discuss the impact of mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia by large monopoly coal companies. Be thorough with several examples, but confine yourself to one page TheLastMountainAltern
discuss the impact of mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia by large monopoly coal companies. Be thorough with several examples, but confine yourself to one page
Presents “The Last Mountain”
A documentary film viewing
The Last Mountain
Mountaintop Removal Mining and Its impact on Central Appalachia.
This is about Big Coal, its political and economic power, its colonial possession and exploitation of the land and its people, for profit; and the resulting poverty forced upon its people, who are fighting valiantly for the survival of themselves, their richly biodiverse environment, and against climate change.
This presentation is also about the rich, diverse culture and history of the people of the Appalachian Mountain region that is downplayed by the media’s stereotypes of “hillbillies” and “rednecks.” The definition of these terms was created by the corporate controlled media, to define an “inferior other,” comparable to the misrepresentation of minorities.
(Elizabeth Catte, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia)
The Internal colony history, past and present, of this region – is one of extraction, monoculture, and enforced poverty by dispossession from the land. (Steven Stoll, Ramp Hollow, The Ordeal of Appalachia)
Where is Appalachia?
The Appalachian chain of mountains stretches from Mississippi and Alabama all the way up to Southern New York State.
It is the oldest mountain range in the world and the most biodiverse; as old as the Himalayas.
Our focus for this presentation is Central and North Central Appalachia; encompassing the states of West Virginia, Eastern Kentucky and Tennessee; rich in coal and timber resources, and also one of the poorest areas of the U.S., with high unemployment, serious health problems, including opioid addiction, and inadequate infrastructure (roads, hospitals, schools, other diversified industry). But Appalachia is the “canary in the cage. The same problems exist throughout the nation.
The film discusses Mountaintop Removal Mining in West Virginia, but the problem is anywhere coal is being mined this way today.
It is a region on a continent originally settled by indigenous people, who were dispossessed by America’s “Manifest Destiny,” which is deeply rooted in white supremacy.
Indian Removal Acts Called for the Relocation of all Tribes to Indian Territory West of the Mississippi
The “Trail of Tears” is depicted in the map to the right. This involved forceable removal by federal troops of all of the Cherokee, Shawnee, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Creek, in Tennessee, West Virginia, Georgia and the Carolinas. The Seminole were removed from Florida in two Seminole Wars.
Unprotected for the harsh winter, and provided smallpox infested blankets, many died of disease, starvation and exposure on the forced march.
However, many of the Cherokee and Shawnee resisted and hid deep in the mountains of West Virginia and the Carolinas. Many are still there, dispersed throughout the region.
They have generally not been recognized by the census, nor were they allowed to claim Indian ancestry or own land until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed.
The Cherokee, Shawnee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole were also removed because of the need to expand slavery; and because many of the Native American tribes protected runaway slaves, who merged with these tribes through marriage. The 2nd, “Black Seminole War“ was waged to destroy the havens for runaway slaves. (Paul Ortiz, An African American and Latinx History of the U.S.)
Who Are the “Hillbillies” and “Rednecks?”
The Civil War in Ulster, Scotland in the end of the 17th Century was between King William of Orange and King James of England. The Scots-Irish people who fought on the side of William were called “Billy Boys.” They wore red bandannas to distinguish themselves from the other side – thus called themselves “rednecks” as well.
When the Scots-Irish migrated to America in the late 1700’s, they settled in the Appalachian mountains, adopted the culture, fighting and farming (agrarian) techniques of Native Americans and intermarried with them, understood and respected their clan structure, and referred to themselves proudly as “hillbillies.” They also intermarried with African-Americans. And these fierce fighters were the scourge of the British in the American Revolution, defeating British General Braddock, setting the stage for our independence.
In 1921, at the Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia, coal miners, black and white, engaged in a pitch battle with Coal Owners’ police-state detectives and U.S. soldiers in an attempt to join the United Mine Workers Union. They wore red bandannas; thus, “rednecks.”
(Jeff Biggers, The United States of Appalachia; Stoll, Ramp Hollow; http://www.appalachianhistory.net/2012/03/theword-hillbilly-linguistic-mystery-and-popular-culture-fixture).
Who Are the “Hillbillies” and “Rednecks?”
These Mountaineers intermarried into Cherokees tribes and were accepted into the clan structure through their Cherokee wives, adopted their farming techniques, including the “Three Sisters” planting method, and their fighting ways. They understood the nature of clans and the bonds of kinship and were welcomed as members of the tribes.
