Driving up to Norton, in Wise County, VA, on Saturday – the Saturday of a Fourth of July Weekend – I had just about all 4 lanes of the road to myself. What a contrast from Damascus, just 45 miles to the southeast, where traffic was almost in a gridlock. Everywhere were smiling families on bikes out for a ride on the Creeper Trail, and teenage kids with backpacks going out for a day or two on the Appalachian Trail.

The mountains in Wise County and Washington County look pretty much the same – at least those mountains that haven’t been blasted into rubble like the one from Wise County in the photograph. What makes that 45 miles into a lightyear in every other way is the fact that the mountains in Wise County have coal, while Washington County was blessed with the lack of it.

Washington County is building an economy and an infrastructure around the incredible natural beauty, rich cultural traditions, first-rate music and everything else that part of Virginia has to offer. Wise County, under the overwhelming power of coal companies, has embarked on an entirely different path: flattening the mountains, filling in the streams, and creating a whole bunch of flat land for “economic development.”

I have to admit that I was one of those who never really understood exactly what the World Trade Organization Protests in Seattle were all about, or exactly what “anti-globalization” protesters were protesting. But if what is happening to Wise County can be called “globalization”, I think I understand what all the fuss is about.

Imagine telling the people of New England that we need to level the mountains in which they live so that we can build more shopping malls and more prisons. Imagine telling that to the people of Colorado, or the people of the Coastal range of northern California.

What kind of people would make that choice – to blast the tops of their mountains into rubble, bury their mountain streams with the waste and debris in order to make room for more Wal-Marts and more parking lots.. Who would choose to make their lives a living hell as earth-shaking blasts and earth moving equipment of unimaginable proportions grind away endlessly – day and night – and giant boulders and floods devastate the families, homes and communities living below? Not the local folks of Wise County – it’s pretty clear if you talk to them that they want nothing more than to rein-in the lawlessness and destruction being wrought by the coal companies.

But this is the choice being made in central Appalachia – not by the people who live there –but by the U.S. Government. While it would be easy to blame the hugely powerful coal companies who have written the laws in their own favor and corrupted the political system for more than a century, the fact is that it is our democratically-elected government that, under the Bush Administration, has gone from complicit to a central mover in pushing this monstrous type of globalization onto the people of Appalachia.

We all, my friends, are complicit in the globalization of Appalachia. What are you going to do about it?

They’re at it again in Washington, finding new and better ways to take money from taxpayers (and increasing the federal deficit) to get more money in the hands of hugely wealthy coal and energy companies. According to WYMT out of Lexington:

Senator Jim Bunning says a bill that could give the coal industry a boost is gaining momentum in Washington.
The bill, which Bunning introduced last month, would give financial incentives to companies that invest in a new technology that turns coal into a liquid fuel source.

The technology could be a cleaner way to use coal.

Bunning said he expects the measure to be considered during a Senate hearing later this summer.

I’m still a little confused about all the various coal liquefaction and syn-fuel technologies that are coming up in bills and coal company commercials – does anyone know a good resource that assesses the viability and profitability of this use of coal?

The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported on Thursday that a consortium of power companies, led by Richmond-based Dominion Power, has selected a location for a new “Mouth of the Mine” plant in Wise County. According to the Times Dispatch:

The plant, which would be built on a reclaimed strip mine partially within the town of St. Paul in an area known as Virginia City, could feed electricity to Virginia consumers by 2012.

Congressman Rick Boucher voiced enthusiastic support for the plan, which is estimated to create 75 permanent plant operator jobs in the county. The Times Dispatch also reports:

About 250 coal miners would be needed to supply the 2 million tons of coal that it would burn annually.

Using highly efficient technology, modern pollution controls, and local resources, in addition to providing jobs in a county that badly needs them, this is almost the kind of coal-fired power plant a person could really get behind. Except, of course, for that giant elephant in the room – the coal is coming from mountaintop removal mines that are destroying wells, homes, communities, and lives and threaten to make a big part of the county all but uninhabitable.

Wise County needs jobs, but this is a deal with the devil that could irreparably harm the economic potential and quality of life in one of the most beautiful counties in Virginia.

Of course, the deal looks a lot better if you ignore the fact that they’re blowing up Virginia’s mountains to get at the coal. That is precisely the approach taken by Congressman Boucher who believes, according to his staff, “there is no mountaintop removal in Virginia.”

The following photos were taken last month by Steve Wussow – an intern with Appalachian Voices.

