The AP reports another coal spill water disaster in West Virginia. This time a coal slurry line from a coal prep plant ruptured in the middle of the night poisoning Fields Creek, which flows into the Kanawha River. But the same chemical, MCHM, which poisoned the Elk River watershed depriving 300,000 people of water, was released in the slurry disaster.
And so we watch as our nation’s water is poisoned in disaster after disaster from deregulated and unfettered coal processing and fracking for natural gas.
The fracking is not union and now most of the coal fields have been forcibly de-unionized and deregulated.
That means the people who fish the waters and hunt the woods have no protection or warning of impending disasters. Their work life is degraded. Their families degraded. Their communities degraded. Their resources degraded.
Please do not adopt the arrogance and human hubris of thinking theses disasters don’t affect you. They do. These disasters affect all our country and all of us.
These continuing, even constant environmental disasters desensitize all of us to our proper role as stewards of our planet. We slide into easy rationalizations about jobs. We allow the profiteers to sacrifice that which sustains life to talk us into bullshit about free markets and to conflate destructive deregulated capitalism. And we cheapen our deepest values.
Photo source: iwasaround on Flickr (CC BY 2.0)