Mountain Justice Blacksburg

A public screen of Mucked with guest speaker Jack Spadaro.

Coal field residents tell their own story from the July 8, 2001 flash floods.  As we search for the causes of the floods where entire communities were swept away, we see devastation of the environment by mountaintop removal coal mining and steep slope timbering.

Mine safety and health and environmental specialist Jack Spadaro has a 39 year career safeguarding people from environmental and safety hazards related to mining.  He continues to serve as an expert witness and consultant in environmental and mine health and safety litigation.

Torgerson 3100, Thursday, April 2, 7pm

This event is free and open to the public.

Learn about extraction, processing, combustion, and waste disposal.  Hear accounts of directly affected communities, climate activism, and more.

Tuesday, April 7, 7:00pm, Squires 236.

The Beehive Design Collective is coming to Blacksburg!

Understanding the devastation of Mountaintop Removal is perhaps primarily a visual undertaking – the vastness of the altered landscape cannot be conveyed with words alone. And while the Beehive Collective is known for graphics that speak in pictures across the cultural and language barriers of North and South Americas, it is our hope through this campaign to use our image-based storytelling methods to cross domestic class, geographical, and literacy barriers very close to home. We intend to produce a learning tool that artfully captures the human and ecological scale of totalitarian resource extraction while reinforcing and participating in the rich storytelling tradition of Appalachia.

Come see the Beehive on Monday, March 23 at 7:30pm in Whittemore 300 on the Virginia Tech campus.

The Clean Water Protection Act was introduced on the House floor yesterday.  Reps. Frank Pallone (D-NJ-06), Dave Reichert (R-WA-08), and John Yarmouth (D-KY-03) introduced the bill this morning with 117 bi-partisan co-sponsors, more than double the number of original co-sponsors from the 110th Congress!

The Clean Water Protection Act restores the integrity of the landmark 1977 legislation, The Clean Water Act, which was enacted by Congress to “restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters.” For 25 years, the Clean Water Act (CWA) allowed for the granting of permits to place “fill material” into waters of the United States, provided that the primary purpose of the “filling” was not for waste disposal. As such, the CWA prohibited mountaintop removal operations from using the nation’s waterways as waste disposal sites. That changed in 2002, when the Army Corps of Engineers, under the direction of the Bush administration and without congressional approval, altered its longstanding definition of “fill material” to include mining waste. This change, which the CWPA would reverse, accelerated the devastating practice of mountaintop removal coal mining and the destruction of more than 1,200 miles of Appalachian streams.

As part of the cutting edge blogging community that joined the iLoveMountains.org Blogger’s Challenge, we need your help to spread the word to the rest of the world!  Your posts are crucial to building the public awareness that will ultimately win the fight to end mountaintop removal coal mining.

For more information on the CWPA including a current list of co-sponsors and links to other online coverage of this issue go to:
http://www.iLoveMountains.org/news
http://www.ilovemountains.org/action/write_your_rep/