Mountaintop Removal: The Damage Goes Beyond Appalachia

When I was a child growing up in West Virginia, on our way to school the school bus would drive us over a bridge that spanned a small stream. Out here, where I live in southern California, the waterway would be called a river, but in Appalachia small streams are called creeks. This one was called Simpson Creek. I remember that as we approached the bridge, and for a time after we crossed the span, an acrid smell would fill the school bus. The smell came from sulfur, as well as other toxins in the creek. Those pollutants came from the runoff of old surface mines that were farther upstream in the watershed of Simpson Creek. Besides the odor, the rocks in the stream were stained orange. And there weren’t any fish in the stream.

Simpson Creek earned some infamy back in the seventies. Mayf Nutter, a local native who had become a television star of soap operas Knott’s Landing and Days of Our Lives*, had a country music hit with “Simpson Creek Won’t Never Run Clean Again.” In the song Nutter sang of the freakish color of the creek and its lifeless waters. Simpson Creek was only one of the waterways close to where I grew up with sulfur stained rocks and streambeds devoid of life. I remember that some streams had a smell so strong that it seemed that I could taste the fouled river, although I might be 30 or 40 yards away from its shores.

A creek with acid mine runoff from strip mining (Photo: Ohio Chapter of the Sierra Club ohiosierraclub.org)

Besides the fouling of Simpson Creek, in his song Nutter sang of the West Fork River, a waterway that claims Simpson Creek as a tributary, and how it’s waters were fouled by the contribution of Simpson Creek. You don’t need a degree in watershed management to understand the aquatic karma of tossing something in a creek: whatever goes into a creek flows downstream.

Mayf Nutter, musician, actor, and a man who understands acid mine runoff (Photo: mayfnutter.com)

So in a recent study we have a finding that a television star and country singer understood over thirty years ago: Acid mine runoff flows downstream.

And as the surface mining operations have expanded—when I was a child riding the school bus across Simpson Creek, those mines encompassed dozens or hundreds of acres; mountaintop removal mining now encompasses thousands of acres—that selfsame aquatic karma only grows. You don’t need to be a watershed manager, or even a 1970s country singer, to understand that.

Mountaintop removal does just that, removes mountains. And as the mountains are removed, so are the forests, streams, and ecosystems of those mountains. The lives of the people who live around those mountains are disturbed as well. Their wells are often contaminated from the mining, and they are subjected to noise and coal dust from the mines. They may be facing health risks as well.

But as we know that what you throw in a creek flows downstream, mountaintop removal goes beyond the mountains that it destroys. The pollutants flow downstream. Lives are disrupted or destroyed. And all that coal being burned adds more tons and tons of CO2 to the atmosphere, warming the planet. The problems of this type of extraction go beyond the hills of Appalachia.

* Nutter’s television and film credits exceed these two shows. You can check his website here: http://www.mayfnutter.com/

H.R. 5959 The Appalachian Communities Health Emergency Act: Common Sense From Dennis Kucinich

Thank goodness for Dennis Kucinich. He has introduced to Congress the Appalachian Communities Health Emergency Act. It is heartening to know that there are members of Congress who are trying to help people and that there are 13 cosponsors for this bill.

            The Appalachian Communities Health Emergency Act (H.R. 5959) simply makes the commonsensical requirement that before more West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky mountaintops are blown apart for their coal, the health implications of the residents around those mines need to be understood.

We currently do not have a comprehensive understanding of the health effects of mountaintop removal. Only ten investigators study the relationship between this type of mining and public health.[i]
There is nonetheless reason for concern. Recent evidence points to mountaintop mining as the root of many health problems for the residents of Appalachia. Among the recent investigations were a toxicologist and an associate professor in the department of Community Medicine at West Virginia University who found learning disabilities, kidney stones, tooth loss, diarrhea, rash, and some forms of cancer in individuals living close to MTR operations.[ii] Using GIS mapping techniques, a team of health professionals and geographers found higher rates of circulatory, respiratory, central nervous system, musculoskeletal, gastrointestinal, and urogenital birth defects in areas close to mountaintop removal.[iii]

            Kucinich’s bill would require a detailed review of these, and possibly other, health risks to be conducted by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services. Mountaintop removal would be suspended until the research is completed. If the research finds no health risks, then mountaintop mining could resume.

            As I said before, this is commonsensical. The FDA requires that new drugs be proven safe before doctors can prescribe them. And product safety is part of the process of other consumer goods hitting the market. Shouldn’t we do the same for the people who live around the mountaintop mines?

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[i] Holzman, David C. “Mountaintop Removal Mining.” Environmental Health Perspectives Vol. 119, Issue 11 11/1/2011 electronic journal

[ii] ibid

[iii] Ahearn, Melissa M. et at. “The association between mountaintop mining and birth defects among live births in central Appalachia, 1996–2003.” Environmental Research Vol. 111 Issue 6. Aug 2011, p 838-846 electronic journal

Colorado Wildfires: Will We Have Our Cuyahoga Moment?

