"A good place to toss trash"

Bobbie Ann Mason has an angry, heartbreaking piece in the New York Times today on how her home state of Kentucky fits into the global economy.

Mason's op-ed brought to mind a comment by Wendell Berry earlier this year, as he responded to the proclamation that the University of Kentucky was determined to become a Top 20 national research institution by the year 2020.

I'm paraphrasing now, because I can't find the op-ed online, but Berry was, to say the least, skeptical of the idea that "Top 20" status was desirable or obtainable for UK, given that it is a land-grant institution situated smack dab in the middle of a state that is, in effect, a natural resources colony for the larger economies beyond its borders.

Today, Mason picks up Berry's thought...

In Kentucky we’re used to remote control. Historically, outsiders have dominated the place like a kudzu invasion. Many of the coal mines are owned by huge out-of-state companies. The coal and the profits depart, leaving behind ravaged land and poisoned streams, soil and air. In 2000, 300 million gallons of sludge spilled from a coal slurry pond in Martin County, a greater toxic accident than the Exxon Valdez oil disaster. You might not remember that, because Kentucky seems out of sight, out of mind — a good place to toss trash.

Actually, Mason soft-pedals the extent of the catastrophe, at least in comparison to the Exxon-Valdez disaster. At 300 million gallons, we're talking 30 times the extent of that notorious spill.

And just so you know, that Martin County spill happened in October 2000. In January 2001, as Dubya took office, investigators into the spill were told to "wrap things up"--just as they were getting started.

But of course Massey Energy, the parent company of the negligent mining outfit, had to pay massive fees to clean up the largest ecological disaster east of the Mississippi River. Well, yea, or so you'd think. But, no. An April 2002 fine 0f $110, 000 was later reduced to $5,600.

But wait, there's more to Kentucky than just coal catastrophes!

For example, consider our weapons-of-mass-destruction site, the Blue Grass Army Depot in Richmond, where a stockpile of chemical weapons has been languishing since World War II. At least 55,000 rockets, with 523 tons of chemical weapons, are stored in shabby igloos. How to dispose of toxins like mustard gas and sarin has been a debate for decades. And the stuff is prone to pesky leaks. But at last Kentucky is getting a $2 billion federal plant that will neutralize the weapons by separating the chemicals and washing them in water. It’s a pilot plant, to find out if this process will really work.

Local leaders insist on local hiring so the community can benefit economically. So the government contractor plans to recruit teenagers at high schools, vo-tech schools, even church groups, to train them for careers in working safely with weapons of mass destruction. One procedure will involve cutting the heads off chemical-filled rockets with something like a pipe cutter.

Then there are the leftover contaminants from the cold war. The Paducah uranium-enrichment plant has been cleaning up its old piles of radioactive uranium, tritium, plutonium and what-have-you, and now it has a chance of opening a major recycling plant for nuclear waste from all over the globe. It would treat spent fuel rods from nuclear reactors in order to salvage the residue of radioactive uranium and plutonium for use in power plants.

As part of the Bush initiative to recycle nuclear waste, the contaminated byproducts would come (by flatcar? 18-wheeler? FedEx?) into our state. Importing deadly radioactive stuff would be a boon for the community, creating up to 6,000 jobs, so you can’t argue. Or can you?

That’s not all. Kentucky’s politicians have also proposed building a $451 million lab for the study of pathogens that might be unleashed in a bioterrorism attack (ebola, anthrax). Before the boom in weapons of mass destruction, Kentucky’s economy depended on its land. But with farms disappearing, country life is becoming a memory.

To preserve the idea of Kentucky as a state of farms with a farm state of mind, we’re getting a $24 million agriculture museum. I imagine a pretend working farm with Civil War re-enactors playing old-timey farmers.

In rural Kentucky, where the health of the land once meant plowing manure under the soil each spring, the future is not in cows and corn. We’re now poised to take on the burden of the world’s poisons. Y’all come!

Read the whole op-ed...