A Great Loneliness of the Spirit
A great loneliness of spirit that is what Chief Seattle warned would happen if we did not take care of the land. I have contemplated these words several times in my life but never did I truly understand them. Not until I stood on top of a mountain that was simply not there.
I wish that I could say that this last phrase was a clever bit of philosophy but what is happening right across America is real. A reality so unimaginable that even now I have to look back at my photographs to believe it. Mountains, those vast, unimaginable creatures are being destroyed. Their tops blown away, the rubble pushed into the valleys beside them until what is created is a great plain of rock and coal.
Mountaintop removal, a term originally coined by industry officials began in the 1970s. It is a process of almost indescribable horror in which trees are clearcut and dumped unused into neighboring valleys. Then dynamite charges are places to blast away as much as 800-1000 feet of the mountain top. A process that is irreversible and will forever blight the mountainside. The coal is transported to a processing plant where it is washed. The waste from this process is stored in earthen dams containing millions of gallons of slurry.
While the environmental devastation, and the destruction the families and community members, often low-income, who live in the area face from the continual blasting from mining operations that can take place up to 300 feet from their homes and operate 24 hours a day are obvious the other thing that mountaintop removal does is just as horrific. We are destroying a part of ourselves and must one day face this great loneliness of spirit. This immense yearning of our soul when we realize what has been done in our names. What dreams and visions we have destroyed.
Who would ever have imagined that you would have to take a picture of a mountain to remember it? There was something permanent about mountains. Some indescribable security that they gave us, that even in this turbulent world they would remain to steady our dreams. But now not even mountains cannot withstand our desire for dirty energy.
We stand at that gateway upon which there can be no return. If we let the mountains that have battled for so long fall we will have no soul to return to. We will be left only with the loneliness that one feels standing on a mountaintop that is no more.
Mountain Top Removal Statistics:
Half the electricity in the United States is produced from the burning of coal, as is 97% of Kentucky's electricity. About 80% of Kentucky's coal is exported to other states. In spite of these statistics Kentucky's coal-producing counties are among the most poverty- stricken in the nation. Because mountaintop removal requires only a few men with bulldozers about two- thirds of the mining jobs in Kentucky have been eliminated during the last 25 years, and much of the profit from this mining goes to out-of-state corporations.
In the biggest coal producing state in Appalachia, West Virginia, tourism already contributes more to the economy, and creates far more jobs, than the coal industry and has for more than a decade.
In West Virginia, more than 300,000 acres of hardwood forests (half the size of Rhode Island) and 1,000 miles of streams have been destroyed by mountaintop removal strip mining.
Just one mountaintop removal mine can denude up to 10 square miles and pour hundreds of millions of tons of waste material into as many as 12 "valley fills." Some of these "valley fills" are 1,000 feet wide and a mile long.
A great loneliness of spirit that is what Chief Seattle warned would happen if we did not take care of the land. I have contemplated these words several times in my life but never did I truly understand them. Not until I stood on top of a mountain that was simply not there.
I wish that I could say that this last phrase was a clever bit of philosophy but what is happening right across America is real. A reality so unimaginable that even now I have to look back at my photographs to believe it. Mountains, those vast, unimaginable creatures are being destroyed. Their tops blown away, the rubble pushed into the valleys beside them until what is created is a great plain of rock and coal.
Mountaintop removal, a term originally coined by industry officials began in the 1970s. It is a process of almost indescribable horror in which trees are clearcut and dumped unused into neighboring valleys. Then dynamite charges are places to blast away as much as 800-1000 feet of the mountain top. A process that is irreversible and will forever blight the mountainside. The coal is transported to a processing plant where it is washed. The waste from this process is stored in earthen dams containing millions of gallons of slurry.
While the environmental devastation, and the destruction the families and community members, often low-income, who live in the area face from the continual blasting from mining operations that can take place up to 300 feet from their homes and operate 24 hours a day are obvious the other thing that mountaintop removal does is just as horrific. We are destroying a part of ourselves and must one day face this great loneliness of spirit. This immense yearning of our soul when we realize what has been done in our names. What dreams and visions we have destroyed.
Who would ever have imagined that you would have to take a picture of a mountain to remember it? There was something permanent about mountains. Some indescribable security that they gave us, that even in this turbulent world they would remain to steady our dreams. But now not even mountains cannot withstand our desire for dirty energy.
We stand at that gateway upon which there can be no return. If we let the mountains that have battled for so long fall we will have no soul to return to. We will be left only with the loneliness that one feels standing on a mountaintop that is no more.
Mountain Top Removal Statistics:
Half the electricity in the United States is produced from the burning of coal, as is 97% of Kentucky's electricity. About 80% of Kentucky's coal is exported to other states. In spite of these statistics Kentucky's coal-producing counties are among the most poverty- stricken in the nation. Because mountaintop removal requires only a few men with bulldozers about two- thirds of the mining jobs in Kentucky have been eliminated during the last 25 years, and much of the profit from this mining goes to out-of-state corporations.
In the biggest coal producing state in Appalachia, West Virginia, tourism already contributes more to the economy, and creates far more jobs, than the coal industry and has for more than a decade.
In West Virginia, more than 300,000 acres of hardwood forests (half the size of Rhode Island) and 1,000 miles of streams have been destroyed by mountaintop removal strip mining.
Just one mountaintop removal mine can denude up to 10 square miles and pour hundreds of millions of tons of waste material into as many as 12 "valley fills." Some of these "valley fills" are 1,000 feet wide and a mile long.