The Politician Who's Ready to Reclaim Our Food Chain Now

The Politician Who's Ready to Reclaim Our Food Chain Now

President Obama's got an awful lot on his plate. Sadly, it's all lousy leftovers from the previous administration: rotten bailouts, curdled wars, moldy policies. Is there any room for grass-fed, grassroots-led reform?

The eat-better-brigade's hoping our new Commander in Chief will be "the prize delivery guy...delivering fresh, steaming change in 30 minutes or less" as Raj Patel put it in a speech last Friday at the Farming For The Future conference in Pennsylvania. Patel bemoaned the monocrop monarchy that rules from our school cafeterias to our diners and dining rooms. He ended with the rousing declaration that we are "not consumers of democracy, we are its proprietors."

Who's minding the store, though? Will Obama even attempt to emancipate eaters from the military industrial complex cabal that helped Big Ag give small farms the boot? Our government's policies have played a scandalously large role in exiling wholesome, unprocessed, uncontaminated foods to the fringes of our culture.

But we don't need to wait for deliverance from DC when NYC's got a powerful advocate for fresh, healthy, locally grown foods who's ready to lead the way today. Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer held a press conference last Saturday at Manhattan's Union Square Greenmarket to announce the release of Food In The Public Interest: How New York City's Food Policy Holds the Key to Hunger, Health, Jobs and the Environment , a comprehensive report on how to strengthen our local foodshed by establishing "food enterprise zones" and other incentives to improve access to fresh, healthy, locally grown foods in every neighborhood. Stringer's also a big fan of urban agriculture, eager to help NYC residents curb their carbon "foodprint" by helping folks grow more of their own food in community gardens, backyards and on rooftops. The report, produced with the help of Stringer's dedicated, able staff and input from food policy experts and activists of all stripes (like myself), grew out of a forum he co-hosted with Columbia University last November on The Politics of Food.

Stringer's calling for a "radical overhaul" of the disastrous food policies that are plunging us into a future of lower life expectancy and higher sea levels. And he's looking beyond his own borough, hoping to set a precedent for communities all over the country. The Politics of Food conference was the first step in Stringer's plan to "begin the urgent work of creating a...practical and innovative food policy for New York that puts our great city at the front of this debate where it belongs."

NYC is, after all, the birthplace of J. I. Rodale, America's foremost proponent of sustainable agriculture. That's right, the founder of Organic Gardening magazine (originally called Organic Farming and Gardening when it launched in 1942,) grew up on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Rodale "believed that modern agricultural techniques and American eating habits left quite a bit to be desired," so, in 1950, he launched another periodical, Prevention, to promote a healthier diet and combat the food-induced illnesses that plague us. He died in 1971--rather inconveniently, during a taping of the Dick Cavett show, where he had a heart attack--so we can only imagine what he would make of the extent to which our diet has deteriorated in recent decades.

No doubt Rodale would have applauded Mayor Bloomberg for taking on tobacco and trans fats. But he would have been baffled by Bloomberg's much vaunted sustainability initiative, PlaNYC, which fails to consider any aspect of our food chain in its goal of greening New York and ensuring a better quality of life for NYC's residents in the decades to come.

This egregious oversight of the impact that food production has on our environment is a sin committed not only by Bloomberg but also by the otherwise visionary Van Jones and Pulitzer prize-winning columnist Thomas Friedman, who both lobby tirelessly for a green collar economy but have yet to realize that growing healthy food is the ultimate green collar job, whether you're doing it on pavement or pasture. As Michael Pollan wrote in his open letter to President Obama advocating the "resolarization" of our food chain:
...we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine.

...We need more highly skilled small farmers in more places all across America -- not as a matter of nostalgia for the agrarian past but as a matter of national security.

...The revival of farming in America, which of course draws on the abiding cultural power of our agrarian heritage, will pay many political and economic dividends. It will lead to robust economic renewal in the countryside. And it will generate tens of millions of new "green jobs," which is precisely how we need to begin thinking of skilled solar farming: as a vital sector of the 21st-century post-fossil-fuel economy...

But while Obama and his Secretary of Ag, Tom Vilsack, have given lip service to the merits of Michael Pollan's proposals, our bold borough president has been busy actively working to implement them, heeding Pollan's call to reregionalize our food system and rebuild America's food culture. Stringer has even signed on to the politically risky aspect of Pollan's "sun food agenda" that addresses those inconvenient truths about the corporate-sponsored corpulence and petro-fueled pollution that plague our nation. As Pollan notes:
Our agenda puts the interests of America's farmers, families and communities ahead of the fast-food industry's. For that industry and its apologists to imply that it is somehow more "populist" or egalitarian to hand our food dollars to Burger King or General Mills than to support a struggling local farmer is absurd.

