Breaking news: Citizen groups seek OSMRE takeover of West Virginia DEP’s mining program

Breaking news: Citizen groups seek OSMRE takeover of West Virginia DEP’s mining program

This story is a big deal. People are standing up for the rule of law in West Virginia.
           This is from Ken Ward and his blog Coal Tattoo. Ken is a reporter for the Charleston Gazette. His reporting over the last 20 years on the subject of coal, coal mining, and mountaintop removal has been outstanding.

Complain About Your Tap Water? You Could Be a Terrorist

In Maury County, Tennessee yesterday, at a meeting convened to address citizens’ concerns over the quality of their drinking water, an official of the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation said to residents, “We take water quality very seriously. Very, very seriously. But you need to make sure that when you make water quality complaints, you have a basis, because federally, if there's no water quality issues, that can be considered under Homeland Security an act of terrorism [Italics mine].”

            Sherwin Smith is the Deputy Director of the TDEC’s division of water resources, and what he said to this group of concerned citizens is, in a large sense, true. If someone were to put poison in the aqueducts that bring Colorado River water to southern California, threatening the lives of millions, that could most certainly be considered terrorism. Correspondingly, if someone were to make the threat of poisoning the aqueducts or to make the false claim that they had done so, spreading fear and panic, under current law that could be considered terrorism as well.

            Smith, however, was not speaking to representatives from al Quaida hell bent on dropping anthrax into the local water tower. He was speaking to the Statewide Organization for Community eMpowerment, a civic group that had been working with Maury County residents to address water quality complaints. Some county residents have complained about cloudy, odd-tasting water for years. In recent months children have become ill; some say it’s because of bad tap water.

            Industry, some GOP politicians, and right wing rhetors have been quick to label folks that get in the way of industry as terrorist or eco-terrorists. Examples are here and here. And the FBI as made it easy to blur the line and label minor offenses as terrorism. This is the first time that I’ve run across a state government official doing the same. It’s seems to me that it was just his way of telling this group to shut up, to intimidate the citizens who showed up for this meeting. In this way, he is using this rhetoric of terrorism just as industry and right wingers do, as a verbal cudgel.

            It’s difficult enough to make a complaint to government officials. People should not have to fear that they will somehow be considered in league with Ted Kaczynski or Osama bin Laden if they call up someone at the water department to say that their tap water is cloudy and tastes funny. And considering that extractive industries are quick to attack those who question or criticize practices, it could be a facile tactic on the part of the oil and gas industry to pick op the ball from Sherwin Smith and label the folks who say that their wells have been fouled by fracking as nothing but a bunch of terrorists.

Environmentalists Sue Landowners Over Pollution From Closed Coal Mines

The damage to people, communities, and the environment have always long outlasted the life cycle of a surface mine. What I recall from growing up in West Virginia were dozens of scarred landscapes from mines that had been abandoned ten or even twenty years earlier. Waterways suffer long after a mine closes. As I wrote in a previous blog, as a schoolchild I remember passing over a very polluted Simpson Creek. The acid mine drainage that stained the rocks and sand in the creek a rusty orange and killed all the fish was from mines that had been closed years before.

            Now, in a move that is intended to address this mining legacy, three environmental groups are suing the Pocahontas Land Corporation and Hernshaw Partners LLC over alleged violations of the Clean Water Act in a U.S. District Court in Huntington, West Virginia. The environmental groups—The Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, and the Sierra Club— say in their lawsuit that pollution still flows from two former mines in Mingo County that are owned by the companies, even though the mines were “reclaimed.” The reclamation of these mines entailed cleaning them up and planting them with vegetation. The environmental groups say that state and federal regulators are not working to end the pollution, so the landowners should be held responsible. The lawsuit demands monitoring and sampling, a restoration program, and a judge to fine the defendants $37,500 per day for each violation.

            When they wrote the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act in the late seventies, it was supposed to mitigate the damage to the environment that I grew up with. That never really happened. The enforcement of SMCRA in the past has been lax to nonexistent.[i] And the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has in the past been exceptionally negligent in fulfilling its protection of West Virginia and its people. In the late nineties investigative reporter Ken Ward uncovered that the department did not know the number of acres permitted for mountaintop removal. The DEP could not even provide to Ward the number of permits that it has granted for mountaintop mining.[ii] Given the even worse track record of the second Bush administration, I have no reason to hope that things have changed much in the last fifteen years.

            With the failure of the regulatory framework for surface coal mining, this move by environmental groups is an obvious and wise move. Whether it is the coal companies or the landowners, somebody should be responsible for what they are doing to Appalachia and Appalachians.

