Warning reading this article can really mess you up if you are a person not from the mountains and believes and accepts things as truth, when told by a person who says they are representing themselves as a person who knows right and wants to show you right, and you should listen and believe. You should believe because they are cloaked in a religious garment or have a white collar around their neck. Or they take people on environmental tours showing them things they believe harmful to the earth and mankind, and they want to get good folks to believe it also. But when you look a little longer at what these self appointed people who "feel" (because they couldn’t be thinking) they know best. They "feel" we who live here are all too stupid to know what is good for us and what is not. What is right and what is wrong! Any good hearted person, who will listen to these people for a spell, would come to the conclusion that all coal mining is bad and we need to stop it.

The only problem is these people who are pushing anti mining present half truths and right out lies. That’s a fine way to represent and hide behind two good causes. First it was the environmental movement that was taken hostage and now its religion. Today as evidenced by the article below where religious dogma is being used to pitch the lefty point across to un-suspecting and very trusting and for the most part good folks who might go to the Smokies once a year to experience the mountain life. Traffic jams and tourist traps and all. But folks who don’t have a clue nonetheless about central Appalachia and the topography we have here. The people you will read about below are those who would take this tourist out and show them active mine sites. Show them the dust, the big earth moving machines, the black coal that makes it all worthwhile. Then they leave and let them assume the land where an active surface mine is operating will stay as a industrial site with no grass or trees, forever a brown and black moonscape, where nothing will ever grow again. NOT TRUE. Liar liar, pants on fire. Shame, shame.

When we have recovered the coal and thus the energy that America demands and requires to maintain our current quality of life we reclaim to land in the name of nature and about 5000 state and federal laws. We are shaping the land back after its been mined, in most cases into dynamic land that is different and different in a better way. A place where things can now occur like homes, farming, shopping, and economic development. God has allowed us to change it and make it better. He has given us the knowledge to make houses warm at night and allowed people not to be required to be burning coal and wood in individual polluting home stoves and business establishments like we did a generation ago. To take it to central points where it can be converted into electrical power in a much cleaner manner with huge scrubbers and air pollution controls. There are also laws (a lot of laws) that insure the land is restored to a productive state. Remember that the lefty point of view hates that word, "productive". What we here in the mountains consider productive is newly developed level land as a results of surface mining where we can build shopping centers, schools, hospitals, banks etc... They consider this bad stuff. But wait they desire these things where they come from but it’s somehow bad when we build these things on former mine sites. Of course they drive back to their suburb or college campus to a warm heated home or apartment, heated at least 50% with coal. They enjoy a hot bath or shower that night with the water made hot with a couple of pounds of coal back at the electrical generation plant. I guess Granny would call that being a hypocrite. They use about 3 pounds of coal on their computers to order a book. They enjoy a ride in a car made with steel made from coal. Yet they come here and tell us to stop mining coal. When it’s their demand for it that makes us mine it in the first place.

I tell you what! If all the people who come in here and go on the "protest coal tour" would start first by looking in the mirror and change their evil ways of using electricity and give up the high quality of life they now enjoy, coal miners will pack err up by Friday and find new jobs. If you could bring those same people back in just a few short years after the mined site after it had been reclaimed they would not feel the same way they do after the short brain-washing session you will read about in the article below. If you could bring them back to show them the level land created in an area where the number one problem to economic development is the lack of level land that things can be built on and things can be grown like the grapes vines at the site in Wise County where wines are fermented named after local seams of coal. Or they would see the cattle on rolling fields where steep slopes existed before mining. It would shock those good folks coming in here to have their brains-washed if the facts were ever to surface.

Facts like VMA has agreements with groups like the National Wild Turkey Foundation (NWTF) that ask VMA coal producing and reclaiming members to re-plant the land with a seed mix of grass and shrubs purchase from and provided by the NWTF that encourage the wild turkey and other wildlife as well such as deer, game birds, and numerous other wild animals. It would shock them to know that anyone here in the mountains who hunt will tell you the most games are located on reclaimed mined lands.

