1115.org

photo: Melissa Farlow / National Geographic

Though I’ve written about the environment here many times, most notably ANWR, I don’t consider myself an environmentalist. It’s not that I don’t care about the environment, of course I do, but there are only so many hours in the day, and so many -ists one can choose to identify as. I want to breathe clean air and drink clean water. I want there to be enough show to snowboard on, and enough rain to make rapids for rafting. But while the health of the planet will eventually touch the lives of everyone, there are other issues that are adversely affecting people right now. I haven’t quite figured out how to tell a kid living below the poverty line that he’s going to have to wait for help until after we save some trees. Admittedly we should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, but the left’s bumbling on the issues and inability to coordinate anything make that a moot point. So prioritizing is essential, and as long as there’s a senseless war fueled by vanity and refusal to admit mistakes, and accelerating domestic inequality, my environmentalism will be limited to recycling and taking public transportation when possible.

The exception to this was ANWR, and even that wasn’t strictly speaking environmentalism. As I’ve argued before, were there enough oil in the ground to allow us to tell the Saudis exactly what they they can do with themselves and buy some time to come up with renewable energy sources, I’d be up there drilling myself. But the fact is there’s less than two years worth of oil there, and when that’s gone, our addiction would remain and ANWR would have been ruined for nothing.

With the news that the Bush Administration is set to “enshrine” a destructive and toxic form of coal mining called “mountaintop removal,” the environmental damage from extraction is coupled with a human toll, and that’s before the coal is even fired for energy. Most Americans have never heard of mountaintop removal, not especially surprising when you consider that coal mining isn’t a high profile industry outside of a few localized areas, and no one has attempted to remove the top of Mt. St. Helens, Mt Rainer, or Pike’s Peak. Yet. And I would be in the same boat as everyone else, dismissing the latest Bush Administration sop to its big business contributors as business as usual if I hadn’t had the occasion to see a presentation by National Geographic photographer Melissa Farlow. Farlow was on the staff of the Missouri Photo Workshop last year, and presented photos from a story she did in early 2006 on the effects of mountaintop removal in the coal country of West Virginia and Kentucky. Ostensibly I was supposed to be watching the presentation as an example of the power of photojournalism - and it was most certainly that - but I couldn’t help getting caught up in the actual story itself.

The bottom line on mountaintop removal is pretty simple: it is a lot easier and profitable for mining companies to dynamite coal above ground than it is to dig for it underground. But all of the non-coal byproducts, as well as coal dust too fine to transport, have to go somewhere. In this case, dust goes airborne, and the rest ends up in holding pools carved out of the mountains, and valleys where people once lived. The effects of mountaintop removal include health problems for anyone unlucky enough to be downwind, ruined streams and ponds, dead fish, and massive unemployment due to its efficiency. And this is all based on everything going according to plan. It gets much worse:

In Logan County in the winter of 1972, following two straight days of torrential rain, a coal-waste structure built by a subsidiary of the Pittston Coal Company collapsed and spilled 130 million gallons (492 million liters) into Buffalo Creek. The flood scooped up tons of debris and scores of homes as it swept downstream. Survivors recalled seeing houses bob by, atilt in the swift current, the doomed families huddled at their windows. The final count was 125 dead, 1,000 injured, 4,000 made homeless. The Pittston Company called the disaster an “act of God.”

In neighboring Kentucky on an October morning in 2000, the bottom of a waste pond near the town of Inez collapsed, pouring 250 million gallons (946 million liters) of slurry—25 times the amount of oil spilled in the Exxon Valdez disaster—into an inactive underground mine shaft. From there, the slurry surged to the mine’s two exits and flooded two creeks hell-bent for the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy and the Ohio River beyond. Miraculously, there was no loss of human life, though 20 miles (32 kilometers) of stream valley would be declared an aquatic dead zone, water systems in ten counties would have to be shut down, and the black slick would eventually reach out toward the riverfront in Cincinnati. Lawyers for the Martin County Coal Company, a Massey subsidiary and owner of the impoundment, blamed the accident on excessive rainfall, which was simply another way of saying what had been said at Buffalo Creek. It was God’s fault.

For anyone who thinks that the Bush administration is mostly over, think again. Coal is dirty. Clean coal is a fiction wholly invented by energy companies. The new mountaintop removal rules will compound this by destroying the environment before any energy is even produced. And that’s just fine with the powers that be.