Painting, painting, painting! Amidst all of the chaos that comes with painting a house as a group we've all become closer. We talk to people we don’t normally talk to, we're making new friends, new alliances, collecting new ideas and experiences.
Yesterday it rained, and as anyone who might know something about painting, you can't paint in the rain, so we all went to Beckley and visited a mine. After driving the 20 mile trip in our caravan of white vans, we all piled into a modified mine car equipped with handrails and cushioned seating. As we descended into a rather uninviting cold hole in the ground, I noticed electric lights running the length of the tunnel through solid rock, a luxury miners wouldn't have had while they made their wages of 2 dollars per day. Instead they used kettle pot lights or calcium carbide lights to see their way as much as five miles underneath the surface. Down at the bottom of the tunnel we could see the 18-inch coal seam which people would have dug before this particular mine was made a museum. Miners would crawl on their shoulders and pick and shovel and blast the coal out of this small space, all the while listening for "Fire in the hole" and watching for large petrified tree stumps called kettle bottoms. It was a dangerous job to say the least. It still is. But our country still needs coal, so someone's got to dig it.
Before I got to West Virginia, I thought that people only went down in mines to dig for coal. I didn’t know what coal seams, mountaintop removal, or strip mining was. Mountaintop removal and strip mining really hurts the environment. Basically what they do is take the tops, like several thousand cubic feet of rock and coal and debris, and remove all the coal and dump the rest into valleys. This "fill" drastically changes the ecology of the area and whole waterways have been diverted by this practice. Another problem with mountaintop removal is that it unearths elements buried under the mountain that would be harmless in small concentrations and puts large amounts of them in the waterways and then all around wherever the water goes. Selenium is one of those elements. It is fine in small concentrations, but toxic to animals and to humans in large quantities. Currently there are a few pieces of legislation and mandates going through various authorities to help stop or limit the amount of selenium coal companies should be allowed to dump into nearby waterways, but we all know how slow these things go through the system.
One of the solutions I've thought of for myself is to just conserve energy. We wouldn’t need coal if we used alternative energy resources. But then again, all those miners who are lucky to have work would be out of the job and perhaps poverty would get even worse here. It's a tough conundrum.
Rebecca Colson '11
Between totally abandoning coal as an energy source, and the status quo, there are compromises possible, too--coal companies could work harder on environmental & safety conditions and consumers could reduce energy use. In fact, if coal pricing included more environmental and safety considerations, more consumers might try to conserve.
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