One of the reasons for this for example is the needs of the wild turkey. They need water and a forest sure, but did you know they also need grassy areas where they can find the bugs they need to survive as well as feed their young? A reclaimed mine site offers this. This helps explain the comeback of the wild turkey in the mountain region of Southwest Virginia where they were extinct before the late 60's and early 70's when surface mining began in full force and there were no reclaimation laws that required anything to be re-planted at all and they still reclaimed themselves and brought the turkey back as well as deer to the region. Thanks to the newly open long benches ( and where the now unwelcome Autumn Olive) and open grass areas could thrive and create food for wildlife. We in the industry must read articles like the one below in order to face these people who would hide behind things like religion to attack us and the mining industry. They have already high jacked the true environmental movement away from the true environmentalist, like me and the thousands of good people who work in permitting and environmental areas in the mining industry who deal with environmental issues on a regular basis who live, hunt and fish here, as well as drink the water for goodness sake. We care people! We are as concerned about the earth and are as religious as these would be self appointed do good'ers. We just don’t try and put others down with it.

Who are these people? Well to start out with they are not elected to anything and represent no one in the community. They are a small group of people who support each other in their delusional world. They just look for groups who will listen to their dogma and delusion. They get good folks from "off" as Granny use to call them, bring them in here and preach their version of the Bible then send them back to churches all over the country to repeat the half truths and lies. They try and take the higher ground but I am telling you brothers, their version of higher ground is built on and is nothing but sand and it will not stand the test of truth. God put us here. When Adam and Eve took a bite of "the apple" from the tree of knowledge we were off to the races. Today we use technology to make the production of electricity these good folks demand cleaner and all our lives better. Really that’s what it boils down to. We got better homes, autos, education, schools etc... As a result of using knowledge to make the world a better place for us all man and nature. We have increased the span of life in one generation so as we now live one third longer than good folks did one generation ago. Stopping development and being hypocritical is not the answer good folks. Good folks who mean well and have all the good intentions in the world. Know the truth and the truth shall set you free. You coal miners hold your nose and read this just so you will know what they are selling to good folks who don’t live here and don’t have a clue as to what’s going on here. But are willing to listen to those who would call themselves religious people. Whilst all the time spreading a lie and encouraging others to do the same. I think Grand pappy would call them suckers.

You young kids in college who take these tours or come to protest us on the weekends read this wake up and don’t follow false know it all's.


My thots and comments are in this red though out the artical where I thot there a need. Man blogging is fun.......

