Mountaintop mining consists basically of blowing off entire mountain peaks, or entire mountains, in order to easily and relatively cheaply extract coal. It occurs mainly in West Virginia and Kentucky, although mountaintop removal is also carried out in far-Southwest Virginia and in Tennessee. Peaks are sheared off with heavy machinery and explosives, exposing the coal seams inside. Excess rock is used to fill steep Appalachian valleys, some with streams at the bottom.

When rainwater falls on the filled-in valley, it trickles through the rubble and picks up pollutants off rocks that came from deep underground. The water emerges mixed with pollutants such as metals and chemicals called sulfates, which can be toxic to the insects and fish in small Appalachian streams. It is also toxic and damaging to other animals, humans and entire ecosystems.

Although the companies are required by existing laws to “rehabilitate” the damaged areas, the wanton destruction of the mountains is more than obvious to anyone who sees it.

The latest development in the mountaintop removal battle is a study published by a group, headed by a University of Maryland researcher, who said it performed the most comprehensive study to date of the controversial practice, also known as “mountaintop removal.”

They also did something that scientists usually don’t: step beyond data-gathering to take a political stand.

“The science is so overwhelming that the only conclusion that one can reach is that mountaintop mining needs to be stopped,” said Margaret Palmer, a professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Sciences and the study’s lead author.

The group’s paper, published in the journal Science, was released in the same week that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency – which has been scrutinizing these mines – angered environmentalists by supporting a new mine permit. The EPA said the Hobet 45 mine, in West Virginia, had made changes that would eliminate nearly 50 percent of the environmental impacts and protect 460 union mining jobs.

Palmer said the group’s work did not echo the idea implicit in this EPA decision: that there could be a “good” mountaintop mine, whose environmental consequences were acceptable.

So, the fight goes on, but this time it seems that the advantage has shifted a notch to the good guys.

Technorati Tags: coal, destruction, Environment, EPA, Mountaintop Removal, pollution, study

The livestock industry as a result of its reliance on corn and soy-based feed accounts for over half the synthetic fertilizer used in the United States, contributing more than any other sector to marine dead zones. It consumes about 70 percent of the water in the American West – water so heavily subsidized that if irrigation supports were removed, ground beef would cost $35 a pound.

In addition, livestock accounts for at least 21 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions globally – more than all forms of transportation combined. Domestic animals – most of them healthy – consume (not by their choice, mind you) about 70 percent of all the antibiotics produced. Undigested antibiotics leach from manure into freshwater systems, impairing the sex organs of fish. The antibiotic use in animals has also contributed to the growing antibiotic resistance in bacteria, which infect humans.

It takes a gallon of gasoline to produce a pound of conventional beef. If all the grain fed to animals fed people instead, you could feed China and India.

Meat that’s produced according to “alternative” standards (accounting for about one percent of meat in the United States) might be a better choice but not nearly so much better as some would have us believe. “Free-range chickens” would theoretically have access to the outdoors. But many of the so-called “free-range” chickens never see the light of day because they cannot make it through the crowded shed to the opening, which leads usually to a patch of concrete, anyway.

“Grass-fed” cows produce four times the methane – a greenhouse gas 21 times as powerful as carbon dioxide – and many grass-fed cows are raised on heavily fertilized and irrigated grass. Pastured pigs are still typically mutilated, fed commercial feed and prevented from rooting – their most basic instinct besides sex.

Deforestation is the single largest contributor to climate change – far larger that all the transportation-related pollution, power generation and livestock flatulence. As it stands, huge tracts of forests are cut down for a variety of reasons – for wood, farming, industry, human habitation and yes: the factory farming of livestock.

Issues of animal welfare are also related to all forms of meat production. Domestic animals suffer immensely, feel pain and may even realize the fate that awaits them. In an egg factory, male chicks (economically worthless) are summarily run through a grinder. Pigs are castrated without anesthesia, crated, tail-docked and nose-ringed. Milk cows are repeatedly impregnated through artificial insemination, confined to milking stalls and milked to yield 15 times the amount of milk they would produce under normal circumstances. When calves are removed from their mothers at birth, the mothers mourn their loss with heart-rending moans.

Then comes the slaughterhouse, an operation that’s left with millions of pounds of carcasses – called deadstock – that are incinerated or dumped in landfills.

If someone told you that a particular corporation was trashing the air, water and soil, causing more global warming than the transportation industry, consuming massive amounts of fossil fuels; unleashing the cruelest sort of suffering on innocent and defenseless beings; failing to recycle its waste, and clogging our arteries in the process, how would you react?

We are looking forward to hearing from all of you out there. This isn’t an attempt to turn everybody into vegetarians, or vegans, but for a variety of reasons we believe that meat consumption and large-scale livestock farming should be reduced by a noticeable margin.

