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.

The subject of MTR has been covered previously on this blog in a number of posts, including EPA Halts MTR Permits for Review, with information about EPA administrator Lisa Jackson’s attempt to slow the destruction – a task that has been less than successful due to the power of King Coal. Old King Coal vs. Reality talks about some of the legislative actions attempted by states impacted by MTR to prevent the continued destruction of mountains and entire watersheds – which have also been less than successful. Old King Coal, a Filthy Old Soul described some of the environmental horrors being visited upon the land, water and people of the Appalachian highlands by a coal mining method that has succeeded in eliminating 40,000 jobs for those same people while burying more than 2,000 miles of once pure mountain streams and flattening 500 mountains.

The film’s fine website includes links and outlines of ways you can help end mountaintop removal mining, something people even well outside the Appalachian region should support. We must not allow these most ancient and abundant mountains on earth to be utterly destroyed to serve the bottom line of criminal enterprises like Massey Energy – which racked up more than 60,000 environmental violations between 2000 and 2006 and criminal charges for violations leading to the explosion at its Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia that killed 29 miners in 2008.

It’s not easy to stand against King Coal. Just in the last two years more than 200 people have been arrested in civil disobedience protests just in West Virginia and Kentucky, two states that are suffering the bulk of destruction and the loss of more than a million acres of forest and dozens of towns. This extreme form of coal extraction has turned the coal fields of eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, eastern Tennessee and southwest Virginia into a moonscape of barren, toxic wasteland. What needs to happen, and needs to happen soon, is for so many people to make a stand that the unholy alliance of King Coal, state politicians on the take and law enforcement are forced to step aside.

Please see this film. Arrange a showing (can be done through the website) and invite all your friends and neighbors, maybe your co-workers and boss. Join or support some of the alliance groups that have supported the production of The Last Mountain. Some of these are listed and linked below.

If the Appalachians are destroyed for their coal thousands of homesteads will be destroyed along with them, along with the loving work all those homesteaders did to develop their little pieces of heaven on earth for themselves, their families, and all of us who are making the same effort in our own lives, wherever we are doing it. We all must stand with the people of Appalachia against the forces of destruction-for-profit. Thanks, Homesteaders! Let’s get together and end this outrage now, not later!

Alliance Links:

Appalachian Voices
I Love Mountains
Coal River Mountain Watch
Natural Resources Defense Council
Sierra Club
Waterkeeper Alliance
CREDO Action
Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition

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.

With the human population growing at an increasingly unsustainable rate, irrigation for growing crops around the world has also increased by millions of hectares, more than doubling from less than 150 million to 300+ million hectares since 1960. As the climate changes more rain will fall in some places while other places turn to desert, and no one seems to be paying enough attention to our bad agricultural practices and lousy dietary choices that pretend clean water is something we can all take for granted forever. It’s not just the fabled Colorado that is running dry – China’s Yellow River, which used to flood so severely every year that my childhood never saw a year when hundreds of thousands of people weren’t drowned, no longer reaches the sea and has been known to go completely dry. One of the two rivers that feed the Aral Sea is now completely dry for part of every year, even as the Aral itself shrinks alarmingly.

Lake Chad in central Africa has shrunk by 95% in the last 40 years, and the Punjab region of India is facing a vastly diminished water table, as is our own Great Plains breadbasket region as the vast Ogallala Aquifer is drained steadily to irrigate genetically engineered crops used to feed livestock raised in unhealthy CAFOs for meat rather than human beings.

As we here at the homestead move through the summer being very careful to ration our water usage due to the cracked cistern, it’s not hard to see how it’s not just our bad farming practices that waste and pollute the earth’s water supplies, it’s also ourselves. Why doesn’t everyone have low-flow toilets and showers by now? Why do we still fill big bathtubs high for lengthy soaks when a few inches of water would do the job of washing away the grime just fine? Why do we insist on those ridiculous manicured lawns that serve no purpose at all, when a nice veggie or flower garden would be much more inviting, and local, well-acclimated wild plants would make for a much more interesting landscape?

UK’s Independent published an article citing details of the World Water Development Report released this week, and the outlook isn’t good. Right now 1.1 billion people lack access to clean water, and nearly 2 and a half billion lack proper sanitation. Inertia among the world’s political leaders means that necessary efforts for conservation aren’t even starting despite the ever worsening situation. The projection is that by the middle of this century at least 7 billion people in 60 countries will face water scarcity. This adds up to hunger, disease and death.

