| Have you read the WHOLE column? If not, please, go back and do so.
I am not going to offer extensive quotes, because you need to read the material in context.
I will note that immediately after the 2nd passage I quote Kennedy points out that when his father visited Appalachia, 44,000 46,000 people earned their living by coal mining, but now that figure is fewer than 11,000, less than are employed in the Walmarts within the state.
Kennedy goes through 6 current legal requirements he says can be used now to stop mountaintop removal. Let me note only the fifth: the Clean Water Act requires mining operators to prove that they can restore the "function and structure" of affected streams. Operators have never been compelled to make the functional or structural analyses of the aquatic ecosystem required by the act. Obama should order his officials to stop ignoring this requirement.
Of course the coal operators cannot meet this requirement- or realistically, any of the others. Which means insisting upon obeying the law would stop mountaintop removal now.
2,500 hundred tons of explosives daily, or as Kennedy notes, the equivalent of one Hiroshima bomb weekly . . .
500 mountains destroyed already . . . .
2000 miles of Appalachian streams interred under the fill waste . . . .
Those mountains are billions hundreds of millions (h/t my stupid opinion at Dailykos) of years old. They cannot be restored.
The bio diversity was perhaps as rich as any place in the lower 48 states. It is being irreversibly diminished as habitat is lost.
There are many issues facing this nation. We do face an economic crisis. We have pressures to move away from dependence upon foreign oil. Some will use the current crises to oppose any change the current way we extract and use coal. They will argue it will cost too much, it will make coal, and thus electricity, too expensive.
But they are providing inaccurate cost figures. They are not paying for those ancient mountains gouged out, for the once pure streams blocked and buried, for the trees and shrubs and the wildlife that live on them lost forever.
For too long we have not required proper costing of ecological impact, any more than we have included in the price of our food and beverage the long-term medical costs they impose "downstream" - a term hard to use in the context of mountaintop removal when so many streams no longer pass water "downstream". . .
Perhaps were we honest enough to account for such costs, we would not find ourselves scrambling for the funds to restore what can be restored.
Think of the Superfund sites, a desperate and failed attempt to rectify the damage done by uncontrolled production of chemicals and dumping of the waste byproducts. We should be smart enough to realize that the chemical industry was hardly an isolated problem.
I look at pictures like that accompanying the op-ed, with ancient mountains gouged to death. I think of a song by Pete Seeger, written perhaps with a different intent, but still applicable. It starts with a question:
Where have all the flowers gone?
And it ends all except the last verse with another question, identical or each of those verses:
When will they ever learn?
The final verse asks about graveyards, and their disappearing. In the song, the flowers come back to cover the graveyards . . . and the loss of memory implied therein leads to a similarly implied repetition of the cycle.
That will not be true with the mountains, the streams, the trees, the shrubs, the birds.
That last verse rephrases the question that is the refrain throughout the song: When will we ever learn?
When will we?
How many more mountains will be blown apart?
How many more streams will be buried?
How much longer will this destruction of our common natural heritage be allowed to continue unabated, despite the law, so that some can continue to amass wealth at an obscene rate and an even more obscene cost to the rest of us?
Congress is not in session. Thus even those Members and Senators who do regularly read the Post and perhaps do glance at the op-ed pages are not likely to see this column.
Force them to read it.
Pass it on to their staff.
If you have their private emails, send it to them.
But there is more you can do. Much more.
Stop wasting electricity. Reducing our wasteful use of electricity will reduce the demand for coal, much of which goes to power production.
Turn off your lights.
Remove tvs and computers from standby.
Unplug cell phone recharters.
Turn up the thermostat for your AC.
Close your refrigerator and freezer doors.
All of this will not be enough. We have to persuade others, not just our politicians, but our friends, family and neighbors.
Make sure they also see the RFK Jr. piece.
Make sure they know the real costs of what is happening.
Then, maybe, we can persuade our president that it is not just the hearts of the people in Appalachia that are breaking. It is the heart of Appalachia itself, the mountains and the streams.
Peace?
a suggestion from A Siegel in the thread at Daily Kos: Might I suggest ...
putting a link to Devilstower on this? Such as Mountaintop Day, where he calls on people to call on President Obama to visit MTR sites.
And, as an easy action, calls on people to twitter this call: "Visit the mountains before they're gone, Mr President #stopmtr" Or something like that. |
