Unconventional Sources

Okay, maybe it’s not just your MP3 player, and maybe it’s not just you, but the American appetite for cheap electricity has indeed destroyed mountains. That’s not a figurative statement.

I Love Mountains logs 470 mountains that have been destroyed through mountaintop coal mining.

In a particularly useful tool for encouraging accountability, the site allows a person to enter in their zip code and see whether their own local power company burns coal from mountaintop removal. Mine – NYSEG – does, at the AES Cayuga coal burning power plant.

That gives me information about how my energy conservation can make a real impact in reducing mountaintop removal, air pollution and global warming.

When we think about how far our society is willing to go in fueling its rollocking good time disposable material culture, this ought to be an icon in everyone’s memory: A mountain gone where once it stood, and the land all around laid to waste. Mountains are supposed to be eternal – at least in the scope of human imagination. Now, they’re regarded as just more resources for corporations to exploit.

This is not a mythological fantasy imagined by Lorax-mimicking tree huggers. It’s a reality, and it’s been documented by a dedicated non-profit organization: Appalachian Voices.

Recently, they’ve teamed up with Oil Change International to produce the database behind the following widget, which you can use to see how much dirty coal money your congressional representative in Washington has taken.

(I find that incoming U.S. Senator from New York Kirsten Gillibrand has taken $1,000 in dirty coal money from Entergy Corporation, for example.)

U.S. Senators and Congressional representatives have accepted $40,404,519 from the coal industry since 2000.
Enter your zipcode to see how dirty your congresspeople are: