Capitol Action to End Dependence on Coal

Power Shift, a youth led training and nonviolent protest/civil disobedience action in DC, brought thousands of protesters to the coal plant that fuels the White House and Congress. The issue is about America's dependence on coal at a time when the imperative to reduce green house gas emissions grows stronger every day. The action brought Robert Kennedy, Jr., Bill McKibbens, and Wendall Berry and movie stars to join with green energy advocates and youth concerned about a sustainable future.

Kennedy spoke eloquently about ending the most egregious process in coal mining: mountain top removal mining. As he explained, every week an explosion the size of Hiroshima bomb is obliterating the Appalachian Mountains.

As citizens in the American southwest face warming temperatures and the threat of water shortages, and people in Victoria, Australia face the horrors of more deadly fires from long term drought and spiking temps on their side of the globe, we must get a grip on our carbon based emissions economy and, as Van Jones has shown us, marry the Green Jobs Movement to the production of the new grids and energy sources that are nonpolluting for a viable future.

Appalachian Mountains Preservation Act Introduce into NC Legislature Today

Follow this link to learn about progress by Appalachian Voices NC Team working with Representative Pricey Harrison to end the use of mountain top removal energy by NC (30% of its energy comes from MTR coal production.)

For breaking news in VA follow this link. Oral argument took place today before the Virginia Supreme Court in Appalachian Voices, et al. v. State Corporation Commission, et al. (No. 081433), in which a coalition of environmental groups is attempting to block construction of Dominion Virginia Power’s 583-MW coal-fired power plant in Wise County, Virginia.

High Country Excursion

Over the last month I have seen my father through two surgeries and into rehab, closed down a personal business, put my things in storage, moved to Boone, N.C. in High Country of western North Carolina. Moving from the Gulf Coast of Florida to the Appalachian Mountains - especially in the winter months - is a jarring experience.

Staying at a friend's condo, complete with her wonderful library of mountain literture, I've reentered a world I once knew well when I lived in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains in Johnson City, Tennessee where I was born. The Appalachians are old and embued with a distinct energy that is both dark and disturbing as well as mysterious and inspiring. Here in these hills and hollers my relatives lived, worked, and struggled to make a good living. They were farmers and tinkers from Germany and Ireland; on my mother's side, Cherokee blood flows through our family tree. My great grandmother grew tobacco and corn on the Clinch River where her Cherokee relatives had lived for millenia.

Coal is richly laced through these mountains and therein lies the struggles of the mountain people, and the wealth of a few companies to which we are all dependent today for our energy. North Carolina obtains 80% of its energy from coal combustion. Much of it is now coming from mountain top removal, a relatively new method that while efficient for coal companies is literally blowing up mountains and covering or polluting streams, rivers, and wells - and thus thousands of Americans living on or near these ancient mountains.

Go to iLoveMountains to listen to the voices of the American citizens living in the wake of MTR.
Read one person's testimony to Barack Obama about living in terror: MTR in West VA.

This will be a theme of my blog for some time as this issue is directly related to sustainable energy production and the imperative to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Coal burning contributes more per unit of energy to the CO2 emissions than anyother kind of energy.

Another Genocide is Happening - Call Congress Now

Dear Reader,

Gaza is without electricity and water, children and women are dying by the hundreds, and now we learn that Israel is using phosphorus laden weapons. I have no more patience for this nation of ours that will sit in its legislature and cooly vote to continue to support Israel. It is about our own national security and not the high principles that we purportedly stand for. What have we become? I am not interested in who is right or wrong, only that innocents are slaughtered.

I vote for a coliseum where teams from warring nations can duke it out to the death...but the stadium seats will be empty. Let the politicians and terrorists take the bullets. I wonder how long the war would last?

Please go to your congressional representatives: http://www.house.gov/house/orgs_pub_hse_ldr_www.shtml

Make a call, email and blog to stop this humanitarian crisis. Another one that we are sitting out, clenching our national jaw and supporting Israel REGARDLESS for some policy. How much longer are we going to take these spineless stances, too afraid to upset our so called foreign relations.

There is only one kind of relation with which we should be concerned: human relations.

http://www.democracynow.org/. Democracy Now is airing REAL information and news, not the crap with which our major news channels distract citizens from the real work of free citizens in a democracy.

Act please act.

Coming to Terms

Please take time to watch Robert Kennedy's testimony in the House of Representatives on December 12 about the egregious roll back of environmental law by the Bush Administration in its parting weeks. In particular, he outlines what is happening to the Appalachian Mountains - the oldest mountains in America and communities of great cultural value.

Southcrop Forest: A new genre of environmental writing

Every once in a while a new book comes along that resets the compass of writing. Lorne Rothman’s tale, Southcrop Forest, sets a new standard for ecological literature.

