The Last Mountain: A Call to Action

The Last Mountain is a new documentary film detailing the gross environmental destruction of mountaintop removal [MTR] coal mining, featuring interviews with some of the activists most involved in trying to save the beautiful Appalachian mountains from King Coal.

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Water, Water Everywhere but Not a Drop to Drink

As my family begins work to re-engineer our water system by tapping a new spring and installing a ram pump to a new cistern on the ridge, I am once again thankful for our semi-abundant supply of clean, fresh water on our mountain homestead via two clear-running creeks draining the National Forest uphill to the continental divide. I realize that we have something real and valuable here to work with that way too many people who aren’t lucky enough to live here do not have – a nearly endless supply of water pure enough to drink without filtering, fresh and cold enough to host ample populations of native trout, and fast enough to escape the winter freezes on its way to the piedmont’s rivers and lakes.

Serious shortages of fresh potable water across entire regions of the Middle East, Africa, central and south Asia have long been in the news as conditions grow worse with the advent of global warming. Extended droughts have caused increasingly destructive wildfires in Australia, Russia and here in the United States, where fires so far this year in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas have charred millions of acres of land.

To get a picture of how bad the situation is getting – and how agricultural policies, municipal waste and unsustainable consumption levels affect the clean water we Americans tend to take for granted, consider the fact that the mighty Colorado River no longer flows to the sea because every drop is diverted along the way. Running 1,450 miles through seven U.S. states and two Mexican states, the river and its tributaries have been impounded by 20 dams along its length to provide water to cities in the parched southwest and water for irrigation, golf courses, desert green-spaces and such. Some researchers are saying that Lake Mead, the source of water for 22 million people, may be dry by 2012.

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Odd Weather & Funding Cuts

Sigh. As the Kabuki in D.C. continues into yet another week/month of grandstanding on the budget and raising the debt ceiling, a good many of us homesteaders are watching our state governments engaging in the same kind of bad budgetary theater as summer hits hard (and early). This year it looks a lot like neither the weather nor government policies care to offer any help to rural America, where the ‘Great Recession’ is a whole lot more like a Great Depression.

In Washington the drastic budget cuts are of course not hitting ADM or Cargill or any other giant Agribiz subsidies – mostly used to grow bioengineered corn, soy, etc. for animal feed. Rather, cuts in the USDA, EPA and FDA budgets are targeted at conservation, extension, research, renewable energy and rural development programs. Less money for inspections and enforcement, less for policing big livestock operations, less for wetland set-asides, etc., etc., etc. The slashing goes on and on, and bodes ill for just about everything that counts in this world. As if this wholesale gutting of all programs geared towards sustainable agriculture, responsible land use, regulation of pollutants and development of alternative crops isn’t bad enough, they’re also slashing food assistance programs like WIC and food stamps.

The Rodale Institute has a very good overview of how the Republican’s scorched earth policy is targeting small-scale farmers, organic growers and specialty farm/homestead programs that have been important to those of us actually engaged in trying to live sustainably on the land. With $39 billion in cuts to conservation programs aimed at protecting environmentally sensitive areas and $350 million for the Organic Transitions Research Program, it seems quite obvious that today’s politicians don’t have much of an appreciation of what it takes to grow and market nutritious food.

Meanwhile, here at my homestead where the summer crops were planted late due to too much rain and some concern about fallout deposition of cesium from Fukushima (which was high in this area), the rain finally did slack off. To nothing. Haven’t had more than a few drops in over a month, and issues with the cistern have us on water rationing in the household – there’s nothing to irrigate with. That hasn’t been an issue most years given that average rainfall here is ample, but this year’s shaping up to be hellishly hot and dry. I can do nothing but wait and see which crops make it through to the next rainy spell, keep some potted seedlings in reserve to plant REALLY late if need be. If it’s to be a super-hot summer, it could last well into November. That’s enough time for most things, even if planted late.

Below are some good articles and resource collections so that we who will be most affected by what Washington (and our state governments) do about the coming second dip of the Great Recession. I urge all my readers to educate themselves to what’s happening nationally and locally, and get involved. Call your representatives. Write letters to the editor. Bring up the important issues at the farmer’s market and at church and at any other community meetings where people who are also affected can be found. Money is just paper and computer data these days. Wall Street’s paper is even less than that. But everyone has to eat, and if there are no food producers people will starve. Our land, our labor, our crops are much more imp We must speak out. We must speak loudly. And we must enlist all the help we can get.

