I just got these photos from Zavisha and Reno's visit to Machias back in September. They're so frickin sweet I have to share them.

Meanwhile in the Keys, we have learned to tame the bratty parrot by letting her babysit herself picking at a bathmat in the shower stall for hours on end. Now she sings all the time and doesn't bite. I'm drawing a giant coal power plant that also sorta looks like a locomotive and a missile silo. And I tattooed a pinup girl sitting on a crescent wrench on a woman client who turned out to be a helicopter mechanic for Boeing. Works on helicopters damaged in the Iraq War, among other things. I also tattooed a newlywed in the Keys for her honeymoon. She got a mini ball-and-chain with the wedding date engraved on the ball. My sentiments exactly.

Craftin Stuffed Toys With Reno

All the Kids atop Merienda, the Bus

First Tea Party Aboard Merienda. Check the newly-installed velvet couch from Fancy House in Philly.

A nice sunny walk on the beach in Maine!

It’s a slow night at Paradise Tattoo in Key West and I’m sitting on the sidewalk outside in a tshirt, watching all the fancy wheels roll by: custom motorcycles with LED lighting and leather fringe, pickups so big and shiny I can’t imagine their owners have ever allowed a single speck of dirt to touch their football-field-sized truckbeds. The tourists meander by in a happy holidaze, cocktails in hand. It’s a vehicle-friendly, pastel version of Bourbon Street in New Orleans, minus the surrounding poverty and ground-in character. Florida is a surreal change from Machias, Maine, where locals take pride in their skills with body fill and Bondo and are probably chopping wood with gusto right now so they don’t freeze in their handbuilt homes and trailers this winter.

So here I am, my second day of my new dual life, making serious political art about coal mining during the week and tattooing palm trees on drunk, sunburnt tourists on weekends. I’m parked in the driveway of my fellow bee Beatriz’s parents’ home on a canal on
Sugarloaf Key, seventeen miles north of the southernmost point in the US. Fifteen steps and I can dive into the boat channel. Farther off across the shallow puddle of the Atlantic there are mangroves to explore and a sunset extravaganza every evening.

I’m pretty shocked that I made it, after all, following a three week stint in Vehicle Maintenance Boot Camp trying to get out of the northeast. I spent many quality hours crawling around under my bus with two hunky mechanics named Jim, one in Machias and one in Boston. The victories! The defeats! We’d fix one thing, then just as we were getting out the champagne glasses something else would scream “broken!” Before I left Maine we replaced the radiator, fixed a broken drainplug on the replacement, troubleshot a short in the ignition system, replaced a couple of tires, repaired a leak in the fuel tank, and put on new rear brake pads. Then in Boston, with a giant hairball in my brain from carbon monoxide poisoning, I bit the bullet with Jim #2 of Associated Diesel and we cobbled together my exhaust system with a new muffler, scavenged pipe, JB Weld, hoseclamps and a coupla cans of Arizona Ice Tea (my final touch further down the road.)

The elderly couple who own Associated Diesel work on a lot of veggie oil vehicles for Green Grease Monkey in Boston. A tour of the workshop, crammed with intriguing disassembled parts in oily rows, ended at an unassuming door where Arlene welcomed me through the looking glass into their startlingly white, fluffy, doily-draped home. I stood paralyzed, keeping every greasy inch of me as far away from the furniture as possible, while she told me about her exploits scavenging parts from cars at auctions. “Nobody suspects an old lady,” she said and grinned mischeviously.

The delay in Boston wasn’t all bad because it meant I could stick around for my second year at HONK!Fest and dance until I fell over. While I was waiting for the mechanic to get back to me, my pal Trouble distracted me by throwing me on a bike and taking me to a drunk punk party (live music, bullet belts, beer and stage-diving in a ten-foot-square living room), the awesome local vegan pizza collective, and a beautiful old railroad bridge where we watched prepster crews rowing on the Charles River. Then, with the exhaust problem tamed, I made it to Providence for a visit with my pal Kim who’s going back to school for her BFA at RISD. We squeezed in a little conversation and sleeping between her midterm exam and homework assignment, then I continued south with just one all-systems-down blowout on the side of the freeway – a bad fuse, as it turned out, no big deal.

