‘It’s more than just air pollution. You gotta clean your brain.’
~Nina Simone
sweet art from NY Times awhile back
Okay, focus, relax, take a deep breath. This is going to be a long post, you may need a tall glass of wine, and this will still only be a skimming of a portion of what's going on surrounding mountain top removal (MTR) coal mining right now. And if you can get to Charleston, WV on December 7, be there!
My mind is often floating towards mountains and today is no different. But I have been thinking about the lack of mountain where recently one existed, in particular because of mountaintop removal coal mining, that hideously distasteful, disdainful, and degrading form of strip mining. One of the most destructive extractive processes we have, if you want to give it a calm name like process.
It's more like an assault, which is how many residents feel about MTR happening around them and in and around their communities. I'm not going to go into detail about the steps of what MTR is or the dozens of social injustices it causes, many people have done that already and I recommend you check out a little primer if you're unfamiliar.
But the short and gist is the removal of hardwood forest and all flora, injections of bombs made of fertilizer and diesel fuel put in the ground, mountaintops blown away allowing that rubble and earth to be pushed into adjacent valleys burying headwater streams and releasing newly oxidized minerals and heavy metals from inactivity into our system, just like the coal still holding some of those nasty extras about to be washed, shipped, and burnt, leaving a compacted moonscape after 20 story draglines and heavy machinery are through. All of which heavily impact local communities. And in the greater scheme of things all of us.
I want to focus on a few facets of this beast that have been on my mind recently. In particular, false advertising, false economics, and false choices. And more than likely a few unrelated things as my mind chaotically and sinuously flows through this topic spastically firing up in my brain.
Excuse me, did you say clean coal?
A new study has just been released, and it doesn't have any sort of fancy complicated title where you wonder what they are talking about or what the point is going to be. It's entitled, "Coal's Assault on Human Health." A report from Physicians for Social Responsibility. It focuses primarily on the impacts to our respiratory, cardiovascular, and nervous systems.
Why do I get such a eerie feeling reading this report. It's a well put version of many ailments and problems I had heard of before, as well as a lot of little things about the degenerative ripples coming from coal throughout all stages of its life cycle.
James 3:6 And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire of hell.
This false notion, a public relations masterpiece, of clean coal is in strong need of being debunked. It's the smoothness of the way they say it that makes me shudder, they're so sure of it, speaking of it with such calm, ease, and faith. Our President is in that boat as well, and it makes one wonder sometimes how much truth and how much politicking is going on.
excerpt from a Friends of Coal coloring book going into some of our elementary schools, another to follow
I think the words clean and coal shouldn't be in the same sentence outside of sentences saying such. Of course there is coal that is cleaner than others in respect to the quality of the coal, the amount of btu's one gets, the amount of sulfur one gets, mercury, etc. Clean coal technology is a fanciful myth brought to you by the same wonderful minds that tell us gas guzzlers help the economy, global warming isn't necessarily a bad thing (if it exists), and since we‘re the “Saudi Arabia of Coal,” its our patriotic duty to burn it. The same people that tell us carbon capture and sequestration is our holy savior. They never seem to mention how IF it is ever used, it reduces the efficiency of the plant 20 to 40 percent, increasing demand heavily for more strip mining, which seems to me like it isn’t really getting to the root of the problem if we’re worried not only about carbon emissions but pollution, land degradation, toxic water, and a livable ecosystem.
Speaking of coal’s cleanliness, here’s the first part of the first paragraph from this new study by the Physicians for Social Responsibility.
Coal pollutants affect all major body organ systems and contribute to four of the five leading causes of mortality in the U.S.: heart disease, cancer, stroke, and chronic lower respiratory diseases. This conclusion emerges from our reassessment of the widely recognized health threats from coal. Each step of the coal lifecycle—mining, transportation, washing, combustion, and disposing of post-combustion wastes—impacts human health.
So even if flowers and fairies and chirping chickadees, which are on the decline (though I have no data about the population changes of flowers and fairies as of late, only birds), came shooting out of the smokestacks and all the carbon was wistfully and thoughtfully put underground for some unknown set of time, there is no such thing as clean coal technology.