Here’s a photo Steve took of the stream just down from the mine:

Even the staff at the Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy acknowledge that there is mining happening that falls well within the Office of Surface Mining’s (OSM) definition of mountaintop removal. But the efforts of DMME and the coal companies to muddle up the definitions seems to have give Mr. Boucher enough wiggle room to say that there’s simply no mountaintop removal in Virginia.

He should really take a trip to Appalachia, VA, where a toddler by the name of Jeremy Davidson was killed in 2004 when a boulder from a mountaintop removal mine (at least by OSM’s definition) came crashing through the roof of his home in the middle of the night and landed on his bed. At a minimum, he should support the Clean Water Protection Act, which would curtail the biggest types of mountaintop removal mining, which involves fill stream valleys with the waste from the blasting. If the coal companies that support his campaigns aren’t doing it, what’s he got to lose?

Regardless of whether our politicians and government agencies choose to bury their heads in the sand, the fact remains that the coal companies are blasting Virginia’s mountains into rubble to get coal. To add insult to injury, this coal, when it is burned in the new “Mouth of the Mine” plant, will be called “clean coal” because it will be burned with newer technology, which reduces the air pollution caused by burning it.

While that technology is great, and we can all be thankful that the technology is improving, could we ever really call coal that is mined in a manner that destroys homes, communities, mountains and an entire culture clean? The citizens of Wise County deserve better than that.

Those of us who love Virginia’s mountains enough to fight for them have our work cut out for us: this juggernaut may well be impossible to stop. But at least we can use the opportunity to call attention to that giant elephant in southwest Virginia. Whether we call it mountaintop removal, cross-ridge, or modified contour mining, it’s destroying the beauty and the very culture and economic future of southwest Virginia and it has to stop.

Time to get involved, folks – there’s a lot to lose, we’re losing more mountains every day, and there’s not a lot of time to save what’s left.

Well, there’s no longer any doubt – spring has arrive in Lazy Horse Hollow. While leaf-out is far from complete up here in the mountains, every tree has leaves, the trillium are finally in bloom and the water level in the south fork of the New River is back up to canoe-friendly levels.

Unfortunately, the recent rains have turned the river water back to the color of chocolate milk. When the water looks like chocolate milk when it rains, it means there are some serious problems in the watershed. In the case of the south fork of the New River, it’s no mystery as to the cause – the booming development around Boone and Blowing Rock, NC, are putting extraordinary pressure on the watershed. If folks around here don’t know about the National Committee for the New River they ought to follow that link and learn more.

But back to the happier subject of spring in the mountains, the bird life out in the forest is changing by the day. While most of the white-throated sparrows have moved on to the north, it looks like the ruby-throated hummingbirds are back and here to stay – thought I’d write a little about these wonderful birds this week.

Ruby-throated hummingbirds spend their winters in Central and South America and on the Caribbean Islands. It’s hard to imagine these tiny birds migrating such a long distance – across the Gulf of Mexico – which has historically given rise to the myth that they actually “hitch-hike” on the backs of other birds. While this fanciful myth has no grain of truth to it at all, it may actually be more amazing that they can make the trip on their own. At rest, the hummingbird’s heart will beat between 200 and 400 times per minute – imagine what their heart rate must be like when they’re half-way through migrating across the Gulf of Mexico!

The hummingbirds here in Lazy Horse Hollow spend a lot of time at the lilac bush. As many gardeners know, planting red and reddish flowers is an excellent way to attract these nectar-feeding birds to your garden. Hummingbirds are able to feed on flowers because of a unique ability to move their wings in a figure-8 pattern, which is what enables them to hover in one place for a long period of time.

When hummingbirds are breeding, however, they feed on a lot more than flower nectar. Insects and spiders become an important part of females’ diets when they’re producing eggs, and their ability to hover makes it a lot easier for them to pick spiders out of webs. These prey provide the large amounts of lipid (or fats) that go into the yolk and the proteins that go into the albumin (or “egg white” to those who rarely think about eggs except around breakfast time) – nutrients that are scarce in the sugary nectar that these birds mostly feed on other times of year. Hummingbirds will also eat bits of eggshell and even snail shell in order to get enough calcium to produce eggs (the shells of birds’ eggs are made of calcium carbonate, which means they have to eat a lot of calcium to produce a healthy egg).

Other interesting facts about ruby-throated hummingbirds are that they weigh only about 3.1 grams and they maintain an average body temperature of about 107º Fahrenheit. Also, the magnificent metallic red that you see on their throats is what ornithologists call a “structural color.” While we typically think of colors coming from pigments, like the dyes we use to color our clothes, birds can modify the structure of the keratin layers in their feathers to refract light in ways that produce many colors, including the iridescence of hummingbirds.

