Perhaps it's difficult for those who want to believe that Republicans and Bush and all those that follow that path don't care about people.  They talk a great game about values... but ultimately don't those values have more to do with their own personal acquisition?  If nothing else, doesn't someone need to concede that their idea of definitions for some pretty important words and ideals are different from most of the rest of us?

Consider that they define hunting as being something akin to your drunk uncle going into a pasture with a gun to shoot a cow that his buddy is pointing out to him.  Essentially the 'hunting' of Dick Cheney was essentially this... compromised, tamed birds pointed out by outriders and dogs for the convenience of the 'hunters'.

Now consider that they consider this strip mining important enough to compromise and perhaps take the lives of virtually every person in the entire region.  Would they be among the first to speak up about how horribly the Native Americans were treated by the Western Europeans 100+ years ago?  How is this different?  The culture of these people was completely altered by the arrival of coal mining and it is dangerously close to being destroyed entirely.

Finally, take a moment to recognize that if this is how they view 'hunting' and 'coal mining'.... what would be the parameters of war?  Does this help put the Iraq situation into context?  Does it help us to understand why the Iraqi people (and all of the Middle East) are so upset?  Does it seem not only possible, but dammmed likely that many of the accusations leveled at the treatment of the Iraqis at the hands of the Americans is true?

Before anyone blindly agrees to how "Christian" this administration is... perhaps we need to recognize how they must define that term as well.  It clearly has NOTHING to do with Love Thy Neighbor.

Julie Hensley Greeneville, TN

Instead of fluff stories about Survivor and what movie star is doing what, why aren't the morning shows covering stories like this? This is a great but disturbing article. We are all accountable in a way because of our dependence on fossil fuels.

This is a wonderful song, by Timothy.  It would frighten me to hear it set to music.

And it already frightens me to know what is going on in West Virginia and Kentucky, with the government not only turning a blind eye but actually assisting the extraction industries everywhere, and the local people being disgracefully neglected.  The Orion photographs are most eloquent.  Too bad that too few see them.  And we who see them are already persuaded.

My undergraduate thesis was focused on this very subject: environmental justice in the coal fields. The most difficult question I found, and one that is at the core of most environmental justice battles, is how do we sacrifice jobs for the environment?

While coal mining has employed declining numbers of Appalachians for decades, it is still a major player in many eastern Kentucky communities. I believe that there are other opportunities for employment in the region that have yet to be fully explored (eco-tourism and recreation are at the top of the list), but that's not going to happen overnight. A common response I got from residents in these communities was, "The coal companies may be dirt bastards, but at least I got a job."

Coal mining can be done in less-destructive, more environmentally friendly ways, but the chances of coal companies using those methods without being forced to by the government are about as good as Bush joining Amnesty International.