There are horror stories and horrific videos being leaked out of factory farms everywhere. This PETA video is just one example, featuring a factory pig farm in North Carolina. It is patently obvious the the “people” involved in this sadistic acts are the real animals. To put it politely – scum of the earth. And to think that our jails are full of people sentenced for writing a bad check, or for possessing a small amount of marijuana…

Technorati Tags: climate change, cruelty, Environment, factory, farming, global warming, Health, Livestock, meat, pollution, production

A lot of us have multiple environmental concerns. Many people have either gotten more efficient and cleaner cars, or have ditched personal cars altogether.  Others buy and install energy efficient bulbs, recycle as much of their trash as they can and so forth.

The Huffington Post is getting involved in supporting Colin Beavan and his No Impact Project.
Here’s a fragment of their post on the subject:

“With political and corporate forces getting in the way of large-scale change, the task is daunting. We think the first step is to get some perspective on the impact we’re already having.

Enter No Impact Man. We first heard about Colin Beavan and his No Impact Project around the time many others did – when the New York Times did a feature on him and his family’s efforts to live with no environmental impact in New York City for a year. Our reaction: intriguing, innovative and seemingly a bit kooky.

As we learned more about Colin, and saw No Impact Man, the documentary film and read his book of the same title, about his family’s year-long experiment, we were downright inspired. The documentary follows the Beavans’ journey as they incrementally lowered their impact through phases, such as making no trash, only eating food grown within 250 miles, using no carbon producing transportation (not even the subway!) and finally, no electricity in their home. By year’s end their impact was down to nearly zero.”

We plan to get involved and are hoping that some of you will give it a try as well.  Despite what the naysayers keep mumbling and screaming, the pollution problem is impacting us and our planet in a very real way.

We know that a little experiment such as this will not fix the actual problems, but it might provide an opportunity for a dry run and for the realization that we actually can reduce our personal footprint.

Technorati Tags: clean up, Colin Beavan, ecology, Environment, no impact week

At issue is toilet paper: the kind that is already fluffy and getting fluffier so fast that manufacturers are running out of synonyms for “soft”. Quilted Northern Ultra Plush is the first big brand with three plies and three adjectives in its name.

Environmental groups say that this race to make the fluffiest, softest butt paper is an environmental menace and another example of American excess.

As it happens, the butt-friendly U.S. toilet paper is mostly made by chopping down and grinding up old trees and the environmentalists would much prefer that the Americans, like Europeans wipe their asses with recycled paper.

Some progress has been made and a few U.S. manufacturers are now offering recycled versions of their butt-wiping products. The problem is that most Americans are so used to pampering their dirty sphincters, that softness is still “in” and recycled roughness hasn’t caught on very much as yet.

Toilet paper reportedly accounts for five percent of the U.S. forest-products industry, but that is still obviously too high a cost. Trading beautiful, old-growth forests for a pleasant sensation in America’s butt crack? Old trees cut down for the briefest and most undignified of ends and purposes?

No way, say the environmentalists, adding that cutting trees to feed the American obsession with softness removes too many trees – a valuable scrubber of carbon dioxide, contributing to global warming even more.

Why are the virgin wood paper fibers softer than the recycled kind? The answer is quite simple: fibers from virgin wood are longer, producing smoother paper and the recycled variety, which gets chopped up and reprocessed boasts shorter fibers, which tend to be rougher.

Toilet paper in about 75 percent of bathrooms in restaurants, offices and schools comes from recycled sources, mostly because it is cheaper.

But at home, most people like to pamper their asses and about 95 percent of Americans equip their bathrooms with the softest, most comfy variety of paper available, which almost invariably comes from virgin fibers, from trees cut for that specific purpose.

Big tissue makers say they’ve tried to make their products as green as possible, including buying more wood pulp from forest operations certified as sustainable.

But despite environmentalists’ concerns, they also say that customers are unwavering in their desire for the softest paper possible.

Greenpeace is on the job, pressuring paper manufacturers to do more to pamper the forests, rather than American’s butt cracks.

There’s also the issue of the paper’s strength. Few people enjoy finding that during the wiping operation their finger somehow found its way through one, two, or even three layers of paper.

This brings memories of an old, nasty joke that we have heard years ago about the then-Soviet toilet paper. It went something like this:

“How do you use the Soviet toilet paper? You unroll about half a foot, fold it once, find the folded edge and very gingerly and carefully rip a half circle in the middle of the folded part, about an inch across and put it aside, making sure that you don’t misplace it. It will soon come in very, very handy. Then you insert your finger in the resulting hole and carefully wipe your ass. And what do you do with the circle of paper that you have removed and placed aside? Its purpose should be very obvious by now. Carefully clean the underside of your fingernails.”

It isn’t our intention to insult our Russian friends, but for some quite justified reasons, many nasty anti-Russian jokes have evolved over the years in countries subjugated by the Soviet Union and this is just one of them.

