Same as it ever was

I got to go see this brilliant woman speak live and in person last night:
Her name is Vandana Shiva and you can read more about her by clicking here. I was going to write a post about my thoughts on some of what she said but when we got home I heard about the coal mine disaster in West Virginia and since Ms. Shiva talked about mining in her lecture tonight, I'm going to do the same.

The words 'coal mining disaster' and 'West Virginia' go together like 'ketchup and mustard' and 'salt and pepper.' You can't have one without the other and if you had to describe what coal mining has done to West Virginia, then you can't go wrong with using the word 'disaster.' Coal mining has been an unmitigated disaster for the residents of West Virginia since the first day the dug that black stuff out of the ground.

They, the coal companies and their lap dogs in business and industry, have told us and told us that West Virgina is rich with coal. They like to tout the made up factoid that West Virginia is the Saudi Arabia of coal. What they like to hide though is that it's like Saudi Arabia in that only a very few people make any money off coal and that the vast majority of it's citizens are energy slaves for a wider market. And just like in Saudi Arabia they use religion to justify their actions in raping the earth and exploiting the workers who mine the coal and their families too. They say God gave us dominion over the earth and that when Jesus comes back he'll be mad if we didn't use all the stuff his daddy hid under ground. It's God's will that big energy companies mine the coal, exploit the workers, ruin the mountains, and make huge profits that hardly ever see any taxation in the process.

Government in West Virginia is as guilty as the coal companies, chief among them is Massey Energy, which is headed up by the most venal amoral snake American business has ever produced, Don Blankenship, in keeping the workers down and of ruining the land, sky, and waterways of West Virgina. They are owned lock, stock, and barrel by the coal companies and the banks who love to invest in them. Senator Jay Rockefeller ran for Governor of WV back in the 1970's and he ran on an anti strip mining platform. When he lost he decided to stop running against the coal companies and to embrace them. As if by magic he got elected to the US Senate the next time he ran for public office. And he's stood beside them right up to this present day, as has the old KKK member Sen. Byrd. You can't win statewide office in WV and be anti coal.

But what has coal brought the citizens of WV? It's brought death, either by black lung disease, which you get from years of inhaling mine dust which smothers you to death slowly, or cancer. It's brought low wages and no benefits for the miners. Sure, at one time the United Mine Workers was strong and most of the miners were protected but Blankenship and his boys broke the union and stole the gains the workers had made over all those years. It's brought an environmental disaster to the state and soon it will spread to all states that border it due to the polluting of the ground water due to mountain top removal mining.

In her talk tonight Ms. Shiva, who is a marvelous and warm woman who overflows with intelligence and common sense, said the most important places inside of mountains are the places where fossil fuels are not and those are the places we need to be saving. Mountains provide us all with soil, water, and vegetation that drives our world, ripping them apart to get the coal, gas, oil, gold, or silver, out of them does nothing but benefit a few greedy people. Mining ruins our planet and keeps us locked into this consumption/fossil fuel death spiral we're currently locked into now.

Ms. Shiva and the women from her village stood up to the mining companies in her home area in India and they got an end to mining in the mountains where they lived. The mining companies cried that they were stopping progress, but she made the Indian Supreme Court see that real progress was not made through mining which ruins things but instead was made through conservation and natural farming. And that's what we need to do in West Virginia. The technology exists today for energy producing solar panels to go up on every home, church, business, and government building in this country and each one of those panels could be producing energy that flows into the local power grid thereby reducing our dependence on the burning of dirty coal. But Don Blankenship and his cronies won't make a fucking dime off of a solar panel on your house or mine and he pays lobbyists a lot of money to keep his business going, politicians in his pockets, and those panels off our houses.

And he does it so he can line his greasy greedy pockets with our hard earned cash.

And more miners will die because he's allowed to keep his coal operations going.

And the citizens and landscape of West Virginia will be raped and ruined as long as he's allowed to keep his coal operations going.

Until we're ready to think differently and get the idea that we've got to keep energy cheap so that we can build more Wal-Marts so we can buy more cheap shit made in China, then the Don Blankenships of this world will continue to rape working families, the state of West Virginia, and our world.

Me, I'd rather live in a world where Vandana Shiva holds more sway than an asshole like Don Blankenship does.

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.

New Sidebar Item

Monkey Movie Round Up

I've been a movie watching machine lately. Here's quick reviews of the last four I've seen:
I bought this on DVD at the grocery store the other day for $4.99 and after seeing it again after a few years I was struck by how good this film is. It's one of those timeless films that does not get old or cloying or sappy stupid with each successive viewing. Thora Birch and Scar Jo are sublime in this film, many experienced actors could learn a thing or two from the restrained performances these two young ladies gave in this film. I had forgotten how funny this film was as well. I laughed out loud at many of the scenes and bits of humor that are laced throughout this tale of loneliness and alienation. If you have never seen this film, do yourself a favor and watch it. If you have not seen it in a few years, watch it again.

Thank goodness I did not pay to watch this movie. It's not very funny, although it does have some cute gags and jokes, it's preachy, it's not at all realistic in it's portrayal of how the US Congress works, and it was directed by the guy who gave us Patch Adams. I'm going to say that I watched it all the way through because I like Lauren Graham, but in reality I was just too lazy to turn the channel to look for anything better to watch. Avoid this one.

Lucky Number Slevin is a fine fun little modern ironic gangster/revenge movie. Yes, people get shot in it, yes, people get beat up in it, yes, there are many deaths, but all the violence is cartoonish and germane to the plot. It's a very good film and if you like gangster/revenge movies then you'll dig it. Josh Hartnett is very good in it and I'm sure he'll make the ladies swoon. Republican party boy Bruce Willis is oh so archly hip in this flick and he's bearable in it. And boy howdy is Lucy Liu cute as a button in this movie, if you don't have a thing for Asian females after seeing this one then something is wrong you with you.

We watched this movie last night on Sundance Channel. It's about the practice of strip mining coal out of the top of mountains, a practice called mountain top removal, and the environmental damage it does to the land and to the people who live around the land where the practice takes place. This film illustrates perfectly how the poor and powerless get trampled on by corporate interests when there is profit to be made.

Instead of ruining the mountains around here, and yes I live relatively close to the area where this shit is being done, they could mine the coal in the mountains like they used to, by using deep mine technologies. But since it's cheaper to blow the tops of the mountains off to extract the coal the coal companies forgo the deep mining and are poisoning the people of southern West Virginia and it's surrounding environs in the process.

This film is an eye opening view into the world of corporate greed and avarice. I highly recommend you see this film as soon as possible.

(As a result of seeing this film I'll be writing about the dangers and idiocy of mountain top removal coal mining in the future. The fight to ban the practice of mountain top removal is now one of the pet causes of this blog.)