Links:

Agri-Pulse Communications
Rodale Press
Rural Resource Guide [NC]
American Farmland Trust

Okay, Had to Plant Anyway

Despite what my trusty Geiger counter tells me about the presence of radioactive isotopes in my air, water and ground, it’s in the 80s here in the mountains this week and things really must be planted. After several days of steady rain when levels were up around 10 mcrem/hr here on the mountain, we got a break yesterday when it fell back to entirely undetectable. Today it’s up again to an average of 5 mcrem/hr, which I’m guessing is going to be our new ‘normal’ background. At least until Fukushima stops dumping, and that may take months.

So I’ve turned some beds, busted up the clods, and scattered seed for salad greens and bunching onions. I figure what we’re getting here of airborne radiation is primarily iodine-131, which has been showing up in milk in various states closer to Japan than mine. We can live without fresh milk, dry works just as well for baking and cooking, was processed long enough ago to be free of radioactivity. Butter is a bit more worrisome because we go through a lot of it here on the ‘stead, cheese less so due to the fact that it tends to get aged pretty well. After 4-6 weeks even relatively high levels of iodine will decay away, since its half-life is 8 days. Nothing that I can plant right now would have detectable levels left of iodine by the time it’s ready to eat, so I feel pretty good about that too. Cesium is a bigger problem (134 with a half-life of 2 years and 137 half-life at 30 years), but that will be much more of an issue at and near Japan as well as in seafood and seaweed. What will make it here won’t be more than after a Chinese bomb test.

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Radioactive Spring

I am probably not the only American homesteader who has been watching with fascinated horror the events in Japan since the 9.0 earthquake on March 11, its subsequent tsunami on the nation’s northeastern coast, and the amazing nuclear disaster underway at the Fukushima-1 power station. We have heard reports of three reactors in various stages of meltdown, we watched horrified as reactor buildings exploded one by one, and we keep on hearing about unshielded (open to the atmosphere) spent fuel pools that are also in various stages of melting.

Radiation levels have been so high that plant workers attempting to prevent worst-case scenarios by spraying seawater onto the melting fuel had to be withdrawn for extended periods of time. We have been humbled by the selfless courage of workers willing to lose their lives to protect the nation from this awful mess. And this past weekend we have begun hearing about radioactive contamination of food crops and water at ever farther distances from the reactor reservation, even as we concurrently hear about the plume of nasty isotopes having made it across the Pacific to come ashore in California, the most important milk, fruit and vegetable producing region for the entire United States.

Thus it seems timely to offer some real information about radioactive isotopes that will continue to contaminate milk, meat, vegetables and fruit in northern Japan, and which may end up in our food supply too (but in much lower concentration). First, let me direct my readers to an excellent blog effort by a friend of mine who spent a long career in government [USDA] assessing various dangers to the food supply, including emergency planning for radiological accidents and how they can contaminate food.

Radioactive contamination of food: A primer for consumers by my friend, who goes by the internet pseudonym of “Deep Harm,” is the best place to start in gaining understanding of how to minimize your family’s exposure to radioisotopes in food, along with very good information about how all this works, what it means, and how to protect yourself.

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EPA Halts MTR Permits for Review

The ‘Breaking News’ headline at the anti-mountaintop removal website I Love Mountains brings tears to the grateful eyes of we lovers of these ancient, beautiful and abundant mountains…

Hope renewed across the Appalachian coalfields – Obama Administration suspends mountaintop removal permits for further review…

Obama’s new EPA administrator Lisa Jackson announced this past Tuesday that the agency would be delaying somewhere between 150 and 250 permits issued by the US Army Corps of Engineers to coal companies to flatten mountains and destroy watersheds in their desperate quest to extract the last of the sequestered coal with as few paid miners as possible.

What the EPA will be reviewing are blatant violations of clean water regulations former President G.W. Bush waived in his 2002 “fill rule” and a last days repeal of the stream buffer zone rule that would allow coal companies to ignore any and all impacts of the water supplies of rural residents, towns and cities dependent upon these mountain streams for drinking water supplies.

The map above (h/t Appalachian Voices) shows graphically how open strip mines and MTR directly affects the very poorest regions of Appalachia. One might suspect that these areas are happy to have the good jobs these operations offer, but the reality is that this kind of mining is equipment-reliant, done with machines and not men. For instance, King Coal once provided 120,000 decent paying jobs in West Virginia, but now fewer than 20,000 citizens call themselves coal miners. The people whose environment is being raped are getting nothing of value out of the deal. And may indeed be harmed significantly as their water supplies are systematically polluted, sickening their crops, livestock and families.

As reported on this blog in several posts linked below, some of the people in these poor counties have better ideas about what to do with their mountains, things that will improve everyone’s life, make them leaders in clean, renewable energy supplies, and create green jobs for local residents. Especially check out projects like Coal River Wind, which proposes to harvest the wind instead of the mountain itself.

