Internationally renowned author and farmer, Kentuckian Wendell Berry, has taken back personal papers he donated to the University of Kentucky. The prolific writer made the decision after his Alma Mater, where he also taught for 19 years, named a basketball dormitory the “Wildcat Coal Lodge.”

“The University’s president and board have solemnized an alliance with the coal industry, in return for a large monetary ‘gift,’ granting to the benefactors, in effect, a co-sponsorship of the University’s basketball team,” Berry explained.

Mr. Berry has penned as many as 50 books and received multiple awards for his writing. The papers at hand are 60 cubic feet in volume – extensive enough to fill around 100 boxes – and the author plans to move them to the Kentucky Historical Society in Frankfort.

The famous Kentuckian is no fan of the coal industry and staunchly opposes mountaintop removal. In a 2005 essay entitled, Not a Vision of Our Future, But of Ourselves, he wrote:

Eastern Kentucky, in its natural endowments of timber and minerals, is the wealthiest region of our state, and it has now experienced more than a century of intense corporate “free enterprise,” with the result that it is more impoverished and has suffered more ecological damage than any other region. The worst inflictor of poverty and ecological damage has been the coal industry, which has taken from the region a wealth probably incalculable, and has imposed the highest and most burdening “costs of production” upon the land and the people. Many of these costs are, in the nature of things, not repayable. Some were paid by people now dead and beyond the reach of compensation. Some are scars on the land that will not be healed in any length of time imaginable by humans.

The author goes on to say:

If Kentuckians, upstream and down, ever fulfill their responsibilities to the precious things they have been given—the forests, the soils, and the streams—they will do so because they will have accepted a truth that they are going to find hard: the forests, the soils and the streams are worth far more than the coal for which they are now being destroyed.

Click here to read his entire essay.

At present, Mr. Berry is focused on promoting Wes Jackson’s 50-Year Farm Bill (pdf) and working to stop mountaintop removal. The author was recently featured in a special issue of Solutions journal, dedicated to ideas for a brighter future in Appalachia.

News broke today that former Congressman and West Virginia Secretary of State Ken Hechler has also filed to run for the vacated Senate seat of the late Robert C. Byrd. Representative Capito, meanwhile, has announced that she will not be seeking the seat.

Hechler stated this morning:

I don’t want to make it a campaign against Gov. Manchin. I want to make it about mountaintop removal. A vote for me is not a vote for Ken Hechler — it’s tantamount to a vote against mountaintop removal.

Hechler is a long time opponent of mountaintop removal. The 95-year-old former representative was arrested last year for blocking traffic and protesting Massey Energy at one of the company’s prep plants in Raleigh County. More recently, Hechler took part in a protest at Marsh Fork Elementary in Coal River Valley. Marsh Fork Elementary sits below Massey’s massive earthen Shumate impoundment, which holds back billions of gallons of coal sludge. Close to the dam and the school, mountaintop removal operations detonate earth shattering explosives.

Representative Hechler and other members of the 1962 House Committee on Science and Astronautics

After being elected to the House in 1958 (the same year Senator Byrd was elected to the Senate), Hechler served nine terms. In 1974, after a House amendment was introduced to allow mountaintop removal in to the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, Hechler proclaimed:

Mountaintop removal is the most devastating form of mining on steep slopes. Once we scalp off a mountain and the spoil runs down the mountainside and the acid runs into the water supply, there is no way to check it. This is not only esthetically bad as anyone can tell who flies over the State of West Virginia or any place where the mountaintops are scraped off, but also it is devastating to those people who live below the mountain. Some of the worst effects of strip mining in Kentucky, West Virginia, and other mountainous areas result from mountaintop removal. McDowell County in WV, which has mined more coal than any other county in the Nation, is getting ready right now to strip mine off four or five mountaintops. They are displacing families and moving them out of those areas because everybody down slope from where there is mountaintop mining is threatened. I certainly hope that all the compromises that have been accepted by the committee, offered by industry in the committee, that now we do not compromise what little is left of this bill by amendments such as this.

Hechler served as a military officer in World War II, helped President Franklin Roosevelt write his 13-volume public papers, and was the only member of Congress to march with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama in 1965.

He does not expect to win the seat, but has noted:

I’m running for the environmentalists who are opposed to mountaintop removal. It’s a way to put it on the ballot. I’m trying to give an opportunity for all those people in the state to show there is strength in our numbers.

West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin announced this morning that he is making a bid for the late Robert Byrd’s Senate seat. There will be an August 28 primary and a November 2 general election for the vacated seat, and the winner of the election will take over for Carte Goodwin – Manchin’s temporary appointee.

