The events in WV take me back to Chris Hedges' "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt" .......

[marmar]

....... and the chapter on West Virginia and what mining hath wrought. It really is a must read if you haven't. ..... An excerpt, via the Daily Beast.


Joe and I are walking along the ridge of Kayford Mountain in southern West Virginia with Larry Gibson. Small wooden shacks and campers, including Gibson’s simple wood cabin, dot the line of ridge where he and his extended family have lived for more than 230 years. Coal companies are blasting hundreds of thousands of acres of the Appalachians into mounds of debris and rubble to unearth seams of coal. Gibson has preserved 50 acres from the destruction. His forested ribbon of land is surrounded by a sea of gray rock, pale patches of thin grass, and barren plateaus where mountain peaks and towering pines once stood. Valleys and creeks, including the old swimming hole Gibson used as a boy, are buried under mining waste. The wells, including his own, are dry and the aquifers below the mountain poisoned. The fine grit of coal dust in the air settles on our lips and leaves a metallic taste in our mouths. Gibson’s thin strip of trees and undergrowth is a reminder of what has been destroyed and will never be reclaimed.

......(snip).......

His defiance has come with a cost. Coal companies are the only employers left in southern West Virginia, one of the worst pockets of poverty in the nation, and the desperate scramble for the few remaining jobs has allowed the companies to portray rebels such as Gibson as enemies of not only Big Coal but also the jobs it provides. Gibson’s cabin has been burned down. Two of his dogs have been shot and Dog was hung, although he was saved before he choked to death. Trucks have tried to run him off the road. He has endured drive-by shootings, and a couple of weeks before we visited, his Porta-Johns were overturned. A camper he once lived in was shot up. He lost his water in 2001 when the blasting dropped the water table. He has reinforced his cabin door with six inches of wood to keep it from being kicked in by intruders. The door weighs 500 pounds and has wheels at the base to open and close it. A black bullet-proof vest hangs near the entrance on the wall, although he admits he has never put it on. He keeps stacks of dead birds in his freezer that choked to death on the foul air, hoping that someday someone might investigate why birds in this part of the state routinely fall out of the sky. Roughly 100 bird species have disappeared.

......(snip).......

The spine of the Appalachian Mountains, a range older than the Himalayas, winds its way through Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. Isolated, lonely patches of verdant hills and forests now lie in the midst of huge gray plateaus, massive, dark-eyed craters, and sprawling, earthen-banked dams filled with billions of gallons of coal slurry. Gigantic slag heaps, the residue of decades of mining operations, lie idle, periodically catching fire and belching oily plumes of smoke and an acrid stench. The coal companies have turned perhaps half a million acres in West Virginia and another half million in Kentucky, once some of the most beautiful land in the country, along with hundreds of towering peaks, into stunted mounds of rubble. It was impossible to grasp the level of destruction in the war in Bosnia until you got in a helicopter and flew over the landscape, seeing village after village dynamited by advancing Serb forces into rubble. The same scale of destruction, and the same problem in picturing its true extent, holds true for West Virginia and Kentucky.

That destruction, like the pillaging of natural resources in the ancient Mesopotamian, Roman, and Mayan empires, is one of willful if not always conscious self-annihilation. The dependence on coal, which supplies the energy for half of the nation’s electricity, means that its extraction, as supplies diminish, becomes ever more ruthless. The Appalachian region provides most of the country’s coal, its production dwarfed only by that of Wyoming’s Powder River Basin.5 We extract 100 tons of coal from the earth every two seconds in the United States, and about seventy percent of that coal comes from strip mines and mountaintop removal, which began in 1970. ...................................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/14/chris-hedges-and-joe-sacco-chronicle-mining-catastrophes-in-west-virginia.html

[shenmue]

1. :(

[countryjake]

2. A hero doesn't get used to this...

[marmar]

3. Thx for the vid.

[Duppers]

4. thanks!

This war on the environment benefits the few but only in a relatively temporary way. It'll be too late for the environment to recover by the time the vast majority awake from their comfortable "it not me" stupor and begin to give a damn!



People seem to be caring more about Crisp Crispy than they are about the plight of those in West Virginia.

[LuvNewcastle]

6. Thanks for saying that.

That Crispy bullshit doesn't amount to a hill of beans, and nothing is going to change as a result of it. It's just another distraction for people until the next distraction comes along.

[LuvNewcastle]

5. That region still has some of the most beautiful country in the U.S.

It's a goddamn shame what's been allowed to happen to it. Some people up there say that coal mining is their only opportunity to work, but if they're going to do it, they shouldn't allow companies to do the kind of mining they're doing these days. How many people besides the owners have anything to show for the destruction of that gorgeous environment? And once it's gone, it's gone forever.