Slow Death in Appalachia

 

This deviation from the usual Lake Ontario content is  very much about living on the edge. Land and water are connected, and we cannot have a healthy lake without healthy land and an ethos that respects that wholeness.

My friend Roland may now be dying for the mountains. He has chosen to fast with another activist, Mike Roselle, in the West Virginia state capital. It is a form of witness, he says, to call attention to the brutal tragedy of blowing up mountains to extract coal.

He has made no promises to return from this  witness.

Roland is a Virginia native with a deep and abiding love for nature and for a sustainable society. And he is also a tireless advocate for social justice. He converted to the Quaker faith many years ago and is a gentleman in every sense of the word. He taught school and at summer camps where he introduced children to the world of nature. Later he worked for an employee owned business that distributed organic food throughout western and central New York. He's been involved with various organic farms and growers near his upstate home as a volunteer “farm hand” where he and his bicycle were a long familiar sight to other travelers on our rural roads. He's also been tireless in his outreach and educational efforts on behalf of what he calls God's Creation.

The environmental and social costs of extreme energy extraction methods trouble him deeply. Mountain top removal for coal uses large amounts of energy to move tens of thousands of tons of top soil earth and rock to reach underlying coal deposits. The rubble is pushed into valleys and creeks and wetlands. More than 2000 miles of streams have been buried so far and hundreds of square miles of Appalachia lie barren. Water and land are also contaminated by dust and airborne pollutants such as selenium. And local communities pay the price in human health impacts, flooding and contaminated wells. In the end this grossly simplified leveled off land is “restored” by pitiful plantings of trees and grasses, no substitute for one of the richest and most diverse deciduous forest and stream lands in the world. Bleak doesn't even begin to describe this transformation. If affects all of us.

It has driven Roland Micklem to make a last stand. There are other ways to produce electricity. There are ways to mine coal and to increase efficiency and reduce the use of it. Destroying vast swaths of life giving land is a starkly immoral act in Roland's view. Mountains gone forever, land forms that will never nourish unborn generations of humans and other life is unacceptable.

If you agree with him call, or write to.... Earl Ray Tomblin Office of the Governor, State Capital 1900 Kanawha Blvd E Charleston, West VA 25305 (304) 558-2000 or 1-888-438-2731

or submit a comment to http://www.governor.wv.gov/Pages/SubmitaCommenttotheGovernor.aspx

Please feel free to cut and paste from this blog if you wish.

Then please send a letter or make a call to your representative in Congress and ask them to pass H.R. 1837 the Clean Water Protection Act which will help protect mountain streams and Great Lakes alike. All of us, like Roland, are running out of time.

visit ilovemountains.org for more ideas to stop this brutal practice.