A Line in the Green Sand

A Line in the Green Sand by Paul Kingsnorth
Last week the government published a shortlist of five schemes for harnessing the tidal power of the river Severn, to provide renewable electricity. It is no secret which is favoured in Whitehall - the biggest one, as ever: a 10-mile mega-barrage that would cost £14bn, and could generate 5% of Britain's power.

This may sound the kind of thing environmentalists ought to be unanimously keen on. Yet many say that the damage done by this mammoth piece of technology - destroying mudflats and bird habitats, and weakening the famous tidal wave known as the Severn bore - would outweigh the benefits. A battle is being joined over the fate of Britain's longest river, and it is highlighting an uncomfortable truth which environmentalists don't much like dwelling on: some green technologies can have distinctly un-green impacts.

Britain is a small, overcrowded and overdeveloped country in which wild places are at a premium. On moors and glens, on tidal rivers and empty beaches, humanity's impact can be escaped, at least for a time. A mountain is an example of what the American poet Robinson Jeffers called "the transhuman magnificence": a place that rises above the detritus of civilisation, where we may go to experience the reality of nature and the reality of ourselves. I have had such experiences on mountains, and they helped lead me to become an environmentalist.

When I climb a mountain, then, and find that the detritus of civilisation has followed me, in the form of giant wind turbines, my reaction is not to jump for joy because it is zero-carbon detritus. My reaction is to wonder how anyone could miss the point so spectacularly. And when I hear other environmentalists responding to my concerns with aggressive dismissal - particularly if they have never visited the mountain in question - I get really quite depressed.

Fifteen or so years ago, as an excitable young road protester, I tried to prevent the destruction of beautiful places. To me, building a motorway through ancient downland, or a bypass through a watermeadow, was a desecration. To me today, a windfarm on a mountain is a similar desecration. A tidal barrage that turns a great river into a glorified mill stream is a desecration. Carpeting the Sahara with giant solar panels would be a desecration. The motivation may be different, but the destruction of the wild and the wonderful is the same.

It is de rigueur among greens to respond to such heresy by explaining that we have less than 100 months to get to grips with global warming; a few turbines on the odd hillside is a small price for preventing the apocalypse that would result from our failure.

Well, maybe. But while renewable energy is a good thing in principle, if schemes end up, like their conventional forbears, as centralised mega-projects that override local feeling and destroy wild landscapes, then they become precisely the kind of projects that people like me cut their teeth trying to stop.

If you don't understand what makes Helvellyn awe-inspiring, or the Severn bore magnificent, or the Lewis peat moors evocative, in some deep - and possibly inexplicable - sense, then you will have no idea what I'm talking about. These places will seem not to be places at all, but "resources", ripe for exploitation; and your response to them will be about not breathing space or spiritual nourishment, but kilowatt hours and energy security.

Environmentalism is surely inspired by a sense of wonder at the richness of the natural world. Without that inspiration, it becomes the kind of bleached, technocratic, office-bound variety so common today, which pushes for the taming of rivers, mountains and wildlands in the name of making the ever-expanding human economy more "sustainable". Desperate to seem grown up, serious and economically literate, many greens seem to have become terrified of talking about the things that motivated them in the first place. Beauty. Wildness. A connection to the non-human, the remote, the untamed.

Human impact on the world is now so enormous that the civilisation we have built is feeling the shudders. If the world's governments, with the collusion of some environmentalists, want to pretend that the need to question that civilisation's values can be staved off with wave machines and wind turbines, it is up to them. But we should understand that, whether we dig up coal or carpet the wildlands with barrages and turbines, we are making a statement: this is our world, and we will exploit every inch of it. We want - no, need - more energy for our TVs, cars and planes. It is our right. There is no alternative.

Republicans and Centrists Sell Out

Call Yourself a "Centrist" and Magically Get Away with Selling out the American People
What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care and nutrition, undermines schools, but offers a $15,000 bonus to affluent people who flip their houses?

A proud centrist. For that is what the senators who ended up calling the tune on the stimulus bill just accomplished.