What little fresh water the planet does have is being polluted unmercifully. Much pollution comes from chemically dependent agriculture, but in our haste to exploit energy sources the practice of fracking for natural gas is shocking in its gross disregard for environmental preservation. In some places water coming out of taps actually burns, and the chemical stews used in the process don’t even have to be reported for toxicity. The pollution is so shocking that the state of New Jersey this month passed a statewide ban on franking in order to protect their water supplies. Pennsylvania is considering its own ban, and more states are sure to follow.

At present more than 1,100 U.S. counties face water scarcity issues. That’s a third of all counties in the contiguous 48 – this is a very, very serious situation we should all be paying attention to. For homesteaders out here working hard to become as self-sufficient as possible, we might well begin to consider our own water supplies to be the most valuable natural resource of all in our efforts to protect and defend the land and our chosen way of life.

I know that our current water troubles here on my own homestead have certainly made me more aware of just how precious this resource really is, even though I do not irrigate my crops at all because there is no shortage of rainfall in these Great Smoky Mountains. I have been following the various models for projecting what is to occur as the climate changes, and have been somewhat gratified to see that while we can expect up to 4 degrees overall rise in annual temperature means, we are slated to also get about 4 inches more rain every year. I can always plant peaches, figs and pecans in the orchard if it gets too warm for good apples and pears, grow more watermelons and pumpkins for market. But ensuring the purity and continued flow of water through my land must become a passion that I’m as willing to pursue as my lobbying against GMOs to neighboring farmers in order to protect the value of my organic crops.

They attempted a couple of years ago to carve out sections of the National Forest we abut, so developers could create fancy log McMansion gated communities for wealthy people’s vacation comfort. These developments had carte blanche to divert the natural mountain streams that drain the eastern side of the divide for their own lakes and golf courses and such, which would discharge chemicals along with their sewage back into the streams uphill of us that then flow through my property. Every conservation group in the region got together, and with help from us landowners lobbied hard to the federal agencies who thought they could sell portions of our collective natural heritage to rich people just because there was lots of money involved. The very best thing to come out of the nationwide financial collapse – and real estate bust – was that this plan got shelved when nobody was buying. Though we are watchful, because once things pick up again they’ll be right back to buying up tracts of National Forest for their own amusement and dumping their waste on us.

This can happen anywhere there are state and federal lands, way too close to our beloved little plots of land we cherish so much. Even during times of economic distress like the current Great Recession bureaucrats may be moved to sell the water and mineral rights to irresponsible corporate interests for exploitation, and our water woes will get steadily worse. Look around closely at what’s happening in your state and area, and get involved with the conservation groups that are fighting this rape of the land and water. Don’t feel safe just because you no longer live in a city, or because your land abuts set-aside tracts of wilderness. We homesteaders must get active to protect it all, or one of these days we’ll wake up and it will all be gone.

Links:

Frack and ruin: the rise of hydraulic fracturing
FAO Water: water scarcity
EPI Eco-Economy Indicators
Water Scarcity Could Affect Billions
Global Warming: Water scarcity scares US counties
Regulation: an acceptable cost for frackers
N.J. legislature passes ban on fracking

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

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.

According to my calendar, I could risk planting corn and beans at this point, even though last frost date is officially May 10. In this my 19th gardening year here, I’ve never seen it freeze that late. Blackberry winter always hits during the first week of May, but it hasn’t been below the 40s in all those years. My biggest plans for the upcoming weekend are to organize the ‘shroom hunters planning to converge here. It’s morel time, it’s scheduled to rain, and we are very much looking forward to the feast.

Meanwhile, my local plant supplier – Painter’s Greenhouse has changed hands. Steve and Susie Painter have chosen to retire, transferring the business to the Owens family. The focus has changed from landscape and houseplants to garden vegetables and herbs, which can be purchased by the dozen for not much more than the cost of seeds and potting soil. I got some heirloom tomatoes and very good non-hybrid peppers last year that did so well I still have some in the freezer. The tomatoes were viney enough that this year I’m planning on just letting them hug the ground, there isn’t a tomato cage anywhere tall enough to handle them. A 3-4 inch layer of straw on the ground should allow for good fruit without having to be off the ground entirely, and Painter’s should have bales of straw as well.

I encourage readers to check out their own local suppliers and give them their business. They will pay attention when you request they offer heirlooms and open-pollenated varieties, as these are in great demand these days. If your homestead doesn’t have a local supplier, you might look into the idea of becoming one yourself! At Painter’s there are weekly sales events in season with cook-outs, local bluegrass bands and lots of diversion for the kids so you can roam the greenhouses at will. These have proven immensely popular, and they often allow local artists to set up as well. Our potters and ceramic artists are gaining quite the regional reputation, and there’s just nothing more glamourous than having a few unusual pots and planters decorating your porches with great greenery planted within. Supporting local artists is always a good thing, and helps to establish great networking opportunities to grow homestead viability in a number of creative ways.