Every step in the process is dirty. Dirty. Very much so. But let us remember, there are no flowers and fairies and chirping chickadees coming out of our smokestacks. So what about all that respiratory loving stuff? Let's go ahead and quote the last sentence of that first paragraph of this new study.
Coal combustion in particular contributes to diseases affecting large portions of the U.S. population, including asthma, lung cancer, heart disease, and stroke, compounding the major public health challenges of our time. It interferes with lung development, increases the risk of heart attacks, and compromises intellectual capacity.
So much for coal being clean. It sounds like that would put a huge burden on our health care system, another ‘externality’ of coal we fail to calculate into our energy policy. And for the sake of clarity, this is a strictly egocentric look at the moment, we’re not talking about the contamination that comes to the land and water rippling to us, something that is much harder to quantify, even though it exists, kind of like a haunting specter of yesteryear on a morphine and mercury drip.
I've seen a few comparisons of the coal industry to the tobacco industry lately, especially in re to advertising and pumping up their marketing and public relations as their negative health effects starts to back them into a corner.
Oh. It doesn't sound good for coal on any fronts. Good thing it's such a 'homegrown, cheap energy source.' How cheap does it sound to you?
And cancer, the great teacher
Has been opening schools
Downstream from every factory
Still, everywhere fools are
Squinting into microscopes
Researching cells
Trying to figure out a way
That we can all live in hell
Well, step back, look up
You'll see I'm dimming the sun
But you won't, will you?
Oh, that's a good little one
~Ani Difranco
Can we really afford to continue fooling ourselves about the cost and price of electricity as swarming amounts of information continue to collect pointing towards quite the different story? Is this blatant ignorance, apathy, greed hungry policy and regulation, a failure of democracy, or what?
Is it a problem of economics? How can our world, as far as our industrialized commerce oriented world, be governed by laws of economics that fail to consider the true costs of products or the liquidation of natural resources because it is difficult to accurately measure such pillars of our foundation. Yes it is difficult to quantify some of these functions and values of mountains, wetlands, waterways, and the atmosphere. Oftentimes things so dear to our survival, the little and big things, are next to impossible to put a price on and when one thinks about it, it makes too much sense because they are indeed priceless. That difficulty in addressing these values fails miserably as reason to ignore them in cost benefit analyses, and we are failing in not doing something about this. But there are things a stirrin', slowly.
Lamentations 1:2 She weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks: among all her lovers she hath none to comfort her: all her friends have dealt treacherously with her, they are become her enemies.
The economies of scale are skewed. Something is awry. Short term profits that plunder long term stability do little for overall well-being and health, homeland security, or general sanity. The skewed hunger and impatience of our greased and well oiled machine will make you go crazy. Plum, bonafied crazy. So don't stare at it too long, or look the beast in the eyes unless you want your circuits fried worse than Johnny 5 that one time he got turned into a bad guy. But seriously.
As Jesus said, 'there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.'
The reason for all the confusion is that there are two paths of human knowledge - discriminating and non-discriminating...I deny the empty image of nature as experienced by the non-discriminating understanding. If we eradicate the false conception of nature, I believe the root of the world's disorder will disappear...Nature as grasped by scientific knowledge is a nature which has been destroyed; it is a ghost possessing a skeleton, but no soul.
~Masanobu Fukuoka
We need to work on a way of integrating new components of our world and these complicated interconnections into our decision making processes. We're like a dull heartbeat stuck in a lull, pumping but fading with just enough to keep going in some semblance of living as long as we borrow a little more from China. The system needs a strong jolt, a shock, a lightning bolt flaming whip of fresh ideas and edited playbooks traveling down the path of least resistance, just like a strong current enjoys. If we're going to continue to take and take from nature, we might as well take more biomimicry as well.
MTR - Mountain Top Removal or Morality Tax Recession. False dichotomies and mountainous lobotomies, how does it feel to be an externality?
What's up with all these disconnects? We need a binding line, where does it hide?
The snip snip of our detachment from nature detaches us from much, one of many being common sense. Perhaps it will return in atavistic fashion. Once we, as a society, become detached from nature, it makes sense to measure the health of our nation preeminently from the health of our market and not the health of our environment.
