Environment
A coalition of conservative Christian and Jewish leaders known as the Interfaith Council for Stewardship and the Environment has released "The Cornwall Declaration"...
If Tennessee Ernie Ford were to sing his blue-collar anthem "Sixteen Tons and What Do You Get?" to the residents of the coal fields of Kentucky and West Virginia, they would answer: property damage, dried up wells, respiratory illness, and explosions 100 times more powerful than the Oklahoma City bombing.
The latest technique in strip mining—mountaintop removal—involves detonating explosives to blow apart the top 1,000 acres of a mountain and using a dragline (a mammoth bulldozer) to dig away the soil and reveal seams of coal. The excess dirt is then deposited in valley fills, mountain streams that support the regional ecosystems as well as providing area residents with a source of water.
This is the latest of the ongoing battles for economic survival in the mountain communities of central Appalachia. In the last 40 years, the number of coal-industry jobs in coal-rich states such as West Virginia has dropped from 138,000 to 16,000, while the amount of coal mined annually is the highest ever. With the steady decline in jobs and the increase in the threat to the visual legacy of the mountains, citizens are fighting to take back their mountains—and their futures.
In Harlan County, Kentucky, citizens organized a local chapter of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (KFTC) to stop mountaintop removal. Robert Gipe, an organizer with KFTC, said the group asked themselves what the pivotal issue was. "We found a strategy that gives citizens something to do," Gipe said. They drafted a "Lands Unsuitable for Mining" petition to declare Black Mountain a public land trust. By focusing their efforts around protecting the state’s highest peak, the group was able to draw greater public attention to the extent of mountaintop removal in eastern Kentucky.
Last year’s anti-World Trade Organization uprising was a reminder that there are detractors from the Pax Capitalista that currently placates some Americans with e-money and numbs others with the not-so-cheap thrills of day-trading. With unfettered consumption and development largely unchallenged, Seattle was one of those rare signs that this economic boom is leaving in its wake newly impoverished people and a devastated environment that has never been in worse shape.
All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life, by long-time Native American activist Winona LaDuke, is another disturbing signpost. This book implicates the current boomtown mentality flowing through America and cautions us to learn new ways to live in harmony with the environment and with our neighbors.
LaDuke examines the often heroic struggles of indigenous communities in North America and Hawaii to regain control of their traditional lands and resist the onslaught of "development"—which is rarely aimed at improving life for America’s Native peoples, but very often comes at the expense of their land and resources.
There are close to 200 environmental groups based in Native communities, most of them, as LaDuke says, "underfunded at best and more often, not funded at all." In these small groups, which lack the cash of their mainstream counterparts in the environmental movement (who, as this book points out, have rarely proved to be Native people’s allies), LaDuke found Native environmentalists who "sing centuries-old songs to renew life, to give thanks for the strawberries, to call home fish, and to thank Mother Earth for her blessings."
The Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) revealed in April an alternative to the U.S. government’s radioactive waste disposal plans.
In a new report from Cambridge University’s World Conservation Monitoring Center in Britain, scientists say that humans have destroyed more than 30 percent of the natural world since 1970
United Methodist Bishop Joseph Sprague filed a formal complaint in October against the Rev.
Early in the 1980s, I served a parish in Woburn, Massachusetts. This suburban city, some 12 miles north of Boston, had boasted of tanneries for 300 years.
Put aside the Holy Scriptures for a while and read God's first revelation—nature itself. Such was the advice offered some years ago by a profound, Christian thinker.
It's a misty morning on Big Chippewa Lake. An Anishinabeg couple drags their canoe toward the water's edge. The woman boards in front and sits on her haunches.
Most of us have places that, for us, hold a special sense of the divine-sacred locations where we go for prayer, meditation, and reflection.
A recent article in The New York Times reported that environmental consciousness and community trust in Portland, Oregon, can now be found in the form of a yellow bicycle.