October 28, 2006Taking On a Coal Mining Practice as a Matter of Faith

By NEELA BANERJEE
HALE GAP, Va. -

The windswept ridge that Sharman Chapman-Crane hiked to on arecent fall afternoon is the kind of place, she said, that she normally would avoid. From there, she could see what she loved about Appalachia and what it had lost, and she wanted her visitors to see it, too.The old rounded peaks of the mountains encircled the ridge, dense with trees smudged red and gold. (they always start with this romantic notion on the Appalachian Mountains, this neaqrly always sets the scene) But in the middle of the peaks, several stood stripped bare and chopped up, a result of an increasingly common and controversial coal mining practice called mountaintop removal.( ah here is where they leave out anything about reclaimation to a higher and greater use) "Doesn't it say in Scripture, 'Who can weigh a mountain, measure a basket of earth?' " Ms. Chapman-Crane said, recalling descriptions of God'somnipotence in Isaiah 40:12. "Well, only God can. (I guess you ignore what you want to in human development that has made all our lives a lot more easy thru the years and just pick on mining and us coal miners ) But now, the coal companies seem to be able to do it, too."Ms. Chapman-Crane, her colleagues at the Mennonite Central Committee Appalachia and other Appalachian Christians are trying to halt mountaintop removal, and at the heart of their work, they say, is their faith. (I would guess more their hate of working people and the ability God has give man to make it a better world) They are part of an awakening among religious people to environmental issues, said Paul Gorman, executive director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, an inter religious alliance. Increasingly,religious people across denominations are organizing around local issues, like preventing a landfill, preserving wetlands and changing mining. (and very ofetn not having one fact but just pure emotion )"People of faith are thinking afresh about human place and purpose in the greater web of life," Mr. Gorman said. "They are asking, What does it mean to be present in a crisis ( they need to have a crisis and they need fear to make their porject work,. this is a tried and true form of explotation of the people of our region by outside the region do gooders who think they mean well but really are so out of touch they think squirrels aint made for eating) of God's creation made by God's children?" (This is their attempt to say they are "of God" and superior to us un's here in the woods sort of like savages I reckon if we dont agree with them) Although Christian environmental activists (activists- this is their word for themselves and also makes them feel better than us mere mortals who just work all day long and dont have the time to invent these evils they perceive we are doing. In reality they have no clue to what is really going on ) speak out against mountaintopremoval at different levels of government, many believe that showing the practice's toll (but only one side which is why I am here doing this to show you the reader the other side) will persuade others to join them in seeking stricter regulation of it, (as if the thousands of current laws and regulations just are not enough) if not an outright ban. A new group, Christians for the Mountains, urges religious people to take upmountaintop removal "as a spiritual issue," and it has made a DVD that it isdistributing to churches and individuals, said Allen Johnson, an evangelical Christian and a founder of the group. The Rev. John Rausch, director of the Catholic (Catholic's are the best at this because guilt is a major part of the dogma and the Catholic church has the market cornered on guilt, well almost. I could be wrong I suppose others use guilt also. But I grew up a Baptist and fear was out big thing) Committee of Appalachia, has led tours of mountaintop removal sites since 1994. Mr. Rausch estimates that 400 people have taken his tour. They learn of the tours by word of mouth or from their churches, pay a few hundred dollars to stay in simple accommodations, ( I knew a donation need would show up sooner or later) hike several miles through forests and mined lands and talk to people whose lives have been affected by mountaintop removal. ( This means to people who dont work and dont want anyone else to) The Mennonite Central Committee Appalachia, based in Whitesburg, Ky., gave its first tour in October, focusing on a corner of southeastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia rich in coal and diverse forests.On the second morning of the four-day tour, the trip's leaders, Ms.Chapman-Crane and the Rev. Duane Beachey, marched their three-member group up the mile-long trail to Bad Branch Falls. Poplars, beeches, hemlocks and magnolias thatched together a canopy above the trail, and the rain on the leaves made a soft ticking sound. Wild ginseng (no way them mountain boys would leave ginseng beside a trail like that, no that would have been dug up long ago. this make me question even more the writer true sense of realism and shows me the un-facts in the artical) and wintergreen lined the path. Cottage-size boulders leaned forward over a rushing stream below the trail."Not every place on the mountains has waterfalls like Bad Branch," Ms.Chapman-Crane said. "But this is pretty much what it's like on the mountains here. (another misrepresentation) The forests of the Appalachian range are like a northern rain forest."Mary Yoder, who had volunteered to come on the trip for her congregation,Columbus Mennonite Church in Columbus, Ohio, asked, "So this is the kind of place that gets blown up in mountaintop removal? "Mr. Chapman-Crane replied, "This is what would be lost, is lost, when they blast a mountaintop.