The Last Mountain

Appalachia: hillbilly country, coal country, mountaintop removal country. Massey vs. The People of Appalachia replaces the mythic antagonisms of Hatfields and McCoys. i can't review this film because i haven't seen it, but based on these clips and the extensive, informative interview with Robert Kennedy, Jr. and The Last Mountain film director Bill Haney, my instinctive critical eye tells me it's a film worth watching. A close friend and eco-warrior comrade of mine has been in and out of jail/court for a few years now for getting in the way of Massey Energy, and i know that promoting this film is right now the best thing i can do to support those efforts.

NB: West Virginia is hardly the only place in the world where mountaintop removal is being executed. Gold mining companies are engaging in this on many islands and most continents; it's also become de rigueur for other precious metal ventures. While distinguishable from open pit (UK: open cast) mines only in that some of the mountain is left behind to serve as walls for the massive, contaminated water-filled pits left behind, as far as i'm aware, there is little difference in the final devastation, i.e. long-term environmental impact. Coal Country has a list of documentaries which address mountaintop removal and mining, generally; this report by Oxfam and Earthworks looks primarily at the impacts of gold mining - it's disturbingly global in its scope. If you're thinking about what you can do to challenge these megaprofiteering monster companies, No Dirty Gold offers some ideas.

Jadugoda: The disgusting underbelly of India's nuclear industry

Paid a visit yesterday to our planetary caretaker friends over at Intercontinental Cry and have since spent every possible online moment educating myself about India’s uranium and nuclear power industries. Crazed and wanton don’t even begin to cover it. Uranium mining is consistently written off as a necessary evil by nuclear energy advocates, including some among the ‘Stop Climate Change’ crowd, who are evidently willing to sacrifice anything in the interests of clean air and predictable weather patterns. Don’t get me wrong, i care about air quality, extreme weather, desertification, etc. as much as any environmentalist, but i don’t believe nuclear power is the solution, in large part because of the actual power source, which is not some monolithic, theoretically earthquake-proof reactor, but uranium ore, mined on a massive scale, generating a lethal legacy to which ‘long-term’ doesn’t do justice.

Jadugoda has been referred to as ‘India’s Navajo Nation’, which under any other circumstances would be considered a great compliment, given the incredible beauty of Navajo lands. Located in the eastern state of Jharkhand, it has a 40+ year history of uranium mining and levels of contamination and negative health effects that reflect this. While it may be true that Jharkhand is an ‘environmentally friendly state [that] has lots of tourism potential. Whether you like pristine nature or the thrill of adventure, whether you are on a religious introspection, or health rejuvenation, Jharkhand can enchant your senses,’ with an estimated 48,000 tonnes of uranium ore in its bedrock, it seems fair to say that enchantment will require some strategic touring, a lengthy list of areas to avoid.

The problems at Jadugoda detailed in a 2010 WISE-Uranium report include displaced persons, political repression of displaced persons, a long, on-going history of labor union strikes, repeated pipeline bursts and tailings spills, health crises and lack of responsible government oversight. Given that the Uranium Corporation of India Ltd. (UCIL) is a public sector holding of India’s Department of Atomic Energy (DEA), the level of government complicity in ignoring and/or denying the problems at all of the country’s uranium mines is hardly a shock. It’s important to note that UCIL not only operates 6 mines in Jharkhand, but also has ore processing plants there to leach the ore and then mill the uranium for use in nuclear reactors. A public hearing is being held today to discuss UCIL's plans to extend the life of the Jadugoda mine, and while one wants to hope said extension will be denied, the overall picture of India’s nuclear ambitions leads this writer to expect otherwise.

