While I was waiting for Hurricane Irene to hit Manhattan, I was channel surfing and landed on Channel 1006—Free Movies on Demand. I chose Climate of Change, a 2010 documentary about people around the world fighting for a sustainable way of living. The stories ranged from Papua New Guinea, Togo, and India to West Virginia, where people whose families have lived in the Appalachian Mountains for generations are fighting to save their mountains from blatant, needless, and greedy destruction.
Known as "mountaintop removal," coal companies literally blow up mountains using tons of explosives, flattening the mountain and the landscape until it looks like a barren alien landscape from outer space. These companies--corporations, people--have already destroyed a land mass the size of Delaware, and they're continuing to blow up as many mountains as they can as fast as they can, destroying as they go the communities and lives of people and the other creatures who depend on the mountain ecosystems. The companies say flattening the mountains makes the land more usable (for tract houses, box stores, shopping malls, I suppose, as long as you don’t care if you can drink the water or breathe the air and you like living in an arid manmade desert) and that it’s the most economic way to extract the coal (employs a lot fewer people and they get a lot more coal a lot faster). It may do that, but it also unleashes tons of poisons into the air and water and land faster and in higher concentrations than we’ve witnessed before, and certainly more than we can handle, and it destroys the waterways and the homes and the beauty and rich life of mountains where families have lived for seven generations and more.
The people who live in the Appalachians are fighting this violence with all their lives, and many movies and websites have been and are being made.
Still, compare the mass media coverage of Irene with the coverage of the ongoing destruction of the Appalachian Mountains and its entire ecosystem. Almost everyone in the country now has heard of Irene, and the pictures of the destruction are played over endlessly.
Here I was sitting on a couch in my comfortable home, waiting for a storm that barely materialized, inundated by media coverage of said storm, and at the same time watching a little known documentary on an obscure cable channel that showed ongoing massive destruction on a much larger scale—more permanent, more devastating, by far—and completely preventable and unnecessary—made for and by man’s greed—and almost no one knows about it!
I am not minimizing the destruction that Irene did cause--my heart goes out to those who are suffering--but in terms of loss to life, community, and the environment, the damage is miniscule compared to what’s going on in the Appalachian Mountains. Boardwalks can be rebuilt. Power lines reattached. Homes rebuilt. Trees replanted. Lives, of course, cannot be replaced. Neither can communities. And neither can MOUNTAINS.
Where is the media coverage of this ongoing, completely preventable, manmade catastrophe?
Goodnight, Irene. Good morning, real world.
Climate of Change http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1563712/
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