Have to say, I'm not looking for rosier predictions. I think the only thing that can save it for our children and their granchildren is if we are all willing to feel the pain of pure stark shock and grief and massive accountability right to the level of taking it very personally, as our personal consumption and our personal commitments to action and advocacy and radical change, fast, are the only things that could really turn it around in the long term. Soft-pedaling what we've done just means we'll keep doing it, imo.
Last weekend I went to witness MTR (mountaintop removal mining) in West Virginia with a small group. Looked first hand at where my electricity comes from. Met a brave man, Larry Gibson, who lives with a gun in every room of his cabin, and his bedroom door is on wheels it's so heavy, for protection... He would not sell. His family's mountain land has shrunk to 50 acres, from the top of which he has been inviting people to view the moonscape that's been created around him for the last 20 years. Recently, it's gotten so there's enough interest that he built a picnic shelter in his meadow and brought in 2 portable toilets. His family cemetery used to be a small sweet knoll with beautiful mountains rising on each side. Now, half of it's gone, the ancient headstones of his kin tossed down with the valley fill...old Appalachian bones ground through by the dozers. (They just put a road though it one day. Some other relative had signed papers with an X.) The cemetery, what's left of it, now sticks up in between two truncated, amputated, permanently flattened, chopped-off ridges that will forever be gone. Like 500 other Appalachian mountains so far. Because there's a lucrative form of purer coal in seams near the tops, and the coal companies have figured out how to blast off the entire top of a mountain with 9 men and advanced equipment, rather than the hundred or so that would've worked it beneath the surface. So, their jobs have shrunk, their streams are full of acid runoff, and people in the area who've never even set foot in a mine are being diagnosed with black lung because the blasts send so much debris and dust through the air. And the beautiful mountaintops and ecosystems that took millenia to form are...GONE. Permanently. To fuel a couple years of our energy consumption.
They're only uneducated Appalachian folks, though, so they have a hard time being heard. The Gulf is acute and visible and we watch it spew on TV...MTR is chronic, ongoing, and hidden from us as much as possible. Clean coal? A foul lie.
MTR sites are hidden behind the pretty mountains right along the interstate, so tourists driving through won't even have to think about it. His home, Kayford Mountain (center of the largest MTR site in W.Va.) is 30 minutes from Charleston.
I'm ashamed, and agonized, and angry, and grieving, and my life must change. The only way I can feel okay is to keep telling myself, stay turned in the direction that me witnessing, me speaking, me changing, is the right thing to do. Instead of feeling powerless or waiting for corporations or even fellow citizens to have an epiphany, I've just decided to accept that I've had my own. Science helps, religion helps. All that's in between, all the minimizing and rationalizing, will be things there's time to discuss after the refugees from coastal cities have been safely settled. They'll be hungry and thirsty.
I brought home a pocket full of coal. I'm going to use slivers of it passed around in baskets during a lay sermon I'm doing in July. Kind of a coal communion. I hope everyone will tape little slivers to their light switches. Touch them each time. Think of the miners. Think of Larry and his blasted home and history, and his tears.
Hops