Even if the original Obama plan — around $800 billion in stimulus, with a substantial fraction of that total given over to ineffective tax cuts — had been enacted, it wouldn’t have been enough to fill the looming hole in the U.S. economy, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will amount to $2.9 trillion over the next three years.

Yet the centrists did their best to make the plan weaker and worse.

One of the best features of the original plan was aid to cash-strapped state governments, which would have provided a quick boost to the economy while preserving essential services. But the centrists insisted on a $40 billion cut in that spending.

The original plan also included badly needed spending on school construction; $16 billion of that spending was cut. It included aid to the unemployed, especially help in maintaining health care — cut. Food stamps — cut. All in all, more than $80 billion was cut from the plan, with the great bulk of those cuts falling on precisely the measures that would do the most to reduce the depth and pain of this slump.

On the other hand, the centrists were apparently just fine with one of the worst provisions in the Senate bill, a tax credit for home buyers. Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy Research calls this the “flip your house to your brother” provision: it will cost a lot of money while doing nothing to help the economy.

All in all, the centrists’ insistence on comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted will, if reflected in the final bill, lead to substantially lower employment and substantially more suffering.

But how did this happen? I blame President Obama’s belief that he can transcend the partisan divide — a belief that warped his economic strategy.

After all, many people expected Mr. Obama to come out with a really strong stimulus plan, reflecting both the economy’s dire straits and his own electoral mandate.

Instead, however, he offered a plan that was clearly both too small and too heavily reliant on tax cuts. Why? Because he wanted the plan to have broad bipartisan support, and believed that it would. Not long ago administration strategists were talking about getting 80 or more votes in the Senate.

Mr. Obama’s postpartisan yearnings may also explain why he didn’t do something crucially important: speak forcefully about how government spending can help support the economy. Instead, he let conservatives define the debate, waiting until late last week before finally saying what needed to be said — that increasing spending is the whole point of the plan.

And Mr. Obama got nothing in return for his bipartisan outreach. Not one Republican voted for the House version of the stimulus plan, which was, by the way, better focused than the original administration proposal.

In the Senate, Republicans inveighed against “pork” — although the wasteful spending they claimed to have identified (much of it was fully justified) was a trivial share of the bill’s total. And they decried the bill’s cost — even as 36 out of 41 Republican senators voted to replace the Obama plan with $3 trillion, that’s right, $3 trillion in tax cuts over 10 years.

So Mr. Obama was reduced to bargaining for the votes of those centrists. And the centrists, predictably, extracted a pound of flesh — not, as far as anyone can tell, based on any coherent economic argument, but simply to demonstrate their centrist mojo. They probably would have demanded that $100 billion or so be cut from anything Mr. Obama proposed; by coming in with such a low initial bid, the president guaranteed that the final deal would be much too small.

Such are the perils of negotiating with yourself.

Now, House and Senate negotiators have to reconcile their versions of the stimulus, and it’s possible that the final bill will undo the centrists’ worst. And Mr. Obama may be able to come back for a second round. But this was his best chance to get decisive action, and it fell short.

So has Mr. Obama learned from this experience? Early indications aren’t good.

For rather than acknowledge the failure of his political strategy and the damage to his economic strategy, the president tried to put a postpartisan happy face on the whole thing. “Democrats and Republicans came together in the Senate and responded appropriately to the urgency this moment demands,” he declared on Saturday, and “the scale and scope of this plan is right.”

No, they didn’t, and no, it isn’t.

Compromise With Republicans Means Fewer Jobs

More Bipartisanship, Less Stimulus
Determined to pass something in the way of a stimulus package, Senate Democrats on Friday bartered away key elements of the more robust plan approved by the House.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, and his caucus colleagues got what is being called a "bipartisan agreement." But this is not a case of less being more.

The Senate's $780 billion plan is still a budget buster.

It's just not focused on spending as much of the money as the House sought to on renewing the economy.

In order to get the votes of two Republican (Maine's Susan Collins and Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter) and perhaps another (Mainer Olympia Snowe) that were needed to undermine the threat of a GOP filibuster, Reid surrendered $86 billion in proposed stimulus spending. In doing so, the Democrats agreed to cut not just fat but bone, and to warp the focus and intent of the legislation.

The Senate plan is dramatically more weighted than the House bill toward tax cuts (which account for more than 40 percent of the overall cost of the package). This is despite the fact that there is a growing consensus -- among even conservative economists and policy makers -- that tax cuts will do little or nothing to stimulate job creation in a country that lost almost 600,000 positions in January alone. As French President Nicolas Sarkozy, no liberal, said Friday of countries that opt for tax cuts rather than stimulus: The approach "will bring them nothing" in the way of economic regeneration.

