At a meeting in Springfield, Illinois last week, I stood and watched farmers weep, recounting the loss of their beloved lands and farms--and their health--to strip-mining and longwall mining, and the unregulated dumping of coal slurry and waste in their aquifers.
This was the message I received from this crowd of Americans on the frontlines of the coalfields:
"We don't need no stinkin' coal mining jobs. We want our fair share of the clean energy investment funds and green jobs. We want a just transition for the small ranks of coal miners and our boarded-up coal mining communities, who continue to live in some of the poorest areas in the nation, despite the billions of dollars of wealth that has been mined and hauled away. And after 200 years of shouldering the burden of our country's boom-bust coal cycles, we'd like to develop a sustainable economy."
As some Midwestern Democrats turn their backs on the reality of climate destabilization and petitioning the EPA to lower greenhouse gases limits, their coalfield districts are literally burning--or sinking or getting stripped into despair.
It's worth reading the whole thing. He makes several points similar to an editorial I recently submitted to the SJ-R. I wonder how the people in rural Sangamon county worried about their property values going down because of a wind farm would like to be in the shoes of Montgomery county residents losing their land to longwall mining.
Every time the local Sierra Club holds a meeting on coal mining or agriculture it attracts at least a few farmers or coal miners. I'm always encouraged to see people who don't fit the tree-hugger stereotype. It's pretty obvious that talk-radio conservatives play up cultural stereotypes about environmentalists just to keep people with common interests from working together. How sad that people feel like they have to say they aren't environmentalists just because they don't want anyone to think they're moving to California to live in a tree.