May 26-29, 2006
HEALING MOUNTAINS
The 16th Annual Heartwood Forest Council &
6th Annual Summit for the Mountains

Join us for this important national conference, the largest-ever
gathering of folks working to STOP the devastation of Mountaintop
Removal coal mining.

The combined Forest Council/Summit will take place at the Cedar Lakes
Conference Center, 38 miles north of Charleston, West Virginia. In
addition to a full schedule of events and activities at Cedar Lakes,
Healing Mountains will feature a Memorial Day event on Kayford Mountain,
an island in the middle of an active mountaintop removal mine.

Cost is very minimal to encourage folks from all walks of life to
attend. If possible, PLEASE REGISTER by May 15th to ensure adequate food
& lodging for everyone. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.
To sign up for work exchange, contact Elisa Young, 740.949.2175,

REGISTRATION INFO & ON-LINE REGISTRATION available at:

DOWNLOADABLE EVENT BROCHURE available at:

An on-line CARPOOLING board will be operational at www.heartwood.org in
the next few days!

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS & WORKSHOP LEADERS include: Granny D, Jack Spadaro,
Cindy Rank, Ken Hechler, Mari-Lynn Evans, Judy Bonds, Larry Gibson, Erik Reece, Ed Wiley, Jeff Barrie, John Blair, Allen
Johnson, and many more. The program includes a screening of Catherine &
Anne Pancake’s BLACK DIAMONDS documentary.

ADDITIONAL PRESENTATIONS include the history, culture and geography of
coal; coal’s deadly impacts at every stage of its extraction, transport,
and combustion; and the importance of healthy forests and mountains,
especially in times of dramatic climate change. There will also be
programs on alternative sources of energy and alternative modes of
economic and community development in the mountains. The Forest Council
will also include great music and food, and activities for all interest
levels and ages.

HOSTING ORGANIZATIONS: Healing Mountains is being organized and
co-hosted by Heartwood, the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, Coal
River Mountain Watch, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, Sierra Club
Central Appalachian Environmental Justice Program, West Virginia
Highlands Conservancy, Model Forest, and SouthWings.

SUPPORT THIS GREAT EVENT – Become a CO-SPONSOR!
Please contact Heartwood to
co-sponsor this important event. Co-sponsors contribute funds, on a
sliding scale ($25-$1000 and up), which will be used to to offset costs
for lower-income individuals who could not otherwise attend.
Co-sponsors receive recognition in all program materials.

(List of co-sponsors to-date at the end of this email.)

FOR MORE INFORMATION, contact:
Andy Mahler 812.723.2430
Janet Keating 304.522.0246, or
Tonya Adkins 304.522.0246

We hope to see you there!

*******************************

Co-sponsors for HEALING MOUNTAINS as of 4/27/06:

Coal River Mountain Watch, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, Sierra Club
Central Appalachian Environmental Justice Program, West Virginia
Highlands Conservancy, SouthWings, Model Forest, Appalachian Voices,
Rainforest Information Centre, West Virginia Environmental Council, Sam
and Winkie Kusic, Dave Cooper, Kentucky Heartwood, Starla Medina Tonning
Scholarship Fund, National Forest Protection Alliance, United Mountain
Defense, Mountain Sustainability Project, Citizen’s Coal Council, Native
Forest Council, Ruckus Society, Virginia ForestWatch, Buckeye Forest
Council, Missouri Forest Alliance, Anonymous, Permaculture Activist,
Helen Vasquez, Leigh Haynie, Living Education Center for Ecology and the
Arts, Ann Phillippi, Regional Association of Concerned
Environmentalists, Broadened Horizons Organic Farm, Tom Rooney, Virginia
Organizing Project, Dogwood Alliance, Southern Appalachian Biodiversity
Project, Gerry and Joe Scardo, Hoosier Environmental Council, American
Lands Alliance, The Wilderness Society, Southern Appalachian Forest
Coalition, Jackson Purchase Audubon Society, Knob and Valley Audubon
Society, Sierra Club Southern Appalachian National Forest Campaign,
Sierra Club Cumberland Chapter and Bluegrass Group, Sierra Club Hoosier
Chapter, Sierra Club Virginia Chapter, David H. Dyer, Gerald Coomer, the
Center for Sustainable Living, Christians for the Mountains, Sisters of
Saint Francis, The Druid Network-North America, Bean Mountain Farms,
Camellia Hill Herbals, and Annette McCormick.

