The title are the words on a sign by an opponent of mountaintop removal. In the book in which I read those words, I also read these:
We caught ten flying squirrels on that July day in Robinson Forest. Their flights were all different and remarkable. As we stuffed the final cages in backpacks and walked back to Krupa's truck, I asked for his prognosis of the human condition.
"Oh, I think we're doomed," he offered cheerfully. "with our levels of population and rates of consumption, it's just a matter of time before we kill ourselves off." He paused, wiped his glasses on his T-shirt, and smiled. "It's not something I tell my freshman."
In the remainder of this diary, I will explore a remarkable book entitled Lost Mountain, a Year in the Vanishing Wilderness: Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of Appalachia. The author is Erik Reece, and our own va dare highly recommends it.
In the book, about which I wrote a little in my recent diary Connections?, Reece examines the impact of the current tendency in Appalachian coal mining to use an extreme form of strip mining known as mountaintop removal. His particular mechanism for doing so is a series of visits over the course of year to one mountain being destroyed by this method, known ironically as Lost Mountain. Around this he weaves in an examination of the history of coal mining, the impact upon Appalachian families, the destruction of habitat, the unholy alliance between mine operators and politicians. Let me begin by offering two blurbs from the back of my paperback edition. The first is from the review in the NY Times:
Mr. Reece dissects unholy alliances between politicians and the coal industry. He considers the effects of voracious globalism and suggest alternatives to a coal-based Kentucky economy. He underscores the urgency of sustainable forest management. And he suggests that taxes reflect the true social and environmental costs of coal. Why? Because, as a woman who grew up in Harlan County puts it: "We all live downstream."
The second is from environmental writer Bill McKibben:
This is that rarest kind of work, a melding of investigative reporting and deep and evocative writing about a particular people in particular places. It makes me think of Orwell in its quiet anger and deep commitment. Erik Reece is obviously a writer to be reckoned with.
In my previous diary, I quoted from two long paragraphs at the end of the first part of the book, from which let me repeat just a bit:
This small planet is all we have, and to continue on our current course will be to ensure that we all become outsiders. It is, I think, for this reason that former Czech president Vaclav Havel said we must "reconstitute the natural world as the true domain of politics." Ideology and arbitrary borders mean little when roofs won't stay on houses anywhere and people die of bronchial infections everywhere. It is time we stopped thinking like those who conquer mountains and started thinking like the mountain itself.
There are so many issues upon which this book touches. I lack expertise in most of them, and yet as a concerned citizen have sufficient knowledge to recognize the importance of what I am reading. Thus in reading I constantly encountered illustrations of the destruction that is being done. Early on Reece uses the cerulean warbler, a songbird with striking colors which nests high in trees, the kinds of trees now rapidly disappearing from the forests of the Northern Appalachians, with a result that
cerulean warbler populations across Appalachia are plunging - down 70% since 1966
(p. 7). Part of such losses of wildlife is because of pollutants, for example
of the 113 tons of mercury produced each year in the United States, 48 tons comes from coal-fired power plants
(p. 25). This pollution can cause direct problems for humans, and on that same page Reece cites an study commissioned by the EPA which attributes 30,000 deaths a year to coal-fired power plants.
But it is not just the coal itself which is destructive. The warbler has lost habitat as the forests disappear, in Appalachia because of the process of radical strip mining. To put this in context, let me continue further down page 25:
At the same time, forests worldwide have shrunk from 5 billion hectares (12 billion acres) at the beginning of the twentieth century to 2.9 billion hectares (7 billion acres) now; over 2,000 square miles of Appalachian forests will be eliminated over the next decade under current mining regulations. Because of such deforestation, 12 percent of the world's birds are endangered, as are 24 percent of its mammals and 30 percent of its fish.
In theory the mine companies are supposed to "restore" the land after strip mining. In the case of mountaintop removal, that is clearly an impossible task. As Reece notes on p. 38:
The reality is that mountains pitched at a grade as steep as that of the Appalachians cannot be restored. Gravity and topography are working too forcefully against you.
And far too often whatever is "restored" is flattened and planted with grasses, and the coal mine operators will claim they have increased pasture land. But let us go back to where we left off, turning to the top of page 26 so that we understand clearly:
A forest, by contrast, can store twenty times more carbon than cropland or pasture. Its leaf litter slows erosion and adds organic matter to the soil. Its dense vegetation stops flooding. Its headwater streams purify creeks below. A contiguous forest ensures species habitat and diversity. A forest, in short, does all the things that the mining and burning of coal cannot - that is its intelligence.