Ecclesiastes 5: 9-10 Moreover the profit of the earth is for all. The king himself is served by the field. He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver; nor he that loveth abundance with increase: this is also vanity.
The detachment limits any smooth integration of the two that would inherently be present in any civilization that understood it's connection to the land. Physically, mentally, and spiritually. The detachment digs deeper into our psyche fueling further disconnect through current lifestyle norms in spiraling positive feedback fashion. If detachment pushes our interests towards more technologically oriented mediums of communication, recreation, and education, it pushes us towards more energy consuming hours on the laptop and tele and less immersion in the 'real world,' doing little to bridge the gap and more to strain the possibility of a successful operation to begin to reconnect the strings.
The earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future. ~Marya Mannes
Chief Seattle's proverbial web of life is a little battered and torn, but I believe and hope it is time and a slow healing is due.
Back to the root, or rut, as we pronounce it in the country, serendipitously they both work at the moment. I believe this disconnect is further tainting our eyes, our perception, or perhaps it's just a major deficiency in vitamin A and a few B's from processed foods, but this disconnect is impeding our vision of each other.
The hard working folks that are speaking up about mountain top removal coal mining and its impacts to communities are not tree huggers out to kill miners’ jobs. First off, it's more like a few operator jobs that are at stake, jobs that could be replaced by green jobs, but just where exactly are these green jobs, they need to be made!
The miners all lost their jobs to draglines and improved profit margins of machines. These organizers are interested in diversifying the economies of the coalfields. Oppressive monoeconomies are tough cookies to crumble though, and they've got razor witted plans to disrupt any organizing efforts to dismantle their empire of dust covered glamor. They specialize time to time in how to divide. How to push and coil the minds of people until folks are sure as can be all those stinkin’ tree huggers just want to kill all their jobs for the sake of some bugs. It's crazy how much we try to reduce situations sometimes, how easy it is to manipulate or womanipulate anything into something or something into nothing, and how difficult it is to have a healthy open discussion when false lines have been drawn in the sand.
It is a far cry to call someone an environmentalist because they believe in clean air, clean water, and clean land, and believe their children deserve such things. Does that make someone a tree hugger?
It's maddeningly funny how past perceptions and actions of those crazy enviro's has caused anyone who stands up for what we stand on to be cast out as a dirty tree hugger. They are thrown into this category of being anti-industry, anti-jobs, anti-growth, and even sometimes anti-American. Another puzzle piece in the successful sorcery of rotten public relations.
Some of these destructive stigma blinders prevent people from seeing the social justice side of so called tree huggers. Many are just people interested in community, empowering communities, and the health and future well-being of communities. That sounds like diversified smart growth to me, not anti-growth. And it sure as apple pie sounds patriotic to me, helping our communities, a far cry from what I would say Wal-mart, or the People's Republic of China Merchandise Distribution Center, feels like.
Patriotism is an interesting word, drawing up excitement in people's hearts and feelings of being proud about your homeland. A far cry from what blowing up our own backyard and headwater sources and poisoning our communities feels like. That's more of a sick gut wrenching madness like watching someone cut themselves repeatedly day after day, or maybe more accurately cutting chunks from themselves, it makes you shudder and it leaves scars for both parties, physical scars on the source and mental scars for letting it continue as we all watch live from our television and computer screens. The cutting and defleshing is subtle, changed in all the 1's and 0's into more digestible chunks of news updates, facebook profiles, gmail, and of course blogs.
taken from a powerful Google Earth based project that can be found on ilovemountains.org
Some of these same mind limiting stigma's that prevent us from seeing the good hearted foundation of social justice work prohibit an accurate perception of Appalachian Culture for its beauty, self reliance, diversity, and historical roots as well. The same stigma's that somehow help justify in some twisted way the collateral damage of dealing with the upheaval of their heritage, land, and communities prevent us from truly relating to this miscarriage of justice and the bloody, slurry filled ooze creeping through the flattened mountains and drinking water.