It’s all dogwood and lilacs this time of year up here in the mountains. We’ve been spending a lot of time sitting on the front porch in Todd, NC, almost watching the buds burst into leaves on the sugar maples and poplar, then the buckeye and beech. Sometimes it gets hard to focus on anything but the eerily beautiful song of the wood thrush echoing through the hollow. Other welcome recent arrivals include the ovenbirds, towhees, red-eyed vireos and least flycatchers.

Folks in the mountains have an interesting name for eastern towhees – “Cha-winks” because of the loud, almost shrieky calls they make from deep inside some shrub or hedge. I always think of them as the “Tea bird,” because of their familiar “Drink your Tea” song that punctuates the pre-dawn stillness of the Appalachian forests.

Since the ornithology class I teach at Appalachian State University has recently come to a welcome, if a little sad, conclusion (I was blessed with a wonderful and engaged class of 16 students this spring) just at the time that many of the migrants are coming back to the mountains for the summer, I thought I’d share with Front Porch Blog readers what some of those calls they’re hearing in the woods are.

“Old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody…”

That mournful song that’s been echoing through the hollows for last week is the song of the white-throated sparrow. Many of the juveniles have not yet got the song down right. Someday they will proudly burst out the distinctive “Old Sam Peabody” song, but during adolescence, the songs are as awkward as the voice of a 12 year old boy. Often they sound a lot like the “I’m so sad,” song of the white-crowned sparrow. With how perfectly beautiful the weather has been, however, the sentiments of the sparrows, whether they’re white throated or white crowned, are far different than my poor phonetics of their song.

“Teacher! Teacher! Teacher!”

I just heard the wildly emphatic “Teacher!” call of the ovenbird for the first time this morning. I’m certain that ovenbirds have been around for a few weeks down on the lower slopes of the Blue Ridge, but today was the first day that this wonderful bird’s song rang out here in Lazy Horse Hollow. Ovenbirds are warblers, like those yellow warblers with the red streaks on their breasts that have recently returned to grace the abandoned fields and marshy areas of the mountains. They get their name from the Dutch oven-like nests they build from leaf litter on the forest floor.

Well, that’s about all the news there is from Lazy Horse Hollow. Have a great weekend and a productive spring – I’ll get back next week with news of more welcome arrivals of our feathered friends from the south.

Those of you who have been involved in the fight to end mountaintop removal for a while will be surprised to learn that we’ve been barking up the wrong tree all along. According to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, reclaimed mountaintop removal sites look a lot like this idyllic little scene that they have posted on their website in which it is quite obvious that the water and forest are in healthy shape and the heavy metal contamination from the mining has been cleaned up to the point that farmers can produce healthy food!

According to ODNR:

Removing the top of the mountain results in a unique opportunity to create relatively flat terrain that is suitable for residential, agricultural, and other development in areas where much of the natural terrain is too steep for any developed economic use.

The ODNR website goes on to give a detailed explanation of what’s happening in this picture:

The flat or very gently rolling area on the right side of the illustration is land reclaimed after a mountaintop removal operation was completed. Many new land uses can be established on reclaimed mountaintop removal mining sites. The illustration shows a mined area reclaimed for agricultural use in the foreground, and for the site of a new village in the background. In the far background to the left of this reclaimed operation, another mountaintop removal operation is underway on an adjacent hilltop.

In contrast to this idyllic view, the Office of Surface Mining is actually weaking the already anemic reclamation standards whereby coal companies spray “reclaimed” sites with some exotic grass seed and move on to the next hilltop. Check out what OSM is up to in the write-up by Front Porch Blog contributor Scot Chandwater.

As astute news-watchers know, a number of Christian evangelicals have recently emerged as leaders in the struggle to get the polluter-friendly politicians running the country to take global warming seriously. Now, a group of polluter-friendly Christian evangelicals have set up a front-group (supposedly an “interfaith” group although the leaders such as James Dobson are all from the Christian right) to counteract this awakening of fellow Christians to the degradation of Creation at the hands of greedy corporations.

The group, the “Interfaith Stewardship Alliance” cynically professes to support care of creation while working to divert attention away from the real problems facing our relationship with the environment, describing the issues of global warming, species loss and overpopulation as “unfounded” and “speculative” – at odds with the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence.