---

[i] Loeb, Penny “Shear Madness,” US News and World Report (August 3 1997)

[ii] Ward, Ken “Flattened,” Charleston Gazette, 9 August 1998

Hollow, a Documentary on the People of McDowell County, West Virginia

It doesn’t have Brad Pitt or Selena Gomez; the movie isn’t even premiering in Hollywood. But a new film promises to shed some light on Appalachia and its people. Due to have its initial showing this Saturday in Welch, West Virginia, a new documentary called Hollow focuses on the people of McDowell County, West Virginia.

            McDowell County is in the middle of coal country, and Welch is a typical coal town of Appalachia. I went to college with folks from Welch, as well as other West Virginia coal towns, such as Iaeger and Bluefield. At the time, in the mid seventies, the relative prosperity that coal brought to mining towns had already started to wane.

            And things have not improved in McDowell County. As this article in the Seattle Post Intelligencer on the new documentary sums up:

More than a third of its 22,000 residents live in poverty, and median incomes are less than half the U.S. average. McDowell also ranks last in the state in many health areas, with a premature death rate nearly double the state average and high rates of physical inactivity, adult smoking and obesity. It leads the state in teen pregnancies and has led the nation in fatal prescription painkiller overdoses.

Pretty grim. As I said earlier, McDowell County is right in the middle of coal country. If you go to Google Maps and take a satellite view of McDowell, you can see a number of the mountaintop mines strewn about the landscape.

            At one time, Welch was a prosperous working class town, and McDowell County the home to 100,000 residents. Today, only about a quarter of that number remains in the county. The mines have not shut down, and coal production in West Virginia remains at levels that have comparable to past decades. The decline for McDowell County, as it is for many other areas of Appalachia, is in part due to the union busting of the UMW by some to the big coal companies, such as Massey Energy. In the fifties almost all coal mining in West Virginia was performed by union miners. By 1998 membership in the UMW was down to 240,000, half or what it was in 1946,[i] when the union may have been at the height of its power under John L. Lewis. Mountaintop removal exacerbated the economic decline. A traditional coal mining operation requires dozens miners. In some cases, a huge mountaintop removal mine might employ as few as nine men.

            Other industry has left McDowell County. A little over 25 years ago, US Steel closed down its factory in McDowell County, leaving over 1,200 workers jobless. In the mid to late eighties, an otherwise prosperous time for the United States, personal income in McDowell County plummeted by two-thirds.

            Though the coalmines keep the coal coming out of the ground, the people of southern West Virginia don’t benefit from the mining. The situation in McDowell County is particularly bleak. It’s hard to get my head around this—it baffled me when I was growing up in West Virginia, and I still can’t make sense of it—how can a state with such mineral wealth have people who are so poor?

---

[i] Fox, Maier B. United We Stand, The United Mine Workers of America 1890-1990 United Mine Workers of America 1990

Protesters Slash Tires in Wisconsin and They Call It Eco-Terrorism

In Wisconsin protesters entered a site that a mining company hopes to turn into the largest open pit mine in the world. Compared to the destruction of mountaintop removal, the mine would cover 22,000 acres, the same area as Manhattan Island, and could potentially dump millions of tons of rock removed from the mine into the headwaters of the Bad River, which flows through a state park and an Indian reservation before emptying into Lake Superior.

            The protesters slashed tires and allegedly assaulted a female mine employee before fleeing. A spokesman for the mining company, Bob Seitz, had this to say about the incident:

"This is eco-terrorism," Seitz said. "There is no doubt it is eco-terrorism when your head is wrapped like Al Qaida and people are yelling things at people and threatening them."

Once again you have someone mislabeling vandalism and, in this case, assault as a type of terrorism. Already going overboard with his rhetoric, Seitz brings in Al Qaida, as though this crime compares to the deadly intent of Osama bin Laden’s network. The news report says nothing about the protester’s dress. Were they masquerading as some sort of T.E. Lawrence lead band of raiders? We don’t know.

            What is baffling about these attempts to tar these protesters is that Seitz could have easily condemned the actions of this group of vandals. What they did was criminal. That’s all he has to say. But there is probably more to this. Seitz is not going to say anything that is not approved by those higher up in the mining company’s power structure. Mining companies and other organizations have probably calculated that pushing this meme is in their long-term interest.

UPDATE: 6/17/13

Right-wing blogs and news have picked up this story and are pushing the "eco-terrorism" meme. In a post by Brian Fraley, a Wisconsinite who has worked for ALEC, an organization that supports big business, has a post Video: Masked Eco Terrorists Target Wisconsin Mine Site. The video shows a couple young gals confronting a member of the mine crew. Watch the video for yourself. You can judge if the gals behind the masks are threatening or not. To me, it seems to be the farthest stretch of the imagination to think of these two protesters as terrorists. Fraley expounds further over at the website RedStates. Patti Breigam-Wenzel also chimes in on the eco-terrorism theme at the Right Wisconsin website.

