MORE THREATS OF VIOLENCE, THIS TIME FROM A COAL BOSS

Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2008 06:27:32 -0700 (PDT)
From: davecooper928@yahoo.com
To: Mountaintop Removal Road Show list mountaintopremovalroadshow@lists.riseup.net
Subject: [Dave Coopers Mountain Top Removal Roadshow] Katrina, Buffalo
Creek, and General Motors - Climate Change and Human Denial

Friends of the Appalachian Mountains,

Last month I wrote an essay, published in several newspapers, which
compared the current struggle against mountaintop removal coal mining
in Appalachia to the civil rights struggles of the 1960's.

I compared our great leaders in the anti-mountaintop removal movement
to such giants as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. I also
made comparisons between those who opposed civil rights, such as
Alabama Gov. George Wallace and Sheriff "Bull" Connor, to the current
coal industry spokesmen for the "Friends of Coal" and politicians like
Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell.

I was severely chastised for making such comparisons by a coal industry
VP from West Virginia, who wrote a rebuttal essay entitled "Mining not
Comparable to Segregation" that was also published in the Lexington
Herald Leader.

This is an interesting debate, and I invite everyone to watch ABC World
News Tonight and ABC "Nightline" tonight - Monday, April 7, which will
feature a segment with ABC's veteran investigative reporter Brian Ross,
and ABC's attempts to question Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship about
his relationship with West Virginia Supreme Court Judge Elliott "Spike"
Maynard.

Massey has had a case pending before the West Virginia Supreme Court
regarding a contract dispute with another coal company, Harman Mining,
and Blankenship has spent millions of his personal fortune in support
of electing Judge Brent Benjamin to the West Virginia Supreme Court.
Photographs of Blankenship and Judge Maynard vacationing on the French
Riviera were recently published in the New York Times.

The ABC News link, entitled "Coal Boss: If You Take Photos, You're
Liable to Get Shot" is here:

   http://tinyurl.com/5avafp
   [Open in new window]

******

Coming soon! Mountain Justice Summer Camp, May 17-23!

Low cost, delicious food, fantastic location on a beautiful Kentucky
mountain with a lake and old-growth forest - workshops on Appalachian
culture, mining, music, and film, plus great speakers and workshops!

Register now at:

http://www.mountainjusticesumm...

*******

Following is an essay I wrote last night about climate change,
Hurricane Katrina, Buffalo Creek and General Motors - and our boundless
human capacity for denial. Thanks for reading - Dave

When I first graduated from college with a Mechanical Engineering
degree, I went to work for a General Motors auto assembly plant in
Norwood, Ohio, just north of Cincinnati. We made Camaros and
Firebirds, but the Detroit GM bosses were unhappy with our
productivity, labor relations and quality standards. They constantly
threatened us with dire consequences if the plant didn't improve.

It seemed unthinkable that such a massive plant operated by the largest
industrial powerhouse on the planet, General Motors - with two shifts
producing one of the hottest muscle cars in America - would ever shut
its doors. I remember hearing the guys on the factory floor laughing
about it. "They'll never close this plant down!"

And of course they did, and 6,000 good-paying union jobs were lost
forever.

In my senior year of college (1980), I went to New Orleans for spring
break, and I learned that the city was actually below sea level, that
storm water had to be pumped up hill into the Mississippi River, and
that massive earthen levees held the river back and prevented flooding.
"If we ever had a bad enough flood, this whole city would be under
water," my college buddy Delmar Caldwell told me. Well - that'll never
happen, I remember thinking. A city the size of New Orleans, under
water? Impossible.

And then there is the tragic story of the Buffalo Creek flood in 1972,
where a coal refuse dam in West Virginia suddenly failed and unleashed
a wall of water into a crowded hollow, killing 125 people and
destroying 4,000 homes. During the investigation of the disaster,
government officials questioned the Pittston Coal mine engineer
responsible for the dam, Steve Dasovich, about why the dam had been so
poorly constructed and designed.

In testimony before the US Senate three months after the disaster, Mr.
Dasovich stated:

" ... as massive as that structure [dam] was, failure was the furthest
thing from my mind. To conceive of a mass that large which was close
to a million tons of material ... was beyond my conception of being
possible to fail."

And that is the way the human mind works. If something is so terrible
that we cannot even imagine it, then it cannot happen.

How many times must we humans learn that bad things happen, even though
we don't want them to?

When we see the slides of Al Gore in "An Inconvenient Truth" showing
possible inundation of Florida, Manhattan, and San Francisco caused by
Greenland's ice melting, our minds reel. It can't actually happen, can
it?

In his 2005 essay "The Ends of the World as We Know Them," Pulitzer
Prize-winning author Jared Diamond ("Collapse", "Guns, Germs and
Steel") says that "History warns us that when once-powerful societies
collapse, they tend to do so quickly and unexpectedly ... a major factor
[in the collapse of the Mayan civilization] was environmental
degradation by people: deforestation, soil erosion and water management
problems."

Well, thank goodness we don't those kind of problems in America today!

Are we Americans all living in complete denial? Do we think that if we
don't want climate change to happen badly enough, if we wish and wish
and wish, then it won't happen?

I don't like to fixate on this troublesome subject. It's depressing as
hell.

But one person who does is Derrick Jensen, the author of "Endgame." In
his Ten Principles which preface that book, Jensen proposes that the
sooner industrial civilization collapses, the better it will be - for
those who are left. In other words, if civilization takes another 500
years to descend into anarchy or oblivion, it will be much worse than
if it happens now, because 500 years of population increases means more
people will suffer.

Also, there will still be some natural resources left if civilization
falls apart next week, and those resources might actually sustain the
"Mad Max" and "Waterworld" type scavengers who survive the crash. You
can watch a two hour lecture by Jensen on Google Video (just search
"Derrick Jensen.")

I find Jensen's message deplorable. Timothy McVeigh was inspired by a
doomsday book called "The Turner Diaries." There are unstable people
everywhere, and what happens if some nut with access to smallpox germs
or nerve gas actually takes Jensen's message to heart?

And yet I have friends - people that I respect - who believe that
Jensen's ideas are worthy of consideration and discussion.

I've got a better idea. Instead of figuring out the best way to
survive the end times, let's save the planet instead.

******

Well, I'm off for two weeks speaking in New York and New England -
check my 2:30 minute You Tube video on line at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

You can follow my travels via my website calendar at

http://www.mountainroadshow.com/

Dave Cooper
The Mountaintop Removal Road Show
http://www.mountainroadshow.com/

608 Allen Ct.
Lexington KY 40505
(859) 299 5669

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