|
Mountaintop Removal What do you know? I sit here right now trying to think of ways to gently tell you what you need to know. Here is the problem, gentle does not seem to be work. We need a come to Jesus talk! So here I am, miles away and I think myself capable of making people listen. ! Ha! Yeah right! But I have to try. There are so many things I need to tell you but the mind can only handle one big thing at a time. First thing to discuss is mountain top removal. Do you know what it is? I mean do you really know what it is and what is like? There is an election coming up and people need to hear this. YOU need to know this! I can’t tell you what it’s like to live next to a mountain top removal site. I have never been a person who has had to, but I can tell you some of the things they deal with. There is a family in Boone County WV who’s house sits in front of a slurry damn from a mountain top removal site. The children sleep with their clothes on and have their bags packed ready to run in case the damn breaks in the night. Oh, I forgot to mention that the damn is in violation of several DEP codes and could give way if there is enough rain. You know what the coal company responsible for the damn will say? “It was an act of God that caused the damn to break.” I don’t think God made the unsafe damn to start with. The pursuit of the almighty dollar is NOT an excuse to loose your conscience and treat your fellow human beings as if they are simply casualties of a larger system. People, CHILDREN, are not expectable casualties. Marsh Elementary School sits about 400 yards from the toxic waist slurry impoundment. Slurry impoundments leak carcinogens into water that poison the children while the coal dust in the air causes lung maladies that children should never have to deal with. The coal company thinks it is acceptable repayment for these losses if they donate $9,000 to the Energy Express program of Marsh Fork. Valley fills are another issue to consider. There is all this talk about what a good thing it is to take off a mountaintop and put it in the valley, thus leveling out our Mountain Mamma to make development easier. I could spend days trying to explain this farce but I’ll just keep it real simple. I’ll ask a couple questions. Valleys have water, where does that water go? Valleys often contain wild life, where does the wild life go? The answer to the water is it finds a new path and often it takes homes and even whole communities with it. The answer to the wildlife is it dies. They take what timber they can take and they beery the valley. They are supposed to put back the mountain to its approximate original form but it winds up looking more like a pyramid. I’ve seen a good mountain top removal site after it’s been reclaimed and I’m not impressed. It looks more like an African grassland then like a West Virginia mountain. As for economic development, I ask you all to consider this, would you put your home or your business on top of a very large pile of boulders and rocks that had pockets of air and water that had yet to be settled out? I know that was a really long sentence but think about it a minute. Foundations crack because of the shifts in the ground it sits on. How can that be good? There is a jail that has a "leaning tower" because it sits on a mountain top removal site. Another instance caused children to be stuck in a school gymnasium when the foundation cracked and they could not get the doors of the gym open. This does not sound like a good plan for economic development. Instead let's consider what we will loose if we cripple our tourism industry by allowing our mountains (that took millions of years to build) to be leveled. In 2000 mining lost employment by 4.6%. This loss of jobs was more than made up for in the tourism and hotel industries with a combined 5% increase ( WV Tourism Report ). Mountaintop Removal does not create jobs for West Virginians. In reality it only takes a very small fraction of the workers that deep mining takes. That's good for the coal companies, but bad for West Virginia as a whole. What will be left after the race to take all our coal is finished? It won't be our mountains or our wild life. What will we have for economic development then? On the subject of economics, consider for a moment, who pays the bills of all of the problems created by mountaintop removal coal mining. You probably think, like I did not so long ago, that it’s the coal companies job. You, like me would be wrong. When a damaging mistake is made by the coal company, it’s the insurance and the government that pays. So, in a round about way it’s your tax money that has to fix the problems left in the wake of these mountains. I’m not so radical that I believe that coal mining should be completely stopped. I just feel that God is the only one who should be allowed to move mountains. No human being has enough knowledge, wisdom, compassion, and foresight to do the job right. I say go back to deep mining. It’s a fact that there are more jobs in deep mining then mountaintop removal. Yes it is dangerous I’ll not argue that, but at least there is pride in doing something hard and dangerous. Firefighters, and solders risk their lives all the time but they know the risks and take precautions. Deep mining is the same way. God bless the coal miner who knows the risks and does it anyway. Deep mining is so much more sustainable the mountaintop removal. Which leads me to my last question. West Virginia is built on her fossil fuel abundance, what do we do when fossil fuel runs out? It will not last! It may be your grandchildren’s life time before it’s gone but it will be gone! Do you want your mountains to be gone too? If you think that means it’s not your problem I say shame on you! WAKE UP! You have the power to make a difference in the way things go down for the future! We have the technology to begin a switch to renewable energy but the money in coal, oil, and gas is so comfortable that we don’t budge. I know that there are people in this county sitting on money that could be invested in renewable energy. Yes, is a new market and new markets are scary and not a lot is know but that’s not a good excuse. West Virginia needs to break away from it’s addiction to fossil fuels and start leading the way to the future. Maybe you can’t fund something like renewable energy but you can be an educated voter. Know who you are voter for in this election. Here is a list of questions to ask about the candidates. Where do they stand on Mountain top removal? How do they feel about renewable energy? How do they feel about deep mining and miner safety? Where does their campaign money come from? STOP MOUNTAIN TOP REMOVAL, CREATE JOBS, AND CREATE A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE. |
LINKS
|