WWED: What would Evo do?

Bolvian president Evo Morales is sick of taking shit from predatory mutlinational energy companies, and is doing something about it–by nationalizing Bolivian resources and vowing not to stop with that (land, he promises, is next). I wish him the best and hope he doesn't fall victim to an "accident" like so many populists before him.

This makes me wonder when will Americans start looking at things that way, and wake up to the fact that their own "resources" are being plundered?

As I type, the mountaintops of Appalachia—not just Kentucky, but West Virginia and Tennessee as well—are being blown away, several ridges a week (!). Three million pounds of explosives a day! Read that number again.

Precious topsoil, a thousand years in the making, is dumped into the valleys below, all for thin veins of coal. The process is only economically feasible for predators like Massey Energy because it basically involves very few human beings. Those unpleasant labor disputes of years past no longer get in the way of pure mining profits—which of course shoot straight out of the area. Coal-area communities are left with less than nothing—blighted landscape, dangerous impoundments, polluted rivers. Maybe Evo is onto something. But when it's your own government that's raping you, to whom can you turn...?

I really have no idea. But everyone should read The Rape of Appalachia, the Michael Snayerson essay in Vanity Fair. You might think the title is over the top, but after reading the essay I guarantee you won't. For some perspective, it never hurts to turn to the words of Wendell Berry, who wrote the great essay Compromise Hell! a few years back.

Nearly forty years ago my state of Kentucky, like other coal-producing states, began an effort to regulate strip mining. While that effort has continued, and has imposed certain requirements of "reclamation," strip mining has become steadily more destructive of the land and the land's future. We are now permitting the destruction of entire mountains and entire watersheds. No war, so far, has done such extensive or such permanent damage. If we know that coal is an exhaustible resource, whereas the forests over it are with proper use inexhaustible, and that strip mining destroys the forest virtually forever, how can we permit this destruction? If we honor at all that fragile creature the topsoil, so long in the making, so miraculously made, so indispensable to all life, how can we destroy it? If we believe, as so many of us profess to do, that the Earth is God's property and is full of His glory, how can we do harm to any part of it?
In Kentucky, as in other unfortunate states, and again at great public cost, we have allowed -- in fact we have officially encouraged -- the establishment of the confined animal-feeding industry, which exploits and abuses everything involved: the land, the people, the animals, and the consumers. If we love our country, as so many of us profess to do, how can we so desecrate it?

But the economic damage is not confined just to our farms and forests. For the sake of "job creation," in Kentucky, and in other backward states, we have lavished public money on corporations that come in and stay only so long as they can exploit people here more cheaply than elsewhere. The general purpose of the present economy is to exploit, not to foster or conserve.


Look carefully, if you doubt me, at the centers of the larger towns in virtually every part of our country. You will find that they are economically dead or dying. Good buildings that used to house needful, useful, locally owned small businesses of all kinds are now empty or have evolved into junk stores or antique shops. But look at the houses, the churches, the commercial buildings, the courthouse, and you will see that more often than not they are comely and well made. And then go look at the corporate outskirts: the chain stores, the fast-food joints, the food-and-fuel stores that no longer can be called service stations, the motels. Try to find something comely or well made there.

What is the difference? The difference is that the old town centers were built by people who were proud of their place and who realized a particular value in living there. The old buildings look good because they were built by people who respected themselves and wanted the respect of their neighbors. The corporate outskirts, on the contrary, were built by people who manifestly take no pride in the place, see no value in lives lived there, and recognize no neighbors. The only value they see in the place is the money that can be siphoned out of it to more fortunate places -- that is, to the wealthier suburbs of the larger cities.

Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations.

Read the whole essay...

Also, here's a good look at the ABCs of mountaintop removal.