The Senate's increased emphasis on tax cuts comes at the expense of the aggressive spending in key areas that might actually get a stalled economy moving.

Spending for school construction that would actually have put people to work -- while at the same time investing in the future -- has been slashed. (Almost $20 billion slated for school construction is gone.)

Money for Superfund cleanup, Head Start and Early Start child care, energy efficiency initiatives and historic preservation projects -- all of which create or maintain existing jobs -- has been cut.

Supplemental transportation funding has been hacked.

The House's proposal to help unemployed Americans maintain their health benefits has been chopped down.

Axed, as well, has been $90 million that was to have been allocated to plan for and manage a potential flu pandemic that economists and public health experts worry could shutter remaining businesses, bring the economy to a complete standstill and throw the country into a deep depression.

The bottom line is that, under the Senate plan:

* States will get less aid.

* Schools will get less help.

* Job creation programs will be less well funded.

* Preparations to combat potential public health disasters -- which could put the final nail in the economy's coffin -- will not be made.

In every sense, the Senate plan moves in the wrong direction.

At a time when smart economists are saying that a bigger, bolder stimulus plan is needed, Senate Democrats and a few moderate Republicans have agreed to a smaller, weaker initiative.

And Republicans are still delaying passage. It could be Sunday, even Monday, before a vote is taken. And who knows what more will be lost -- in time and stimulus spending before President Obama signs a bill.

These are the fruits of bipartisan fantasies and the compromises that follow upon them. President Obama, who should have been on television addressing the nation and doing everything in his power to rally support for a sufficient stimulus plan, will be lucky if he gets anything by the President's Day deadline he set. (Even after the Senate measure passes, a difficult process of reconciling the very different House and Senate bills must take place. Then there will be more votes before any legislation gets to the president's desk.)

Plan to Help Renewable Energy May Backfire and Aid Big Coal

Plan to Help Renewable Energy May Backfire and Aid Big Coal
1. New high-voltage transmission lines are needed to decrease electric grid congestion and therefore increase reliability and security.

There is indeed congestion on some parts of our distribution and transmission networks. Congestion reveals a problem; it doesn't demand a specific solution. It can be addressed by reducing demand through increasing energy efficiency or by increasing on-site or local energy production, strategies often less costly and quicker to implement than building new transmission lines. An analogy from the solid-waste sector may be appropriate. Exhausting nearby landfills does not inevitably require us to send our garbage to newly constructed and more distant landfills. We can emphasize recycling, composting, scrap-based manufacturing and reuse.

2. A new national high-voltage transmission network is necessary to dramatically increase renewable energy.

President Obama wants to build new transmission lines because, "I want to be able to get wind power from North Dakota to population centers, like Chicago." Writing in Vanity Fair, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants a new high-voltage transmission system to "deliver solar, wind, geothermal and other renewable energy across the country."

But do we really need to deliver renewable energy across the country? The distinguishing characteristic of renewable energy is its availability in abundant quantities virtually everywhere.

The Institute for Local Self-Reliance recently pulled together the modest amount of data available on the amount of renewable energy available in each state. Our report, "Energy Self-Reliant States," concludes that at least half the 50 states could meet all of their internal electricity demand with renewable energy found inside their borders, and all states could meet their current renewable electricity mandates from homegrown energy sources.

High-voltage transmission lines are not necessary to dramatically expand renewable-energy generation. But they are essential if we want to expand coal-generated electricity, because coal is found in limited places, and coal-fired power plants tend to be very large and therefore must serve very large markets. This is why, until recently, the primary advocates for new high-voltage transmission lines were those who wanted to construct large coal-fired power plants.

One of the most effective ways to stop new coal-fired power plants is to stop building new high-voltage transmission lines.

Before building new transmission lines, we should first investigate how much capacity there is on existing lines. Tellingly, that data is not readily available. A several-year campaign in Minnesota by the North American Water Office led to the nation's first utility-led analysis of the capacity on the existing transmission system in one part of the state. The results were so positive the state legislature ordered the utilities to expand the analysis.

The most recent study's data suggest that Minnesota can achieve its renewable electricity mandate of 25 percent by 2020 without building any major new networks of high-voltage transmission lines (a report summarizing the utilities' studies is available at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance Web site).

