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I live in Rhea County, Tennessee in a small town called Grandview, right on the edge of the Cumberland Plateau. The view looking down from the edge of that plateau is pretty grand, except for the fact that you can see the cooling tower of Watts Bar Nuclear power plant. Now they’re trying to get another reactor online at Watts Bar, because they are completely insane. The worst industrial disaster in human history happened at a nuclear power plant, but I guess it’s okay to put millions of lives at risk for more electricity. We all know there’s only a small chance that all those people will be slaughtered due to the demand for power. Our masters also want us to think it’s okay for the plant to use up all that water. Electricity is more important that water right?
I love people. I also love plants. I also love animals. I love clean air and clean water. In short, I love life. I love the forests, mountains, rivers and oceans that generate this life and provide a habitat and healthy environment for living things. And last but not least, I love bacteria. Our mouths are full of bacteria. There are more bacteria cells in our bodies than human cells. You could not digest food without the bacteria in your gut. I’m telling you this because it’s important to realize that the web of life is connected in ways most of us never think about. It’s not just trees producing oxygen for us and us producing carbon dioxide for trees.
Though the intellectual and rational part of our beings may understand our connections to the web of life, we have lost our spiritual and emotional connection. Life cannot function and flourish without clean air and water and a healthy landbase full of diverse life. Our air, water and land is currently being polluted and destroyed by people and industries who care more about money and power than respecting life. These people have no right to destroy resources that we all depend on, and we have every right, indeed a responsibility, to stop this destruction by any means necessary if we wish for life to continue. If our spiritual connection to all of life was being realized by us as fully as it should be, it would be too painful for us to allow this destruction to continue. We would vividly feel how this destruction is hurting us and we would feel the pain of our brothers and sisters being killed throughout the planet. Because we do not feel this, we do not do whatever it takes to make the killers stop.
The environmental movement has failed to stop this destruction. Anyone who is environmentally aware knows that the destruction is growing at an accelerated rate, it has been at least since the industrial revolution began, and we have failed to stop this acceleration. We have succeeded in slowing the acceleration down a little bit, not nearly enough, but the destruction is still accelerating. We need to seriously re-evaluate our strategies and tactics for fighting this destruction. We are at the point where we must engage in actions that actually stop environmental destruction from happening, as well as actions that improve the environment and help it renew.
The government has failed to adequately protect our environment, and has shown that it has no interest in doing so. It is currently illegal to bury our life-giving streams, but the government lets it happen anyway. There is currently a rule known as the “stream buffer zone” that prohibits dumping mining waste within 100 feet of streams. You see, water is important for life’s survival, and if we treat our water supplies like waste dumps, life won’t go on surviving. Of course the coal mining industry finds ways around this rule so easily that they’ve already buried over 1,000 miles of our Appalachian streams. Now the Bush administration’s Office of Surface Mining wants to remove this rule.
This rule change would simply make legal what is already happening. The Office of Surface Mining and Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation are appointed government agencies who are letting our environment be destroyed. This rule change would accelerate this destruction further by allowing mountaintop removal coal mining to happen faster, since without the rule in place, citizens have no legal grounds for challenging the dumping of mining waste into their water supplies. This is nothing more than the government removing some red tape so the coal companies can rape the land more quickly.
As if that’s not enough, now the industry and military are setting the stage to drastically increase the demand for coal by pushing for massive government subsidies towards coal-to-liquids technology. Coal converted to liquid fuel pollutes more than gasoline. The U.S. military is one of the biggest consumers of oil on the planet, and they know the stuff over in the Middle East won’t last forever and is in an unstable region. What better to fuel our unstoppable air force than some homegrown Appalachian liquid coal? Know what other military-industrial complex used coal-to-liquids technology? The Nazis.
Burning coal is one of the biggest contributors to global warming. It should be clear by now that the question is no longer will global warming hit us, but how fast and how hard. Conservative estimates are saying that we’ll get at least a meter of sea level rise even if we start drastically reducing our emissions now. But we’re not reducing, we’re increasing. A meter of sea level rise will displace millions of people along our country’s coast lines. Just think of how much more strained the land that sustains us now will be when those people start moving inland. We weren’t even close to being prepared for Katrina, and we’re much farther from being prepared for this.
I recently became aware of an article in the British paper called The Independent. In this article, Professor Sir David King, the top scientist for the British government, predicts that if we don’t do something about global warming, then by the year 2100, the only land on the planet that will be able to sustain human life will be Antarctica.
If you think renewables will save us, you should know that according to the Energy Information Administration, only 2.4% of U.S. electricity came from renewables in 2006. They predict that from 2005 to 2030, renewable electricity generation will increase by roughly 100 billion kilowatthours. However, they expect total electricity sales to increase by around 1,500 billion kilowatthours during the same period. Demand for electricity is growing much faster than use of renewable technologies. Unless this situation changes drastically very soon, which it probably won’t, renewable energy technologies will not avert a climate crisis.
Now they’re talking about drilling for oil beneath the Arctic. The Russians submarined down there and stuck a flag in in case you haven’t heard. The thirst for fossil fuels will never end until there’s nothing left. But the oil beneath the Arctic is the least of our worries. Human caused greenhouse gas emissions pale in comparison to the massive amounts of methane that will be released as the Arctic ice melts.
We need to stop this destruction now. The web of life is strong, and it will renew itself, but we must act now if we wish to see this renewal. The more destruction that happens before a climate crisis hits, the more difficult it will be and the longer it will take for life on earth to renew and regenerate afterwards. The longer it takes for the destruction to stop, the worse it will be for all of us.
Our government has proven itself unwilling, perhaps unable, to stop this destruction. This government is supposed to be of the people, by the people, and for the people, and when the government allows the very resources that the people’s lives depend on to be destroyed, and appointed government agents change the rules to accelerate this destruction, then the people should not allow the government to exist and do everything they can to stop this destruction themselves.
Unless we can all start to prioritize maintaining life above maintaining a certain way of life, we are doomed. It saddens me that even many environmentally-minded people seem to fail to realize this. We don’t need TV and the internet and automobiles and cell phones, MP3 players and electricity everywhere. We need clean air, clean water and a healthy landbase.
The resources we need are being destroyed so that we can have luxuries and conveniences. Not so that we all can have luxuries, but so that some of us can have luxuries. Over half the people on this planet live on less than two dollars a day. We wouldn’t have our luxuries if the lives of many others were not being oppressed and exploited, being driven off their land so it can be exploited too, and made to serve this machine of oppression and destruction. This is happening here in our Appalachian Mountains, and it is happening nearly all over the world. The U.S. military is destroying Iraq to take control of the oil, and coal companies are detonating over four million pounds of explosives every day (that’s 27 atomic bombs per year) in Appalachia to take control of the coal. Twenty-five percent of Wise County, Virginia has already been destroyed. Virginia coal plants already cause nearly 1,000 premature deaths every year, and now Dominion Power is trying to build another coal-fired power plant there. Here in Tennessee, the coal industry wants to mine an area in Bledsoe County near Fall Creek Falls that has been declared land unsuitable for mining due to the dangers the acid mine drainage there would pose to the ecosystem: our ecosystem.
We can stop this, but we have to make it happen and we have to make it happen now. We cannot rely on the system to stop the destruction. The system is the problem that is causing the destruction. We don’t need government. We don’t need industry. We need life and love. Government and industry protect and serve the lives of few and destroy the lives of many. But their game cannot and will not last forever. Let’s end it now.