Technorati Tags: American, asses, butts, Environment, global warming, paper, soft, toilet, trees

Would the fact that we are having summer-like temperatures in October, hardly any snow in places winter, after winter, along with an extreme drought and the melting ice caps be enough? Or maybe the well-deserved Nobel Peace Prize awarded  to IPCC and Al Gore?I wonder if the happily polluting Chinese and Indian economies, or the millions of SUV-driving Americans would agree that the present bout of global warming is at least partly caused by humans? According to a very recent Greenpeace report just three of China’s largest power companies created more greenhouse gas emissions last year than the entire United Kingdom.

Why is there so much resistance by some to explore and implement alternative energy sources, such as solar, wind, geothermal, wave and so forth? Could it be that certain fossil fuel lobbies are exerting way too much influence upon our decision making?

Some say that about 1,000 years ago the Vikings encountered a “Green Land” in Greenland and that the climate fluctuations are nothing new and are simply what Mother Nature does, even without our input.

That’s at least partly true, with an important caveat: The present warming trend is proceeding much faster than all of the previous ones and unless we help Mother Nature by very quickly reducing the emissions that we are so enthusiastically creating and pumping into the atmosphere, there’s a distinct and frightening possibility that unlike the previous Earth cooling and warming episodes, the present trend might become simply irreversible.

Don’t let the skeptics convince you that humans do not have a role in global warming. Those could very well be the same “geniuses”, which have in fact voted for the neocons during the 2004 U.S. presidential election.

Look around you. At the millions of Hummers, Yukon XL’s, Ford Excursions, Chevy Suburbans, or the totally ludicrous new crop of huge pick-up trucks from Ford, GM and Chrysler. These enormous, badly designed, gas-guzzling monstrosities not only “process” and emit much more pollutants than a reasonably-sized vehicle, but when their sheer size is taken into consideration, their manufacture uses up considerably more raw materials, energy and produces more carbon emissions that it should.

And yes! Driving those ridiculous vehicles IS ecologically incorrect in every possible way. In addition, it is highly doubtful that anyone, who buys that kind of a vehicle, without a supporting reason, such as: work, owning a farm, horses, etc. is an enlightened, and/or educated person. In short: I wouldn’t feel guilty about prominently showing the middle finger to some drivers of humongous SUV’s, who use them simply to haul groceries, kids, commuting, or going to the movies. What a price for “keeping up with the Joneses”!

I have test-driven some of these vehicles. Frankly, I hate the design, the handling and the overall feel and unless someone has an overpowering and uncontrollable urge to move a refrigerator, I cannot imagine any person in his right mind, who would want to have, or drive a crappy vehicle of that sort.

Also, why does almost everybody in the U.S. insist on driving cars with automatic transmissions? I would not even CONSIDER a vehicle, unless it had a nice manual tranny.

I suppose that automatics do make sense in the case of people, who are handicapped, or infirm, but for normal driving?! Come on! Is everyone out there retarded, or terminally lazy? I know that getting stuck in traffic and commuting are not much fun, but have you all forgotten the joy of driving and efficiently shifting through the gears? The manual transmissions are better in practically every conceivable way in comparison to automatics.

In addition – despite the claims of the manufacturers – we could save millions of gallons of fuel EVERY DAY, if people were smart enough and not too lazy to drive “normal” cars.

We all can help. By influencing politicians, by realizing that the new and profitable ethanol fuels are not the solution, but are quickly becoming a part of the problem, by installing and using energy efficient bulbs, driving less, cycling more and walking.

Not using drinking water in plastic bottles would be helpful in many ways. Billions of plastic containers are laying around everywhere. Transporting tap, or even spring water from faraway places uses huge amounts of energy and generates more pollution. Get a water filter and reusable bottles.

Reducing the catastrophic epidemic of obesity is also a prime consideration. Most of the fat people become that way not only because of lack of exercise, but also because they keep eating crap, the sort of “food” that our processed food industry has been feeding us for at least two generations. High fructose corn syrup seems to be present in most U.S. non-alcoholic beverages. Avoid it like the plague!

Most of our foods here have been adulterated in some way by now. The industry has either added some chemicals, or taken away some natural and often healthy ingredients. At the very least, our food supply has been contaminated to some degree by pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics and hormones.

Haven’t you noticed that most obese people drink “diet” drinks? Doesn’t that tell you something? Why do you think that there are so many diabetics as of late? While sugar might not be the healthiest substance around, it is still much better than corn syrup, Aspartame, or Nutrasweet. Take note!

I realize that finding unadulterated food has become very difficult, but it is not impossible. Try harder and buy from local producers and farmers. Your body and Mother Nature will thank you.

Technorati Tags: conservation, Environment, global warming, obesity, pollution