Not your usual Monkey movie review

I got off my ass and went to see this documentary at ETSU last night (it's part of the SOAPIFF environmental film series):
As the title suggests this film is about coal and the region of the country where it's been mined the longest, the Appalachian mountains. It does it's best to provide both sides of the coal story but after seeing it there's no way one can remain neutral or on the side of the coal companies, well no way if you care about your fellow citizens, this planet, and what's right. It's a fine documentary and it's going to be on television on Planet Green network on Nov. 14th, so mark your calendars.

The main thrust of this film is the practice of mountain top removal mining, the practice of which has become the dominant way to mine coal in southern West Virginia and southwestern Virginia. For those of you who don't know here's how mountain top removal mining works:

• Bulldozers and earth removal equipment are taken to the top of a mountain ridge and the topsoil is removed. And by removed, I mean it's pushed down the side of the mountain and into local streams and creeks.
  
• Next all the layers of rock are blown away using dynamite so that a thin line of coal is exposed.
  
• The exposed coal is then scraped off the mountain and put in trucks that haul it to either coal yards or to waiting train cars that haul it to coal processing plants.
• After all the coal, and dirt and rock, and anything else that was once there, is removed the coal company then plants a few trees and some grass and says that the land is 'reclaimed,' meaning that it is supposed to be back like it was before.
• Once the coal gets to the processing plant it's washed with a chemical solution and then it's loaded into train cars once again and it's taken to electric power plants where it's burned to generate electricity.
  

The problems with this process are:

• the mountains are irrevocably changed and damaged beyond repair.
• the removal of the dirt, trees, rocks, grasses, and everything else that stands between the coal and the coal company causes water run off and the subsequent run off causes flooding.
• the bad chemicals in the coal, such as mercury, and the blast residue and the dirt and residue created as a result of the blasting runs into a pond that the coal companies make. These ponds are called containment ponds and they are nothing more than pools of toxic sludge.
• when the coal is washed at the processing plant the chemical residue from that wash is pumped into another containment pond, this one though is closer to where many people live.
• the toxic chemicals from the ponds, both the ones near the mountain top removal sites and the ones down in the valley near the processing plants, seep out and leach into the ground water and ultimately into the creeks, rivers, and people's wells. It has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that in towns that have a coal processing plant, cancer rates are much higher than in towns in the same area that do no have coal processing plants.

What mountain top coal removal is doing then is it's destroying not only our mountains so that you can have electricity, it's killing my fellow citizens, it's poisoning our water, and it's destroying the economies where it's practiced.

Before mountain top removal mining became the normal the way coal was mined was a process called deep mining. Deep mining is the type of mining you may be familiar with, it's where miners tunnel deep under ground and mine the coal. Understandably the men who did this type of work were brave and stout men and back in the early part of the last century when they saw how badly the coal companies were screwing them they unionized and their union, the United Mine Workers, fought many bloody battles and they won most of them. What the union did was to create a higher standard of living for it's members and in turn the whole region. The UMW made mining safer and it became, through the years, a powerful and feared union, which meant that the coal companies wanted to break it.

And in the 1980's they did just that. They used a divide and conquer strategy that worked beyond their wildest dreams. When they had the union divided, they fought for and won wage and benefit concessions and the then president of the UMW, Rich Trumka, happily agreed to them because he believed that in doing so he'd save many miners their jobs.

With the union broken and divided, with wage and benefits concessions won, the coal companies, led by Massey Energy, which is headed by uber corporate creep Don Blankenship, introduced mountain top coal removal. Once they adopted this method of removing coal they did not need any deep coal miners any more and they fired or laid off the deep coal miners. They were now free to mine as much as they liked and make more money from doing so. The union was broken and their members were now out of work. So what we ended up with is an environmental disaster that is a ticking time bomb, when those containment ponds break, and they will break, the scale of flooding will be horrific and when cancer rates start to creep every higher due to contaminated ground water, the toll on our medical system is going to be huge. Factor in the cost of the ruined mountains and the screwed up economy and mountain top coal removal has been good for only one group of people, the coal companies. The rest of us are getting screwed as a result of it. And as if that weren't bad enough, the coal companies have all the politicians (local, regional, and national levels) in our region in their back pockets, they are generous donors to politicians of both parties.

So whats a concerned citizen to do? Well, some of the folks in this area are fighting back and they've formed a group called Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards, or SAMS for short, and they've achieved quite a few victories in their short life. SAMS has joined with other environmental and social justice organizations and together they're all fighting the good fight.

As for me, I want to get our place on solar as soon as it's economically feasible so that we become less dependent on coal, and I hope that you do the same when you can at your house and business. I'll be posting more about this topic of mountain top coal removal mining and what you and I can do to help stop it and help end our dependence on coal in general in the coming weeks and months, so stay tuned.