Sludge, Slurry, Coal Ash and other names for Poison

I jumped up and checked the aerial when I got my message my first message from Dave Cooper and his Mountain Top Removal Roadshow-- huge disaster in Tennessee. I couldn't breathe; I almost couldn't cry, but if you hold your breath long enough, well it feels like the world will surely end. If four feet deep of anything came down the mountain and covered my yard, my borage, my daisies and mint-- the mint from my grandmother's house that I've had for over twenty years and covered my neighbors house and let's see--398 more football fields worth of precious little nooks and niches.
I was in a really nice house once, on Maui-- it was a million dollar home; it had been renovated by an all-woman contractor crew of ship builders and it was built like a boat- as to say tight, and my friend Christine stopped up the toilet and she started squealing and I went in there and the shit was about to spill over and I just leaned over and turned off the water valve. No disaster.
Now it is time for us to start appreciating what we have here in Appalachia-- and I use the term very roughly. I know there are huge problems with Regionalism, especially it's ineffectiveness, but I tend to want to emphasize that our entire region is precious, that our entire region is in jeopardy, if not peril. Wait, I still don't have it right. I feel that the planet earth is in jeopardy and that the balance lies in the Appalachians, especially in West Virginia.

Some might think Ive got a little too much state pride, but I assure you that I am only thinking about basic ecological principles. WV has the surface area of Texas, and it is nearly all covered in forests and it is sitting up high, which means that water flows from WV, and this is critical to understanding the importance of its role in ecological stability. Just imagine now if you covered Texas with forests and rivers, then you could slide it into the eastern seaboard, relatively undetected and sparely populated and then keep it uneducated as possible and in poverty-- then it doesn't really change, and it is potentially completely controllable. As early as the civil war, people knew that there were vast supplies of coal here and those that did know came in and bought up the mineral rights at about 2 cents an acre. It is just awful how they lied and deceived and made people think they were getting something.
Anyway, the coal companies have lied, cheated, stolen and killed-- I mean massacred the people of West Virginia and other parts of Appalachia I am sure for access to this coal, which they stole decades ago and steal all over again, and now in the last ten or twelve years have started blasted mountains to the point of theses beautiful mountains eviscerating their internal workings into the vital waters of our side of the country. No, the mountains don't spill themselves nto the stream beds-- the draglines do that. I guess it isn't an evisceration as much as a turning inside out and for scale, do we kill a child just for the kidney? I have heard it is done, and now I see it being done here, to our children.
The coal is the kidney of the mountain, and for 20 thousand years or so, coal has been the filter to keep the water tables clean and the coal keeps getting more and more of the heavy metals and other elements that are best kept deep underground, trapped in the coal. Then they burn the coal and these poisons are then concentrated in the ash-- so here is the largest component of Clean Coal's Toxic Toilet, and the rest is chemical they add- they wash the coal with all kinds of binders to pull out impurities and then they put all the impurities in OUR WATER!

So what I am trying to say is our house is awesome; it was built by Mother Nature and it is tight and it can keep us. We need to really value every little detail of it, every square inch is important. Secondly, the toilet is overflowing!! We need to get in there and turn off the valve-- coal is over.
It may mean we can't use all the power that we want to use. It may mean that entire cities should run black outs or brown outs--it is up to all of us to come up with solutions, to BE the SOLUTIONS we seek. I have my own path. I am heading toward an almost entirely self-sufficient lifestyle which I intend to reach within five years, and I urge everyone to do what they can do to achieve thier own energy, food and water goals, but as a community, as a society, we need to turn off the valve to BIG COAL-- cut off their free streams (to destroy), cut off their subsidies-- you gotta be kidding? We are paying for this?? cut off their free hall pass-- they have been BREAKING EVER ENVIRONMENTAL law in place-- We need to start allegations against every government offical who partakes in this shit- I mean flow of excrement.

I really watned to make sure I didn't start telling what needs to be done. I don't really know. But I drank some rain water yesterday that had some broken ice in it, oh man, it was so sweet-- I really love water. It is so sweet and so yummy. Water is my favorite drink, and oh, to be emersed in it, to dive down into it, no chlorine, no arsenic, no mercury, no cadmium, no lead, no excess iron or magnesium; I mean it-- I just LOVE water.

Everyone, Happy New Year! A Toast to you in Water!!