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urocyonOne I just ran across, from Brooke Jarvis: Appalachia Rising for a New Economy. I quoted more than I'd intended (emphasis added), but it touches on some very important points.
For more background, see iLoveMountains.org, and their excellent America's Most Endangered Mountains series.
I may understand why (more very convenient victim blaming--see “You People”, environmental degradation, and difficult choices), but it continues to frustrate me just how little attention this irreversible destruction gets from people not very directly affected by it. Even though it's affecting lots of other people.
"Only when the last tree has died, the last river has been poisoned, and the last fish has been caught will we realize that we cannot eat money." —Cree Proverb
I guess we should add to that "when the last mountain has been knocked down". :-|
ETA: I didn't explicitly say, but one of the big reasons this caught my eye was that it was very explicitly not suggesting that Appalachian people need saved from ourselves. When, erm, we aren't the ones with the power to destroy shit in the first place.
"Being arrested? That's such a small price to pay for being heard," said Mickey McCoy, former mayor and lifelong resident of Inez, Kentucky, who started opposing mountaintop removal (or MTR) when the creeks by his house ran black following a breach in a nearby sludge dam in 2000. "My home and people are paying the real price for mountaintop removal. They are dying."...
Mountaintop removal, Randolph continued, "is keeping an entire region poor. It has meant a direct loss of tens of thousands of coal mining jobs in the region, and is 100 percent directly correlated with high unemployment, high poverty, and low economic diversification. We agree that Appalachia needs jobs, but we can create jobs without poisoning our communities. According to the Appalachian Regional Commission, we could create 15,000 jobs a year for the first five years by investing in energy efficiency."...
Of course, tourism is just one industry that depends on an end to MTR. In West Virginia's Coal River Valley, residents are pushing for a wind farm that they say will bring more jobs—not to mention higher paying, more secure ones—than mining. But blasting for an MTR coal mine has already begun on the mountain ridges that would support the turbines...
What does it mean, I asked him, to say that Appalachia is rising? As coal's economic power wanes, he answered, so does its political power—leaving a vacuum for the residents of Appalachia to fill. "The political clout of the coal industry has long outlasted its ability to provide job growth or sustainable economic development for the Appalachian region," he said. "Just like the coal, that power is going away."
And Appalachians are rising to take its place—in a more diverse, stable, and less destructive economy.
For more background, see iLoveMountains.org, and their excellent America's Most Endangered Mountains series.
I may understand why (more very convenient victim blaming--see “You People”, environmental degradation, and difficult choices), but it continues to frustrate me just how little attention this irreversible destruction gets from people not very directly affected by it. Even though it's affecting lots of other people.
Chris Irwin, an attorney with United Mountain Defense, told TENTHMIL this is about looking to the future, to a time when we’ll regret permanently contaminating the thousands of streams and rivers that are the headwaters for the water supply that much of the US East Coast relies on. “The coal industry likes to say that we are the ‘Saudi Arabia of coal,’ but that’s bullshit. What we’re the Saudi Arabia of is clean drinking water…You can’t drink coal.”#
"Only when the last tree has died, the last river has been poisoned, and the last fish has been caught will we realize that we cannot eat money." —Cree Proverb
I guess we should add to that "when the last mountain has been knocked down". :-|
ETA: I didn't explicitly say, but one of the big reasons this caught my eye was that it was very explicitly not suggesting that Appalachian people need saved from ourselves. When, erm, we aren't the ones with the power to destroy shit in the first place.
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Date: 2010-09-30 05:50 pm (UTC)Are you from Appalachia?
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Date: 2010-09-30 11:08 pm (UTC)Yes, I'm from Southwest Virginia. A lot of my father's family is from the WV/KY coalfields, and I was shocked seeing the destruction up close when I first spent time in that area as an adult (well, when I was in college) ca. 1993. That's when I really started taking an interest in the situation.
This is one of those issues that keeps making me feel rather useless, sitting here in Greater London. But, if I can't do much else to try to help, I can keep using my keyboard.