Reece makes extensive use of the work of recognized experts in what he offers us. I want to offer an extensive passage from pp 98-99. Let me note that he sets up what I am about to quote by talking about the difference between large islands (say Madagascar) and small islands in terms of their ability to support diversity, and then explores the thinking of R. H. McCarthy and E. O. Wilson, noting that the smaller the "islands" of forest are the loss of diversity, the increase of inbreeding,etc. He then goes on, and I will quote extensively here:
The upshot: We are currently witnessing - and ignoring - the sixth great extinction since the advent of life on earth. This is not the hysterical cry of some druid; it is cold scientific fact.
The history of life on earth has seen five great extinctions, all caused by natural phenomena. The last extinction, 65 million years ago, possibly caused by an asteroid, wiped out the dinosaurs. Everybody learns this in school. What we don't usually learn is that up until the age of agriculture, species became extinct at roughly the rate of a few every million years - the same rate at which new species evolved. Or as E. O Wilson has figured it, one species out of a million went extinct each year. That formula is know to biologists and archaeologists as the "background rate." Now, because of rising temperatures, chemical pollution, the introduction of exotic plants, and forest fragmentation, species worldwide are disappearing at 1,000 to 10,000 times that rate. That is to say, roughly one species goes extinct every hour.
According to the World Conservation Union Red List, one in four mammals and one in eight bird species are in some degree of danger. Since 1980, habitat destruction has reduced our closest genetic and socially predisposed relative, the bonobo of West Africa, from 100,000 to merely 3,000. Of the 9,946 known bird species, 70 percent are declining in number. Wilson concludes, "If the decision were taken today to freeze all conservation efforts at their current level while allowing the same rate of deforestation and other forms of environmental destruction to continue, it is safe to say that a least a fifth of the species of plants and animals would be gone or committed to early extinction by 2030, and half by the end of the century."
One of the arguments used in favor of radical strip mining is economic, that it is the cheapest way to extract the coal we need for the electricity we demand. Reece explores this in several ways. First, the approach has clearly not benefited the people of Appalachia. From p.54:
Forty years ago, Appalachia's poverty rate stood at 31 percent. Since then, nearly 2,300 miles of roads have been laid across the region and 800,000 more families have indoor plumbing. And today, eastern Kentucky's poverty rate hovers around, well, 31 percent. Furthermore, one can look at a map of central Appalachia, and almost every county - in Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, and Tennessee - the areas that the Appalachian Regional Commission deems "distressed" are the ones that have seen the most strip mining.
. On p. 64 Reece notes that the surface mining industry brings a total of about 4,000 jobs to the 30 counties of Eastern Kentucky, an average of only 130 per, and observes that
if coal hadn't brought prosperity to the mountains in the last ninety years, it probably isn't likely to do so.
Meanwhile there is the ever increasing accumulation of wasted and destroyed mountains and dead streams.
Coal is also realistically not cheap, butin this as in so many areas of our economy we do not properly attribute all of the costs to the economic activity, even though we eventually wind up paying them in some other form. Let me offer some words from pages 65-66:
The reality of our modern economy is that we attach no monetary penalty to throughputs the toxic by-products and environmental damage that result from industrial manufacturing. But because we have settled for a linear, through-put economy where the by-product of energy is waste, that waste must be taxed. There must be a cost for polluting streams and rivers with mercury and choking them with sediment; there must be a cost for pumping sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide into the air. Because natural capital such as coal is a limited resource, it must be taxed as such. In other words, market prices must reflect social and environmental costs. To have an economy based solely on the short-term growth of our gross domestic product follows a dangerous and absurd logic - that we can have infinite growth based on the use of finite resources.
And this reasoning becomes obvious when one simply places facts into context, as Reece has already done, back on page 55:
The twentieth century added more people to the world than all other centuries combined. Scientists calculate that each of the more than 6 billion humans on the planet needs 2.5 arable acres to produce the food and energy they need. The World Wildlife Federation estimates that the planet cannot regenerate its resources if every human being uses over 4.45 acres. Currently, the global average is 5.44 acres, which is still a deceiving number given that each American uses 23.47 acres. For the rest of the world to live like Americans, we would need four more Planet Earths.