They settled into the mountains, adopting an agrarian, makeshift lifestyle, planting gardens of corn, beans, squash, potatoes, rye and wheat, and supplemented that by living off the animals and edible plants, like ramp, a wild onion, in the forest, until the lumber and coal companies stripped the forests by clear-cutting trees and dynamited the tops of the mountains off. That is the cause of poverty and the migration into the exploitative coal camps, for survival.
Rye, a hardy crop, was used to make a value-added and non-perishable product – rye whiskey – that was mostly traded in nearby stores for things that the mountaineers could not make or grow themselves.
(Jeff Biggers, The United States of Appalachia; Stoll, Ramp Hollow; http://www.appalachianhistory.net/2012/03/the-word-hillbilly-linguistic-mystery-and-popular-culture-fixture).
Interesting facts about Appalachia (see Central Appalachia (Diversity) Fact Sheet, in your packet: http://www.appalachiancommunityfund.org/central-appalachia)
Sequoyah, of the Cherokee Nation, is the only known person in the world to single-handedly develop an alphabet; his work became the first written language for Native American people.
One of the descendants of the Cherokees who hid back in the hills to escape the “Trail of Tears” is Maria Gunnoe, appearing in the film “The Last Mountain.”
Bristol, Tennessee is the “Birthplace of Country Music, which started with recordings made in the 1920’s by the Carter Family, Jimmy Rogers, and many others. The promoters attracted the history of Southern Appalachian traditions in one setting: black and white musicians, church choirs and gospel, quartets, banjo and guitar players, Scotch-Irish fiddlers, country string bands, balladeers, and even a jazz combo.
However, as a marketing ploy, they asked performers who arrived to record in their Sunday best to dress down in outdated work clothes and oversized hats to push the stereotype of hillbillies.
The Highlander Folk School was established in the Eastern Tennessee Mountains in 1932 as an interracial center – known throughout the region as an advocate for racial and social justice. Dr. Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks both attended workshops there well before the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The school hosted labor union workshops and promoted ethnic unity and cooperation. It was the single mountaintop school where both blacks and whites could meet, in defiance of a Tennessee law forbidding interracial gatherings in the state.
Interesting facts about Appalachia (see Central Appalachia (Diversity) Fact Sheet, in Your Packet: http:// www.appalachiancommunityfund.org/central-appalachia)
The first American woman ever awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938, Pearl Buck, was born in West Virginia. She was recognized by the Nobel committee more for her biographies about her West Virginia parents than for her Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Good Earth, about village life in China.
A young Jewish publisher from Chattanooga, Tennessee, Adolph Ochs, whose descendants worked in the coal mines in the 1880’s, became the new publisher of the New York Times in 1896 and set its course to world acclaim. Ochs had earlier spoken out against lynchings that had occurred in his home town and surroundings.
Booker T. Washington, who founded the Tuskegee Institute and became the nation’s most prominent African American at turn of the 20th Century, had worked in salt mines and coal mines in West Virginia.
Harriet Arnow’s novel The Dollmaker, depicting the struggles of a Kentucky mountain family in Detroit in the 1940’s when the UAW was fighting to organize the Ford Motor Company, was nominated for the National Book Award in 1955, and was made into a movie starring Jane Fonda.
Nina Simone, known as the high priestess of soul, was born in small town North Carolina. Her townspeople, of all ethnic backgrounds, donated money to send her to the acclaimed Julliard School of Music. She became a world class performer of gospel, jazz, pop, folk and classical music. She also became a major figurehead in the Civil Rights Movement when she wrote and performed “Mississippi Goddam” in response to the assassination of Civil Rights Activist Medgar Evers and the terrorist bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four little girls.
Jeff Biggers, The United States of Appalachia
Figure 3.1: Percent of Population in the Appalachian Region That Is Minority, 2011-2015
Appalachia is far more diverse than the media has led us to believe. It used to be much more diverse, before the dispossession of Native Americans and the migration northward for industrial jobs by African Americans
These are in your packet
The concentration of poverty and high unemployment is due to the massive loss of coal jobs in Central Appalachia. Automation is the cause.
These are in your packet
Where are the Coal Deposits in the U.S.?
The map to the right shows where the significant deposits of coal exist. There is far more coal in the Western Region of the U.S., including the Powder River Basin in Wyoming.
The coal in the Powder River Basin has a much lower Sulphur content than that in the Appalachians, Illinois and Indiana; so, much of the demand for coal has shifted towards that region, where the coal seams are closer to the surface, and 18 to 20 feet thick compared to only 2 or 3 feet thick in the Appalachian Mountains.
