"We didn't inherit this land from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children."
Lakota Sioux Proverb
America the Beautiful
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
The Last Mountain...coal companies destroying the actual purple mountain majesties Katharine Lee Bates wrote about when she composed America The Beautiful.
I strongly urge all you so called 'conservatives' to conserve purple mountain majesties, the very mountains where Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett hunted and trapped.
YouTube - ‪The Last Mountain OFFICIAL TRAILER‬‏
"If the American people could see what I saw on that trip, there would be a revolution in this country. We are literally cutting down the Appalachian Mountains, these historic landscapes where Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett roamed. The Appalachians were a refuge during the Pleistocene ice age 20,000 years ago when the rest of North America turned into a tundra where there was no forest. And the last refuge for those forests was the Appalachian Mountains. And when the tundras and glaciers withdrew, all of America was reseeded from the seed stock in those forests. So itÂ’s the mother forest of all north America, and thatÂ’s why itÂ’s the most diverse and abundant temperate forest in the world. Because itÂ’s the longest living. And today, these mining companies with the help of their indentured servants in the Bush White House are doing what those glaciers couldnÂ’t accomplish. What the Pleistocene Ice Age couldnÂ’t accomplish which is to flatten the Appalachian mountains and destroys those forests."
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - Testimony before The Select Committee on Energy Independence & Global Warming hearing on Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Where are you from? Where do you live? I was born and raised in the heart of Appalachia and was a 4th genration coal miner until the EPA saw fit to make it impossible to strip mine coal anymore.
Who gives anyone especially Robert F Kennedy Jr the right to decide whats best for me and my children? Save the mountains and starve familys. But who cares because you and your lefty elitist buddies dont have to suffer the economic consequences to save these mountains.
Dont give me any lines about new jobs and new industries to replace the coal jobs lost because they will not get here in time to save my house from being reposessed.
Forgive me if I see angry but we are all sick and tired of outsiders coming in to save us from ourselves. All you green idiots live in la la land. There is no land of milk and honey. All of us cant just pick up and work at McDonalds. You are taking away a mans basic right to feed his family.
If you go see the movie, it is people who LIVE in the the heart of Appalachia who are protesting. What gives any corporation the right to destroy the commons, human health and life???
The rule is the commons, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the fish we eat are owned by all of us. They're not owned by governments, coal companies or utilities. Everybody has a right to use them. Nobody has a right to abuse them. Nobody has a right to use them in a way that will diminish or injure their use and enjoyment by others.
I have some really bad news for you...the EPA is not to blame for lost coal jobs...blame strip mining, which eliminates 'miners' and union busting by scum bags like Don Blankenship who should be arrested and tried for manslaughter.
Razing Appalachia
Before
After
Mountaintop removal mining is the practice of blasting off the tops of mountains so machines called draglines can mine coal deposits. Coal mining companies dump the mountaintops into nearby valleys and streams to create "valley fills," converting mountain landscapes covered in hardwood forests into fields of sparse grass. Coal companies are stripping off the tops of mountains in West Virginia, Kentucky and Virginia. Tennessee has three inactive mines.
The U.S. is responsible for 22.3 percent of the world's coal-related carbon emissions.
Over 1000 miles of streams have been buried by strip mine waste in Appalachia.
In 1950, West Virginia employed 143,000 miners. By 1997, that number was down to 22,000.
75 percent of West Virginia's streams and rivers are polluted by mining and other industries.
300,000 acres of hardwood forest in West Virginia have been destroyed by mountaintop removal mining.