Speculation has it that Republican Representative Shelley Moore Capito could also run for the seat, though the Congresswoman has yet to announce she will make a bid.

Click here to learn more from the NYTimes.

Over the weekend, polluted runoff from the BB&T parking lot on Highway 105 in Boone, NC killed all life in a 1.5 mile long stretch of Hodge’s Creek. The incident was caused by a toxic asphalt sealant that a careless contractor failed to keep from entering the creek during rainfall on Saturday. Of the many fish that were killed, most were trout, including one that was 13 inches long.

Call 336-771-5000 to ask the local Deptartment of Water Quality to investigate the incident! The Appalachian Voices Waterkeeper Team is investigating and produced the video below.

The material data safety sheet (MSDS) for Asphalt Based Pavement Sealer reads:

SECTION VII — SPILL OR LEAK PROCEDURES SARA TITLE III: #302: No #304 CERCLA: No #313: No Steps to be Taken in Case Material is Released or Spilled: Ventilate the area. Wear approved respiratory protection. Wear suitable protective clothing, gloves, and eye/face protection. Coal Tar Driveway Sealer is a marine pollutant and should be placarded as such when transported in bulk over sea or large bodies of water. Coal Tar Driveway Sealer will harm waterlife and should be prevented from entering any body of water. Dispose of in accordance with federal, state and local regulations.

Stay tuned for more updates, CLICK HERE to visit the Upper Watauga River Keeper website, and don’t forget to call 336-771-5000 to ask the local Dept. of Water Quality to investigate the incident!

Make sure you don’t miss today’s NPR article about methane monitors being disabled at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine.

From the article:

An NPR News investigation has documented an incident in February 2010 in which an Upper Big Branch electrician was ordered to circumvent the automatic shutoff mechanism on a methane detector installed on a continuous mining machine. The machine then continued to cut rock without a working methane monitor, a dangerous and possibly illegal act.

The incident occurred two months before the explosion that killed 29 mine workers. Running mining machines without methane monitors risks similar explosions.

Massey contends:

The supervisor did not order an electrician to bridge a methane monitor on a continuous miner “to keep the mining machine from shutting off while operating.” The methane monitor was bypassed in order to move the miner from the area that did not have roof support to a safer area for repair.

Click here to read the NPR piece

Mountain Justice Photo

Yesterday, activists with Climate Ground Zero and Mountain Justice locked themselves to a piece of mining equipment called a highwall miner on Coal River Mountain at Massey Energy’s Bee Tree Surface Mine. Colin Flood and Katie Huszcza locked themselves to the machine in order to raise awareness of the threats Massey is posing on the local community and the region’s ecology.

The activists are also calling attention to the fact that detonating earth-shattering explosives a short distance from Massey’s immense earthen Brushy Fork Impoundment—the largest lake of coal sludge in the Western Hemisphere – is ill-advised, to say the least.

Massey, of course, is the company that owned the Upper Big Branch mine where 29 miners tragically lost their lives in April. Going back 10 years, 52 miners have died in Massey mines. Making the argument that the company shows a remarkable level of disregard for the welfare of miners, communities and ecologies could hardly be easier. In 2009, Massey was charged with $12.9 million in proposed fines for safety violations. In 2008, the EPA fined Massey $20 million for 4,500 violations of the Clean Water Act; the largest fine in the history of the law. In 2010, four environmental groups filed a lawsuit against the company citing evidence that, unbelievably, Massey’s Clean Water Act violations had, increased in frequency since its record 2008 fine.

Particularly relevant, in October of 2000, a Massey owned sludge impoundment in Martin County Kentucky failed and leaked more than 300 million gallons of sludge, killing 1.6 million fish and contaminating over 27,000 people’s water.

If the “Level C” rated Brushy Fork impoundment fails, Massey itself estimates that at least 998 people will lose their lives. Level C ratings are given to dams that have “specific problems that could lead to failure.”

Compounding concerned residents frustration is the understanding that Coal River Mountain has wind resources at the highest “Class 7” rating. However, if Coal River Mountain is leveled by Massey, wind farming will not be economically viable on the unstable ground and lowered ridges.

Vernon Haltom, co-director of the Coal River Wind Project, expresses his concern:

“The Brushy Fork sludge dam places the downstream communities in imminent danger. The threat of being inundated by a wall of toxic sludge is always present. Blasting next to this dam increases this risk at the same that it destroys the opportunity for renewable wind energy.”