Mountaintop Removal Mining exists in both places and in Canada, Australia, and China. But mostly in the U.S. 13% of U.S. coal (30 % of West Virginia coal) is exported.
About 30% of electrical energy is generated from coal burning power plants (a significant drop since 2007); there has been a shift to burning natural gas, which is plentiful in the U.S., and to solar, wind, and other renewable sources, such as hydropower, wind, solar, biomass and geothermal energy. Renewable sources are catching up to coal as a source of energy.
The many methods of mining coal. All have been automated, eliminating large numbers of coal jobs.
The before and after of mountaintop removal mining.
The ecological destruction caused by mtr mining.
This is Mountaintop Mining Removal, folks. This is in your packet.
And over 500 mountains have been destroyed.
Millions of tons of dynamite used each month to blast the rock away to get at the coal seams. The silica dust (a cause of cancer and respiratory disease) falls on residents in communities below. A child was killed in one community by a huge boulder hitting the house where he was sleeping. Home foundations are shaken, broken. Wells are poisoned. It is as if a war was happening.
Mountaintop removal in progress. Trees are clear-cut, all wildlife driven away, and the top layer of rock is blasted away. The mountain is forever degraded (scalped).
Overburden being dumped into valleys, filling streams with waste. Wells are contaminated with toxic chemicals released from the rocks blown apart.
One of 500 mountains in Central Appalachia destroyed by Mountaintop Removal Mining. This one is about the size of Manhattan, N.Y.
Results of Mountaintop Removal Mining
So-called “reclamation” by spraying with grass seed. It will take a thousand years for the full fauna, especially trees, to recover.
Ecological Impacts of Mountaintop Removal
The Appalachian region is home to one of the oldest and most biological diverse mountain systems on the continent. Mountaintop removal mining has already destroyed more than 500 mountains encompassing more than 1 million acres of Central Appalachia.
The EPA estimates that mountaintop removal “valley fills” are responsible for burying more than 2000 miles of vital Appalachian headwater streams and poisoning many more.
As a result, water downstream of mountaintop removal mines has significantly higher levels of sulfate and selenium. This can directly kill aquatic species or disrupt their life cycles so severely that populations can all but disappear.
The EPA estimates that by 2012, mountaintop removal has destroyed 1.4 million acres of Appalachian forest. The remaining soil is incapable of producing native hardwood forest.
As a result, wildlife habitat is lost, and the disappearance of forests that have captured carbon dioxide and kept it out of the atmosphere. When the forests are clear-cut, they release all the C02 they have stored!
Bird species that rely on mature forest habitats are in danger, and their numbers have dropped significantly.
Appalachian fish have experienced habitat degradation, declining populations, and increasing developmental abnormalities.
Fish populations downstream of mountaintop removal operations were reduced by two-thirds between 1999 and 2011.
West Virginia and Kentucky lead the nation in deaths per capita from cancer.
60,000 cases of cancer in Appalachia have been directly linked to mountaintop removal.
More than 700 additional deaths from heart disease occur annually in areas with mountaintop removal compared to areas without mining.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in Appalachian coal-mining communities.
Scientists found a direct link between dust from mountaintop removal and lung cancer
Kentucky and West Virginia lead the nation in lung cancer mortalities.
Overall mortality rates are significantly higher in areas with mountaintop removal.
Emissions from Burning Coal
Several principal emissions result from coal combustion:
Sulfur dioxide (SO2), which contributes to acid rain and respiratory illnesses.
Nitrogen oxides (NOx), which contribute to smog and respiratory illnesses.
Particulates, which contribute to smog, haze, and respiratory illnesses and lung disease.
Carbon dioxide (CO2), which is the primary greenhouse gas produced from burning fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas).
Mining and burning coal is the number one source of greenhouse gas worldwide; the primary cause of climate change.
Mercury and other heavy metals, which have been linked to both neurological and developmental damage in humans and other animals.
Fly ash and bottom ash, which are residues created when power plants burn coal.
Sulfur Dioxide, Nitrous Oxide, Mercury, Fly Ash, Bottom Ash and Particulates.
Coal processing plant, which leaves toxic chemicals in a coal slurry pond after the coal is washed.
A coal slurry pond, just above schools and homes, just waiting to burst, controlled only by earthen dams.
There are 312 coal slurry impoundments in W. Va.
Massey Energy’s 28 impoundments have spilled 24 times in the last decade, contaminating rivers with 309 million gallons of sludge- more than twice the amount released in BP’s Gulf Oil Disaster
The Buffalo Creek flood was a disaster that occurred on February 26, 1972, when the Pittston Coal Company's coal slurry impoundment dam #3, located on a hillside in Logan County, West Virginia, burst, four days after having been declared "satisfactory" by a federal mine inspector. It claimed 125 lives, injured 1040 and left 4,000 homeless.
