As the Earth careens through space, our species stops at nothing to extract fuel from its thin crust.
We all know that.
Our energy recklessness is creating a growing threat to our physical well-being, perhaps our survivabilility.
We all sense that.
But some words can speak to the hollowness in our hearts. The passage below the fold is the powerful opening from the motion filed by Appalachian Voices and the Canary Coalition to stop coal plants now in line to be subsidized by some sad Act passed by Congress in 2005.
Read it - and weep.
Appalachian Voices and Canary Coalition
In Support of a Preliminary Injunction, March 2008
II. INTRODUCTION
Armed with behemoth earth-moving machines, bunker-busting explosives and other terrors of modern technology, surface mining operations exact a devastating—far too often deadly—toll on the people, communities and ecosystems in which they occur. Rapaciously transforming majestic forested mountain ranges into flattened, eerily lifeless moonscapes, mountaintop removal coal mining in the Appalachian Mountains is by far the most egregious type of surface mining.
In roughly thirty years, Americans have stoked the infernos of our power plants with so much mountaintop coal that we have permanently erased more than 470 peaks from the Appalachian skyline, buried or polluted more than 1,200 miles of pristine headwater streams and swept away more than 800 square miles of America’s most diverse and valuable ecosystem—the mixed mesophytic forests of the central Appalachian Mountains. Left unchecked, mountaintop removal will destroy an area the size of Delaware by the end of the decade. Surface mining, however, is just the beginning of coal’s devastating cradle-to-grave lifecycle. From lakes of toxic sludge to rapidly melting glaciers that leave polar bears stranded and starving, the coal industry leaves a wake of human misery and environmental destruction wherever it is extracted, processed, transported, incinerated or disposed of as air pollution and poisonous post-combustion waste.
With more than half the nation’s electricity generated by burning coal, Americans depend on the people, communities and environments wherever it is mined, processed, burned and discarded.
Accordingly, the nation has a moral obligation to reduce or eliminate coal’s catastrophic societal and environmental impacts. Congress codified this ethical duty in the National Environmental Policy Act ("NEPA"), which requires Defendants to take a "hard look" at the environmental consequences of their actions. Defendants’ decision to ignore their moral responsibilities under NEPA—after receiving a courtesy notice and an opportunity to comply—required Plaintiffs to initiate this lawsuit.