Remember that local networks of sales and barter tend to keep what’s valuable circulating locally instead of just enriching some faceless corporation somewhere. When thinking about growing things from the ground up, it’s good to remember that can mean much more than just fruits, veggies and herbs. The same is true of local Farmer’s and Tailgate markets, CSA cooperatives, etc. So when you’re surfing after a long day doing work about the homestead, don’t forget to do some localized searching for developing cooperatives in your area that it may behoove you to investigate and/or join!

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.

To Deep Harm’s work I would add just a few details that should also be kept in mind whenever you hear that the plume is in your area, or has been in your area during the most important weeks of the growing cycle (like spring). First, it is NOT the external gamma dose given off by radioactive particles in the cloud/plume that are of primary concern. That will be so minimal on this side of the planet that it won’t add up to a single chest X-ray all told. The real danger comes from the isotopes themselves – atoms of matter in the air that you can’t even see. If these get into your body by breathing or being ingested with your food and water, they can do many times the biological damage right up close to your internal organs.

And for those of us who grow some of our own food, it is important to know that it’s not just these isotopes “falling out” of the cloud onto the ground and plants that needs to be considered. You could wash that off of many foods without too much trouble. A bigger problem is that when isotopes such as cesium, strontium and many others will, if they are in the soil, be uptaken by growing plants and incorporated into their very cells. Cesium is uptaken just like potassium, neither plants nor animal bodies (including yours) can tell the difference. Strontium is uptaken just like calcium, which will, if you ingest it, be greedily allocated to your bones. And this is known to cause leukemias and other cancers over time. The iodine that is such a threat to thyroid glands isn’t uptaken in high amounts due to its short half-life (8 days), but easily gets on the grass that is eaten by cows and from there into the milk.

Officials will of course be keeping careful track of the situation both in Japan and here in the U.S., but self-reliant homesteaders should also bear in mind that potential problems will tend to be downplayed drastically. Supposedly to prevent “panic,” though no nuclear power plant accident has ever actually caused people to run screaming down the streets as if they were being chased by Godzilla. In situations where radioactive fallout is present, what you don’t know CAN hurt you. Those who are in charge of knowing are too often unwilling to let you know everything you need to know. So bear that in mind as the weeks and months proceed, Fukushima’s nukes will be releasing steadily for the foreseeable future because they are not and cannot be contained.

As a perfect example of the kind of insufficient and occasionally downright misleading information that can come out of supposedly responsible ‘officials’, let me just deconstruct an article from the March 21 edition of the Mainichi (Japan) News:
No need to fear radioactive contamination of food, rain if proper steps taken: experts. This article is a short series of questions and answers, the most misleading of which I deal with below…

1. What happens if you eat food products that have been contaminated by radiation?

Expert Answer: Radioactive iodine has a tendency to collect in the thyroid, and ingesting massive amounts raises the risk of thyroid cancer. However, it has a half-life of eight days, which is relatively short.

Me – It doesn’t take “massive” amounts of iodine to cause thyroid problems or thyroid cancers, which tend to show up years down the road. The greater the dose, the sooner the problems appear, 3-5 years if you get a lot, 10-20 years for far lesser doses. The 8-day half-life means nothing in this equation except to assure you that what you have ingested is emitting its radiation quickly and steadily to your thyroid. Sure, it may be essentially gone in a two or three months because it has decayed, but the damage it did to sensitive internal tissues while it was decaying is already done.

2. What are the “provisional regulation levels” of radiation that spinach and raw milk were found to exceed?

Expert Answer: These levels refer to standards from the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare based on [Japan's] Food Sanitation Act.

Me – Spinach, milk, canola and other leafy greens in a 150-mile distance from the stricken reactors have tested for iodine and cesium at above these standards and the Japanese government has acted to prevent those food products from getting into the marketplace. It is reasonable to presume that agricultural products from this entire region will be a total loss this year, and due to large amounts of longer-lived isotopes in the soil, may have to be abandoned as a ‘dead zone’ like that around Chernobyl for many years into the future.

3. Is it okay to keep eating such food products?

Expert Answer: According to former University of Tokushima professor Jun Sekizawa, much of the radioactive material found on spinach can be eliminated by washing and boiling it. As for milk, Sekizawa says, “drinking even the most contaminated [1,500 becquerels] several times is still less than one tenth of the radiation people are exposed to in the natural world. He adds that people will be fine if they do nit keep drinking the milk.