Reality Check

    Never was much of a reader, always would just wait until the movie come out. Early in life they made you read some stuff in school. I don't know if they still do or not, when considering the current intellectual condition of the general public a case could be made that they don't. Now there is a statement that will endear a lot of readers right off the bat. No I am not saying every body out there is stupid. We all just spend an inordinate amount of time watching TV instead of reading a book every now and then. Somebody made me read "Alice in Wonderland" years ago, I am just now understanding the weird symbolisms and the bazaar theme of that book especially the talking animals. It seems like I just fell down the rabbit hole sometimes when I look at what is going on around me. It's becoming a visual media world made up of sound bits and slick visual productions produced by the Madison Avenue Ad men. Condensed down to a 60 second theatrical productions meant to sell you something or alter your opinion in one minute or less. Its very effective and they make millions with it because they know that from the baby boom generation on that electronic baby sitter called a TV has numbed the brains of two generations. The total mind control has even bled over into the News Program's they don't just report the news anymore. They have to do a commentary and explain to you what you just heard or watched. TV has dummied down our cognitive process to the point they have to explain to you what you just heard or watched, or at least their version of it. The reasons corporations spend millions on an Ad in the visual media to alter a view or make whatever they are selling more socially acceptable instead of using the print media is simple. They don't want you to think about what you are watching or what they are selling.
    Case in point a slick little commercial Walker/Cat is running right now to promote Mountain Top Removal and Hollow Fill. STOP! I know what you are thinking this article is going to be a big long one against Mountain Top Removal and Hollow Fills; it is not. I have a lot of friends that make a living on strip jobs, either on them or hauling coal away from them. I am not anti-coal, that particular type of mining maybe but just because I don't have to do it to feed my family, a lot of my friends do. We don't judge each other by what we do. I have done the other types of mining but that is neither here nor there. The coal corporations have had their foot on our throats down here for generations. We do what we have to do to eat. We will not let them polarize the community and pit one group against another. I have friends who work on the strip jobs that feel just as I do, they would rather do the original contour stripping. It takes longer, more job security and they take a lot of pride in what they do. It takes more skill to put that over burden back on the original contour than it does to just push over into a valley. No one goes to work everyday thinking I'm doing a valley fill. They are thinking about making house payments, paying utility bills and feeding their family, just like the rest of us. They also know the coal is what keeps the lights on for all of us.
     That Ad is as insulting to them as it is to the whole county. To think we would do hollow fills just because a cartoon bug told us to. It is an insult to their intelligence and ours. We do what we have to do to eat. We do as we always have done. Take any bone they throw us and try to scratch out a living with it. Just don't insult our intelligence with that stupid commercial and leave us a little dignity. That commercial may fly in West Virginia but you have to know thanks to the efforts of the tax payers and the Pike County School System most of us have at least an 8th grade education. Some of us spent two years there so that should make us twice as smart. The reason you don't come into the print media is not because of cost, it's actually a lot cheaper. It is because you would have to explain why an owl can't come back to a hollow fill or even a possum. You don't need to have experienced the soundless flight of a large owl at night as it catches a mouse by hearing it a hundred feet away in the dark. You do have to understand it hunts from and nests in trees. It has to have a tree in order for it to come back after the hollow fill. Even the old possum hangs by its prehensile tail, "FROM A TREE". I guess the point they are trying to make is don't stop a hollow fill because of some endangered species bug. They use a cartoon from the insect world, as most people just don't like bugs and who cares about an insect. It would be a harder case to make if all the creatures in the valley were on that court bench in real or animated form saying don't worry we will be back to the valley after the hollow fill.  They should have used a crow or wood hen          " that's really just a souped up woodpecker", loudest mouth in the forest. They bust more deer and turkey hunters than Fish & Game. If they had used a crow they would have every deer hunter in the county on their side. All of them have been ratted out by a crow, crows are to them what pigeon's are to New Yorker's, Sky Rats. Maybe a big cartoon copperhead or rattler might make us more inclined to get a valley filled and get rid of the snakes.
     Seriously, what they think they know about the culture is what makes them makes them stupid. They targeted the people who are fixed in front of a TV in some kind of Reality Show stupor. Thinking even if there is not a football or a UK game on no one will just snap out of it and say Hey! That's a cartoon bug and it's telling me its OK to do Mountain Top Removal and Hollow Fills. It will never dawn on them that real bugs can't talk. Oh, most of us have someone we know with the DT's and they say they see talking bugs but we take them down to the Hope Center and get them dried out. In general most of us know that bugs can't really talk. What will get them busted out is the print media; some one will see the commercial and write an article about it. Other papers will pick it up and it will run down to Lexington. AP will pick it up and it will run national or it will end up in some liberal Environmentalist Magazine. More likely it will show up on one of a Dozen online sites where environmentalist hang out and spread from there. Some tree hugging liberal who is just back from the Artic with Green Peace chasing Whales will read about it in mother earth news and burn them a new one. The Environmental Groups have money also and might decide to make some commercials of their own. Target the same demographic group you did with cartoon animals only to promote their cause. How would they like to see one with all the little cartoon animals crying, bags packed and leaving the Valley just before a valley fill? How about the one where Bambi don't get shot, but it shows a big D-9 Dozer covering him up?
      If you can come up with an argument that will stand the light of day in the print media you may get by the 10% who are still conscious. You had better because if you are going to spend all your advertising money with visual media you could be giving the print media an incentive to let everyone out there know that bugs can't really talk. If nothing else come down here and let us see if your TV AD will pass the print litmus test before you spend millions on it. If it seems as plausible on TV as it would in print you got yourself a winner. Your PR man sucks. We can fill these valleys for you "git er done" we have to eat. We should not have to run your Public Relations for you and do your advertising.  That's degrading and ads insult to injury. When you go on TV you draw attention to Mountain Top Removal and Valley Fills. It was out of sight and out of mind. You people don't even have enough sense to keep your mouth shut and stay off the airways. All press is not good press. This is one of the things on my "Bucket List", just like the movie. Before I kick the bucket I thought I would let everybody know that bugs can't really talk. If you are trying to target the young with cartoons to condition them for your long term Mountain Top Removal and Valley Fill plans, run them during the Saturday morning TV cartoon slot for kids. This may be a stretch but lets assume you have a few people down here with maybe a slighter higher degree of education than 1st grade and come up with something more mature for prime time.
    That is a must for all of us in order to keep us out of the rabbit hole. I was right in the middle of a UK Game when the little woman come through the house with some bills in her hand. She said; looks like we may be getting some premium creep on our car insurance, been with them a while. Why don't you check some rates? Right! I will get right on it, middle of first half here. Half time I went to check my email and well what the heck pull up a quote. I reach it to her right before 2nd half started she looked at it but said nothing until after the game was over. Did you compare coverage and premiums rates on a few of these she ask? No, just pulled up a popular one I see all the time on TV. She come over and sit in my lap and give me a big hug, Honey do remember last week when we had the little talk about the Easter Bunny, THAT LIZARD AIN'T REAL!