Check out their website here – they have a “contact us” page if you want to let them know how you feel about their polluting and destructive way of “caring for Creation.”

[Texas] The groups will offer a resolution at Kimberly-Clark’s shareholder meeting Thursday calling on the company to report by Nov. 1 on whether it could phase out the use of fiber from old-growth Canadian forests that environmentalists say are threatened by clear-cutting operations. Greenpeace estimates that Kimberly-Clark, the maker of Kleenex tissues and Huggies diapers, gets 20 to 30 percent of its pulp from boreal forests in Canada. Kimberly-Clark’s directors unanimously recommended that shareholders reject the Greenpeace-backed resolution. The company said it only buys fiber from suppliers that use sustainable forestry practices and has a policy against using wood from virgin rain forests or certain old-growth areas of Indonesia and Canada. It opposes an effort by environmentalists to rely on a single group, the Forest Stewardship Council. It says the supply of timber approved by the stewardship council isn’t large enough to meet its pulp needs. Less than 30 percent of Kimberly-Clark’s fiber comes from recycling.

[Vermont] In Ohio and New England, and through Canada, the maple sugaring season starts and ends earlier than a generation ago — a sign of warming climate trends…. for the last two years, the Marshes have tapped their maples in January, the earliest they can recall in five generations of sugar making, The Los Angeles Times reported. In response to rising global temperatures, spring comes as much as 13 days earlier in many parts of North America — and 15 days earlier in Europe — than it did 30 years ago, scientists say. Spring and winter are becoming milder, the National Climatic Data Center reports. From 1950 to 1993, the coldest winter temperatures rose by 5 degrees, and the warmest spring temperatures rose 2.5 degrees. Searching for reliable clues, scientists have turned to people such as Marsh — who for generations have kept a precise weather eye on the seasons.

[Arkansas] Much like the bird that drew attention to it, Bayou de View — where birders reported seeing an ivory-billed woodpecker — is critically endangered, researchers said Thursday. University of Arkansas at Fayetteville graduate students spent last fall slogging through hip-deep mud to study the cypresses and other trees in the eastern Arkansas bayous. They found a forest of bald cypress and tupelo, an ecosystem that has all but disappeared from the landscape. Researchers estimate that less than 12,500 acres (5,000 hectares) of such a forest remain in the south, a fraction of the original 42 million acres (17 million hectares).

[Mississippi] In the late 1980s, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service served notice that it would likely put the Louisiana black bear on its endangered species list. Unfortunately, an Endangered Species Act listing can provoke fear among landowners who believe that the species uses their land. They wanted to save the bear, but they knew a listing under the Endangered Species Act could mean an end to property rights as they knew them. Eager to avoid a repeat of the spotted owl fiasco in the Pacific Northwest, which pitted loggers against bureaucrats and environmentalists, Louisiana farmers, timber companies, environmentalists, and regulators resolved to talk about solutions. Because 90 percent of the bear’s forested habitat rested in private hands, a private-public partnership was not only possible; it was essential. The result: About 350,000 acres of Mississippi River lowlands in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas have been planted in a mix of hardwood trees since 1990, creating new roaming grounds for the Louisiana black bear. Except for selective cutting, these lands must be kept forested in perpetuity.“The bear became an asset to the average landowner,” Davidson said. “I think we’ve probably had more bears today in Louisiana than we’ve had in a hundred years,” he said.

Presentations from the Energy from Wood Conference at NC State University in March, 2006 are now available online. The conference explored potential benefits of wood biomass utilization for energy production and identified needs for further research.
North Carolina Cooperative Extention – whole article

News notes are courtesy of Southern Forests Network News Notes, April 27, 2006
www.southernsustainableforests.org

This just in – the Tennessee legislature has passed a bill that gives the state authority to shut down surface mines if they are in violation of the law, rather than having to go through a lot of red tape. Tennessee has been at the forefront in dealing with the devastating impacts of mountaintop removal.

By The Associated Press
April 20, 2006

A bill to give the state the power to shut down polluting surface coal mines is headed for the governor’s signature.

The House voted 93-0 to approve the measure on Thursday. The Senate passed the bill on Monday.

The bill introduced by Gov. Phil Bredesen was carried by Rep. John Tidwell, D-New Johnsonville.

“What this bill does is correct the problem immediately and provides an alternative to the court system, which is cumbersome and expensive,” Tidwell said.