mining

Cross-posted from the Institute for Southern Studies.

Living in a community where coal is mined by mountaintop removal can be bad for your health.

That's the finding of a new study conducted by researchers at the West Virginia University School of Medicine. Based on a random telephone survey of residents in Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia, the study used a health-related measure developed by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The findings appear in the May 2011 issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

Research has previously found an increase in health disparities in Appalachian coal mining communities. But the new study showed those disparities are especially concentrated where coal is mined via mountaintop removal, where mountain peaks are blasted off using explosives and the waste dumped into valleys below.

It is about a week before early voting begins for a bunch of us around the country, and that means this may be one of the last times I have to convince you that, frustrated progressive or not, you better get your butt to a ballot box or a mail-in envelope this November, because it really does matter.

Now I could give you a bunch of “what ifs” to make my point, or I could remind you how we spent all summer watching oil gush into the Gulf, and how that came to be...but, instead, it’s “Even More Current Event Day”, and we’re going to visit Hungary for a extremely real-world reminder of what can go wrong when the environmental cops are considered just too much of a burden by the environmental robbers—and if today’s story doesn’t scare you to death, I don’t know what will.

It ain’t Texas, but we will surely visit a Red River Valley...and you surely won’t like what you’re gonna see.

This atrocious news came across my desk a few minutes ago and I'd like to pass it on. It used to be that "conservative" meant being good stewards of the bounty our land had, its beauty and promise, to be able to hand down to our childen and grandchildren. By ample demonstration, the term has been co-opted by a few self-servatives whose greed and lack of concern over the consequences of their actions have soured the taste of the very word in the mouths of a growing majority.