Another great article with good links and pictures is Hope is Alive in Appalachia!!! by Kossack ‘faithfull’. So get off your duff – call some legislators, sign some petitions, and spread some love of mountains in your circle today!

Links:

Old King Coal vs. Reality
Hope is Alive in Appalachia!!!
Old King Coal, a Filthy Old Soul
Coal River Wind
I Love Mountains

Old King Coal vs. Reality

WV win, NC loss:
Champ moves down in the rankings

West Virginia, Feb. 13: A federal appeals court in Charleston, West Virginia, has ruled that the US Army Corps of Engineers may permit coal companies involved in the controversial and environmentally destructive practice of “Mountaintop Removal” mining to bypass the Clean Water Act rules in its permitting process.

The rules had required environmental impact studies and reviews prior to permitting the coal companies to blast the tops off ancient mountains and using the debris to fill in valleys, a practice that destroys mountain feeder streams, diminishes supply and pollutes the water supplies for towns and cities downstream. An excellent overview of the situation and local efforts to stem the tide of destruction can be found in this diary by Bruce Nilles on the political website Daily Kos.

One of the mountains immediately threatened by this ruling is Coal River Mountain, one of the last mountains still standing in West Virginia’s Coal River Valley. A local coalition, Coal River Wind Farm has developed an excellent alternative to destroying the mountain and watershed that will return economic value to the area, jobs to the residents and power to the grid all at the same time. Do check them out and lend your voice to their efforts to convince WV state officials to choose alternatives to King Coal and the filth he leaves in his wake.

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Old King Coal, a Filthy Old Soul

Back in June I posted a disgusted ode to King Coal’s most outrageous method of extracting the combustible black rock from these most beautiful and abundant Appalachians. In that post, Desperate for Fossil Fuels, I described the environmental horror known as “Mountaintop Removal” and offered a bunch of useful links for further information, environmental coalitions and direct actions aimed at stopping this crazy rape of the earth.

Just six months later on December 22, an earthen dam gave way at a coal ash holding pond in Kingston, Tennessee, spilling more than a billion gallons of the sludge into a neighborhood as well as into the Clinch and Tennessee Rivers. Three homes were completely destroyed, many others within the 300 acre sludge zone had to be evacuated, dead fish littered the banks of the rivers and the people of eastern Tennessee as well as the rest of the nation suddenly became familiar with what this waste product of burning coal contains. It’s not pretty.

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Letter to the New Farmer in Chief

There is a resurgence of hope across America in the wake of Tuesday’s election of Democrat Barack Obama as President, promising a new direction of change for the future of our nation. Those of us who have been paying attention to the global financial meltdown, increasingly severe food shortages in the wake of global warming, and the outrageous poisoning of our citizens and livestock/pets by corrupt Chinese producers (a glaring example of globalization’s failures), are hoping that a new dawn in America will bring with it the serious changes to our agricultural policies that have grown increasingly necessary through decades of decline.

Now, politicians don’t generally talk much about agricultural policies while they’re stumping for votes in big cities. And they’re often so ignorant of agricultural issues that even rural dwellers – actual farmers – get nothing but pablum and platitudes in response to their questions. Luckily, journalist Michael Pollan wrote a great ‘open letter’ in the New York Times in October entitled, Farmer in Chief. This is a must-read for all of us committed to self-sufficiency, locally grown foods, the viability of family farms and homesteads, and the future health of an environment we all depend upon for life.

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Used Tires: Pollution or Resource?

I don’t know about you, but I pick up junked tires that other people dump off the side of mountain roads in my county – usually along with assorted junked appliances and badly bagged household trash – and take them with me when I do the monthly trash run to our local Inconvenient Center. I call it that instead of its own self-title of “Convenient Center” because it’s damned IN-convenient. They put all their dumpsters inside a compound with high chain link topped by barbed wire and guarded by a grizzled old grouch (and his junkyard dog) who seem to really hate the idea that people have trash and recyclables to responsibly dispose of, which is only open 3 days a week when almost all of us are actually out working honest jobs instead of hauling our own trash.

Anyway, there is a corner of the inconvenient center devoted to junked appliances and tires, which supposedly get recycled at some point (though I’ve never noticed the piles to go down any). Better to have those big junk items at the center than on the roads and hillsides. They never biodegrade, they are breeding grounds for mosquitoes, and they look really nasty. So, you might have been wondering, how exactly do they recycle things like the 190 million car, truck and equipment tires tossed every year in this nation, and what COULD be done with them?

My friend Vito over at RideLust has asked the obvious question, based on a recycling technology that could actually be of some great use and wouldn’t spread West Nile Fever. It’s called Rubberized Asphalt Concrete [RAC], and it would not only give us better, longer lasting road surfaces, it would save us a whole heck of a lot of petroleum dependence!

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