Even more myths and falsehoods surrounding the economic recovery plan

Even more myths and falsehoods surrounding the economic recovery plan
1. The bill will not stimulate the economy

In a February 1 article, The Associated Press reported an assertion by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) that the recovery bill will not stimulate the economy without noting that the CBO disagrees. ABC World News anchor Charles Gibson echoed this assertion during his February 3 interview with President Obama, stating: "And as you know, there's a lot of people in the public, a lot of members of Congress who think this is pork-stuffed and that it really doesn't stimulate." Additionally, on the January 28 edition of his show, nationally syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh allowed Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) to falsely claim of the bill: "Even the Congressional Budget Office, controlled by the Democrats now, says it is not a stimulative bill." Fox News host Sean Hannity repeated this claim on the February 2 broadcast of Fox News' Hannity, asserting that the CBO "say[s] it's not a stimulus bill."

In fact, in analyzing the House version of the bill, H.R. 1, and the proposed Senate version, the CBO stated that it expects both measures to "have a noticeable impact on economic growth and employment in the next few years." Additionally, in his January 27 written testimony before the House Budget Committee, CBO director Douglas Elmendorf said that H.R. 1 would "provide massive fiscal stimulus that includes a combination of government spending increases and revenue reductions." Elmendorf further stated: "In CBO's judgment, H.R. 1 would provide a substantial boost to economic activity over the next several years relative to what would occur without any legislation."

2. Government spending in the bill is not stimulus

Several media figures, including CNN correspondent Carol Costello, CBS Evening News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson, and ABC World News anchor Charles Gibson, have all uncritically reported or aired the Republican claim that, in Gibson's words, "it's a spending bill and not a stimulus," without noting that economists have said that government spending is stimulus. Indeed, in his January 27 testimony, Elmendorf explicitly refuted the suggestion that some of the spending provisions in the bill would not have a stimulative effect, stating: "[I]n our estimation -- and I think the estimation of most economists -- all of the increase in government spending and all of the reduction in tax revenue provides some stimulative effect. People are put to work, receive income, spend that on something else. That puts somebody else to work." Additionally, Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, has said, "[S]pending is stimulus. Any spending will generate jobs. It is that simple."

3. There is no reason for stimulus after a turnaround begins

In a January 28 Wall Street Journal article, reporter Naftali Bendavid uncritically reported congressional Republicans' criticism of the proposed economic stimulus bill on the grounds "that much of the money in the package wouldn't be spent until 2011 or later, when a recovery is likely to be already under way." CNBC anchor Melissa Francis and MSNBC anchor Contessa Brewer repeated this criticism on the January 29 edition of MSNBC Live when Francis stated: "Only 64 percent of the money is going to be spent within the next 19 months," and Brewer replied, "And how do you justify that?" Francis responded: "How do you justify that is the real question." Limbaugh also suggested that stimulus would not be necessary after a turnaround begins in a January 29 Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he asserted that "[t]he average recession will last five to 11 months; the average recovery will last six years. Recessions will end on their own if they're left alone. What can make the recession worse is the wrong kind of government intervention." None mentioned the position of many economists that a stimulus package will be necessary even if the economy begins to turn around.

In his January 27 testimony, Elmendorf said that fiscal stimulus in 2011 or later would be effective in the current economic situation, in which economic output is projected to remain below its potential even after the beginning of the recovery. Elmendorf stated that unlike in ordinary "periods of economic weakness" that "are fairly short-lived," "CBO projects that economic output will remain significantly below its potential for several more years, so policies that provide stimulus for an extended period of time may be appropriate." From Elmendorf's testimony:

Timing. The economic effects of fiscal stimulus should occur during the period of economic weakness, all else being equal. When, as now, a recession is clearly already under way and aggregate demand is declining, it is better if stimulus affects spending quickly in order to mitigate further deterioration in the economy. Different types of policies may differ greatly in how quickly they can be implemented.

Because most periods of economic weakness are fairly short-lived, it is generally preferable that stimulus policies be short-lived. Currently, however, CBO projects that economic output will remain significantly below its potential for several more years, so policies that provide stimulus for an extended period of time may be appropriate. Indeed, a fiscal stimulus that ends before the economy has started to regain its footing runs the risk of exacerbating economic weakness when the stimulus ends.