The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.

     They come from old Virginia to the wilderness Kentucky the dark and bloody ground. They were landed and independent Scotch Irish, English and later German stock. The large land grants made them rich in their own way but the isolation and heritage made them clannish. The civil war divided them since most were just one generation removed from old Virginia they took a Rebel Stand, more for states rights than anything else for the land was tamed by the work of their own hands and the sweat of their own brow. That war left them poor and divided and those that took a rebel stand lost much. Weakened and desperate they cut the virgin timber first. Rough men who sawed then floated the log rafts down river to Cattlesburg or Ashland Ky. The country was starved for coal especially in the North East; the price had raised three fold. The North East interest come in and stole the mineral paying pennies on the acre for black gold. They owned the product and the means of production after that. They owned the towns, the company houses, the company stores, the newspapers and you had to sign a no union contract in order to work. They even printed their own money called script only good at the company store.
    Local labor could not fill the need so they hired the immigrants from up north to first build the railroads into the mountains and then to mine the coal. Afro-Americans were also hired to work the mines. Long hours and low pay, terrible working conditions, you complained you were fired. A hundred men waiting to take your place, and the place of the hundreds that died each year in the mines. Northern West Virginia was organized first by the United Mine Workers from the northern coal producing states. They were getting 30% more pay and a shorter workday. When they tried to cross the mountains and unionize the southern coalfields it started what we call the mine wars. The coal Corporations owned the law and hired a large private army of thugs called the Baldwin Felts Detective agency. We had the Matawan Massacre and the battle of Blair Mountain where they actually use airplanes to bomb the miners who where trying to cross the mountain to unionize the coalfields. They fought from the twenties through the forties to unionize the coalfield only to lose it all by the 1990's in the Kentucky Coal Fields.
    The drift and shaft mines employed thousands and if you were lucky enough to get a union job the living was fair according to mountain standards. Then the stripping started in Muhlenberg County and Mr. Peabody's brought the large shovels in and showed us a new type of mining. When Mr. Peabody's coal train had hauled Muhlenberg away and ruined the Green River he moved into the mountains of East Kentucky and others followed. By the 70's it had taken its toll even with the old requirements of having to put the mountains back on the original contour. Oh! They never took a tree inventory, just laid a little topsoil over to the side and pushed the overburden back up on the mountain to close the original contour. They spread the topsoil back on and sprayed a weed mix on it, called it reclamation. They started using some autistic accounting practices and figured if you just shoved the overburden into a valley you could save mega bucks. The current administration has went along with it and now instead of freakish bald mountains you have mountains with now with no peaks and with the valley between them filled level with the blasted off peak or flat to flat as the case may be.  I call it miser mining or scrooge stripping because they are just unabashedly cheap.
    It is not just a ruined mountain; that is the point of this lengthy saga. You destroy two mountains and one valley with a mountain top removal and a hollow fill. The valley is just a receptacle for the debris or overburden blasted and bulldozed into the valley. Those valleys most times are teaming with aquatic, tree, plant, herb, bird and animal life. It is a crime against nature and a crime against humanity. A crime against humanity because my decedents will never see this place as I have seen it, an almost identical vision as my father's seven generations ago. Paradise Lost.

The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.

Take Me Home Country Roads
Revised

Almost level Heaven West Virginia
Cropped-ridge mountains strip job runoff-river
Life is odd there we don't have a tree
Mountain Top Removal Valley's filled with ease

Country roads take me home
To a place that's almost gone
West Virginia mountain mayhem
Take me home country roads

All my memories gather round her
Miner's lady stranger to polluted water
Dark and dusty, dust fills the sky
Mountain Top Removal, teardrops in my eye.

Country road take me home
To a place that's almost gone
West Virginia Mountain massacre
Take me home country roads

I can hear the Dozers in the morning it appalls me
The blasting reminds me of a war far away
Driven' down the road I get the feeling
That I should have stopped this yesterday, yesterday

Country roads take me home
To a place that's almost gone
West Virginia, mountains gone yah
Take me home country Roads

The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.

Anyone wanting an indepth look into the culture of the region and to get the feel of how far coal company's will go to protect their stangle hold on the people should research Blair Mountain WVA.

They are wanting to do a MTR of this historic site as much to demolish a symbol of resistance to ruthless coal barons as to get the coal from under the mountain.

The story takes a lot of tellin and would be to long to go into on a blog. I will tell you its a story of an armed resistance by coal miners living in sub-human conditions who banded together against the coal corporations and a major battle was fought on Blair Mountain.

The coal companies actually used airplanes and bombed the miners. Federal troops were brought in to squash the miners and the state prosecuted thousands of them.