Katie Huszcza and Colin Flood, along with Jimmy Tobias and Sophie Kern, have been taken into custody and are being held on a collective $12,000 bail.

Head over to ClimateGroundZero.org or MountainJustice.org to learn more and/or check on the activists.

The Environmental Protection Agency has decided to delay a decision on its proposed veto of Arch Coal’s Spruce No. 1 mine until September 24, 2010. The decision to delay came after the agency received over 4,000 public comments.

The Spruce mine permit, if granted, would allow over seven miles of Appalachian headwater streams to be buried and more than 2,000 acres of West Virginian forests to be destroyed. It would also constitute the largest mountaintop removal permit ever granted.

CLARIFICATION: The September decision will be EPA’s Regional Administrators Recommended Decision. The Recommended Decision is next referred to EPA’s office in DC, and at that point the Corps of Engineers has an opportunity to fix the permit. A final decision on the veto may not happen until early 2011.

That’s the message the Obama administration sent last week when it proposed a new rule that would curtail pollution from coal-fired power plants in the eastern United States. According to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, the rule should improve air quality as far south as Texas and Florida and as far north as Minnesota and southern New England.

More specifically, the new regulations would require utilities to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions by 71 percent and nitrogen oxide emissions by 52 percent – both relative to 2005 levels – by the year 2014.

Such reductions would significantly decrease unhealthy smog and soot levels and have a tremendously positive impact on the health of our nation. According to Gina McCarthy, head of the EPA’s air and radiation office, reduced emissions would save an estimated 14,000 to 36,000 lives every year. In addition, 240,000 cases of aggravated asthma, 23,000 nonfatal heart attacks, 21,000 cases of acute bronchitis and 1.9 million missed school and work days would be avoided.

Though the agency estimates the implementation costs of the new rule to be $2.8 billion per year, that cost pales in comparison to the rule’s estimated savings of $120 billion per year in avoided health costs, lives lost and sick days.

The rule would reverse and strengthen Bush era rules that have been met with intense scrutiny in recent years. In 2006, the previous administration decided not to lower the ten-year-old soot standard, despite the findings of its own scientists that compelled it to act otherwise. In response, over a dozen states, in addition to environmental groups, objected by suing the EPA.

“The E.P.A. proposal is a big step in the right direction,” said Frank O’Donnell of Clean Air Watch. “It’s a step toward taming the environmental beast known as the coal-fired power plant. But it is only a first step. E.P.A. still needs to move ahead with plans next year to limit power plant emissions of toxic mercury and other hazardous air pollutants.”

The EPA will be conducting hearings on the proposal in the months ahead. The rule is expected to take effect sometime next year.

Last Thursday, activists with the Rainforest Action Network showed up at the headquarters of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, chained themselves to one another and began blasting a special edit of “Take me Home, Country Roads.” Their take on John Denver’s classic included intermittent sounds of the earth- and nerve-shattering explosives used during mountaintop removal coal mining practiced in Appalachia.

The protest was organized in response to the EPA’s recent approval of Arch Coal’s major new mountaintop removal operation in Logan County, W.Va. The approved Pine Creek Strip Mine would impact over two MILES of already-suffering headwater streams, create three new valley fills (each over 40 acres), and further endanger local communities already contending with increased flooding due to strip mining. As deforestation on the Arch Coal mine site would continue to dismantle an important global carbon sink, the mine itself would produce over 14 million tons of coal, which when burned in power plants, would contribute over 40 million tonnes of carbon dioxide greenhouse gas pollution to the planet’s atmosphere.

RAN’s Scott Parkin’s explains:

We’re sitting down inside the EPA to demand the EPA stand up to protect Appalachia’s precious drinking water, historic mountains and public health from the devastation of mountaintop removal. At issue here is not whether mountaintop removal mining is bad for the environment or human health, because we know it is and the EPA has said it is. At issue is whether President Obama’s EPA will do something about it. So far, it seems it is easier to poison Appalachia’s drinking water than to defy King Coal.

Click HERE to see more photos of the protest.

How was your weekend, America? Any hot dates? You’re still involved with Big Coal?! Unbelievable. (Sigh) You do love when that industry talks clean to you, don’t you? All those sweet little lies…

Always the same story. You throw on your finest duds, but no longer expect anything new. Maybe you go out on your rapidly depopulating mining town and try to forget that you’re condemning your prospects with other industries there in the future? Knock back a drink or two of water contaminated with heavy metals and chemicals to help with the forgetting? Seriously America, what could possibly make this lousy relationship worse?