An exciting tale about Auja, a young red oak, and Fur— a collective conscience from a colony of tent caterpillars—Rothman has created an eco-fable as magical as a Tolkien adventure even as he teaches forest ecology. We learn about the imperiled state of the forests at the hands of “hewmans.”

Auja lives in Southcrop Forest where trees retain the ability to communicate across the land through their roots, soil, and leaves—Southcrop Vision. Forests were once connected across the world and could communicate by feeling each others sensations. That was before the hewmans cut down the trees, separating forests by false rock (roads or highways) and their rapacious machines chewed down ancient trees and killed the farms that had kept them alive for eons.

As the story opens, we learn that Southcrop Forest is on the verge of destruction. Auja awakes full of hope and joy, glorying in the sunlight, when the remembrance of their doomed future makes her boughs droop. She is watching a group of fuzzy caterpillars nibbling away in her canopy when suddenly a voice speaks to her! At first Auja thinks it is her fellow trees who whisper continuously but then she realizes the voice is coming from the colony of tent caterpillars. Fur introduces herself to Auja and explains that her colony is a Rune—an ancient being that arose at a Gathering of trees and people a thousand years before.

Guide Oak, a wise being, guides Auja to engage Fur to travel to the Dark Forest (Boreal Forest) to obtain a special gift and take it to Deep Sky where it will save the forests to the north of Southcrop. And thus, the epic journey begins.

Along the way readers learn about the life cycle of the tent caterpillars, their viral and insect predators; the ancient geological history of the land and how trees repopulated the earth after the Big Ice (ice age.)

The mysterious “gift” is the Holy Grail Fur toils to find. He must cross the false trails, battle rogue wasps and a viral plague that infects the forests he travels through.

Rothman, a zoologist, provides young readers with endnotes rich with scientific nomenclature; Old Norse lore; Native American history; chemistry and climate change science which can be easily used in a classroom or enrich the understanding of young and adult readers alike.

This book offers the reader a blend of the magical with the hard realities of the human ecological footprint on the natural world. Through nonhuman characters we see the folly of the “hewman” (a brilliant play on words) from wisdom that understands the web of life as the source of life itself.

The last sentence in the story makes me believe Rothman plans a sequel. I hope so. Southcrop Forest should be required reading for all youth—a textbook and a legend for a new generation and an ecological age.

Rothman, Lorne. Southcrop Forest. New York: iUniverse, 2006.
http://www.southcropforest.ca/index.html

Burning it up for a renewal of the landscape: a Florida tale

In September I was invited to accompany staff scientists from The Nature Conservancy in Milton, Florida to take a boat trip on the Perdido River along TNC land newly deeded for restoration. As we motored along the tranquil, broad river on a cool, misty morning, I learned that the forest I observed is greatly changed from its natural state.

The lands along this broad river were continuously logged, passing through three paper companies before being returned to the original owners, a founding family in Pensacola, FL. They were disturbed at the state of the forests that had grown back and donated 2800 acres to The Nature Conservancy for restoration and preservation.

Had the scientists not told me, I would have accepted it as the natural condition. Knowing the natural history of a place is critical. Without that knowledge, newcomers like me, and new generations will not be motivated to act on behalf of the living communities of trees, plants, and animals that maintain the well-functioning of the places we live and come to love.

The Nature Conservancy has begun a program of burning down forest riddled with nonnative species to awaken the fire-dependent seeds of native plants lying dormant in the soil. When the new forest comes back, it is the forest of old: long-leafed pine, live oak, magnolia, Atlantic white cedar, palm cypress, water oaks, willow oaks, diamond oaks, etc. It's encouraging to know this land at least will eventually be restored.

One of our companions is the last living descendant of the Wind Clan of the Musogee-Creek community. He told us stories about his people and pointed out places where burial mounds were developed over with homes and condominiums. We learned about his days on the river fishing and exploring and how it has changed as people buy up lots, remove the wetlands to build boat docks and plant sloping green lawns in front of beautiful, big vacation homes. They want a view of the river, too. But, at what cost do we all render our personal dreams?
Without his stories, how would we know what went before us? What has been lost that we should strive to save or bring back?

Along the way we measured the water depth, checked on sites where campers had chopped down trees, and trashed TNC sites to make temporary campsites, leaving trash behind. What a legacy we modern humans leave! Where is our sensibility that we are spoiling our own nests? These scientists and this tribal elder and myself, a little floating tribe of its own, need to hook up our separate boats with all the other defenders of this river and this land, and make a stronger tribe than the tribe of spoilers!


For more information, visit these sites:
www.nature.org/florida
www.eowilsoncenter.org
www.coastalplains.org
www.gulfspecimen.org