There is a logical conclusion to this, and it involves all of us. Reece thinks we are capable of addressing it, for as we read on p. 66
when consumers are forced to pay the true cost of coal, they will begin to think about smaller homes, better insulation, fluorescent lighting, strategically placed shade trees, and solar hot-water heaters. The technology is there; we simply lack the will.
As I write this on Thursday evening, I sit on my sofa. It is a cool night, so the door is open with the evening breeze blowing through the screen. I realize how accustomed we have been to using technology to alter our immediate environment without thinking of the broader environmental contexts. I live near the national capital. I remind people that the State Department is build on old swampland, which is why it bears the moniker "Foggy Bottom." This, and many of the cities of the so-called Sunbelt, would not be as habitable absent air conditioning. And yet the price we pay for that air-conditioning, and many of the other things which we take for granted as they make our lives more pleasurable, have a cost, often ugly, to which we do not pay attention. For most of the Southeastern US the primary sources of electricity are coal based followed by nuclear. Large portions of our nation are being permanently altered so that we can live in contradiction to the world around us. Perhaps we are not so obtuse as to build an indoor snowboarding slope in the desert as has been done in one of the Arab nations on the Gulf, but the next time you go to the Mall on a hot summer day think how much energy it takes to keep that massive space so cool.
I began to get to know the Southern Mountains less than three decades ago, when we moved to the DC area in 1982. We have seen change, although we have not experienced the devastating changes chronicled by Reece. The nearest mountains to us are the Blue Ridge, in Shenandoah National Park. Our drive is no longer mainly through open country, as the DC suburbs and exurbs continue to spread almost inexorably into the countryside. And when we look down from the overlooks on Skyline Drive we can see the changes in much of the surrounding countryside. But even here it is not that the mountains have been leveled, with the fill poured into the valleys below.
I am going to urge you all to take the time to read this book. The author lacks the name of a former Vice President, but I would suspect that Al Gore would strongly affirm the importance of this book, the clarity of its vision.
As the woman said, we all live downstream. But we also all live upstream, because it is our insatiable demand for energy that causes the devastation at the headwaters, that leads to the disappearance of Lost Mountain.
Despite his sadness at what he has witnessed, Reece does not just offer us totally bleak pictures. He also refers to Wendell Berry's visiting the Menominee Indians in northern Wisconsin who have maintained a 220,000 acre forest on their lands since 1854 by practicing sustainable logging and forest management. He reminds us that the Norwegian Parliament awarded the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize to Wangari Maathai of Kenya for planting trees. He tells us that even where the radical strip mining has been done, and the remaining material is 20 percent larger, rather than packing it down with a bulldozer and planting grass seed the looser soil makes it easier to plant a forest - note that I said a forest, because the trees will establish roots more quickly, grow faster, and a new and still somewhat diverse forest becomes possible.
But these are after the fact actions. In fact we need to change ourselves. I do not think God was wrong when s/he created mountains. And it scares me to read, as I do on the penultimate page of the book (242) the sign in front of Kentucky Coal Association headquarters that "Every American Born Will Need 561,477 lbs. of Coal in a Lifetime" - my mind boggles as I think of the number of coal hopper train cars that represents. I don't want that to be my legacy.
Nor is that how I want to end this diary. I prefer to end it as Reece ends his book, where he begins a meditation with a famous image by a famous genius. And so let me conclude with that material, from pages 242-243:
If one were to imagine as an inner portrait Leonardo's famous drawing of a man with his outstretched arms and legs, one might conceive of a fourfold human being made up these components: empirical knowledge, spiritual knowledge, ethical knowledge, and a capacity for aesthetic appreciation. This fourfold consciousness would, I believe, mark the beginning of a critical turn from selfishness toward noble selfhood, from a narrow understanding of progress to a more meaningful definition based not only on technological innovation and material gain, but also on the other three components of the inner self that we so often ignore. Material gain, speed, and convenience are the most dominant forces within this country, and they have done much to crush the spiritual, ethical and aesthetic elements of our nature. If we understood the natural world as a spiritual presence, we would also see that all living things are kin to us. If this realization led to a moral attitude toward the natural world, then our destructive behavior would change. We would change. We would become more fully human. And we would recognize the natural world not merely as a resource, but as something much more profound - what Thoreau liked to call the Poem of Creation.
Peace.