Jeff Vespa/WireImage/Getty Images
READ MORE ABOUT:
Watch, read, or listen to Coal Country, and learn about the destruction to the environment and human health that comes with coal mining. It's happening on a large scale, and for the good of the country, needs to be stopped. But there's also the personal side of the issue: the people who live in Appalachia, whose lives and communities are being destroyed by this dirty practice. This essay is part of a series leading up to the premiere of Coal Country, and has been adapted from Robert Kennedy's keynote speech at the Sierra Summit convention in September 2005:
A year ago in May, I flew over the coal fields of Kentucky and West Virginia, and I saw where the coal is coming from. If the American people could see what I saw, there would be a revolution in this country, because we are cutting down the Appalachian mountains. These historic landscapes where Daniel Boone and Davey Crockett roamed are the source of our values and our culture, and we're cutting them down with these giant machines called drag lines. They're 22 stories high, they cost half a billion dollars, and they practically dispense with the need for human labor and that, of course, is the point.
I remember when my father was fighting strip mining back in the 60s, a conversation I had with him at the dinner table where he said they are not only destroying the environment, but they are permanently impoverishing these communities because there is no way that you can generate an economy from the moonscapes that they leave behind, and they're doing it so that they can break the unions, and he was right. In 1968 when he told me that, there were 114,000 unionized mine workers taking coal out of tunnels in West Virginia.
Today there are only 11,000 miners left in the state, and almost none of them are unionized because the strip industry isn't. Using these giant machines and 25 tons of dynamite that they explode in West Virginia every day, a Hiroshima bomb every week. They are blowing the tops off the mountains, and then they take these giant machines and they scrape the rubble and debris into the adjacent river valley. Well, it's all illegal. You cannot dump rock and debris and rubble into a waterway in the United States of America without a Clean Water Act permit. So Joe Lovitz sued them, and he won in front of a great crusty old West Virginia judge, Judge Charles Hayden, who recently died. Charles Hayden said the same thing I said, he said, "It's all illegal, all of it," and he enjoined all mountaintop mining.
Two days from when we got that decision, Peabody Coal and Massey Coal, who had given millions of dollars to this White House, met in the White House, and the White House rewrote one word of the Clean Water Act. The definition of the word fill that changed 30 years of statutory interpretation to make it legal today as it is in every state in the United States to dump rock, debris, rubble, construction debris, garbage, any kind of solid waste into any waterway in this country without a Clean Water Act permit. All you need is a rubber stamp permit from the Corps of Engineers that, in many cases, you can get through the mail. It has none of the safeguards that the Clean Water Act provides. And this is what we're fighting today. This is not just a battle to save the environment. This is the subversion of our democracy.
The industry and the great big polluters and their indentured servants and our political process have done a great job, and their PR firms and their faulty [biostitutes] and all these think tanks on Capitol Hill, have done a great job over the past couple of decades of marginalizing the environmental movement, of marginalizing us as radicals, as tree huggers, as I heard the other day, pagans who worship trees and sacrifice people. But there is nothing radical about the idea of clean air and clean water for our children. As I said before, we're not protecting the environment for the sake of the fishes and the birds and the trees. We're protecting it for our own sake, because it's the infrastructure of our communities and because it enriches us.
If you talk to these people on Capitol Hill who are promoting these kind of changes and ask them, "Why are you doing this?" what they invariably say is, "Well, the time has come in our nation's history where we have to choose now between economic prosperity on the one hand and environmental protection on the other." And that is a false choice. In 100 percent of the situations, good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy. If we want to measure our economy, and this is how we ought to be measuring it, based upon its jobs and the dignity of jobs over the generations, over the long term and how it preserves the value of the assets of our communities.
If on the other hand, we want to do what they've been urging us to do on Capitol Hill, which is to treat the planet as if were a business in liquidation, convert our natural resource to cash as quickly as possible, have a few years of pollution-based prosperity, we can generate an instantaneous cash flow and the illusion of a prosperous economy, but our children are going to pay for our joyride. They're going to pay for it with the muted landscapes, poor health, huge cleanup costs that are going to amplify over time and that they will never, ever be able to pay. Environmental injury is deficit spending. It's a way of loading the cost of our generation's prosperity onto the backs of our children.
This [the George W. Bush] White House has done a great job of persuading a gullible press and the American public that the big threat to American democracy is big government. Well, yeah, big government is a threat ultimately, but it is dwarfed by the threat of excessive corporate power and the corrosive impact that has on our democracy. And you know, as I said, you look at all the great political leaders in this country and the central theme is that we have to be cautious about, we have to avoid, the domination of our government by corporate power.
Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, said that America would never be destroyed by a foreign power but he warned that our political institutions, our democratic institutions would be subverted by malefactors of great wealth who would erode them from within. Dwight Eisenhower, another Republican, in his most famous speech warned America against domination by the military industrial complex.
Abraham Lincoln, the greatest Republican in our history, said during the height of the Civil War, "I have the South in front of me and I have the bankers behind me. And for my country, I fear the bankers more." Franklin Roosevelt said during World War II that the domination of government by corporate power is "the essence of fascism" and Benito Mussolini—who had an insider's view of that process—said the same thing. Essentially, he complained that fascism should not be called fascism. It should be called corporatism because it was the merger of state of corporate power. And what we have to understand as Americans is that the domination of business by government is called communism. The domination of government by business is called fascism. And our job is to walk that narrow trail in between, which is free-market capitalism and democracy. And keep big government at bay with our right hand and corporate power at bay with our left.
In order to do that, we need an informed public and an activist public. And we need a vigorous and an independent press that is willing to speak truth to power. And we no longer have that in the United States of America. And that's something that puts all the values we care about in jeopardy, because you cannot have a clean environment if you do not have a functioning democracy. They are intertwined, they go together. There is a direct correlation around the planet between the level of tyranny and the level of environmental destruction. I could talk about that all day, but you cannot—the only way you can protect the environment is through a true, locally based democracy.
I don't believe that nature is God or that we ought to be worshiping it as God, but I do believe that it's the way that God communicates to us most forcefully. God talks to human beings through many vectors. Through each other, through organized religions, through wise people, and through the great books of those religions. Through art and literature and music and poetry. But nowhere with such force and clarity and detail and texture and grace and joy as through creation.
We don't know Michelangelo by reading his biography. We know him by looking at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. And we know our creator best by immersing ourselves in creation. And particularly wilderness, which is the undiluted work of the Creator. And you know if you look at every one of the great religious traditions throughout the history of mankind, the central epiphany always occurs in the wilderness. Buddha had to go to the wilderness to experience self realization and nirvana Mohammad had to go to the wilderness. Moses had to go to the wilderness of Mt. Sinai for 40 days alone to get the Commandments. The Jews had to spend 40 years wandering the wilderness to purge themselves of 400 years of slavery in Egypt. Christ had to go into the wilderness for 40 days to discover his divinity for the first time.
His mentor was John the Baptist, a man who lived in the Jordan valley dressed in the skins of wild beasts and ate locust and the honey of wild bees, and all of Christ's parables are taken from nature. I am the vine; you are the branches. The mustard seed, the little swallows, the scattering of seeds on the fallow ground, the lilies of the field. He called himself a fisherman, a farmer, a vineyard keeper, a shepherd. The reason he did that was that's how he stayed in touch with the people. It's the same reason all the Talmudic prophets, the Koranic prophets, the Old Testament prophets, the New Testament prophets. Even the pagan prophets like Aesop, they did the same thing. They used parables and allegories and fables drawn from nature to teach us the wisdom of God.
And all of the Old Testament prophets, all the Talmudic prophets, all the New Testament prophets came out of the wilderness. Every one of them, and they were all shepherds. That daily connection to nature gave them a special access to the wisdom of the Almighty. They used these parables, and the reason Christ did that was that's how he stayed in touch with the people. He was saying things that were revolutionary like all the prophets. He was contradicting everything that the common people had heard from the literate sophisticated people of their day, and they would have dismissed him as a quack, but they were able to confirm the wisdom of his parables through their own observations of the fishes and the birds. And they were able to say, he's not telling us something new; he's simply illuminating something very, very old. Messages that were written into creation at the beginning of time by the Creator. We haven't been able to discern or decipher them until the prophets came along and immersed themselves in wilderness and learned its language and then come back into the cities to tell us about the wisdom of God.
This essay is excerpted and adapted from Robert Kennedy's keynote speech at the Sierra Summit convention in September 2005.Read more great essays on coal in The Coal Country Book.
Related Posts:
Coal Country Essays
Find Out Your Connection to Mountaintop Removal
Focus on Focus Earth: Coal's Hard Truth
Ten Dirty Things About Big King Coal
Ashley Judd on The Last Patch of Green Earth
-
- {}
