Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

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forests to absorb rainwater, fl ash fl oods are a normal occurrence.
A three-inch rain can become a ten-foot wall of water cascading
off the fl attened mountains and down the hollows. The mining
industry calls these “acts of God” and public offi cials—thoroughly
bought or intimidated or both—agree, leaving the victims with
no recourse. Groundwater is contaminated by coal slurry and the
chemicals used to make coal suitable for utilities. Well water is so
acidic that it dissolves pipes and plumbing fi xtures. Cancer rates
are off the charts, but few offi cials in Charleston or Washington
notice. Coal companies are major buyers of politicians, and the
head of Massey Energy, Donald Blankenship, has been known to
spend lots of money to buy precisely the kind of representatives
he likes—the sort who can accommodate themselves to exploitation
of land and people and the profi ts to be made from it. His
campaign to ravage the rest of West Virginia has the Rovian title
“For the Sake of the Kids.”
Pauline and Carol from the town of Sylvester, both in their
seventies, are known as the “dust busters” because they go around
the town wiping down fl at surfaces with white cloths that are covered
with coal dust from a nearby loading facility. These are presented
at open hearings as evidence of foul air to the irritated and
unmovable servants of the people. Black lung and silicosis disease
are now common among young and old alike who are exposed
to dust from surface operations but who have never set foot in a
mine. They have little or no voice in government; they are considered
to be expendable. Pauline, a fi ercely eloquent woman, whose
husband was wounded and captured by the Germans in the Battle
of the Bulge in 1944, rhetorically asks, “Is this what he fought
for?” The clock reads 9:30 p.m., and we quit for the day.
To permanently destroy millions of acres of Appalachia in order
to extract maybe 20 years’ worth of coal representing perhaps
3 percent of our national coal use is a form of insanity at a scale
that I cannot adequately describe. As a nation we have so far lacked
the compassion and good sense to stop it, and all the talk about