How bout the fact that time after time Big Coal is leaving you to take care of the ENORMOUS check?

Multiple reports and studies are showing how the coal industry receives billions of dollars in direct and indirect subsidies from US taxpayers.

A 2009 Environmental Law Institute study entitled “Estimating U.S. Government Subsidies to Energy Sources: 2002-2008” (pdf) shows that the U.S. coal industry benefited from subsidies of around $17 billion between 2002 and 2008. In addition to federal support, coal is getting plenty of help from state and local governments as well. Another 2009 report (pdf) written by Dr. Melissa Fry Konty and Jason Bailey found that in Kentucky, for instance, the coal industry receives $115 million in subsidies per year. In Virginia, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that the industry receives $44.5 million annually.

A 2010 Synapse Energy Economics report entitled Phasing Out Federal Subsidies for Coal (pdf) concludes that:

There remain certain distinct areas where federal financial policy implementation is not consistent with, and is even in conflict with, clear federal efforts to adapt to a carbon constrained future. Inconsistencies in federal policy require federal administrative intervention; private companies will not necessarily remedy the inconsistency. The disconnect between federal policies not only sets the nation back in achieving energy and environmental policy goals, but also places taxpayer dollars at risk. As regulatory policy changes, as financial circumstances change, so must the administrative financial policies of the federal government.

And let’s not forget about externalities: those negative impacts coal has on third parties that end up being paid for by taxpayers. These include costs associated with poisoned streams, deforestation, air pollution and global warming to name but a few. According to 2009’s Hendryx study, coal mining costs Appalachia $42 billion every year as a result of negative health impacts and loss of life. The Environmental Law Institute found that impacts to miner’s health such as, black lung disease, for instance, costs taxpayers around $1.5 billion, in addition to the incalculable suffering it exacts on the miners themselves and their families.

Unbelievably, the infatuation lives on.

Today, there are tremendous coal industry subsidies in the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), H.R. 2454. This legislation, which has passed the House though not yet the Senate, includes $60 billion in support of carbon-capture-and-sequestration technology.

Aaaaahhhh!

COME ON America. You deserve so much better. And PS, Big Coal is seeing other folks behind your back anyway.

What do you get when you combine 13 real-life characters with one superb actress, a sold out venue, and an issue as compelling as mountaintop removal?

In the case of Adelind Horan’s “Cry of the Mountain,” you get must see theater.

Last week, I had the pleasure of seeing “Cry of the Mountain” at Live Arts in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Horan’s performance was outstanding. The Charlottesville native and recent graduate of Hampshire College, skillfully portrays 13 vastly different real life characters whose lives are inextricably bound to the practice of mountaintop removal coal mining.

* July 8 — Four County Players – box office: 540.832.5355
* July 15 — The Hamner Theatre – box office: 434.361.1999
* July 22 — Live Arts – box office: 434.977.4177
* July 29 — Play On! Theatre – box office: 434.872.0184

By Megan Naylor

An Alliance for Appalachia partner organization, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth and ENGAGE ( Educational Network for Global and Grassroots Exchange) have joined together to create a new report with stories concerning human rights violations associated with the process of mountaintop removal in Floyd County,Ky.

According to The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, human rights are clearly defined as the belief that everyone deserves access to basic human needs such as: food, water, shelter, and a safe living and working environment.

It is when those needs are blatantly ignored or interfered with that human rights are violated.

The process of mountaintop removal contaminates these basic human needs as it poisons the water, land and lives of those it comes in contact with.

The Voices from Appalachia report is compiled of both a history of coal in the region and personal accounts from citizens of Floyd County.

It addresses specific instances of violations of their economic, social and cultural rights and what individuals, communities and organizations are doing to push for positive change.

The compilation is refreshing in the sense that it is aimed at making the public aware of rights which are currently being demolished in the Appalachian Mountains, while enlightening and outlining a framework for those wishing to speak out against human rights violations on both a national and global scale.

The intro to the report mentions the fact that as families in Appalachia struggle with effects of mining, thousands of individuals throughout the world face comparable situations of exploitation, whether due to mining, other large scale development projects, urban poverty, or systematic discrimination.

“To achieve the greatest possible strength organizations and individuals must reach out to one another and work together.”

According to ENGAGE “The process of creating the report fostered a stronger community identity and helped the community understand the rights they share.”

Going into the future, both KFTC and ENGAGE will determine the best ways to apply the messages and lessons of the report in community outreach and educational and legislative settings.