I arrived in New Jersey just in time to find parking and hop the PATH train into Manhattan for the second night of MIX: the Experimental Queer Film Festival. I was planning to just hang out with a pal and continue on the next morning, but one evening of campy sarcasm, drag and flirtatiousness woke up all the nerve endings that have gone to sleep in the earnest tourniquet of heterosexual anarchyland. I promptly signed up as a volunteer and spent the weekend bellying up to the hot queer buffet, stuffing myself with film, friends-n-family, third cousins in the warm and prickly bath of the international queer network. I saw familiar Bay Area faces and ran into someone I dated for a picosecond when I was a newly-hatched Montreal babypunkdyke in the 80s. NYC threw me some surprising adventures and spat me back out Monday night, bruised and sprinkled in flaky black paint (post-festival window scraping). I collected my vehicle, miraculously undisturbed in its parking spot in a quiet Portuguese neighborhood by the Newark airport, and started driving south. After two days of white-lining it down the artificial atrocity of I-95, I pulled into the driveway of our new home in Sugarloaf Key and blinked at the blue blue water, banana trees and shiny boats. Woah. Really?

The Bees talk Mountain Top Removal and coal mining at the Katzen Art Center opening. More photos from Close Encounters Show

Three bees had our moment of glamor travelling to Washington DC to install an in-process snapshot of the coal poster project at the Katzen Art Center. We're one of many political artists and groups featured in Provisions Library's show Close Encounters: Facing the Future. It was interesting to meet the organizers and see our work in a fine art context. As David said, "We're the Swiss Army Knife in a drawer of fancy silver forks."

It was inspiring to meet artists like Daniel Heyman, who accompanies lawyers to interviews with survivors of US secret foreign prisons like Abu Ghraib. With the subjects' permission, he draws portraits while they talk and documents some of their testimony. We also felt honored to meet the unassuming Mel Chin, who has done many illustrious and interesting things over the years and is currently involved in Fundred, a nationwide art project to pressure the US government to release funds for lead remediation in New Orleans. I also liked the public performances and projects of the Floating Lab Collective in DC, addressing issues of identity, marginalization and cultural participation from a Latino perspective.

After two days home we hit the road again, bringing our banners, presentations and posters to the Common Ground Fair in Unity, Maine. I'd never been to a country fair before so didn't know exactly what to expect. It was awesome! Sheepdog demos, bike building, composting toilets, alpacas with incredibly long eyelashes. Giant mules. Old school wood lathes powered by a foot pedal pushing down a spring made from an entire sapling. Spinning and hewing and canoe building and timber framing. Organic local sustainable everything. Giant blue squashes that look like big droopy warty aliens.

As I wandered past the stables of different breeds of cow, I had this lightbulb-going-off moment, similar to the first time I strolled into the produce section of the Berkeley Bowl grocery store and realized that a plum isn't just a plum, that in fact here I am looking at fourteen different kinds of plums I've never seen in a regular grocery store. Now, city kid that I am, I've of course read in books that there are different names for cows (and horses and sheep and goats and chickens....). But it felt different to see them all side by side. I wandered from one to the other, noting them as individuals, each with their own size and hairiness and color and shape of horn. My concept of "cow" flowered and fractalized into all the branches of warm, wary animal before me, shiny eyes returning my gaze. "Cow" is a multifaceted, dynamic collection of nouns. Cow transforms itself with every generation and every breeding.

The most amazing thing at the Fair, I discovered, was the fleece tent. I returned several times to stick my hands in big bags of warm, coarse, animal-smelling, slightly-oily wool. I want an entire barn full of the stuff just to roll around in. But that wouldn't be particularly sustainable, would it, so I'll leave the poor sheep and alpacas and rabbits alone.