So get outside in the garden this weekend and enjoy this recent invasion of ruby-throated hummingbirds – they’re only here for four or five months before they return back to the more comfortable temperatures of the tropics. I’ll be back next week with more news of visitors to Lazy Horse Hollow and the rest of these ancient and wonderful mountains we call home.

It’s all dogwood and lilacs this time of year up here in the mountains. We’ve been spending a lot of time sitting on the front porch in Todd, NC, almost watching the buds burst into leaves on the sugar maples and poplar, then the buckeye and beech. Sometimes it gets hard to focus on anything but the eerily beautiful song of the wood thrush echoing through the hollow. Other welcome recent arrivals include the ovenbirds, towhees, red-eyed vireos and least flycatchers.

Folks in the mountains have an interesting name for eastern towhees – “Cha-winks” because of the loud, almost shrieky calls they make from deep inside some shrub or hedge. I always think of them as the “Tea bird,” because of their familiar “Drink your Tea” song that punctuates the pre-dawn stillness of the Appalachian forests.

Since the ornithology class I teach at Appalachian State University has recently come to a welcome, if a little sad, conclusion (I was blessed with a wonderful and engaged class of 16 students this spring) just at the time that many of the migrants are coming back to the mountains for the summer, I thought I’d share with Front Porch Blog readers what some of those calls they’re hearing in the woods are.

“Old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody…”

That mournful song that’s been echoing through the hollows for last week is the song of the white-throated sparrow. Many of the juveniles have not yet got the song down right. Someday they will proudly burst out the distinctive “Old Sam Peabody” song, but during adolescence, the songs are as awkward as the voice of a 12 year old boy. Often they sound a lot like the “I’m so sad,” song of the white-crowned sparrow. With how perfectly beautiful the weather has been, however, the sentiments of the sparrows, whether they’re white throated or white crowned, are far different than my poor phonetics of their song.

“Teacher! Teacher! Teacher!”

I just heard the wildly emphatic “Teacher!” call of the ovenbird for the first time this morning. I’m certain that ovenbirds have been around for a few weeks down on the lower slopes of the Blue Ridge, but today was the first day that this wonderful bird’s song rang out here in Lazy Horse Hollow. Ovenbirds are warblers, like those yellow warblers with the red streaks on their breasts that have recently returned to grace the abandoned fields and marshy areas of the mountains. They get their name from the Dutch oven-like nests they build from leaf litter on the forest floor.

Well, that’s about all the news there is from Lazy Horse Hollow. Have a great weekend and a productive spring – I’ll get back next week with news of more welcome arrivals of our feathered friends from the south.

Those of you who have been involved in the fight to end mountaintop removal for a while will be surprised to learn that we’ve been barking up the wrong tree all along. According to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, reclaimed mountaintop removal sites look a lot like this idyllic little scene that they have posted on their website in which it is quite obvious that the water and forest are in healthy shape and the heavy metal contamination from the mining has been cleaned up to the point that farmers can produce healthy food!

According to ODNR:

Removing the top of the mountain results in a unique opportunity to create relatively flat terrain that is suitable for residential, agricultural, and other development in areas where much of the natural terrain is too steep for any developed economic use.

The ODNR website goes on to give a detailed explanation of what’s happening in this picture:

The flat or very gently rolling area on the right side of the illustration is land reclaimed after a mountaintop removal operation was completed. Many new land uses can be established on reclaimed mountaintop removal mining sites. The illustration shows a mined area reclaimed for agricultural use in the foreground, and for the site of a new village in the background. In the far background to the left of this reclaimed operation, another mountaintop removal operation is underway on an adjacent hilltop.

In contrast to this idyllic view, the Office of Surface Mining is actually weaking the already anemic reclamation standards whereby coal companies spray “reclaimed” sites with some exotic grass seed and move on to the next hilltop. Check out what OSM is up to in the write-up by Front Porch Blog contributor Scot Chandwater.

As astute news-watchers know, a number of Christian evangelicals have recently emerged as leaders in the struggle to get the polluter-friendly politicians running the country to take global warming seriously. Now, a group of polluter-friendly Christian evangelicals have set up a front-group (supposedly an “interfaith” group although the leaders such as James Dobson are all from the Christian right) to counteract this awakening of fellow Christians to the degradation of Creation at the hands of greedy corporations.

The group, the “Interfaith Stewardship Alliance” cynically professes to support care of creation while working to divert attention away from the real problems facing our relationship with the environment, describing the issues of global warming, species loss and overpopulation as “unfounded” and “speculative” – at odds with the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence.

Check out their website here – they have a “contact us” page if you want to let them know how you feel about their polluting and destructive way of “caring for Creation.”