Corporate removal of mountaintops to get the coal out is another one of the local self-governance issues that the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund works on with people whose communities have been, and are being, utterly destroyed by the practice.
Here’s a link to an essay by Robert Shetterly on the subject, and also on the inadequacy of words to describe the complete craziness of what we are allowing corporations to do to our whole world in the blind pursuit of profit. The destruction is so rampant, emotions like constructive outrage can rarely be sustained long enough to organize and fight back.
But we do fight back, disorganized and tired, if that’s the best we can muster on any given day.
On December 18 (while our own local ordinance was en route to dismissal – and our own Mayor and Council refused to speak on the subject, let alone support the citizens right to self-governance shielded by that ordinance) the Donegal Township PA Board of Supervisors passed a local ordinance banning corporate mining and stripping corporations of fictional legal “personhood” by a 2 to 1 vote. CELDF press release here.
Here’s a quote from Thomas Linzey, CELDF Executive Director, on Donegal Township becoming the ninth municipality in America to refuse to recognize the legal fiction of corporate personhood within its borders.
“For too long, a handful of powerful men have controlled the fate of communities in Western Pennsylvania, using large corporations to impose surface and longwall mining on people wanting to stop the harms caused by mining in the region. Those few, who benefit from the privileges bestowed on corporations, routinely use State law to preempt municipalities from protecting their residents. With adoption of this Ordinance yet another Pennsylvania community is exercising the governing authority of community majorities, and eliminating the governing authority of a corporate few.”
I learned about long wall coal mining from some of the local western PA folks affected by it, at the conference I went to in October.
In a lot of ways, long-wall mining serves as a useful metaphor for the destruction of democracy.
In the “old days,” coal mining companies extracting coal from underground were required to leave pillars of coal every so many feet, to maintain support for the earth and homes and streams and farms aboveground.
Then the coal companies decided that that coal was valuable, and that requiring them to leave those support pillars was an unjust state “taking” of private property.
They won that fight, got state endorsement of their corporate right to tear down the coal pillars, and, not surprisingly, homes and businesses and farms and streams and towns aboveground began collapsing as the earth underneath them collapsed.
Long wall mining is the next phase of that practice, where giant machines chew up huge areas of coal underground and the corporations extracting the coal have no responsibility for the destruction their mining causes aboveground. Quote from the Wikipedia entry:
“As the shearer removes the coal, the powered roof supports move forward into the newly created cavity. As mining progresses and the entire longwall progresses through the seam, the cavity behind the longwall, known as the goaf, increases. This goaf collapses under the weight of the overlying strata. This collapsing can lower surface height considerably, causing serious problems like changing the course of rivers and severely damage building foundations.”
Likewise, all the things that could support democracy in the past - a free media that actually covered issues of importance persistently, with facts and context and multiple perspectives; a decent education system that promoted not only basic factual knowledge but critical thinking skills; good jobs that supported families and left people some time and energy for civic participation - have been knocked out from under us.
What we have left are civic and physical landscapes littered with blown-off mountaintops, bulldozed forests, dried up streams, and homes and families and communities with cracked foundations.
Some quotes from the Shetterly essay.
“…The truth depends on a general respect for the meaning of words. A word is like a seed, an evolutionary artifact, containing in its DNA the fossil memory of precise meaning. Our words today have the same validity that a kernel of corn does after Monsanto has worked its magic. Our words are like pumpkins the day after Halloween — hollowed out, candle-less, the eyes and mouth shrunken, the inside charred. The reason for this is because it always takes courage for people to insist that words maintain their meaning. Words with meaning prohibit the desecration of the irreplaceable…
Our president is correct when he says the Constitution is just a piece of paper. It always will be until legislators and the people have the tenacious courage to demand that the words have meaning. “Democracy”, the word, is merely a stuffed dinosaur in the Political History Museum. Teeth that can’t bite, tail that can’t thrash, no backbone at all. The plaything and mascot of the corporate priests…
Until we insist that our words have meaning (which means that they demand accountability), we might as well make ourselves comfortable thinking that jokes and lies are the same thing. If the words have no meaning, calling attention to the outrage of Mountaintop Removal becomes absurd. A joke. With Profit as god, the truth is a joke, the absurd is sanctified, the self-destructive is ordained…”
Like it or not, believe it or not, that’s what the Villa Maria fight and the whole North Plainfield fight and the whole democracy fight are all about, all rolled into one: “prohibiting the desecration of the irreplaceable.”