So here I am at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis-St.Paul. Lots of the usual is going on -- marches, speeches, music, signs and banners, puppets, "hey-ho, hey-ho" chants, raised fists. The Black Bloc's out in force, too, so we also have a few broken windows and a convenient target for law enforcement's tear gas, rubber bullets, pepper spray, and concussion grenades; a Crayola-box assortment of police and National Guard forces trying out spend down their inventory of crowd-control toys so they can go back and beg for more later. Ironically, most of the mass arrests have been of peaceful protesters and bystanders; perhaps the cops haven't wanted to have to chase anyone down. I've mostly stayed out of the fray, distributing posters with the Beehive and trying not to do anything too fancy on my bum ankle.

But one thing that's happening is pretty out of the ordinary, and it's been stepping up in recent years: overt harassment and intimidation of journalists. First there was the pre-emptive raid on a house where members of I-Witness Video were staying. Then there were the completely random arrests of NPR's Democracy Now! reporters covering a protest on Monday, and the illegal confiscation of their press passes by an unidentified man (possibly Secret Service.) A photographer from the New York Post was tackled and arrested along with them, and according to the Democracy Now! report, his last words were, "But we're a REPUBLICAN paper!?"

I've been happy to be in a big city with a diverse array of humans to check out and sometimes meet, especially a lot of amped-up activists from all over. After a long spring and summer in mostly rural areas, I've been resisting the urge to walk up to every person who looks remotely queer and vigorously shake their hand. I already tried it once and they looked at me kind of funny and wandered off. I've been riding my bike for miles back and forth between the Twin Cities in the warm night air, grinning like a fool everytime I cross a high bridge over the Mississippi (those that haven't been blocked, that is.)

Last night I couldn't stand just being a poster seller while all this stuff was going on so I joined the inspiring March for Our Lives, led by the Poor Peoples' Economic Human Rights Campaign and protesting poverty and homelessness. When we arrived at the convention center, flanked by riot cops, the organizers made us put up our right hands and swear "to not do any dumb shit, because there are old people, and teeny weeny babies in strollers here." Everybody mostly respected the request, except for one dude in a face mask who was probably a cop and kept kicking the fence and yelling at people to attack. The organizers went to the doors of the Convention Center and attempted to deliver a citizens' arrest "for crimes against humanity."

Things got more tense when we moved away from the convention into lines of riot cops with itchy trigger fingers. After the tear gas flew, I considered the fact that I can't really run fast, and so I rejoined the Beehive for an outdoor show featuring the Coup -- an excellent way to dance (with a slight limp) to the revolution.

More news & info:

RNC Welcoming Committee
Twin Cities IMC breaking news

I apologize for the suburban crime of mowing the lawn. I apologize to the dandelions, to the little purple flowers whose names I don't know, to the burdock, to the grasshoppers and snails and the invisible spiders who build the webs that catch dew and look to my city-born eyes like scraps of silvery plastic bag on the green. I apologize for trying to turn your riot of biodiversity into astroturf. We do it for the neighbors. We do it so we can play frisbee, at least in theory. We do it so when we have sixty visitors, like we will this weekend, they can pitch their tents without pushing their way through a field of tall grass.

It wasn't even fun. I've never mowed a lawn before, except for a vague memory of using a manual push mower somewhere back in the mists of my prepubescence. We have two manual push mowers in the garden shed but they're so dull it's like trying to cut bamboo with a spoon. I was shoving one back and forth by the sidewalk when an old neighbor walked by with his equally ancient pug. He squatted down excitedly: "I haven't used one of these in years." He showed me how to adjust it. Supposedly there's a welder in town who still carries the Old Knowledge of how to sharpen them.

Disheartened, I pulled out the red gasoline-powered "Toro" mower and started it up. Yes, more powerful, much heavier, and much louder -- a familiar sound, one I've heard a lot around here without considering where it came from. I cut in tidy rows, feeling slightly light-headed from exhaust. I leaned it viciously into all the green things seeking sky. I made a Lawn.

It's been a cool wet month in Machias and I'm starting to sympathize with the Irish. I know I have those genes somewhere in the mix but I still long for sunshine. My last real break was a two-night bike camping trip up the coast, where I decompressed from a weekend of Beehive Summit meetings by cruising second growth pine forests, skinny dipping, getting eaten alive by mosquitos in the woods by Cobscook Bay (no really, it was like a horror movie -- if I wasn't nursing a sprained ankle I would have leapt up in my sleeping bag in the dark and run for my life!), shopping for groceries in Lubec, the easternmost town in the US, and spending a restful 24 hours on a beautiful misty pebble beach ten miles from possibly the world's most powerful radio transmitter.