Results of a coal slurry dam breaking, inundating miles of Tennessee with sludge
As a result of poor health, mountaintop removal mining’s ecological impact and oppressive living conditions, Central Appalachia has consistently lost population due to attrition. McDowell County in West Virginia lost 56 percent of its population between 1980 and 2010.
Coal is rapidly declining as a source of electricity generation in the U.S.
Coal jobs are declining due to automation and declining coal use.
Why is Coal Production Declining?
The U.S. coal industry is declining in the face of lower cost natural gas, renewable energy and regulations designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and protect public health.
Decades of mechanization have also reduced jobs. In the last 30 years, West Virginia’s coal industry increased production by 140%, while eliminating more than 40,000 jobs! See chart.
Utilities are accelerating their retirement of coal plants because they are increasingly uneconomical. The cost of coal-fired electricity is about $20 higher per megawatt hour than that for natural gas.
Wind and solar are increasingly competitive with coal, even without government subsidies.
Domestic coal consumption is falling. In 2018 it was the lowest in 39 years, driven by declines in coal use in the electric power sector.
Exports are rising (to Europe, India and China), but that may not last.
Climatenexus.org, 2019 “What’s Driving the Decline of Coal in the United States.”
But renewable jobs are on the rise. In 2018, the wind and solar industries employed 446,000 people.
Sources: “What’s Driving the Decline of Coal in the United States,” March 2019, Climatenexus.org
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The United States is in the Midst of a Solar Boom – An Alternative to Coal
Due to the drop in costs for solar technology and increases in electric utility rates, solar photovoltaic-generated electricity is now less expensive than grid electricity, and adoption is rising rapidly.
The U.S. solar industry is now creating enough jobs (hiring new workers 12 times faster than the overall economy) that it could absorb all the coal jobs that would be lost if the coal industry was completely shut down.
But as other states take advantage of solar, much of Appalachia is left in the dark with legislation that limits solar expansion.
The biggest barriers to solar in Virginia, for example, are monopoly utilities and electric cooperatives that are blocking market access to the technology.
Most of the solar power in Appalachia is run by utility companies. While solar farms have environmental benefits, they don’t benefit the communities in which they are built, as the power is sold wholesale onto a regional transmission grid.
The utilities like big solar. They don’t want it on peoples’ roofs. They don’t want you to own it.
“Solar is Being Held Back by Regulations, Not Technology” by Joshua Pearce, 2016; “Harnessing Solar in Appalachia” by Kevin Ridder, 2017, in Appalachian Voices; “The State of Solar in Appalachia,” by Alena Klimas, 2019
Another alternative to coal. This is a Windmap of Wind Farms throughout the U.S. Note that the Appalachian Mountains, with significant potential for successful mountaintop wind turbines, have hardly any because of coal’s political influence.
Wind’s Environmental Record
Wind power has some of the lowest environmental impacts of any source of electricity generation.
It significantly reduces carbon emissions, saves billions of gallons of water each year, and cuts pollution that creates smog and triggers asthma attacks.
Wind farms leave most of the land they are built on undisturbed.
In 2018, the electricity generated from wind turbines avoided an estimated 200 million tons of carbon pollution – 43 million cars’ worth of CO2.
It helps cut significant amounts of sulfur dioxide (S02) and nitrogen oxides (N0x), air pollutants known for creating smog and triggering asthma attacks.
Wind energy saves billions of gallons of water. The conventional power sector draws more water than any other sector in the U.S., including agriculture.
Source: American Wind Energy Association https://www.awea.org/wind-101/benefits-of-wind/environmental-benefits Wind 101 Basics of Wind Energy 1/26/20
Wind Power is Less Hazardous to Wildlife Than Climate Change and Other Hazards
“Audubon strongly supports properly sited wind power as a renewable energy source that helps reduce the threats posed to birds and people by climate change.” So begins a position paper on wind power by the National Audubon Society, the world’s oldest and largest bird conservation organization.
From Audubon’s point of view, reduction of fossil fuel emissions trumps death by turbine blades of comparatively few birds, writing, “…climate change has already affected half of the world’s species’ breeding, distribution, abundance, and survival rates … if climate change proceeds as expected, one in six species worldwide could face extinction.”
Statista, from US Fish and Wildlife data. Creative Commons license.
GROWING OLD UNGRACEFULLY: Bird-Killers — Cats or Wind Turbines? | Lost Coast Outpost | Humboldt County
1/26/20
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