She had never thought about where her electricity came from. but now, because of a great ArtsWeek Presentation and the website ilovemountain.org she does.
Mountain Top (line break) (insert foto) (think the hills are alive with the sound of music, think mountain top experience, think vistas of grandeur and held breath.
Removal of Coal
and the side-effects of such devastation are disastrous:
slurry ponds which have a tendency to leak (one disaster was times bigger than the exxon valdez spill, and was never mentioned in the news), polluted streams and rivers, less jobs available for the folks of the region, ecological destruction, the species who live there, including the people, the blasting rocks and dislodges houses from their foundations. Mountains that take 300 million years to make, take 1 year for a coal mining company to destroy. the few get rich. We get what is termed "cheap" electricity. Homes, forests, lives, mountains, are destroyed. This isn't cheap. Its horrifying. A never heard about any of this before because the people who live there are the poor. No one cares.
A looks at the list she just wrote. She seems to be using understatement against her will she can not capture the horror of what she saw in the slide show last night. She asks you to find out more for yourself.
Go to ilovemountains.org to learn more. to write your congress(wo)man. this is happening in America - (the once) beautiful. there is no such thing as clean coal.
2 comments:
strip mining has been going on for a very long time and the side effects are v ugly. But consider this: where do the people, communities, companies, towns, cities that mine coal for a living go when we ban coal mining?
Jobless people, homeless families, bankrupt companies.
The coal lobby in DC is powerful, but they rep poor people who's livelihood depend on this egregious practice.
BTW clean coal refers to the way it's burned, and Co2 emissions. That's real progress.
I'd love to these canyons filled and used as algae farms and convert the coal power plants to algae burning power plants.
these solutions are on the way. talk to Tony Michaels.
It is a very complicated issue. But MTR of coal actually decreases the number of jobs avail to people who usually work in coal mines. There has been talk of wind-farming as an alternative to coal. The poor people who depend on coal for a living are not being represented by the coal industry, they are being miseducated and abused by the coal industry creating false dependency. Blowing up their mountains is also destroying the culture of the Appalachian-Americans. Also, the process "clean coal" burning is still not clean, it just puts the harmful stuff into liquid/underground.
Its very complicated. i am hoping to get my hands on this book: Something’s Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal by Jason Howard to help understand more. You should read it too!
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