In June of 1969 the Cuyahoga River caught fire. After over forty years I still can’t get used to the image of a body of water igniting, but apparently for the river that meanders through Cleveland, Ohio it was nothing new. In the previous hundred years, the Cuyahoga had caught fire at least nine times. A conflagration on the Cuyahoga in 1952 caused over 1.5 million dollars in damage.

Apparently by the time of the tenth fire, the trash and pollution that had provided the fuel for these fires had befouled the river to such a degree that it was, in essence, a toxic waste dump devoid of life. Time magazine reported on the Cuyahoga River fire in August of 1969 and summed up the condition of the river as such:

Some River! Chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with subsurface gases, it oozes rather than flows. The Federal Water Pollution Control Administration dryly notes: "The lower Cuyahoga has no visible signs of life, not even low forms such as leeches and sludge worms that usually thrive on wastes." It is also—literally—a fire hazard.

The Cuyahoga goes up in flames in 1969. Photo from NOAA*

With environmental degradation of a river there is the degradation itself, pollutants and trash thrown in the river, and the consequences of that degradation: a lifeless river that catches on fire. Anyone can see the pipes from factories and sewage treatment facilities dumping their waste into a stream, and anyone can see a putrid, lifeless body of water. It is easy enough to make the connection between the two.

            The conflagration on a dead river, as well as other dire pollution problems with other bodies of water—for example Lake Erie being declared a “dead lake”—and people’s ability to make the connection between the pollution and the troubles of these waters lead to reforms. Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972. Similar alarming environmental crises—the extirpation of the bald eagle from much of the lower 48 states and dense visible smog hovering over major cities—spurned Congress and President Nixon to pass the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act.

We now have headlines like the following in The Guardian: Colorado wildfires are ‘what global warming really looks like.’ Citing the views of Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton University geosciences professor and a lead author of the UN’s climate science panel, and Steven Running, a forest ecologist at the University of Montana, The Guardian says that effects of global warming are giving Colorado the conditions for the wildfires. Winters with lighter snows and springs occurring earlier in the year give Colorado an earlier and longer fire season. The higher temperatures consistent with the science of global warming also enhance conditions for wildfire. Add to this scenario lots of fuel for the fires provided by dead trees killed by the mountain pine beetle, which are surviving in greater numbers due to the milder winters.

Is this the time to have a Cuyahoga moment? Photo: Scott Seibold (@scottseibold), Twitter

The Cuyahoga had been befouled for decades, to the point of lifelessness, before any serious action was taken to clean it up. And as I said earlier, folks had the advantage back then of making a clear connection between dumping junk in the river and the river’s problems. In the case of the Colorado fires, though what the scientists talk about is easy enough to understand, people can’t see a direct connection between our cars and factories belching greenhouse gasses and whole mountainsides of forest going up in smoke. Because of this I fear that there are going to be lots more wildfires and lots of houses burning down in lots of other places besides Colorado, and there won’t be anybody to say, as folks said along the banks of the Cuyahoga in 1969, “OMG we need to DO something!”

* http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/kits/pollution/media/supp_pol02d.html

Good News: Federal Appeals Court Rules That the EPA Has the Authority to Regulate Greenhouse Gasses

The ability of the EPA to regulate the gasses that are warming our world was affirmed today in a Federal Appeals Court decision that ruled that the agency was “unambiguously correct” in its use of existing law to curb global warming. Several states and greenhouse gas emitting industries had challenged the move by the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate CO2 and other global warming gasses.

            I’m certain that this decision will be appealed to the Supreme Court and, considering the present rightward political leaning of the Court, this may only be a temporary victory for people and the planet. It is nonetheless good news. 

H.R. 2578: Chipping Away at Our Environmental Protections Till They're All Gone

This Tuesday, the House of Representatives will debate and vote on H.R. 2578, the Conservation and Economic Growth Act. H.R 2578 is an omnibus of 14 bills that have passed through committee, all of which are assaults on the laws that protect our nation’s air, water, and land. One measure would remove a section of the Merced River from protections afforded it by the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act; another would allow greater and longer grazing by livestock on public lands, a dubious practice with environmental ramifications.

The Conservation and Economic Growth Act includes H.R.1505, a bill authored by Rob Bishop, a GOP Tea Party congressman from Utah. H.R. 1505, also known as The National Security and Federal Lands Protection Act, would exempt the Homeland Security Department from any need to comply with environmental and public health laws on federal and tribal lands within 100 miles of the U.S. border. The exemptions would be for all of this country’s most ambitious environmental legislation, including the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Air Act.