The Jharkhandi Organization Against Radiation (JOAR) has been staging protests locally and at UCIL hearings for many years now, in addition to conducting their own environmental and health monitoring activities. The film Buddha weeps in Jadugoda offers an in-depth look at what they have been faced with and is full of personal testimonies that certainly rival the horrific experiences of those still suffering from the Bhopal catastrophe. . In one segment of the film, a Deputy Manager of a mill is speaking to a group of local villagers and, after explaining how there will be little uranium left in the waste stream, he has the audacity to make the situation sound almost poetic:

yes, the harmful dust may fly over you

but it is as safe as the sand in the river

but do not worry

we are here to protect you

the energy rays that come out will not reach your homes

it will become gas and go up

without harming you in any way

i'm convinced people gets these kinds of managerial jobs not because they're good managers or engineers, but because they get high marks when it comes to treating others with arrogance, hubris and outright idiocy. Here is part 4 of the film, focusing on the health problems people have been facing. Indian Doctors For Peace And Development published a study in 2007, Black Magic of Uranium at Jadugoda, which documents these at several villages near mining sites. They found that 4.5% mothers reported congenital birth defects, while nearly 10% report death of infants due to congenital defects. Higher rates of sterility and cancers affect the indigenous people disproportionately.

Reading about situations like this always leads me to ask about motivation; in this case, what is driving India to produce so much uranium. i found a very informative slide show put together by UCIL, reflecting such bold ambitions for India’s nuclear power program that one can’t help but wonder if these folks have been drinking the contaminated village water. The country has a 3 stage nuke power program that includes Pressurized Heavy Water Reactors, Boiling Water Reactors, Faster Breeder Reactors and Thorium-based reactors; they are also planning to construct 2 VVERs (Russian designed). The projected power potentials (in megawatts) go from 10,000 MWe in Stage One (PHWRs), to 530,000 MWe in Stage Two (Fast Breeder Reactors), to POWER POTENTIAL IS VERY LARGE in Stage Three (Thorium Based Reactors). Surely and under the circumstances, ‘very large’ is an inadequate, fantasy caliber assessment for long-term energy output. If AREVA or TEPCO came out with that, you know the stockholders would just laugh them out of the boardroom. At any rate, India’s DEA has big plans for a so-called clean energy future, but like all grande national plans, ironies abound.

In addition to the irony of devastating environment and health with more and bigger uranium mines in order to ‘go clean’, the country will still need to import uranium and this they are having trouble doing because of their refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT). In 2008, Kevin Rudd got the Australian government to veto selling uranium to India until it signed the NPT, and since then, other countries have joined the ban against uranium sales to New Delhi. According to The Australian, ‘Depletion of its uranium reserves caused India's production of nuclear power to fall last decade. Its 19 nuclear plants produce only 4 per cent of its electricity, but that level is expected to doubled over the next 25 years as new plants are commissioned.’ The irony, of course, is that the purpose of the NPT was to promote ‘peaceful’ i.e. energy, applications of nuclear materials, yet even though India needs the energy more than it needs a few hundred nuclear warheads, they are sacrificing the former out of principle (i suppose) to possess the latter. Never fear, a solution is at hand. Bloomberg reported earlier this month that Nuclear Power Corp. of India is considering a venture with state-run UCIL to start buying mines overseas. Maybe they’ll move into Navajo country, wouldn’t that be ironic to the extreme?

There are few issues as pressing as energy in this century, because its ripple effects are so strong. JOAR and its peer organizations at uranium mines around the world may not have all the answers, though my guess is that they are probably more concerned than the rest of us when it comes to finding a way forward for energy and climate that incorporates values of environmental justice and sustainability into the broader equation. Uranium mining runs counter to those values, and no matter how clean and advantageous the nuclear power lobby makes those reactors look, there is no escaping what lies underneath them, no way around the damage inflicted by uranium mining. I, for one, do not want to see a group of congenitally damaged descendants who live atop tailing sites left carrying the ball after the last reactor is shut down, cracked apart or washed away in a tsunami.