Continuing Ronald Reagan's Anti-Environmental Agenda With a New Book: Sagebrush Rebel: Reagan's Battle with Environmental Extremists and Why It Matters Today

I voice a lot of opinions on this blog. Whatever I might have to say, though, I try to back it up with facts, references, quotes, and hyperlinks. My hope is that you can check my sources, read what I’m basing my opinion on, and, while you may not agree, you can at least see how I came to see things as I do.
          That being said, I am going to blog about a book that I haven’t read. The book hasn’t even been released yet, although you can pre-order (whatever that means) it on Amazon. The book is Sagebrush Rebel: Reagan's Battle with Environmental Extremists and Why It Matters Today by William Perry Pendly. OK, from the title you can understand why I am eager to say something about this book, even though I have yet to take a look at it.

I am not going to judge this book by its cover, but I am going to judge the cover. The cover features a photo of a mature Reagan, probably taken during his presidency, leaning against an old-fashioned unpainted rail fence. He is wearing a Western style shirt and blue jeans and topping it all off with a cowboy hat.

            The message I get from the photo, or at least the message that I believe the photo is meant to convey, is that Reagan is a man of the West who is comfortable in this environment and whose values are informed by this environment. Though he grew up and went to college in the Midwest, we retain this image of Ronald Reagan from his Western movies and, perhaps because it was his last gig as an actor, the time he spent hosting and sometimes acting in the popular television series Death Valley Days.

            Though they drink hard liquor in saloons and have all the rough edges of a chuck of fools gold, cowboys, or at least television and movie cowboys wearing the white hats, embody for us Americans the values of trustworthiness, bravery, and honesty. We think of them as hard working, and fair-minded. They are for us the essence of America, what we believe that our country is all about. And if I remember the eighties correctly, this is what we wanted to believe of Reagan, even as he took the reins of power in the oval office.

            From watching hours and hours of movie cowboys navigating their horses through chaparral and desert landscapes, we also think of these western pioneers as being in tune with nature, that they value the great outdoors and that their beliefs square with the natural world. On horseback, eating grub around a campfire under a star studded sky, nothing that a cowboy desires is out of balance with the landscape we see him in; at least that is the impression that we hold. So the book cover gives us a cowboy Ronald Reagan, a man whose authenticity and integrity could trump the efforts of administrators and scientists who are working to preserve the environment.

            OK, cover judged. Next, on to the title: Sagebrush Rebel: Reagan's Battle with Environmental Extremists and Why It Matters Today. Wow. Where do I start? Sagebrush Rebel? I guess this fits in with some of the image we have of Reagan from the cowboy movies and Death Valley Days. Reagan’s characters were often at odds with the status quo; mind you a status quo that was unfair and corrupt. Reagan was the outsider, the rebel who kicks the no-goodnic out of town and by the movie’s end or by the final Borax commercial is given the accolades of the townsfolk as their new hero. That he is called a “Sagebrush Rebel” not only helps to conjure up this Western image, it establishes his environmental bonefides, a man whose inner good character and good intentions will have him doing right by the environment.

Ronald Reagan, the good rebel who will set things straight by the fourth Borax commercial

Now to the part of the book title that grabbed my attention first: Battle with Environmental Extremists. Reagan almost coined the term environmental extremist. Even when he was pushing the meme hard during his first presidential campaign and during his presidency, the term never gained great usage. Perhaps because, outside of a very few folks who took part in the Earth Liberation Front, the term describes nobody. Consider this. Think of the most committed environmentalist you know, the one who drives the Prius, recycles plastic bags, and belongs to the Sierra Club. Does the word extremist describe her?

            As Russell Baker wrote during Reagan’s first term, calling someone an environmental extremist could be just another way of calling someone un-American.[i] And I think that that the author of this book wants to keep that sort of thinking alive. Way back in the late forties and early fifties when Ronald Reagan testified to the House Committee on Un-American Activities on communists in Hollywood, the fingers pointed and accusations made were enough to have someone blacklisted in Hollywood or otherwise have his career ruined. It did not matter if that person were a Trotskyite true believer, an absolute devotee to Marx, or merely someone who had attended meetings of a communist group. Any kind of communist was a totally bad communist. That a person could entertain some ideas that were communistic and be only something of a half-hearted communist did not matter. Communists were all equally bad. In this Manichean mindset, all environmentalists, even our recycling Prius driver, are all equally committed to an idea that is, as in the case of forties and fifties communists, equally bad.