After removal of coal from a mine, threats to public health persist. When mines are abandoned, rainwater reacts with exposed rock to cause the oxidation of metal sulfide minerals. This reaction releases iron, aluminum, cadmium, and copper into the surrounding water system and can contaminate drinking water.
The release of tainted secrets whisper dirty things into us.
False choices. Would you rather have the environment or jobs? Do we really need to choose between the two? We're not returning into being hunter-gatherers and we're not transforming into soulless machines on assembly lines either. There is a middle ground, and a healthy balance is just what the good doctor ordered.
How do we bridge some of these gaps, how do we reconnect some of these strings?
Ok, this rambles a bit, but biomimicry tells me to just go with the flow and I'm feeling a tinge of want to dig deeper, and I don't want to stop. Gravity pushes us ever onward. So, if you're in the mood, let's go down the old coal rabbit hole a little deeper underground and see where we get. And yes, we are all mad here...
In the land of milk and honey and luscious bounty the mountains flung themselves across the horizon in waves and swarms of teaming life and sound and scampering whispers as the breeze sneaks across leaves and branch and whisker.
And then the big bang came, again of course, and again. The big bang of the mountaintop being blown off. And everything changed.
Let there be light. Let there be darkness. The darkness we uncover brings us the light. The darkness we uncover reveals the darkness inside ourselves. But it also burns us towards a different light, a light at the end of the tunnel that may indeed be something other than a coal truck barreling our way.
Speaking of patriotism, what is best for our country, and loving your neighbor, isn't all of these degenerative and dehabilitating toxins a direct threat to our homeland security? Today and more so tomorrow, which is a further blow to our economy in extra health care needed, people living and working at sub par levels, increase in disease, decreased land and water value, increase in remediation efforts, and the depressing message we send to our citizens that we aren't quite as advanced, civilized, or smart as we thought.
Catch 22
How do you bring job diversity into a region dominated by an oppressive monoeconomy whose true cost is nowhere near accurate through the fallacies of inadequate assessment of 'externalities' and the fact that it's subsidized by the government?
We need job options for residents of the coalfields, and we need them before, during, and after MTR is phased out. Is it realistic, feasible, or completely idyllic for mountaintop removal operators to check out of their strip sites and walk across the street and check in to a solar energy manufacturer and installer?
I'm not sure. The idea sounds crazy, it's a fantastical thought. For now it seems improbable, but not impossible, and in today's rapid pace of change maybe soon enough that idea could be a concrete reality.
The problem is getting industry there. Ironically MTR proponents run to the idea like wounded dogs run home about the fact that in the mountains it’s too steep for industry to come in, how these flat tops are necessary. It’s their justification of lack of remediation and their loop hole about not returning the mountain to its AOC, approximate original contour, like they are supposed to. There’s a jail, Wal-Mart, golf course and some other structures on some old strip mine sites, but seriously, if they’ve got all these flattened mountains for business why can’t we get some factories, textiles, and manufacturers to come in and give people jobs. I’m guessing it has something to do with the fears of the land subsiding, the problems of compacted fill, groundwater, and wells, and who knows what else.
It seems very difficult to get any new industry in the coalfield regions. How do we do it? Luckily quite a few folks with much more knowledge than me have been thinking about this for awhile. SEED , a recently new group seeming to have some potential in opening up this riddle, Appalachian Community and Economics, and probably some other organizations are focusing on this dire issue bottle necking the progression of life in the coalfields.
What are green jobs, and where are they? If they were needed anywhere it's in the coalfields. Green jobs could open up options, something people in that region aren't used to having. Coal will be used for awhile, it is true, but we still need to start the transition of doing other things, as well as the way in which we extract, burn, and dispose of coal waste which needs an upgrade and upheaval.
Is MTR contributing a mere 4% of American coal? If so...(I don't know, I've heard different figures and know strip mining makes up much more but for MTR I really would like to know)
While we will burn coal and other carbon based fuels for awhile, the transition period will be getting well underway in the upcoming decade. MTR coal mining makes up such a small percentage of the coal we burn and a disproportionately large percentage of the ill effects done to the land, ill effects that cannot be undone. Ending MTR is something that is very feasible, simple efficiencies alone are able to more than cover the demand equal to that 4%.
