I’m a coal miner who’s an environmentalist. But I can see the mistakes in both the coal industry and in the environmental industry. Every time you take somebody’s job, there’s a face behind that, there’s a family behind that.
Saving the land cannot be separated from saving the people, their livelihood, health and the best of their way of life, from the reach of profiteers. The first peoples, the new pioneers of mountain farms, veterans of mining, labor in unions and not, coal-resistance activists have tales that can teach their more modernized would-be helpers. Learn to listen. It will take patience and perseverance to renew coal country, and the rest of the Earth too.
During the time of the mine wars, you had mine guards. Well, now, you have mind guards, They don’t have to use strong-armed tactics anymore. They control the radio. They control the news. They control the schools. When a region or a country doesn’t know its own history, it’s like a person with Alzheimer’s.
More than 50 grassroots women activists from throughout Southern Africa met in late-January to coordinate their stand against the ravages of Big Coal, which includes sickness, displacement from stolen lands and food insecurity. The six-day strategy meeting, organized by WoMin, a regional alliance of women’s organizations fighting the impact of natural resource extraction, involved dozens of organizations in South Africa, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Botswana.
The major media, as if reading coal industry press releases, continues to refer to "clean coal" when describing the industry experiments with carbon capture and storage. "Clean coal" is an industry marketing term, but journalists in the major media continue to use it as if it were truthful reporting. Coal is dirty, costly, and deadly. And journalists that continue to use the energy companies PR-speak are enabling a deadly and outlaw industry.
Why are union miners falling for the company line that there’s a “war on coal” when the coal and gas companies are really making a war on ALL of us, on our planet, on our children’s futures and certainly on those very miners who are marching on behalf of the coal companies?
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