(not only that but they kill Babi and eat him) "The United States is rich with coal, and mountaintop removal has begun to replace underground mining in Appalachia as the preferred method of extraction (another misrepresentation or lie whichever you prefer) because of its efficiency and lower cost. Mountaintop removal involves leveling mountains with explosives to reach seams of coal. The debris that had once been the mountain is usually dumped by bulldozers and huge trucks into neighboring valleys, (creating leval land where there is none and the reason all the development has been beside the creek thus encouraging more stream pollution) burying streams (another lie, most are ditches that only hold water when it rains).The coal industry asserts that mountaintop removal is a safer way to removecoal than sending miners underground and that without it, companies would have to close mines and lay off workers. (duh if you shut down the mine people go home and are then out of work) Luke Popovich, a spokesman for the National Mining Association, a coal lobbying group, said that by fighting mountaintop removal religious groups might find their priorities colliding."They find themselves in a difficult position," Mr. Popovich said, "because they're expressing support for those who purport to protect nature, and, at the same time, that activism carries implications for the human side of the natural equation. Human welfare depends on the rational exploitation of nature.( I dont think i would have used those words but ok ) "Christianity runs wide and deep in Appalachia. At the Courthouse Cafe in Whitesburg, Mr. Beachey explained that as a Christian concern for his neighbors (whom he must think are too stoopit to make decisions on their own) drove his desire to rein in mountaintop removal. But as in much ofAppalachia, pastors and churchgoers here are reluctant to stir up trouble:many work for coal companies, (no kidding who would have thunk it? The other side is mentioned here but no real attempt is made by the writer to talk to any of theswe strange creatures) or the people next to them in the pew do. Others believe stopping mountaintop removal would eliminate the few jobs that remain. (6000 in virginia and they pay on average over $50,000.00 per year) Many understand their faith differently than Christian environmentalists do. (no kidding) One night, Darrell Caudill and several friends gathered to play their guitars for the environmental tour and sing traditional songs and hymns. Mr.Caudill, 57, works for a coal company and believes in being a good steward of the earth. (which is the way the thousands of good people feel who work in the mining industry feel about the work they do, they see themselves as good steward's of the land and try to make good decisions in respect of that) . But to him, he said, being a Christian means being saved and spreading the Gospel. There is no tension between being committed to his faith and supporting mountaintop removal."Why did God produce coal then and put it underground?" said Mr. Caudill,who attends a non-denominational evangelical church. "He produced things that we need on this earth. Without coal, you wouldn't have the warmth and light you have right now." (thats the other side folks in the entire artical you got what maybe three lines telling the other side in a very intentional weak argument ) Late in the trip, the tour group drove Lucious Thompson, 63, a former coalminer, to the horseshoe of peaks above McRoberts, where he lives. The peaks have been leveled. The woods where he had hunted are gone. (you must have the destruction of Eden to make the guilt trip stick ) The new grass on the new plateaus barely clings to the soil, (there is a violation of one of the thousands of laws dealing the reclaiming of the land to restore nature to its orginial or improved state) which means that McRoberts often floods now after hard rains, he said."I've been flooded three times since they started working on themountaintop," Mr. Thompson said. He talked of neighbors whose house foundations had been cracked because of the daily blasting, (but he left out the fact that a pre-blast inspection is performed on any house near the mine site and if there is any thing broken then there is a record of what it was like before and the law says it must be fixed or replaced if damaged, thats the law) of a pond lost to sludge and of respiratory ailments because of the coal dust flying from the coal trucks."The coal company says it's God's will," ( I dont remember seeing this on any company logo or in any official press release) he said. "Well, God ain't ever run no bulldozer. ( I guess you could say he is saying "God loves me but he cant stand you" ) "People like Mr. Thompson and the woods and mountains of Appalachia seemed to make the point the tour's organizers hoped for. After the tour, Ms. Yoder returned to Columbus to ( to spread the stoopitiy to others) tell her congregation of about 200 what she had learned. "My comment to the church was that I would do the tour with an open mind, (sure you did) "she said, "and my conclusion is there is no room for mountaintop removal in our country. (Oh I still want my power to come on each day when I flip the light switch and I have no other solution as to how to do that but what the heck I am just not that smart to see I cant have it both ways and that my electricity must be produced by some method. i prefer to just think it comes from the wall) "HomeWorld U.S. N.Y. / Region Business Technology Science Health Sports OpinionArts Style Travel Job Market Real Estate Automobiles Back to TopCopyright 2006 The New York Times Company