Reclamation, when it is actually done, which isn't that often, can help return a piece of land into something better than the barren moonscape, however it is a far cry from the diversity of the virgin mountain, no matter what. Reclamation has gotten much better but it's still one of those times when you're sort of putting a band-aid on a bullet hole. Lipstick on a corpse is probably the most famous quote, and quite a good analogy.
If MTR creates so many jobs why are there 100,000 less mining jobs than 50 years ago? Because MTR and the mechanization of the process destroy not only the land and communities but they destroy jobs. Massey and other mining companies could easily employ more miners and tighten down on deep mining safety if they really wanted to create more jobs. But it wouldn't be as profitable, so we won't see it, because when it's all said and done they aren't concerned about their workers, they're concerned about quarterly profits and projected earnings. Yes, some of these areas aren't feasible to be extracted via deep mining, but I would argue they aren't feasible through extreme forms of strip mining as well. It's nothing wrong with wanting to make a profit but they're singing on both sides of the fence spreading lies both ways.
OSM, the Office of Surface Mining, and the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, have had their sights on MTR lately and getting a lot of grief over lollygagging, rhetoric, and the trials of jumping through the hoops of the process. The dumping of mining waste and rubble into streams is perhaps the easiest and simplest atrocity they should do something about. And they want your input.
Any civilization that disregards their freshwater as a top priority in all scales of planning is destined to trouble, despair, and downfall on a long enough time line.
Our present rules and regulations are not only a falsehood of our economics and our survival but they show our shortfalls as citizens and communities to not stand up for basic human needs. It is dire and time just munches on.
Ecclesiastes 4:5 The fool foldeth his hands together, and eateth his own flesh.
The insatiable hunger of time moves us ever forward and we must wonder if our own insatiable appetite is agreeable with our present action, methodology, and policy. It's definitely time for some changes. There's a time and rhyme for every season.
With the passage of time more explosives will shake and crumble more of some of our oldest mountains and bury some of the streams that many, many folk are downstream from. OSM says their process won't show any rule changes until at least 2011.
NWP 21, under section 404 of the Clean Water Act, has been highlighted recently as the EPA is having some public hearings about whether this permit option should continue. NWP 21 is a sort of weak, wide spanning blanket letting coal companies get around needing a public comment period, and anyways this rubber stamp was never intended for valley fills from coal mining, it was for projects with 'minimal' environmental impacts. But the beast that is NWP 21 has turned into a voracious gumming whore with no teeth, sucking life out of the land and giving a helping hand to coal companies. It's a horrid site, believe me.
There is a strong, dire need for individual permits to be required, for the impacts to waterways and public health to be looked at via meaningful evaluation, not this calm acceptance of trust or ignorance we’ve seen from the Army Corp of Engineers.
The largest MTR site’s permit has been put on hold for consideration of its size causing impacts to our waterways exceeding what is allowed. This is one of only a handful of times this power has been exercised. Again we are brought to the puzzle. Do not all the pieces also make the whole? The law of accumulation can only be diluted so far. If we are to admit the whole is bad are not all the pieces also?
I think its notable and a good step for this permit to be put on hold, for us to take a better look but all I foresee is more smaller permits if it is a hindrance to the coal industry, a tactic they already use for loopholes. But perhaps we will get some more decisive action, something with some real teeth in it. Now with the EPA, OSM, Senator Byrd, and a plethora of others showing interest as well there is starting to be some real focus on mountain top removal.
In the year of our Lord 2009 A.D. bifurcation points grow and reach new heights. While James Inhofe labeled 2009 as the Year of the Skeptic, perhaps 2010 will become the Year the Mountain Remained.
Cumulative impacts must grant warrant to change this. Dumping waste into our streams is ecocide with no concern for the future. Protecting our nation's waterways should be an utmost priority for homeland security and a basic signal that we understand water as a basic necessity of all life. After all the purpose of the Clean Water Act is to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the nation's waters.
Liberty in a wasteland is meaningless.