Likewise, in a January 27 blog post, New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman wrote:

It's not a problem if some or even most of the stimulus arrives after the official recession, as determined by the NBER, is over. Why? Because in modern recessions, unemployment keeps rising long after the NBER has determined, based on things like industrial production, that the recession proper is over. [emphasis in original]

4. Corporate tax rate cuts and capital gains tax rate cuts would provide substantial stimulus

In his January 29 Wall Street Journal op-ed criticizing the economic recovery plan and offering his own suggestions to stimulate the economy, Limbaugh advocated "cut[ting] the U.S. corporate tax rate ... in half" and "[s]uspend[ing] the capital gains tax for a year to incentivize new investment, after which it would be reimposed at 10%." During the January 29 edition of MSNBC Live, CNBC host Erin Burnett said that there were "interesting ideas" in Limbaugh's op-ed and his advocacy of "cutting the corporate tax" and "slashing capital gains" taxes were "serious things to say." However, many economists do not view corporate tax rate cuts and capital gains tax rate cuts as particularly "serious" or effective methods for stimulating the economy.

According to a January 2008 CBO report, "Options for Responding to Short-Term Economic Weakness," "a reduction in the corporate tax rate" is "not a particularly cost-effective method of stimulating business spending" because "[i]ncreasing the after-tax income of businesses typically does not create an incentive for them to spend more on labor or to produce more, because production depends on the ability to sell output." Indeed, Mark Zandi, chief economist and co-founder of Moody's Economy.com who was reportedly a McCain campaign economic adviser, included in 2008 written congressional testimony a table stating that every dollar spent through a "Cut in [the] Corporate Tax Rate" produces a GDP increase of only $0.30 -- the third least-efficient provision of the 13 he studied.

Obama and Gov. Manchin Act on Coal River Crisis

Obama and Gov. Manchin Act on Coal River Crisis
The nation watched yesterday as fourteen Coal River Mountain residents were arrested and charged with trespassing at a mountaintop removal mine site in West Virginia, in their attempt to draw attention to a possible coal waste dam disaster several times the size of last December's TVA coal ash pond disaster.

But an even bigger question arose: Given that the blasting for the proposed 6,600 acre mountaintop removal site on Coal River Mountain, which rests beside a 6 billion-gallon toxic coal waste sludge dam above underground mines, could be catastrophic for the communities downstream, where was Gov. Joe Manchin?

After the TVA coal pond disaster, and the eastern Kentucky coal sludge disaster in 2000, how could the West Virginia governor simply sit quietly on the sidelines and do nothing?

How can Lisa Jackson and the Environmental Protection Agency overlook this crisis?

Is a crisis never a crisis until it is validated by disaster?

Even James Hansen, the nation's foremost expert on climate change, made an appeal to the White House in Washington, DC, declaring his support: "President Obama, please look at Coal River Mountain. Your strongest supporters are counting on you to stop this madness."

In a statement, Hansen added: "Someone needs to tell President Obama: Coal River Mountain is a symbol of the promise and the hope and the possibilities for a brighter future."

"Massey could flood the towns of Pettus, Whitesville and Sylvester with toxic coal sludge," said Julia Bonds, of Rock Creek, W.Va. "Blasting at a multi-billion-gallon sludge lake over underground mines could cause the sludge to burst through and kill thousands of people."

According to the residents' letter to Massey, "directly in the path of a possible spill at this site is a head start center, our senior center, and the town of Whitesville, with the potential for the loss of lives in the west end of Raleigh County and dozens of miles into Boone County."

Instead of the impending 6,600 acre mountaintop removal strip mine, the Coal River residents planted a banner for the Coal River Wind Project, a nationally acclaimed proposal that would create 200 local construction jobs, and 50 permanent jobs, enough energy for 150,000 homes, and allow for sustainable forestry and mountain tourism projects, as well as a limited amount of underground mining.

"The governor and county legislators have failed to act, so we're acting for them," Coal River Wind advocate Rory McIlmoil said. "They shouldn't allow the wind potential on Coal River Mountain to be destroyed, and the nearby communities endangered, for only 17 years of coal. There is a better way to develop the mountain and strengthen the local economy that will create lasting jobs and tax revenues for this county, and that's with wind power.

Over 470 mountains in central Appalachia have been blown to bits by strip mining. Over 1,200 miles of waterways have been destroyed with mining fill; wells have been busted and polluted with toxic waste. The mechanization of above-ground mountaintop removal has prevented any diversified economy and led to a decrease in coal mining jobs in some of the highest poverty stricken strip-mining areas.

Take a look at testimonies from Coal River Mountain residents and the Climate Ground Zero campaign.