Enjoy ear candy and food for thought from Western Colorado. The following stories and interviews were produced by Amy Hadden Marsh, who holds all copyrights. Thanks for listening…
October 15, 2009 Conversation with Activist and Author, Mike Roselle, KDNK Community Radio
Mike Roselle is the co-founder of Earth First!, Rainforest Action Network, and the Ruckus Society. He has also been a member of Greenpeace’s Action Team and has worked tirelessly for almost 30 years to protect and preserve the non-human world. He recently moved to West Virginia to help stop mountaintop removal coal mining. Roselle contributes to a website and St. Martin’s Press recently published his memoirs, Tree Spiker: From Earth First! to Lowbagging, My Struggles in Radical Environmental Action. He joined me on my radio show, Valley Voices (KDNK Community Radio, every other Thursday at 4:30 PM MST), by phone from Moab, Utah for a conversation about the book, non-violent civil disobedience, and climate activism.
Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining and Colorado Energy: What’s the Connection? An Interview with MTR activists, Maria Gunnoe and Matt Wasson, 7/31/2009, KDNK Community Radio
Ginger Kathrens Interview October 2008
The following interview with Ginger Kathrens, wild horse advocate and director of the Cloud Foundation was recorded live on the air at the KDNK studios in Carbondale, Colorado in October, 2008.
Making the World Aware: The Longest Walk II Crosses the US
Air date July, 2008 KDNK Community Radio, Carbondale, Colorado.
Round Up at the Little Book Cliffs Range
This documentary aired on KDNK Community Radio, October, 2007 and was selected for NPR/PRX Station Showcase in November, 2007.
2 Comments
October 4, 2009 at 6:31 pm
I enjoyed Amy Marsh’s mountaintop removal broadcast on 7/31/09.
I am a mental health and substance abuse counselor working in southern West Virginia, not far from the key mountaintop removal sites in our state. I work with a lot of coal miners, many of them older and injured or sick from black lung disease, but also young miners supporting families and young people out of high school hoping to work in the mines.
Most of these miners work in deep mines, but some do work in surface mines.
I can tell you that just about the only kind of job in our area for a high school graduate that will give them a decent income to raise a family is coal mining. Even a non-union miner can earn $60,000+ a year for a 50-60 an hour week, which most of them are happy to work.
The next job down the income ladder is likely to be fast food.
It’s the lack of other meaningful job opportunities that keeps our populace so hooked on coal mining and so unwilling to question its destructiveness. I believe that unless working people are directly affected by mountaintop removal mining, they are unlikely to protest it. As they say here, people living just one one holler over from a mountaintop removal mine are likely to turn a blind eye.
I believe that publicizing the devastation from mountaintop removal is far more likely to generate outrage in New Jersey or Colorado than it is inside West Virginia. That’s why I believe the the pressure to necessary end this environmental holocaust will need to come from outside our state.
And that’s why Amy’s broadcast is so important.
May the end of mountaintop removal come soon!
Scott Thompson
October 18, 2009 at 4:11 pm
I live in Beckley, West Virginia, in the southern coalfields, and have just listened to Amy’s interview with Mike Roselle on 10/15/09. Good job, Amy! I have the following comments on coal, global warming, and mountaintop removal (MTR).
First, although MTR is a horrifying, spiritually repulsive activity, I must admit that my main concern goes beyond it to global warming. As NASA climate scientist James Hansen has plainly said, we are in danger of passing what he calls “tipping points” within the next 30 years or so, when global warming will spin out of human control and become an irreversible process. If that happens, we can expect massive sea level rises and species extinctions. It will be a catastrophe beyond all description for all living beings.
Hansen has also said that the only way humanity can avoid going beyond the tipping points is to make a willful decision to leave a substantial percentage of fossil fuels in the ground. And since coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel in many ways, most especially in its CO2 content, and since coal reserves outstrip all other fossil fuel reserves, it’s coal we must leave in the ground. Therefore he proposes phasing it out within the next 20-30 years or so.
Bear in mind that Wyoming is by far the largest coal producing state, producing three times as much coal in 2008 as West Virginia, which was second. Remember that Dick Cheney is from Wyoming. Is it any wonder that the Bush administration systematically supressed Hansen’s research at NASA?
Wyoming coal has a huge market because it is low in sulfur content; coal plants that burn it can readily comply with the Clean Air Act requirements against sulfur dioxide emissions.
In addition, Wyoming coal seams are thick compared to those in Appalachia, and can be mined in large, open pit mines, so it is relatively cheap to dig out. Two major railroads, Burlington Northern Santa Fe, and Union Pacific, haul Wyoming coal to many parts of the country and make more money transporting it than the coal companies do mining it.
Wyoming coal is sub-bituminous, meaning it has low heat content compared to Appalachian coal. This makes Wyoming coal highly vulnerable to CO2 emissions caps, because a power plant has to burn more of it relative to Appalachian coal to produce an equivalent amount of energy. So more CO2 is emitted to produce that same amount of energy. Another reason Dubya’s gang put their thumbs down on Hansen.
Fortunately, they were unable to completely supress him.
Make no mistake, I think MTR should be banned. It is awful and ugly; a crime against the Earth. But I’m sharing all this with you because I think it coal production as a whole has to be borne in mind to address global warming.
Now on MTR. I think one of the main incentives Appalachian coal companies have for MTR is price pressure from Wyoming coal. It’s also a reason why they’ve been de-unionizing their mines as quickly as they can.
Now on Friday, 9/16/09, the EPA issued a letter on Arch Coal’s proposed Spruce No.1 mine in Logan County, WV, which initiated a review of the mine’s permit, already approved by the Army Corps of Engineers. It was the first step in a process that could lead to the EPA’s vetoing the permit altogether. The letter referred to “scientific literature that that points to a high potential for dowwnstream water quality excursions under current mining and valley fill practices.” It also said the situation with this particular proposed mine is “unusual.”
So this letter is something of a mixed message, but it’s still noteworthy because the EPA has never used its veto power to block a coal mining permit.
At the very least the letter suggests that under Obama the EPA will be looking closely at the effects of valley fill from MTR on water quality and stream flows. This is certainly a switch from Cheney and Dubya, and is a hopeful sign.
When it comes to public opinion, the poisoning of the water and the increased flooding from valley fill may be what tips public opinion and the EPA against MTR, now that the coal companies don’t have the Bush administration’s farce of an EPA to hide behind any more.
Thanks for bringing attention to MTR. It’s public opinion from outside WV that will make the difference.
Scott Thompson