My back and ankle continue to bother me but less and less every day. I'm trying to do yoga and strengthening exercises pretty regularly. I have hope that some day I will be running and jumping again.

We have 20 people in the house right now and a bunch more coming for the Beehive's annual Blackfly Ball, including Flo, my co-art-director on Maggots and Men! Yay! I hope it dries up a bit so our guests can sleep outside without getting too soggy. Otherwise they will be draped over every available surface in the house until Monday. What Cheer? Brigade is coming, and that's at least twenty folks right there, along with instruments!

The Coal Poster is coming along slowly (check out the sketch gallery!) We're working with several educators and organizers who all have their own input, which is sometimes really great and sometimes a too-many-cooks situation. The combination of nine folks chewing on everything we learned during the research trip led to a decision to vastly expand the scope of the project. We're going to be showing an unfinished version in the streets at the Republican National Convention and the American University gallery show in September, and it will go on tour this fall with educator bees while the illustrators continue to work on the final version.

The good news? Because the house in Machias doesn't have enough heat in winter, it looks like the illustrators are going to take the whole shebang down to Beatriz's parents' vacation home in the Florida Keys (!) where we will be locking ourselves into a vacuum chamber to draw, draw, draw with occasional dips in the ocean. I was running out of energy for the Beehive because of ever-slipping deadlines and difficult group dynamics but that saves it for me. I really want to see this project through and I think it will be awesome in the end. Plus I'm going to come out of this with vastly improved cooking skills and survival skills for working by consensus.

In my free time I've been getting to know my bus better. I've charmed the house kitty into sleeping with me in my little loft at night, which makes it very homey. I finished building shelves and flip-up bench seats just in time for my radiator to spring a leak. I got special fan clutch tools and a (pretty crappy) replacement radiator from a junkyard and I'm trying to swap it out without causing any fatal damage to my nerves or my vehicle. At the moment I'm panicking because I seem to have stripped the coolant drain plug in my engine block. Eek. On the plus side I think I got a few points with the local grizzled electric-trike builders when they came by to negotiate with a Bee about electrifying his recumbent bicycle, and I crawled out from under my bus covered in tranny oil. The real kind, not the ironic-urban-queer-sexually-suggestive kind. I guess you take the small joys in life.

This morning in Machias there was a Shriners' parade, which consisted of phalanxes of aging white men marching between groups of other aging white men driving mini gasoline vehicles including twelve mini model Ts, twelve mini pickup trucks, twelve mini motorcycles, twelve mini big rigs, twelve hot rods and twelve formula 1 racers. They were all from Bangor. This raised many questions for me. Is Bangor a secret Shriner city? What do all the women and children do while their dads are dressing up in scimitars and curly-toed boots and press-on beards (and brownface, at least once...?) When they're not collecting hundreds of mini vehicles I hear they build hospitals for sick children or something...?! What kinds of mini things will they ride when fossil fuels run out? And what did this all have to do with Margaretta Days in Machias, which celebrate the first naval battle of the American Revolution??

Also I got a couple of interesting chain-letter emails from my Dad, one of which shows some startling photos of a resort for the super-wealthy that's rising in the sands of Dubai (surreal!) and another of which is a rant by a Lieutenant-General of the Marines expressing anger at Arabs and Muslims for accusing the US of prisoner abuse, when we've worked so hard to defend their interests despite their hateful terroristic ways.

If this kind of drivel gets passed around on the internet, let me add my own (probably no news to anybody who'd be reading this, but still, sometimes it just feels good to SAY it):

I'm surprised a Lieutenant General would be naive enough to think that the ample history of US intervention in the Middle East is about anything other than securing access to OIL. The Muslims we are supposedly "defending" have no illusions about this. The current war on Iraq is especially blatant.