Circling in on the Arctic Circle

Denmark is laying claim to the North Pole. i asked myself why a country would do that and what ownership of the pole would mean - for Denmark and the rest of the world. One can't imagine that this is somehow related to cornering the seasonal market on elves and reindeer. Nor does it seem that the costs of administering new territory of such strategic importance would be offset by pocketing fees from the annual North Pole Marathon. The magnetic dip pole is moving about 40 miles/year towards Russia, which, among other things, is causing enormous problems for the aviation infrastructure; surely Denmark does not want to have to subsidize yet more renovations at Heathrow, et al. or suddenly find a fleet of Russia submarines calling Danish territory 'home'. Obviously, the Danes' motivation must lay elsewhere.

An article at European Geostrategy last week states that of the five High Arctic States (Russia, United States, Canada, Norway and Denmark/Greenland), 'All but Denmark have... explicitly identified the Arctic as a key part of their national energy security policies. ' This same piece cites a USGS study that 'suggests that thirty percent of the estimated ninety billion barrels of oil and twenty-eight percent of the 1667 trillion cubic meters of gas fall into zones (beyond the continental shelf of a given state) that are... currently contested.' Of course. Arctic oil and gas - i should have known that immediately. Evidently though, the geostrategists spoke too soon, because Denmark is now incorporating annexation of the North Pole territory into its official Danish-Greenlandic-Faroese policy objectives for the coming decade.

It's plausible that Denmark's policy might be coming from a desire to support the Greenlanders' development strategies, rather than risk Greenland becoming fully independent and thereby no longer giving Denmark preferential access to its energy resources or military bases. Well, there i've gone and contradicted my own supposition: no altruism here. Backing the policies of Greenland's current administration must certainly contravene an array of Danish environmental and wildlife protection policies; at the very least, extracting more fossil fuels does not fit with its ambitious 2020 goals for greenhouse gas reduction. Contravention, however, is what right wing governments generally do best.

The Nuuk Declaration, just signed on 12 May 2011 by 10 participating states of the Arctic Council (the aforementioned five, plus Finland, Sweden, the Faroe Islands and Iceland), reads very nicely from environmental, indigenous rights and food security standpoints, but intent and action are forever at odds in such international memoranda. It's hard to envision how more oil and gas exploration are compatible with 'developing best practices in the prevention of marine oil pollution', just as it is unclear how indigenous rights are to be secured when no indigenous nations were included in the council's negotiations. Greenland is giving Cairn Energy - or perhaps Capricon, its 'nonlisted subsidiary' (whatever that means) - licenses for exploratory drilling over 102,000 square kilometers off Greenland's coast. The company posted $1.6 billion in revenues for last year and has major operations in India, Albania and Spain. As of yet, there don't appear to have been any mishaps in their Arctic operations, but the Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico hadn't had a troublesome history either, until it exploded. If the terms of the declaration are ever realized, then at least whichever country is responsible for the next big Arctic oil slick won't be alone in trying to (unsuccessfully) make it go away.

Back to the North Pole. Claims are apparently to be presented to the UN for a June 2014 decision, so if this matter is of interest/concern to anyone, you've got time to try and influence the outcome. The best place to start, i would think, is finding out what the policy of your own government is on the issue of releasing international territories into the exclusive hands of a single nation. The NOAA has a webcam on the true pole, so if you're ever curious about what's going on up there, this link should give you a direct line to the march of penguins, slaughter of seals, planting of national flags or whatever else happens to be in temporal focus. The cloud from Iceland's latest volcanic eruption seems to be moving in the opposite direction, so if you can't sleep and want a taste of White Night, now's your chance - before Denmark pulls the plug.

Good luck with that

Obama has 'demanded' that Israel pull back to its 1967 borders. How bold and innovative the president has become since catching the US' archenemy last month. Bravo! Predictably, Netanyahu's first response is that 'Israel could never withdraw to borders that were "indefensible"'. Given Israeli activity on its borders last week, in which none of its own citizens were injured but plenty of others were, it's hard to grasp how much more defensibility they need. This may be especially true on the Syrian border, where they could just pull their units back from Golan and set them up on lawn chairs to watch Galilee sunsets with one eye and Syria with the other.

