I stood behind the table watching the young girl study the images. Her long dirty-blonde hair glistened in the sun and swayed in the chilly breeze. She must have been around eleven or twelve. She spoke softly to her younger brother. He was about seven or eight but you could see his young [...]
A March 8 post in “Grounded,” The State Journal’s energy blog, vice president of the West Virginia Coal Association, and notorious funny man, Chris Hamilton was quoted saying that some West Virginia delegates might not know “the difference between a dragline and a drag queen.” He made these remarks at a recent coal industry conference [...]
2 p.m. update: HR2579 has passed in the House. An identical bill, SB 472, will be considered by the Senate. Please call your senators to tell them not to support SB 472. HR2579 is being fast tracked in the West Virginia House of Delegates under the guise of “stream protection,” when in fact this bill [...]
The New York Times reported that Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said, “Economic growth is what is going to make mountaintop removal palatable.” Since becoming a West Virginia public figure Manchin has been the state’s mouthpiece for the coal industry, shouting from the flattened mountaintops the praises of the industry. When a lie is big, one [...]
Empowering ourselves on an issue in today’s noisy world requires work. I have been addressing mountaintop removal strip mining (MTR) since 1998, and am convinced the next two years are very important in bringing this issue out of our comfort zone and just as firmly into national consciousness as possible. We’ve been terribly nice in [...]
Several OVEC members and staff are heading to Washington D.C. for the largest climate rally in history, happening this Sunday, February 17. If you can’t join us in person, please join the rally online. Hashtags in use for the rally include #forwardonclimate, #f17. With your tweets please include #(your zip code), so we get a [...]
The Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OVEC) applauds the sponsors of the Appalachian Community Health Emergency Act, H.R. 526, (ACHE) just introduced into Congress and supports the ACHE campaign. After nearly two decades of organizing citizens to oppose this brutal mining technique and after reviewing all the published, peer-reviewed studies, it is clear not only that [...]
OVEC’s Vivian Stockman and I took a tour of the beautiful, new Marsh Fork Elementary School during the open house January 4, and on January 18 a formal dedication was held. Not surprisingly, the media left out much of the back story. And politicians like Senator Joe Manchin didn’t utter a peep about all the [...]
A guest blog from Al Justice, from War, WV Al says: I am encouraging everyone who gives a rat’s tail to begin a personal letter writing campaign in every direction possible. Attached below is my first letter to the Whitehouse. We’ve squandered four years with only limited success. We ‘have’ to be more relentless than [...]
The State Journal has listed the news regarding the groundbreaking November settlement between OVEC and others groups, and Patriot Coal as one of the top ten news stories of 2012. Patriot agreed to phase out large-scale surface mining (mountaintop removal) beginning with a series of drastic annual tonnage reductions on their surface mined coal. The [...]