Posted on behalf of @Symbolman:
I come from mining stock. One of my ancestors was blown to hell underground with a score or more of others, whose bones still lay buried under tons of rock in Colorado. My sisters blessed a statue dedicated to those brave men a few years back. I've placer mined gold with family in the bush of Alaska, using heavy machinery, and prospected for uranium in the bush of that incredible state by helicopters 18 hours a day for two summers, under a relentless sun. So I know something about this issue, it's in my blood.
This is what led me and my wife in 2006 to take a trip to West Virginia to film, document and witness firsthand the coal mining technique referred to as mountaintop removal. In earlier times generations of men and machinery wrested coal (and in some areas it's still that brutal) from the bowels of the earth with a pick and shovel. Many will stay there, forever, encased in coal, while families grieve and suffer in poverty.
Click for video of West Virginia graves being mined and continue reading...
But not all. The very people who sweated and died for little money, who lived by their wits off a rich land, on achingly beautiful mountains are now being mined themselves. Their bones are scraped from the ribs of these mountains, and dumped unceremoniously into coal hoppers, shipped on rail cars.
Those bones may have been burned to generate the electricity that powers the computer you are using to read this. And we have film of that outrage, and more.
Take a look at this clip from our film in progress, and watch Larry Gibson point out a family gravesite that is actively being mined by heavy machinery.
Four years later I'm still chilled to the bone when I watch this footage, like someone's walking on my future grave... maybe they are, with a shovel, followed by a front end loader.
Larry Gibson, a patient, strong man, was in 2006 the last holdout on his mountain land which some coal companies had suggested to him was worth 450 million dollars. He refused. He not only worries about the decimation of the environment, but a whole culture disappearing. Many of the houses surrounding his don't even have electricity. The corporations don't want him there, and those folks aren't getting any breaks, other than the earth being fractured daily about them.
Explosions have sent 5 ton rocks hurtling onto his property, one boulder that size killed a child in his bed. The very earth opens up and stays that way after they blow the mountains to rubble. The grass and bushes grow about these cracks and you can fall into one and there's a good chance no one will ever know where you went. It was difficult to film in this area for just that reason alone, never mind the heartbreak I felt as I crested a hill with Larry and the expanse of decimation assailed my eyes. It took my breath away.
Larry showed us some surviving family cemetaries, the shockwaves from explosions crush the coffins and contents, and they collapse, the earth above drops into the hole where bodies have been flattened. Silver silt covers these graves, and there's a good chance it's poisonous. There's a lot of poison generated by this mining technique. According to Larry the valleys are being filled with trees, tires, and whatever else the mining company can haul and dump in the darkness of night.
He showed us a scale model of the area surrounding his mountain, disassembling the mountain tops, pulling the seams of coal underneath, and dropping the fill sections into the valleys between. His mountain had been the lowest in an area that can be seen from space (use google earth), and, as of 2006, it was the highest.
You cannot imagine the destruction without witnessing it firsthand or on film. One area he showed us had been declared the largest explosion using standard explosives since World War Two. It's flat as a pancake, "reclaimed" with grasses that would "grow on the top of a picnic table" according to Larry, but die quickly, along with pines that have no eccological business growing there.
I'm afraid to see what's been going on at Larry Gibson's mountain since, we've been working on a film about the man, sidetracked by caring for dying relatives, and beating the bushes for money to finish this film - but we'd love nothing more than to return to Larry's mountain and show the damages four years later. We're working in that direction.
I'd made a promise to Larry that we'd get the word out, and in the wake of the most recent deaths of miners, and the news of coal companies owing tens of millions of dollars in fines, I was reminded that this technique continues unabated. This technique floods towns, pollutes the waters so that no one in the area can even bathe in them. There is so much more, that can only be explained with film, you have to "be there" to get it, and Larry's in the trenches. They're done everything short of killing that man to get to his coal, and this story needs to be told.
We'll tell it Larry. Here's one big step towards that. This clip alone is sending shockwaves, exploding all over the internet. Maybe the sound will fall on Congressional ears, and they will finally attack this problem.
In the meantime, when you charge your cell phone, leave lights on in empty portions of your home, use some idiotic butter melting machine at the kitchen table, remember that people DIE for that energy, that revered bodies get MINED for it, that eccosytems and human beings are poisoned by the variety of chemical waste produced, that it is killing a culture.
This is war. We need to end mountain top removal and demand safety for those who lay their lives on the line, make these coal companies responsible for their actions.
The West Virginia mountains may disappear, sounds impossible, but it's true.
All that will be left are the killing fields.
@Symbolman and TBTM Julie are environmentalists and co-authors of Going Rouge: The Sarah Palin Rogue Coloring & Activity Book