The recent hearings over the future of NWP 21 have been met with obnoxious, freedom of speech impeding busloads of miners paid by their companies to raise raucous, prevent citizens from entering the hearings, and screaming and jeering nonstop so public recorders can't hear citizens concerns about this permitting process, which then never make the record. Luckily many people submit comments via the internet or paper. Elderly women have been threatened and have had to be escorted back to their vehicles by security. It is childish, irresponsible, crazed behavior and will more than likely only intensify as this growing momentum builds against mountaintop removal coal mining. The miners are being force fed their jobs are at stake by their higher ups.
You can frame a picture a certain way, it doesn't mean its accurate or straight. Don Blankenship, famed mortician, actor, and CEO of Massey Energy is up to his normal tomfoolery and outright ethical debauchery. I'm reminded of Vivian Stockman's eloquent words comparing his company to a sociopath under the idea of a corporation being an entity, and any entity is going to have personality, however exciting, dull, or crazy and demented it is. It was at a hearing a few years ago inside the gym at Marsh Fork Elementary about another coal silo being constructed next to the school.
I have seen enough to know
That I have seen too much
Excuse me mister
Can’t you see the children dying?
You say that you can’t help them
Mister you’re not even trying…
~Ben Harper
Don Blankenship never ceases to amaze. Nor does irony. Don recently wrote a letter about China's environmental standards, making a methodical mention of children and how important it is to protect our children. He used the word children eight times in the article. Other than reaffirming everyone's worries about his concern for children, he also makes it clear that global warming is a theory, development takes precedent over environment, and he is against lax safeguards that allow heavy metals and toxic materials to leach into our intake stream. How interesting.
Maybe Don had a change of face, and maybe he will use some of his land to put up a new Marsh Fork Elementary on, or at least let them use some of his equipment to prep the site. But I do find it odd how he seems so concerned about children's safety after his blatant disregard during the on going years of talk, trouble, and sickness occurring at Marsh Fork Elementary in Sundial, WV. And just his general accounting mindset when it comes to profit margins dictating his actions when it comes to topics like sludge injections, blasting near communities, and all the other social issues related to mountaintop removal coal mining and other forms of strip mining.
“If we fail as parents, we have failed as Americans. We have failed as Americans. If we don't all stand up and take part in what’s happening in our Appalachia Mountains, we're all gonna’ suffer from this.”
"You can do without light. You can't do without that Water."
Ed Wiley’s wise words come in waves when I think about Marsh Fork and MTR.
Senator Byrd is getting more involved. He knows of the recent announcement from the Obama Administration that is planning to increase federal oversight of mining operations. He's ready to get involved. And he knows about one nasty evil of MTR very well, Marsh Fork Elementary. And it seems the School Board is Finally calling out for funds to move the kids away from being directly under 2.8 billion gallons of sludge and a coal processing plant.
photo taken from ilovemountains.org
It is still unknown whether funding will be granted to move the school, but there is a chance. Concerned citizens have been raising awareness about this issue and raising money themselves for years now. For a little background, here’s an old article I wrote during Ed Wiley’s walk from Gov. Manchin's place in Charleston, WV to Senator Byrd's office in DC, arriving the same time as an unveiling of ilovemountains.org, a great website of info and knowledge, as well as the beginning campaign of the Clean Water Protection Act, part of Lobby Week which will be happening again pretty soon.
There's a great 23 minute video about Ed's walk to Byrd's office (via the concerned citizens link). These ripples and the ripples of others took awhile, but they finally caught up. Ed is one great stand-up guy, and I'm proud to know him for the good he's brought those kids, inspired by his own granddaughter.
Yet the EPA who just released an 'environmental justice showcase' of 10 communities didn't include one community in the whole of Appalachia.
Don Blankenship has been preemptively letting us know about lay offs, blaming environmentalists, Democrats, and possibly even the bad advice of his Vedic astrologer. It's pretty low when you want to keep your profit margins at a certain level and can do it by laying off workers but you want to dig that line in the sand a little deeper by giving false motives for firing workers. He tells shareholders one thing about the security of his company, permits, and jobs, and tells his workers another.
Lamentations 3: 47-48 Fear and a snare is come upon us, desolation and destruction. Mine eye runneth down with rivers of water for the destruction of the daughter of my people.