At any rate, i do wish Obama the best of luck negotiating with a state which, aside from setting terms of weapons sales agreements, has historically rejected the entire concept of negotiations. As long as the dollars keep pouring in, why should they do otherwise? The EU has embraced the same type of relationship with Israel, 'demanding' it end the occupation of Palestine (that would mean retreating to the same borders Obama cited), while concurrently pursuing further integration of Israel into the EU's economy and vice versa. The BDS movement on both sides of the Atlantic will hardly make a dent in these massive coffers, though i wouldn't say that makes it a wasted, pointless effort. The problem remains that in spite of all the international rhetoric inicating otherwise, Israel always gets what it wants and does what it wants, the intransigent state extraordinaire with a tightly knit entourage of G20 enablers.

Well, that was prescient

The Project for Excellence in Journalism at the Pew Research Center released a report last week that looks at how people in the United States access and use internet news sites. An overview of the results is here, with links to detailed analyses by topic. Among these – here’s where my own little blog turns out to be prescient: ‘Drudge Report: Small Operation, Large Influence’.

As Jim Carr of the NY Times writes: ‘Yes, Mr. Drudge is a conservative ideologue whose site also serves as a crib sheet for the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity… [The Drudge Report] is, in its own way, a kind of utility, with stable traffic of about 12 million to 14 million unique visitors every month no matter what kind of news is breaking. Everyone goes there because, well, everyone else goes there. ‘ Considering there are over 300 million people in the US, there is relief in knowing that only 5% use Drudge as a guide to what they read; what did surprise me is that the sites most Drudge users are driven to are Yahoo News, MSNBC and CNN, respectively. i suppose i expected more reactionary linkages, but that probably just reflects my own view of those sites as bland, part of the general cerebral meltdown. They should all just follow The Onion's lead and say outright, "Telling you what we want you to know."

Honestly, i’m not on a mission to keep people away from The Drudge Report. It is what it is. The links there statistically come quite close to what people are driven to from Facebook – as least in the US. i think what this shows overall is that when people want to read and recommend news, they shoot from the hip. We all want exposure to lots of stuff without knowing a great deal about any of it - the nature of the information overload beast. A couple of decades ago, i killed my television. By contrast, i treat my laptop as something close to holy… yet we must remain ever vigilant. At the risk of ending up in Lars von Triers 2^nd class coach to purgatory, i’m reminded of Adolf Hitler’s remark that ‘all propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach.' The issue isn’t so much the propaganda as it is the quality of the audience.

Where's my weekly dose of soma?

Yesterday i was woken by a phone call - way too early for a Sunday morning, might add - one of my students, screaming into my ear, 'We won! We won!' What the f*ck?? 'Eurovision! Azerbaijan won!!!' i'm thinking to myself, 'ask me now if i care,' yet ever the polite foreign guest, i did my best to feign interest - even enthusiasm - understanding immediately why the city's noise level was totally off the charts (yes, pun intended) last night, cringing at the realization that the coming week is going to meet all my criteria for cultural hell.

i do love thinking about ministers arguing over dismantling Schengen while the rest of Europe and its wannabe masses are fussing over dance costumes. Something of a Huxleyian brilliance in that, no? Out and about in the afternoon, i noticed that the urban wildlife was also frantically running around like - well, like rats, which is what they were. A second poignant vision, almost too much metaphor for someone who didn't get enough sleep.

Anticipating that Eurovision will be THE number one topic in all my classes this week, i dutifully checked out the Guardian UK's contest blog and then immediately wished i hadn't.

Our hosts for the evening are Anka, who is wearing a red dress like a 70s shagpile rug and a over-tight ponytail; Judith, who is wearing Bacofoil and doing the French bits, and a man called Stefan who is the actual Swedish Chef off the Muppets. He is talking about TV vankings. I hope these are rankings.

Ah, there's nothing like a bit of set-piece intro comedy, is there? Lena can't perform last year's winning song, Satellite, because she is also competing this evening, so Stefan and Anke are performing a rockabilly version.

