to be so cut off from our natural environment does have consequences. The average American uses about 90 gallons of water a day for cleaning, drinking, bathing, and other purposes. San Diegans use about 150 gallons a day, more than 65 percent more. Those 60 additional gallons that we use every day are used to water our lawns and nonnative plants that we have planted in our lawns and parks.

This water we ship in from hundreds of miles away. Half of our water comes from the Colorado, which is so overused and drawn upon that it usually dries up before it makes its way to its mouth in the Sea of Cortez. Also, shipping all that water takes effort. It’s estimated that 20 percent of the energy used in California is used to move water from one point to another, which has implications for energy security and climate change.

So folks join me on these native plant hikes. I hope they learn something and maybe appreciate their native environment. I hope that it somehow makes a difference.

Senator Joe Manchin Wants to Tie the Hands of the EPA by Reintroducing the EPA Fair Play Act

Earlier this week the U.S. District Court of Appeals handed West Virginia and the environment a victory when they ruled that the EPA could withdraw a previously approved Clean Water Act permit for the Spruce Mine No. 1, a permit for the largest such mine operation to be performed in West Virginia.

            In an unsurprising political move, West Virginia’s Democratic Senator Joe Manchin reintroduced the EPA Fair Play Act, Senate Bill 272. The summary of the bill reads thus:

EPA Fair Play Act - Amends the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (commonly known as the Clean Water Act) to remove the authority of the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to prohibit the specification of any defined area as a disposal site for discharges of materials into waters of the United States, or to restrict the use of any defined area for specification as a disposal site, once the Secretary of the Army has issued a permit for dredged or fill material.

To understand what is going on here, a little background on mountaintop removal is needed. Under the Clean Water Act, the Army Corps of Engineers is granted the authority to issue permits allowing for the discharge of pollutants or the placement of dredge and fill material into our nation’s waterways. Permits under section 404 of the Clean Water Act—intended to be used to allow the use of fill or dredge for the construction of levees, bridges, or other structures in or around water—are generally easier to get than 402 permits, which control the discharge of pollutants into lakes and streams. A court ruling that goes back over a decade established that the Corps can allow mountaintop removal operations to fill in valleys and streams with their waste material under 404 permits, as though these valleys and streams were somehow construction sites instead of dumping grounds.

            The ruling this week stated that the Administrator of the EPA has the authority “to deny or restrict the use of any defined area for specification (including the withdrawal of specification) as a disposal site “whenever he determines” the discharge will have an “unacceptable adverse effect” on identified environmental resources.” That is, the EPA, even though the Army Corps of Engineers has granted a 404 permit, can still determine that a valley fill would pollute or otherwise harm the environment and revoke the permit.

            So the EPA Fair Play Act would tie the hands of the EPA. No matter how bad a valley fill or other disposal of overburden might be, once the Corps issued a 404 permit, the EPA could do nothing to protect our rivers and streams.

            It is unsurprising that Joe Manchin, a strong supporter of the mining industry, would reintroduce this measure. West Virginia’s other Senator, Jay Rockefeller, supports the bill. He has at times stood his ground against King Coal, but in more recent years has grown friendlier to the industry. I imagine that this bill could get a lot of support in Congress, passing the Senate and House. We can hope that it receives a veto from president Obama.

Atmospheric CO2 Levels Soon to Pass 400 ppm

I have my clock radio set to KPBS, our local news station, and this story came on this morning right as I was trying to wake up. The Scripps Institute of Oceanography anticipates that the concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere will begin to exceed 400 parts per million by next month.

            The polar icecap will not suddenly melt and Bangladesh will not be inundated with tidal floods on the day that the 400 ppm threshold is passed, but it does mean that the goal of keeping the global temperature from rising an average of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit will almost certainly be unmet. According to the campaign 350.org, established by author and activist Bill McKibben, scientists have estimated that 350 ppm of CO2 is the highest level of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration that will still allow the earth to avoid substantial harm from warming.

            The radio report talked to Ralph Keeling, who is carrying on the work of his father, Charles Keeling. Working through the Scripps Institute, the elder Keeling initiated the recording of atmospheric CO2 at Mauna Loa, Hawaii in 1958. Those initially recorded levels were at 316 ppm. According to the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, which handles climate change data and information analysis for the Department of Energy, the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide in 1750, at the dawn of the industrial revolution and the mass use of fossil fuel, was 280 ppm.

            So we are passing the 400 ppm threshold; the whole world is passing the 400 ppm threshold. With our factories and automobiles we have raised the concentration of carbon dioxide by over 40 percent. It seems that this is news that should go beyond our local radio station.

            

The Keeling Curve from Scripps Institute of Oceanography

Good News For the Mountains: The EPA Can Revoke the Spruce Mine Permit

This is some great news! The U.S. District Court of Appeals has ruled that the EPA can withdraw a previously approved Clean Water Act permit for the mountaintop removal Spruce Mine No. 1. If there were to be any mine to get the thumbs down from the EPA, it should be this one, which would have been the largest such operation ever in West Virginia.

            More and more scientific evidence has been gathered showing a link between mountaintop removal and cancer, birth defects, and other health problems. And today the National Commission on the Health Impacts of Mountaintop Removal Mining, an independent group of physicians and scientists, has published a report that summarizes the findings of studies on the health effects of mountaintop removal and calls for congressional action that would place a moratorium on all mountaintop mining “until such time as health studies have been conducted that provide a clearer understanding of the associations between adverse health impacts, notably adverse reproductive outcomes, and MTR mining.” The paper, The Health Impacts of Mountaintop Removal Mining and sponsored by the Center for Health, Environment & Justice, recommends that the funding for further health studies should come from the corporations that have profited from mountaintop mining.