So, about all of this wealth, all these jobs the mining industry is proclaiming it creates. Why are the mining regions some of the poorest in the southeast and nation, why is unemployment higher than the national average? All the money leaves with the coal, going to the big wigs and shareholders, doing very little to nothing for local economies. At least very little to nothing positive for local economies.
You lose the things you love and you learn how important things are, you learn how to miss them. You learn what matters.
The recent secret meeting between Gov. Manchin, Blankenship, and a few other big players in the coal industry including a couple representatives show they are ready to get their 2 cents in as far as what's going on behind the scenes and they're also confused and concerned over what will be unfolding about the future of coal mining regulations.
Hm, we've got some serious mid and long term regional planning issues that are going to be one long row to how. Logistical nightmares that we better start planning and strategizing for, for homeland security, happiness, general well-being, health, sanity, and let us not forget that evasive integral factor and motivation, common sense.
Yes, it's long been said the creed is greed and we know short term profits have been governing the Big decisions for awhile, but its time for a new way of thinking and we no longer have the luxury of our inaction and the buffering capacity of time to hold the blinders of the results of our actions and means of existing, i.e. energy. We know too much to do so little. Why are all these little pieces of the puzzle not being connected? Why can we see the trees but not the forest, or the mountainside? It's time to batten the hatch and really get to the heart of this bugger. But for that we're going to have to go deep and deep and deeper still.
These are some serious questions, with even more serious implications. Amplification and bifurcation points tumult us. The ripples grow and its about time to start some more positive waves. The family friendly, PG type. None of this cheap, horrific gratuitous rape and assault and defecation we're used to. No, the future ain't what it used to be, but its still what we make it.
"I know the pieces fit, I watched them fall away." ~ Maynard James Keenan
The dots are just not connecting or adding up in our decision making process and policy. Detachment is a bad thing, at least in re our detachment from reality, ourselves, and the Earth and it is prohibiting and inhibiting many of us to connect the strings. The web of life is torn and fettered, and we have to repair it.
I'd say we were doomed if it wasn't for that one monkey wrench in the human spirit, our stubborn ingenuity, our inability to accept certain things, inalienable rights, our drive when pushed into the corner, our will to survive. I'm hungry for that ingenuity. Salivating at the mouth like one of Pavlov's dogs sitting in the middle of a glorious and repugnant minefield. What will it take for our communities to unite and rise together for freedom from the oppressive and self-mutilating chains of our own poor energy policy?
There is something happening here, and what it is, isn't all too clear. But things are moving, the wheels are in motion, we are left to ask to what end? By what means? At the moment there's so much going on about climate change and one example of point source climate change, MTR. I am thankful for that, the fact we're discussing such relevant prevalent issues.
But the distance between discussion and implementation is what concerns me. Real implementation too, not these gumming whores having no teeth. Just awful. Perhaps the hammer is finally dropping. I surely hope so, for our sake and for the kids. it's always been about the kids. No one deserves someone else’s mess, especially this kind of king hell brain buster.
Some people tell me I live in the woods too much, 'what would you know of what's really going on, in the real world.' I guess this is true, to some extent, but I do have an idea, which isn't too much less than what anyone has, and probably more than some. I enjoy the facts, but it is what or how I feel inside that I try to listen to. What feels right?
It’s harder and harder to give into these atavistic endeavors today. We, the intelligent animal, have become so brain, or pleasure center, oriented we allow little room for intuition, let alone the strange vibrations of our souls. How does all this have anything to do with the climate and mountains. It's a surefire nasty slobber knocker Catch 22. One, our detachment, and two, our need for reattachment to nature amidst the ever pressing sprawl of us, urbanization, commercialization, indoctrination, and of course, electron elation. We've got to overhaul our ways of thinking about energy, from the cradle to the grave, if we want to continue to prosper and live merrily into this new century.
William Arthur Ward once said the pessimist complains about the wind, the optimist expects it to change, and the realist adjusts the sails.
As we adjust inside this new millennium it’s clear some creatures aren't meant to survive, and MTR is surely one of those beasts.
>photo from www.ohvec.org, the best source for daily MTR related news
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