            As I have written before, during his 1980 presidential campaign Reagan claimed that environmental regulations had been responsible for the shuttering of American factories.[ii] He wanted the coal and steel industries to rewrite the then barely ten year old Clean Air Act and promised to appoint to the Environmental Protection Agency people “who understand the problems of the coal industry.”[iii] Once in office he appointed James Watt, a lawyer who worked to open up more federal wilderness land to mining and oil drilling, as Interior Secretary. With this kind of rhetoric and action, I imagine that an average, everyday member of the Sierra club would seem just as extreme as a 1940s factory worker who joined the Communist Party.

            Book cover judged, book title judged, now on to the author. William Perry Pendley worked in the Reagan administration, serving as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy and Minerals of the Department of Interior. His previous books that he has authored include: It Takes a Hero: The Grass Roots Battle Against Environmental Oppression, Warriors for the West: Fighting Bureaucrats, Radical Groups, And Liberal Judges on America’s Frontier, and War on the West: Government Tyranny on America’s Great Frontier. Amazon describes It Takes a Hero as:

           

Environmental oppression. It eats out America's vital substance, puts our economy in chains, violates the public liberty. It hurts people, real people. And they don't take it lying down. They fight back. This remarkable book documents the battle of ordinary people against the multi-billion-dollar environment movement and its offspring, the arrogant bureaucratic government "ecoligarchy." In story after story of bravery in the face of overwhelming odds, author William Perry Pendley here spins a rich tapestry of everyday heroism on the part of Americans being crushed by fanatic environmentalists who threaten to destroy our freedoms, our homes, our lives. Nowhere can one find a clearer voice in the debate over the environment than in the personal profiles of It Takes A Hero. Here are the true stories of fifty-three people who risked everything to stand up for the truth: The true stewards of the Earth are those who feed, clothe and shelter all of us, and they are being systematically destroyed by a powerful movement blinded to our material needs. In addition to inspiring and uplifting stories of real people, It Takes A Hero also contains a directory of one thousand leading grassroots fighters against environmental oppression: The Hero Network. This book belongs in the homes and hearts of every concerned American.

I imagine that his other books have a similar theme.

            Although I can “pre-order” the book on Amazon, my local library is not showing that it plans on making this title available soon. So it might be a while before I can actually get down to reading this book. I’ll update this blog once I do.

---

[i] Russell Baker, Road to Extinction New York Times Magazine April 3, 1983

[ii] Kamieniecki, Sheldon, Robert O’Brien, Michael Clarke. Controversies in Environmental Policy. New York: State University of New York Press. 1986. Print p 284

[iii] Crutsinger, Martin. “Carter, Reagan Differ Widely on Environmental Policies.” Freelance Star 25 Oct. 1980

A Burning Issue: The LA Times Mischaracterizes Chaparral in Their Story On the Powerhouse Fire

Whenever there is a large-scale fire here in southern California, the press repeats the same narrative about our native flora that just continues a great deal of misunderstanding of our environment and our relationship to it.

            The Powerhouse fire, which has been burning in the Angeles National Forest since last week, is the subject of this story in the Los Angeles Times: Powerhouse fire: Old dry brush proved explosive. Among the descriptions of the chaparral in the story are the following sentences:

This old chaparral, with layer upon layer of dead growth underneath, has proved difficult to fight.

Chaparral tends to grow taller as it ages, collecting dead material below it.

Readers are left with the impression that chaparral builds up dead and highly flammable twigs and wood as it ages. This is not true. While dead twigs and leaves do fall from the canopy of a chaparral stand, creating a blanket of duff on the ground, most of the plants that comprise chaparral are actually evergreen. As someone who hikes around in chaparral country, I can attest that stands of chaparral that are decades old can be quite lush, with decomposing duff on the ground that is about as flammable as most other mulch.

            San Diego County, where I live, experienced huge wildfires in 2003 and 2007. If the thinking that is conveyed in this article were true, then the stands of chaparral that are 40, 60, or 100 years old would have been more likely to burn than younger stands of chaparral in these wildfires. This did not happen. As a matter of fact, GIS analysis that I did on the 2007 fires indicated that areas that had burned in 2003, only four years earlier, were actually more likely to burn than older flora.

            Before we had millions of people making their homes here, the chaparral had rare chances of being ignited. Thunderstorms are rare along the coast and foothills where chaparral grows. It is just unlikely that a lightning strike will start a fire among the chaparral. Unlike western forests, which are estimated to have, historically, experienced ground fires every seven to 20 years, chaparral may not burn for decades. Some stands of old growth chaparral are well over 100 years old.

But now add to the naturally occurring thunderstorms ignition from cigarettes, sparks from machinery, arson, and stray embers from barbeques. With the prevalence of nonnative grasses, which dry up early in spring and serve as tinder the rest of the year, you have a formula for lots of wildfires in southern California. That should have been the greater narrative of this LA Times story.

For a greater understanding of chaparral, visit the California Chaparral Institute's website.