I do not know why someone has not made a good movie of this, probably with the new homeland security department they would not want to show how far  government will go to support corporations.

Its a good read and an important part of the national labor movement of the time. At any rate I hope someone stops the plan to do a Mountain Top Removal on Blair Mountain. It would about like doing on MTR on Mount Rushmore down here. They should not be allowed to blow up one of our most important symbols of resistance to corporate greed, and the collaboration of the state and federal government with big corporations to suppress the people.

The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.

Under the Microscope

    It used to be because of our isolation from the rest of the country we might as well have been part of the Amazon Jungle or deepest darkest Africa. News about this area traveled slowly and was most times incorrect. The stereotypical hillbilly was cast in northeastern newspapers mainly because of the sensationalism and yellow press reporting of the Hatfield & McCoy feud. The English, Scots-Irish and German descendants who come into East Kentucky from old Virginia were somewhat clannish because of their isolation and the culture they brought with them from the old country. However if you do an in depth study of the region you will find that for the most part people here were as civilized as they were in other parts of the country.
     This stereotype is perpetuated in films and documentaries created by some liberal organizations that come in here and live off grant money and corporate donors. The money is most time given in a genuine desire to help the area and not intended for the specific purpose of embarrassing us or showing us in a bad light. One organization over in Whitesburg Ky. will make a film documentary after digging up the most severe situation to build their film around and present it as if the whole regions lives like this. They do us a genuine disservice and other than stroking their own liberal ego's waste of lot of money that could be put to a greater good.
     I know that TV and the Movie's have always done as much to perpetuate this image as much as else and that people are conditioned now to believing what has been presented about this region as the way it actually is. However it is doing us great harm now as most of the country sees us as a backwater uneducated mountain region occupied by slovenly clad illiterate hillbilly's who spend most their time drinking moonshine and feudin. That image now is being replaced by pill snorting methheads whose only goal in life is to draw a check and stay stoned. Again some liberal do good'ers think they are going to make a documentary that will get them some kind of award at the Sundance film festival.
     I am hoping at some point the country will start taking us seriously and will actually admit that we are a part of this country's history and legacy. The legacy I hope will not be the one of an environmental disaster that was allowed to happen to a region because nobody actually cared what went on down there. Robert Kennedy comes down here to highlight poverty in the region during his brother's run for president. Lyndon Johnson actually did something about it with his great society program and his war on poverty.  By in large the area has not had much positive media attention since that era.
    I fear the next time the national media and consciousness turns to the East Kentucky and West Virginia coal fields we will be just a shadow of our former ecological self. The deciduous forest filled with abundant wildlife and clear mountain streams are under assault from large coal corporations who see only us in the light of the afore mentioned stereotype. Most of the mineral is owned by out of state interest, as are most of the large coal corporations. They have the large budgets dedicated to promoting Mountain Top Removal and Valley Filling as being beneficial to the economy locally and coal being the alternative to oil as the energy source of the future nationally. The local spots are simplistic in nature with little cartoon bugs saying they can come back to a Valley Fill after the valley is filled. Another one is how much we need the flat land they create for us in order to obtain some industrial complex or housing development site. We have had enough flat land created for us by them now to put every default mortgage property on that was created by the sub-prime housing melt down. We have enough flat land to fulfill the industrial needs of China if they wanted to build here, since we don't actually build anything anymore and nothing industrial has ever been built on one yet we are becoming to be a little suspicious of the argument. They forget to tell the natives down in dogpatch that it takes millions of dollars to develop an industrial site even if someone needs one. A piece of hard packed flat land with a little weed mix sprayed on it is hardly a Christmas gift. Of course the national commercial productions are a little slicker and sophisticated but they fail to show the nation where the coal is coming from or how they are mining it.
     It will only be through environmental organizations that counter this message can the land here can be saved. I am hoping the collective public relations assets of all the environmental groups can start doing something on the national level to highlight what is being done to this region. I applaud what certain organizations are doing legally and how all environmentalists are keeping abreast of the problem on blog sites between themselves. I feel however the national consciousness needs to be pinched much as it was done in the civil rights era in order for the country to get more emotional about it. The crowning jewel of public relations would be for someone to take up the cause in a national presidential election much as the Kennedy's or Johnson did. Due to our sparse population and voting base I do not see the Mountain Top Removal cause being taken up in the near future.
   If a presidential candidate would take it up even as a peripheral problem connected with coal Co2 emissions being the prime culprit I feel it would augment his/her argument for alternative clean fuel technology if that is part of their platform. It would also highlight this ecological disaster that is occurring in East Kentucky and West Virginia. I will reiterate, the nation needs to see the region for what it is and they need to see Mountain Top Removal for what it is. I believe the national consciousness will be so repulsed by it that a changed will forced at the federal level to stop it. Even on the legal front I believe it will make litigation against coal corporations more effective.

The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.