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)