The Pentagon itself has admitted there is no connection between Saddam Hussein and al Queda (http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/03/13/alqaeda.saddam), so it's ignorant to claim that the Iraqi people or all Islamic Arabs deserve to be punished for 9/11. That is the same kind of racist and genocidal thinking that feeds terrorism against civilian populations. The US embargo and then war on Iraq has led to hundreds of thousands of CIVILIAN deaths -- quite a bit more than your typical scared kid with a bomb strapped to his chest, or even the horrific toll of 9/11. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/10/AR2006101001442.html).

Mr. Pitman's philosophy seems to be "an eye for an eye," or more accurately, "a hundred eyes in this country over here for actions taken by people in this other country over there." Even if you agree with that, the desperate acts by individual kidnappers or bombers can't measure up to the violence of the US war machine, which is trying to subdue an entire people in the name of oil and oil's fig leaf, a "democracy" imposed at the point of a gun. Abuse and torture of prisoners is just the logical extension of that same attitude.

On the plus side I went for a lovely brisk swim with some other bees in the Machias River this morning at this little spot five minutes from our house. It's just out of sight of the nearest houses so I can get away without a shirt. Hurray for summer, finally arriving in Maine.

I've been in Machias, Maine for a week now creaking around like an old grandpa with my winter's injured back, recent sprained ankle and pinched shoulder from walking around all sideways since Philly. I've been thinking about how I left San Francisco eighteen months ago because I was worried about being on the wrong side of 40 and feeling like I had to hit the road while I was still healthy enough to sleep under a tree if necessary. My biological clock knew what time it was, but I'm healing up slowly and asking for help when I need it, which I guess is an essential middle-aged person skill.

It's especially exciting to have a semi-functional back again because now that I'm in a private driveway close to an electrical outlet, I've relaunched my bus customization project. Right now I'm working on a hinged bench seat with storage underneath and fancy red velvet backrests I salvaged from a pee-stained Fancy House sofa. Soon I'll be riding in style, or more accurately, parking in style (five-dollar-a-gallon diesel just reinforces my anti-driving, pro-cargo-bike instincts).

The Beehive gears are in motion, albeit chaotically, as we try to mesh our ideas and working styles into an image that will make sense not only to us but (hopefully) to all the people we've worked with on our research trip and to the public at large. I'm one of three illustrators on the team. We just got our studio set up yesterday and are trying to locate all our art supplies and reach some sort of agreement with our storyboard team (more word-oriented people) about how to organize all the concepts onto a single image. The whole thing's a bit overwhelming and even with our deadline extended a bit into September we're going to be hard-pressed to do justice to the subject matter.

My Dad asked me this week what we are trying to do with this poster: shut down the coal industry? If so, won't all the people with coal jobs be angry at us? I told him it's a big question we've been asking folks in the coal fields and ourselves. Coal IS the main economy in that region, even though jobs have dropped drastically with increased mechanization in the last fifteen years. That means anyone who speaks up against the environmental impacts of coal mining and burning risks ostracization at the very least and physical violence at the worst.

In Appalachia, most of the people who are able to publicly question the coal industry are somehow independent of that economy, either because they are retired miners on pensions or are lucky enough to have other work. Many people told us they have to worry about retaliation against family members too. Even those who told us how unsustainable coal is as a fuel source would temper their criticism by saying things like, "well, I wouldn't have been able to have the opportunities I do [going to college, having a job I love] if it wasn't for somebody in my family working a coal job."

Most of the ex-miner activists we talked to aren't interested in shutting down coal completely; they just want to shut down strip mining, which has stepped up in the last twenty years, employs less people than deep mining and is vastly more destructive. Only a few people are imagining alternative economic options for the region -- for instance, Coal River Mountain Watch is lobbying for a wind power farm on a ridge threatened by strip mining.

It's tricky to balance that reality with the bigger picture of how the coal industry affects the rest of the world. The US produces 50% of its electricity by burning coal, which is by far the dirtiest option even when it's so-called "clean" coal. We're all paying the price in the form of greenhouse gases, heavy pollution, the poisoning of the watersheds and the clearcutting of forests that produce the oxygen we breathe. People whose groundwater has been poisoned by coal slurry are getting sick, but so are city dwellers who get asthma from breathing particulates spewed by energy plants.