Me – This is nothing less than insidious. You cannot scrub green leafs enough to cleanse them of radioisotopes (root crops should be okay if they are harvested now). Nor does boiling affect radioisotopes in the least. Pasteurization of milk won’t get rid of iodine or strontium either. So it’s a complete lie that it can be boiled out of vegetables. Assuming that ‘officials’ are reporting truthfully about contamination levels – which has never been known to happen in the entire history of nuclear technology – telling people to boil is doing WORSE than nothing. The fair assumption should be that the ‘official’ story on radiation is short by at least a factor of ten. Proceed accordingly.

4. Is it safe to drink tap water?

Expert Answer: The maximum consumption limit per one liter of water is 300 becquerels for iodine and 200 becquerels for cesium. The Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry says that while people should refrain from drinking water whose iodine and cesium levels exceed the regulation limit, it can safely be used for bathing and washing. The ministry also says that it is safe to drink the water if there are no other alternatives.

Me – I’d avoid drinking the water entirely when radiation levels are present. If I had no other choice (and many people still stuck in the prefecture don’t have a choice), I’d drink it to stay alive. Here in the U.S. levels are unlikely to reach anything close to federal limits, but I’d sure replace the charcoal and particulate filters on my water filtration system just to make sure. Iodine is captured very well by activated charcoal. Then I’d change them again when the all clear comes. I would seriously avoid showering or bathing in hot water, as the steam will bring contaminates right into your nasal passages and lungs. Only lukewarm or cool for washing, and definitely use an abrasive type soap such as Lava. Or use a loufa sponge. Throw it away after a few uses.

Whenever there is radioactive contamination present in the air, soil and water, people who spend time outdoors should definitely wash off thoroughly once indoors. Dry quickly and well, especially the face, and don’t re-use towels. Keep soiled laundry in enclosed containers. Don’t wear your outdoor shoes inside the house. Luckily, the Japanese are noted for fastidiousness in these areas, it will serve them well in this crisis.

5. What should we do when it rains?

Expert Answer: Stay out of the rain as much as possible, and whatever you do, don’t drink the rainwater.

Me – Always wear a brimmed rain hat to keep the rain out of your hair, and a rain coat to keep it off your skin. Keep this outer clothing away from the living areas of the house (like in a mud room) along with shoes and boots. And do that scrubbing wash thing whenever you’ve been exposed – the rain will contain far more contaminates than will be present on a nice day in the air.

Bottom line for those of us who don’t live in Japan, we are not going to be exposed to seriously dangerous levels of isotopes or gamma dose from the plume. Most of the very serious heavy metal fission products will fall out of the cloud over the ocean (or very close to Fukushima) well before they get here. But if we remember that it’s not the exterior gamma dose that will most harm us – but the isotopes falling out of the plume that might get inside us – we should be mostly okay.

Back in the days of atmospheric bomb testing the levels were very, very high. I can remember when word came down that we couldn’t make snow ice cream anymore, and always wondered how much of a nasty dose I got from eating it every year up until then. Yet another reminder that ‘officials’ aren’t going to tell the truth about the dangers if they can help it. Besides strontium and iodine, which were specifically cited back in 1963 as the reason for the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty, cesium that got into the food and water supplies was a big consideration.

Think about this, then – there is more cesium-137 in just one of the spent fuel pools at Fukushima than was released by all the nuclear weapons ever exploded since the beginning of the nuclear age. Sobering thought, but one that it might be valuable to hold when the real debate on shutting these nasty things down for good comes to a forum near you!

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

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.

A new campaign is currently in the works between the Waterkeeper Alliance and environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to fight the ongoing destruction of Mountaintop Removal, to be called “The Dirty Lie.” Stay tuned for links and information here as soon as the website’s up and going.

North Carolina, Feb. 14: Meanwhile, efforts by environmentalists in North Carolina have been targeting the mighty behemoth Duke Energy and its CEO James Rogers to protest the building of yet another coal-fired power plant in the mountainous southwestern part of the state.Anti-coal activists in NC have also been holding the line in the state legislature against the purchase and burning of coal from Mountaintop Removal in any of the state’s coal-fired power plants and industries. The proposed restrictions were shelved again in the last session, but supporters are active to get a positive vote this year. Environmentalists in Georgia have introduced similar legislation to ban coal from this source, and in Ohio has suspended the building of new coal plants altogether.

So progress is being made even though Old King Coal is still trying as hard as he ever did to turn the whole world black. So stay tuned, concerned lovers of the land, we’ll be seeing a lot more about these battles in the near future, and all of them will need our support!