Imagine how bad that could possibly be, and then multiply it by about 7 MILLION.

They have no been joined by 43 Lena lookalikes waving the flags of Europe. And now the actual Lena, doing the final chorus. And a full swing band. And many, many, fireworks.

My head hurts.

i stopped there cuz my head hurt, too. This is just NOT something i'm ever going to care about. Over on facebook, i'm inundated with Nakhba news and Israel's IDF shooting at people on all their borders. You want bright lights and meaningful crooning? Here's my eurovision antidote.

Drudging up the Drudge

Blogspot went down and my two most recent posts have returned to draft status = the graphics ‎remain but all the text has vanished. Bummer. Evidently they are still restoring files, so maybe my ‎work will magically reappear... lesson learned: do the writing elsewhere, so it can be saved on the hard ‎drive. Duh. It is very difficult to rewrite something that's already been edited and then tweaked per ‎literary light bulb. Norman Mailer said that writing 2 good pages a day was an admirable achievement ‎and i'm fairly certain that by 'good', he didn't mean 'easily regurgitated'. True, i'm a far, far cry from ‎Mailer, but that only makes it harder to put the words together again.‎

i guess cuz i was angry about the blog and needed to redirect, or maybe because the atmosphere at my workplace has been rapidly degenerating as closing of the school draws near - for whatever reason, i wandered over to Drudge Report... some things don't ever change... he's still putting out some bizarre, disturbing stuff. Instantly reminded why i've avoided the site for so long, i.e. since about 9/12/2001. Checking it today – well, at least he’s consistent. "Boy rides out storm in dryer" relates the true story of a kid's survival during recent Oklahoma tornado. News of the weird, fair enough. "Mitch would pick Condi as VP" turns out to be totally misleading, since the entire 3 page article is about Mitch Daniel's wife and their rocky marriage; Condi Rice is mentioned only once, in the very last line. i'm sure Matt Drudge would love to see her stalking liberal scum in the White House corridors again, but as far as headlines go, this is pure political trash. Shall i continue? Ok, one more. Walt Disney MegaCorp has trademarked the Seal Team 6 of capture-the-bad-guy fame and is planning to come out with ‘clothing, footwear, headwear, toys, games and “entertainment and education services,” among other things.’ Great. i hope they trademark Mossad next, big profits in Beirut for sure. Thanks Mr. Drudge for keeping us abreast of Disney’s latest money hungry effrontery.

Granted, Drudge is basically a clipping service for people who want to overdigest their slovenly portions of sensationalist ‘news’, so it may be unfair to lash out criticism – they’re just linking to stuff other news agencies are publishing. Nonetheless, i won’t be going there again for another decade, at least. It did take my mind off the blogspot problem,though, which is ultimately the higher purpose being served.

BTW, i was surprised to see that Facebook went ahead on their/its own accord and set up a page for this blog on Networked Blogs. If you happen to read this via FB, please consider adding yourself as a follower. If you're reading directly from blogspot, you could still list yourself. i'm all alone here, it would make me feel better, inspired to keep at it... i know lurking is usually more fun and all, but i'm asking nicely, so do it! :-)

Sorry, it's $27 million

Thought i was being too cynical yesterday? i think this goes to show that i have not lost my capitalist instincts.

We're all powerless here, except for the prez

The first time it happened was about a week after i'd moved into my flat, about 2-1/2 weeks after arriving in Baku. A not too terribly cold night, i'd taken a rambling, roundabout route home, soaking up the sights, sounds and odors of residential night life. When i got to my own street, i suddenly realized it was VERY dark; not dark as in there's no moonlight, but rather urban darkness, as in there's no electricity. My local butcher was conducting business by candlelight, other shops were using kerosene lanterns... clearly, this was not an unusual occurrence. Up four slights of stairs in total darkness - spooky but adrenalizing - when i entered the flat and looked out the balcony window, all i could do was laugh. Business owners and bars on my little side street were depending on paraffin stocks, but in the zone of City Hall, no voltage is spared to maintain Baku's image as a beacon of light shining on the shores of the Caspian's fossil fuel fortune.