It's easy to describe the problem, but we are also challenging ourselves to depict alternative futures that people are working towards -- wind power, local economies based on the richness of the bioregion, etc. -- that suggest other ways for Appalachia and a fossil-fuel-addicted nation (me and my bus included) to survive without trashing the delicate webs that sustain us. We have to do it without being preachy or putting our agendas in other people's mouths. It's a lot to figure out in three months, and the poster won't be complete or perfect, but we hope it will get a lot of noggins thinking and more hands on task.

With a coal poster mockup mostly hammered out, I parted ways with the Beehive for a bit and hopped a Greyhound to Tennessee to get my homo on with my new squeeze Becca at Ida. My seatmate, just out of prison, chatted me up about tattoos and described how to build a homemade tattoo machine step-by-step out of an electric shaver, a bent toothbrush, a stick pen, rubber bands, a sharpened guitar string and soot captured from burning baby oil. I was impressed. I told him about this show of ingenious prisoners' inventions I saw awhile back: beautifully simple ways to meet your needs with limited materials.

Ida was bursting with green during the day and shining with stars at night. Some deep part of me only really relaxes in the company of smart, campy, sarcastic, genderfucking queers. Folks there have been fundraising hard and are close to making their downpayment on their land, partly thanks to a few large donations from supportive gay men connected to Short Mountain Sanctuary down the road. They're also gearing up for their Fruit Jam Fest. I got to hang out, pick collards, gossip it up, draw some tshirt designs, and mess up some silkscreens. I rescued Becca's kitten Agatha after s/he spent the night hiding in a thorn bush where one of the dogs chased him/her. I weeded the garden thinking how little I know about growing anything, being one of those urban kids who was surprised to find out that there is more than one kind of tomato or plum or mushroom.

Ida's friendly Mennonite neighbors invited us lost sheep to hear a travelling youth choir sing in the entrance of a huge cave on their land. We went and sat in camping chairs behind the serious-looking men and the ladies in stiff white caps fussing over restless children. The choir sounded amazing and then we got to mill outside and drink hot chocolate and exchange nervous/curious glances with the other guests while our hosts taught us how to play Amish golf and mini hockey. I don't know much about Mennonites but I did NOT expect them to have zebra-striped linoleum and foosball in their livingroom. Nor did I expect to crowd in behind thirty or so people with flashlights and walk a quarter mile up an underground creek into the mountain, with the youth choir bursting into impromptu song every time we hit some particularly high cavern space. The young and/or intrepid took an alternate route back and I admired our host's disregard of the need for liability insurance as I crawled on my belly, scrambled and rappelled behind teen girls in long skirts through narrow tunnels, down steep slippery slopes, over rock bridges, past deep pits and pungent towers of bat guano on our way back to the surface. This is a man of faith, I thought, and I am grateful for it.


Fresh-faced young ladies in sensible cavescrambling shoes – and me

Becca was MCing the Saturday afternoon circus for this year's Mondo Homo festival in Atlanta so I rounded out my gay holiday by squeezing into a little Nissan pickup truck with her and her pal Kassidy and heading south. I forget that at one time, not all pickups were one-ton, king-cab, jacked-wheel monstrosities. Despite smallish crowds and a beautiful Sunday spent NOT in the park joining potato sack races but with Becca in the emergency waiting room at Grady Hospital (don't ask; let's just say we were confirming that it SUCKS to be sick and uninsured in the US), it was a fun party. I caught a ride back to Philly with the ex-editor of groundbreaking-but-defunct On Our Backs magazine. Currently, she tells me, she hosts a call-in show on Sirius Satellite Radio Network and has discovered a wide-flung community of queer and tranny truckers. Be still, my...uh... heart.