            DHS has not asked for this type of legislation, and it’s unknown whether this bill would have any effect on the department’s effectiveness. What is known is that this bill would affect nature preserves and parkland. One of the National Park Service’s crown jewels, Glacier National Park, would fall entirely under this legislation.

I don’t know if the irony of Bishop’s proposed legislation has been impressed upon him, but if it were made law, one of the most pristine National Parks, home to wolves and moose—They even have grizzly bears up there—would have gaping holes in the amount of environmental protection that our government is willing to give it. As far as operations of the Homeland Security Department, the wolves, bison, and bears would have zero protection in their natural habitats in Glacier National Park.

Does this make any sense?

I live in San Diego, about 20 miles away from the border with Mexico. H.R. 1505 specifically mentions one of our most treasured preserves in the county, the Otay Mountain Wilderness, as an area that would have no environmental protection from the activities of Homeland Security. The preserve has already been assaulted by the building of a border wall. In an adumbration of this bill, that wall was built with the waiving of the same protections that H.R. 1505 seeks to negate.

H.R. 1505, like the rest of the Conservation and Economic Growth Act, does not do away with the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, or other environmental laws, it is nonetheless part of a strategy used by the GOP—and the interest groups whose business interests they represent—of chipping away at environmental laws in such a way that in 15 years, 20 years, 25 years they will be rendered meaningless.

I’ve been following H.R. 1505 for some time, but a big hat tip to my friend Jill Hoslin who notified me today about the developments with this legislation. She is an insightful blogger concerned with border issues. You can check out her blog here: http://www.attheedges.com/

Additionally, our local paper, the San Diego UT, has not been covering this story, but they did publish this op ed by Mark Starr: http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/jun/15/tp-a-veterans-voice-protect-san-diegos-public/?page=1#article

More Facts, More Inconvenience, and More Laws For Ignorance

I hope that this is not a trend. As I previously posted, North Carolina is trying to legislate ignorance by requiring that the science of climate change is excluded from studies of sea level rise. Well, it looks like Virginia is following suit with a similar push by that state’s GOP legislators to similarly exclude science from a coastal study in their state.

            The curious thing for me is the manner in which climate change science was characterized by GOP lawmaker Chris Stolle. He called scientific terminology “left wing terms” and “political speech.”

The push to politically isolate environmentalism, which traditionally has always enjoyed broad public support, to a politics of the left goes back at least to the 1980 presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan. Reagan and others characterized environmentalism as left wing and extreme.

            Now in Virginia we have gone to another level. The inconvenient facts, the science that indicates a warming world and rising seas—what concerns environmentalists and is actually a concern for just about everybody else—is now thought of as political, and left leaning political at that. This is big crazy and makes my head spin.

An Image of Environmental and Social Degradation or Kiddie Porn?

Maria Gunnoe, a prominent opponent of mountaintop removal who has won the Goldman Environmental Prize, had been invited to testify at a hearing on the Spruce Coal Mine by the House energy and resources subcommittee.

Besides her testimony, she received something she wasn’t expecting: a questioning by police on suspicion of child pornography.

Gunnoe, who has testified for the committee four times before, had always felt that the members of the committee had not made eye contact with her, essentially dismissing her testimony with visible lack of interest or engagement. So Gunnoe decided to grab the subcommittee’s attention with a compelling image of West Virginians living with mountaintop removal mining. She chose a photo by noted photographer Katie Falkenberg that shows a five-year-old girl sitting in a tub of water polluted by mountaintop mining. The bathwater is a deep disturbing reddish orange. The photo, as well as other images of mountaintop mining can be found here.

The photo was pulled from the presentation by Doug Lamborn, the leader of the energy and mineral resources subcommittee, which is under the House Committee on Natural Resources. A GOP house member, Lamborn was noted as the most conservative member of Congress by the National Journal in 2009 and 2010. He is against energy conservation measures and for ramping up the extraction of domestic fossil fuels.

            Lamborn says that he did not see the photograph and relied on the judgment of his staff, who said that the photo was inappropriate. The hearing concerned recent actions by the EPA, which is currently appealing a ruling by a federal judge that the agency overstepped its authority in vetoing a permit for the Spruce mine.

            After her presentation, police questioned Gunnoe for 45 minutes.

If only we had more people like Gunnoe, who bravely stand up to the power of big money and King Coal. It’s too bad that besides politely ignoring her, the GOP controlled energy and resources subcommittee censors her presentation and harasses her.

            Mountaintop mining has brought West Virginia nothing good. It has destroyed communities, depressed wages, and filled in hundreds of miles of streams as it has flatted hundreds of mountains. It passes the muster of law only because the Appalachians are sparsely populated with individuals who are poorer than the rest of the U.S. and unused to working the levers of power. If things were otherwise, kingpins of Big Coal would be locked up along with the scum who peddle kiddie porn.