i can't say that i hadn't been warned Azerbaijan has 'utility issues' and for the next few weeks, Wednesdays were my neighborhood power outage day. Other people i know here have either much less regularity or normalized daily shutdowns (no water from 9:00-17:00 every day of the week), so i was actually feeling somewhat blessed by the predictability of what was, overall, a relatively benign situation. However, i also realized on that first evening that loss of power means loss of water, because the water pumps installed to solve the low water pressure problem in apartment buildings here run on electricity. Without the pump, not a drop to drink. While that first night was kind of third world romantic-like, with the candles, 3 layers of clothing and Book I of The Iliad ('He sat himself down away from the ships with a face as dark as night, and his silver bow rang death as he shot his arrow in the midst of them'), being able to turn on the gas stove to make coffee is a moot amenity when there's no water to fill the pot. By the time i'd gotten it together to go out and buy some bottled water, the power had been restored.

The other day, i came home in the afternoon to have a job interview on skype and of course, even though it was Thursday, there wasn't any electricity. Total karmic no go zone. This time it was because Baku Electric had turned the switch off - that's what i get for trusting a new and now ex office manager with both my money and functionality. No warning notice - i guess they figure that people already know they haven't paid, so why bother to waste paper reminding them? Two days without water and electric, working 12-hour stints, is not really conducive to achieving my low stress objectives. My school was on the second day of phone lines being down, hence no internet access... i've omitted here my mid-winter crisis of going 10 days without water when the electrical workers refitting my building cut the line to my pump, but you get the general picture. The concept of having control over one's basic needs gets rather abstract; people have private cisterns and tanks, keep lots of batteries and candles on hand, but there are neither sympathetic comraderies nor complaints. This is just how life is, we are all at the mercy of inept, faceless forces and errant urban planning.

On the bright side, last month i found this notice stuck in the door, loosely translated for me as the president of the republic has decided to be gracious and relieve everyone from having to pay the water bill for a month. If an azeri speaker happens to read this post and is willing to give a more exact translation, have at it. i've always assumed there had to be some benefit(s) to living in a benevolent big D, and i guess this is one of them. An omnipotent leader can mimic the IMF and just make all our debts go away. Wow! When has a US prez ever done that for the working man? Not in my lifetime. It's comforting to know that at least one person is in control of the utility situation, with no Enron equivalents to muck things up. Maybe next month, we'll get free wifi? With all the moaning going on over royalty these days, i think people are missing the bigger picture. There's something to be said for having a national sugar daddy, someone with the means to just wash all our power struggles away.

So who gets the $25 million reward?

Breaking news. Ding dong, the sheikh is dead. i just love it when they get the bad guy. i'm listening to MSN's live feed and Dick Gregory has Richard Engel on the line to tell us that this means the war on terror is over, democracies can now blossom freely throughout the Middle East and we can all feel safe once again. What a relief! i know that i am definitely going to sleep better tonight and i'm sure the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan feel the same.

Of course, they could never have brought him in alive - that was probably a standing mandate from the W Dick administration, intent on covering their own tracks (background sounds of champagne corks popping and ribs sizzling in Crawford). It does look like we'll get a public viewing of the corpse, which is bound to incite an endless stream of fascinating conspiracy rants from Alex Jones proving that the same people who dressed up "Osama's" body for the cameras faked the moon landing back in 1969. Maybe he'll go on display at the WTC memorial site? That would be a sure way to shut the Obama-is-a-compulsive-liar birthers up.

Don't get me wrong, i'm not shedding any tears for this guy. Generally speaking, i don't have any positive things to say about men like bin Laden. That's exactly why i'm still asking why Cheney, Rumsfield, Wolfowitz and Bush are still at large. If they're going to hunt down war criminals, shouldn't they go for the whole gang?