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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
[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.