Now I've put in a few days in ever-lovin' Philly trying to get my bus up and running. I know I look good when I've got those wrenches out and I'm fiddling under the hood covered in grease but I really have no idea what I'm doing. Two days of bumbling around, replacing filters, carrying batteries around on a cargo bike and babbling to anyone who'd listen got me at least started up so I could limp to the mechanic to deal with the real problem: a couple of bad pulleys on the engine block. He fixed everything, hurrah! and it passed its trial drive. I arrived back at Fancy House feeling victorious only to step out the driver side door and promptly sprain my ankle. Ouch! I lay down on the sidewalk until the dizziness passed and then instead of spending the rest of the day at the Trans Health Conference as I'd hoped, I vegged out on the couch with a stack of movies and my foot under an icepack. Give it to me again, Philly, I just can't get enough.

Towards the end of the California Gold Rush (mid 1800s), companies started extracting gold by blasting the hillsides with high-pressure water hoses. 1.5 billion cubic yards of soil and rocks washed into streams and migrated as far as the San Francisco Bay. Farms and towns were buried in silt, but gold mining was so lucrative that it took thirty years for a judge to ban this practice.

Right now, a similar scenario is playing out in the Appalachians. Thanks to the Iraq War, surging electricity usage and the push for "domestic energy security", coal is booming right now. Companies are so desperate to get it out of the ground fast and cheap that they're just dynamiting the mountain tops and dumping them into the valleys. Bye-bye, watershed; bye-bye, most-biodiverse temperate forest in the US. I didn't know that coal feeds half of the USA's electrical grid, did you?

I'm finding all this out because I'm in the Appalachian Mountains, travelling the coal fields with nine members of the Beehive Collective, researching a new poster graphic about coal mining and climate change. We have just started a Beehive blog to follow the progress of this project.

We've been in the region for three weeks, meeting activists and community members and even the head of the Kentucky Coal Association, listening and trading ideas that could translate into a giant poster. This week we're staying at a little ramshackle house rented by Coal River Mountain Watch, an hour south of Charleston, West Virginia. I'm feeling pretty worn down from travelling with nine people and all of our baggage, particularly my own. Plus it's pretty heavy to hear about people's well water and creeks being contaminated and cancer clusters and brain tumors and kids with asthma and constant sinus infections and the EPA coming out (with coal company lobbyists breathing down their necks) and declaring everything to be A-OK. Coal has been the only industry here since the turn of the century, so folks are really touchy about endangering coal jobs. And nobody wants to believe the situation is really that bad until one of THEIR kids gets sick.

It's weird to think that I drove through this area last spring and only saw beautiful green mountains. The mines are mostly way up out of sight off the main roads, and their effects are most visible to the people who live directly under or downstream of them. Whole communities have moved to escape the coal dust and blasting. I've poked at rainbow-colored ooze coming out the ground near a minesite and listened to residents mourn brown creeks that used to be clear. Yesterday we were driving up to look at a big crazy hole in the ground that used to be a mountain, and we saw a momma black bear and three cubs running through the woods. We're destroying all the animal habitat, so they're wandering more and more into human communities and getting themselves shot.

Even if mountaintop removal for coal wasn't so destructive (and many ex-miners we've talked to advocate a return to deep, or underground, mining), most coal-fired electricity plants being built right now are old-school major polluters. So if we keep following the lead of the fossil fools, we'll still be breathing this stuff and melting our ice caps at the same time. How 'bout shifting our corporate welfare programs to support a major push for conservation and renewable, clean energy instead?

On the plus side I'm just getting over the flu and our temporary neighbor came over with some yellowroot he dug up to make tea with. In its powdered form it's goldenseal. The woods that remain, despite generations of logging, still support medicinal roots and herbs and trees I've never heard of. These mountains stopped the glaciers during the last Ice Age and re-seeded the entire continent after the thaw. They are still the watershed for the Southeastern United States and the lungs for the East Coast.

Blowing them up for cheap, dirty energy is incredibly short sighted.

End rant.

Activist Groups:
Coal River Mountain Watch
United Mountain Defense
Kentuckians for the Commonwealth
Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition
Mountain Justice Summer
Energy Action Coalition

Local Cultural and Organizing Institutions:
Clearfork Community Institute
Appalshop
Highlander Research and Education Center

Books I've Read and Recommend
Big Coal (a good big-picture look at the industry, politics, and ecology of coal)
Coal River (grassroots activists challenge to the coal industry's power in West Virginia via lawsuits and direct action)