Here's a news flash. President Bush isn't an environmentalist. I'm rolling my eyes at my own self for even saying something so obvious. I might as well make it worse. He'll do pretty much anything to satisfy important donors to the Republican party. You knew that, too? You guys are so smart.
Here's the part I didn't know.
I just finished a book called Crimes Against Nature by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. In it, Kennedy describes the systematic destruction of Appalachia with mountain top removal. You read that phrase, "mountain top removal," and your brain shuts down. Surely it's hyperbole. Nope. It's exactly that. Miners use bombs, essentially, to literally blow the tops off mountains so that they can get at the minerals. But it's even worse. Where does all the debris that was the mountain top go? Yup, they bulldoze it into the valleys and streams down the mountain. A Bush appointee (whose name I will have to look up -and the book is all the way upstairs.....) finagled a deal whereby the former mountain-top is classified as "fill" and therefore isn't subject to the Clean Water Act that had been slowing down the coal mining companies before this administration. Why would they be content with causing only one ecological disaster when there could be multiple? And all of this was illegal, until George W. Bush encouraged the Republicans to change the laws to allow it -which happened after the coal mining industry donated $20 million dollars to the Republican Party.
Listen to Copland's Appalachian Spring. Watch North Country again. Read Crimes Against Nature and another one I haven't read yet, Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness by Erik Reece. And get mad. Get really really mad. I don't have $20 million to give to the Democrats to see if they'll make a difference. But I can point out that the Bush administration hasn't limited its destruction of cultures and lands to the middle east. Think about Kentucky. Now think about it without the mountains of Appalachia. Now help me figure out what to do to help.
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