Links:

Is America Ready to Quit Coal?
Bill aims to outlaw coal mined by removing mountaintops
Georgia to Ban Mountaintop Removal Coal?
Coal River Wind Farm
Waterkeeper Alliance
Appeals court overrules new mountaintop mine rules

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.

Concentrated in this nasty toxic waste are poisons and heavy metals such as arsenic and mercury, nickel, vanadium, beryllium, cadmium, barium, chromium, copper, molybdenum, zinc, lead and selenium. There are also concentrations of radioactive elements including uranium, thorium and radium. These substances readily leach from the ash into water, and the rivers and wells around the spill site have tested high in arsenic and other pollutants – residents have been warned to drink only bottled water until they hear otherwise.

Yet despite the fact that there is a toxic load in the millions of pounds of ash produced in America every year from burning coal, the EPA does not regulate it as toxic waste and some states don’t regulate it at all. Thus despite known problems with retention of the sludge, this waste product is actually considered to be a valuable commercial product all by itself!

There are actually marketers of coal fly ash that do nothing but re-sell the stuff for use in concrete and cement, as structural landfill and mine reclamation, as base for roads, for making bricks, and even as “inert filler” in agricultural fertilizer (along with waste from other industries, like steel production). Is it any wonder that our once-fertile plains now need ever-increasing amounts of fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides and genetically engineered crop cultivars in order to grow anything at all?

Those of us who are committed to lovingly managing our land and producing as much of our own sustenance as possible using the most organic of tried-and-true methods can use the sad experience of the people in eastern Tennessee as an opportunity to learn more about what ‘standard practices’ our rural neighbors may be using that could threaten our family’s health and livelihood. Large farms upstream of our homesteads could be using industrial waste-based fertilizers that will leach contaminants into our water sources as easily as their in-season chemical sprays will.

While arsenic in the water is a serious concern for our drinking water, irrigation water and livestock water, heavy metals can wreak terrible havoc as well. Round-Up doesn’t contain heavy metals, your neighbor may think he’s being responsible. So he probably needs to know what’s in that fertilizer too, as he may be wondering why his crops do so poorly and his livestock are so sickly. Do your research, put your findings into an easy-to-read format, and present them at future meetings of your extension classes or community farm planning groups. Pass them out at the farmer’s market and contact environmental groups in your area who are or should become involved in dealing with these issues.

This earth is our only home. Our homesteads – our beloved little corners of earth – are our pleasure, our pride, our freedom and our example to the world. If we won’t protect and defend them, no one else will. So as we move into this hopeful new year with a new administration with a commitment to sustainable energy policies for the future, don’t let anybody fool you about “Clean Coal” – there is no such thing.

We can choose to go with clean, efficient, renewable energy sources. We can choose to diversify our production so that gigantic mega-watt plants aren’t necessary to supply our needs. We can choose to stop raping and pillaging our planet for the short-term gain for the wealthy few, while ignoring basic livability for our children and grandchildren’s future. Get mad, get involved, get busy!

Links:

Desperate for Fossil Fuels
“Mountaintop Removal”
Coal Fly Ash
USGS: Radioactive Elements in Coal and Fly Ash
Fear in the Fields: How Hazardous Wastes Become Fertilizer

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.

Pollan begins his letter to “Dear Mr. President-Elect” with an honest caution -

It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

Pollan goes on to explain issues like climate change, energy independence, health care and the general health of the economy in terms of our dependence on food depend crucially on sound agricultural policies. He explains very well what ‘went wrong’ with our food system over the past several decades, and how the antiquated, fossil fuel dependent system cannot be sustained. We no longer have cheap fuels and unlimited water supplies, our policies are haphazard, our subsidies unfair, our planning non-existent. Pollan then offers his particulars in this 9-page article, and the reasoning behind them is fascinating reading. He offers a complete rationale for organic farming many of us have been promoting and practicing for years, in three not at all ‘simple’ steps…

1. Resolarizing the American Farm
2. Reregionalizing the Food System
3. Rebuilding America’s Food Culture

I’ve added my voice to the growing calls for our leadership to pay serious attention to the many complex issues of our food supply – which IS our ‘national security’ – by sending this article as a link in a congratulatory email to President-Elect Obama. This is an immediate action issue, as Obama is right now choosing his cabinet and advisors. Agriculture and food policy issues must not fall to the back of the line. So add your voice to the calls for sane policy and firm leadership today!

You can also sign petitions and keep up to date on incoming news at the Organic Consumers Association. Don’t forget while you’re there to sign up for their email newsletter too!