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A report from W. Va.

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This week, Gabriel Pacyniak and Katherine Chandler are traveling throughout southern West Virginia to report on mountaintop removal mining (MTR). They'll be visiting coalfields with abandoned and "reclaimed" MTR mines, and talking with residents, activists, miners, mine company officials, local reporters, and politicians.

We'll publish their reports throughout the week.

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At the Cabin Creek Rd. exit along Interstate 64, we turn off onto a two-lane drive that follows the creek. We pass from one hollow to another, small communities of West Virginians in the cramped valleys of Appalachia. At the end of the road, atop Kayford Mountain, lives Larry Gibson, the unofficial ambassador of the movement to stop mountaintop removal mining, or MTR. Gibson has been fighting MTR for 22 years, and has over 5,000 visitors signed into his guest book. This includes CNN's Anderson Cooper, who showcased Gibson last week on his 360 Heroes program. It is our first stop on a five-day trip across the coalfields of southern West Virginia, looking at how MTR has changed the landscape 30 years after the passage of the federal Surface Mining Reclamation and Control Act.

From the highway, it is difficult to imagine the devastation that has occurred at the mine site; the green, rolling hills seem to stretch out forever, hidden in the light haze of summer. As we continue up the road, we pass by the houses of local residents and a few community churches, following the dirt fork to the right that takes us over a small bridge. There's still no visible sign of the strip mining taking place all around us, but we do see our first sign of mining's impact -- the one-lane dirt road bridge has been reinforced to hold a 40,000-pound truck.

The blasting area at Kayford Mountain. (photo: Katherine Chandler)

Wouldn’t it be ironic …

… if we burned a bunch of oil, heated the atmosphere, melted the Arctic ice, and then had a war over who gets the oil beneath it?

A Humane Society retailer guide

After seeing my list of green fashionistas, the Humane Society contacted me about its fur-free shopping guide. It’s a helpful resource that includes information on the fur-free policies of more than 50 retailers. Check it out. (Thanks to commenter amc89 for mentioning it as well.)

Would the biosphere care?

Recently we've had a couple of discussions here at Gristmill concerning various aspects of peak oil; that is, the assertion that very soon (if it hasn't happened already) the global supply of oil will peak, and even though demand is going up, supply will start to come down, so prices will skyrocket.

It seems to me that some of the contention in these discussions boils down to the question: would it really be so bad if the oil started running out? After all, we would stop mucking up the planet with the pollution, carbon emissions, and infrastructural damage we have been inflicting for these hundred-years-plus of the petroleum age.

Wouldn't it force humanity to live within our means if gasoline was $10 or even $20 dollars per gallon, as it will eventually be?

As it so happens, I've recently been investigating the question of what kind of civilization we would need to have if we wanted to live without fossil fuels, and I wanted to know how we are currently using oil in order to understand how to live without it.

Using government data detailing the use of oil, in dollars, the conclusion I came to was this: over 90 percent of petroleum in the U.S. is burned by internal combustion engines. So the question needs to be reframed: would it really matter if we couldn't use internal combustion engines?

The answer, in the long run, is that it would be much better if we didn't use internal combustion engines. But that leads to another question: How do we get from here to there, and how will that transition affect the planet?

Sustainability doesn’t just happen

Tom Friedman is fond of the theory that high oil prices will drive investment in renewables and spur reform in corrupt governments. He’s not alone — some peak oil types believe that oil price spikes will force us to do the very things that will save us from global warming. This has always struck me […]

Volunteers get naked for climate awareness, and more

Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: Dying For a Change That’s One Way to Highlight Shrinkage Lead, Swallow, or Get Out of the Play Scaling Down This Gives Us Paws Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: The Butler Did It Living Piggy Lives Crops and Neighbors

In a nutshell

Business types discuss various subjects at industry confabs: best practices, new marketing strategies, changes in the regulatory environment, etc. They discuss how better to compete. When representatives of the coal-to-liquids industry get together, they talk about something else: One theme dominated discussion last week at an industry-sponsored conference on turning coal into gasoline and diesel […]

And New York City is the healthiest of all

As rural and suburban areas have grown, they have become more car dependent. Meanwhile, cities have reduced air pollution. As a consequence, the old urban health disadvantage has disappeared. City dwellers have higher life expectancies and better health on average [PDF] than people in suburbs or the country. And according to New York Magazine, New York City, probably the most urban of U.S. cities, has the greatest health advantage.

The difference seems to boil down to walking. People in urban areas walk more than people in rural or suburban areas (on average).

Why do New Yorkers do better than, say, people in Portland or Seattle, which are also pretty walkable cities? Apparently people in New York walk faster. The people who promoted the whole power walking thing got it right. Walking quickly is healthier than walking slowly.

On Edit: one other relevant difference between rural/suburban and urban: city dwellers, by driving fewer miles, are less likely to be invovled in auto accidents.

Backpacker’s global warming issue

About six months too late to be part of our "oh look, all the glossies are going green" trend piece, Backpacker magazine has put together its own global warming issue. And yes, before y’all ask, it’s printed on recycled, chlorine-free paper. The cover features a hiker waist-deep in water with a submerged mountain behind him […]

A little skin for ice shrinking thin

Saturday in Switzerland, hundreds posed naked for a photo shoot on the shrinking Aletsch glacier.

Greenpeace said it hoped to "establish a symbolic relationship between the vulnerability of the melting glacier and the human body."