Hannah Feldman
Blog Post 5

I have stumbled across a reason for strip mining, why companies thought it was a reasonable way to mine. Robert F. Kennedy Jr wrote an article on his father’s fight against strip mining, and it gives a bit of history on the situation. It starts with unions. In the sixties, there “were 114,000 unionized mine workers in West Virginia digging coal from tunnels and supporting the families and communities of Appalachia. Today, there are less than 11,000 miners in West Virginia taking the same amount of coal and only a fraction of them are unionized because the strip industry isn’t.” Strip mining requires heavy machinery that can do the work of many men. With more machines, fewer workers – union workers – were needed to mine the land. Non-union labor is cheaper, and having fewer workers to pay is cheaper, and companies certainly like a profit.

The initial reason for this practice to be thought up is explained as well: “The mining industry debuted strip mining in the 1940s in the Western States, to extract coal seams that lay a few feet below the surface and therefore inaccessible through traditional tunnel mining. To extract the wealth, all you needed was a bulldozer.” They were only thinking of immediate return, with no eye towards the future of the land.

Well, here’s the future:

The most shocking statistic I have read is from the same site. Strip miners set off 3,000 pounds of dynamite A DAY in West Virginia. Added up, it is the size of the Hiroshima bomb each week. The US Department of Energy estimates that 70,000 people died from the initial blast (Source ). Buildings were destroyed; everything was destroyed. If that’s how much one bomb did, and to humans and buildings, imagine the effects of one of those each week on the trees and natural elements.

Photo credit: Kent Kessinger

Hannah Feldman
Blog Post 4

Coal is dirty. Now, I’m assuming we all know that, as coal is black and leaves coal powder on your hand if you touch it.  But what, then, is “clean coal”? I’m not about to rail on the dangers of coal and why we should just plain stop using it as an energy source, because we as a nation can’t just stop cold turkey.

My point: “More than 60 percent of all coal mined in the United States today, in fact, comes from strip mines.” This comes from an article in the Washington Post . “Millions of acres across 36 states have been dynamited, torn and churned into bits by strip mining in the last 150 years.” Is it because the coal companies couldn’t think of a better way to mine coal? Maybe. At least now there are other options.

Hopefully people will buy into alternate energy sources. My father’s house and synagogue are powered by wind energy, an option offered by PECO. My father reports that wind power (as opposed to whatever energy source is normal) costs him five extra dollars a month. That is it.

I cannot think of any real downfalls of wind energy. Taking the sleeper train from Philadelphia to Chicago, we passed through West Virginia. On top of many lovely mountains, we saw wind turbines. One argument I have heard against wind power is that the turbines mar the landscape. I have to disagree. I think they look nice. They’re tall and majestic. Also, I know they produce a fraction of the greenhouse gases of other energy sources, and that makes me like them even more.

I strongly encourage you to read the rest of the article. It is informative and scary. More later.

Hannah Feldman
Reflection 2

I am falling behind. Just putting that out there. In other news: It is beginning to feel like I have made a case already, and I’m sounding repetitive. There is so much information out there, but when I think about what to write for a post, I don’t want to write what I’m thinking, because it sounds the same as what I’ve already said.

The change agent. My one main concern in deciding on one is not preaching to the choir (Sorry for the cliché. I happen to dislike that one, but I used it anyway.). I don’t want to give my elevator pitch to, say, Appalachian Voices, because they don’t need to hear it. They said it first. So, I am thinking about perhaps tackling PECO. According to ilovemountains.org, they provide energy gained from mountaintop removal, so I would most definitely not be preaching to the devotees.

On the bright side: I am really excited to make the elevator pitch. I love commercials, and I cannot wait to make what is essentially a commercial. I want to make a video similar to the one we were shown in class about the situation in the Congo . It was direct, it presented the situation in black and white (literally and figuratively), and it was polished. It is still an awesome project.

I am in the process of reading A Walk in the Woods, by Bill Bryson . It has many statistics and useful information that I can use in my writing (Thank you Patrick Higgins Jr ).

I will put out my next blog posts hopefully extremely soon (Where has all my self discipline gone?) and until then I will be holed up somewhere reading the book!

Hannah Feldman
Post 3

Coal is already generating protestors because it is nonrenewable, but what not many people know is how coal is mined. Strip mining, a type of surface mining, is one method coal companies use to extract coal from the land. Strip mining is basically razing the vegetation in an area, then drilling holes and blowing up the ground, and then actually mining the coal, as described by Thinkquest . At times, whole mountaintops are simply blown off to reach the coal. Why? Well, according to iLovemountains.org , “Coal companies in Appalachia are increasingly using this method because it allows for almost complete recovery of coal seams while reducing the number of workers required to a fraction of what conventional methods require.” Verifying that, Appalachian Voices says, “although coal production rose 32 percent between 1987 and 1997, mining jobs dropped by 29 percent over the same period.” So, it’s cheaper. Well, coal mining companies may lose a bit of money, but everyone loses the oxygen those trees produced, and simply the beautiful views and landscapes they provided. Over 450 mountains have been destroyed in Appalachia so far, and there are myriad more surface mining permits granted for the area.

There are laws in place to regulate strip mining, but they are not well enforced. “While reclamation efforts such as stabilization and revegetation are required for mountaintop removal sites, in practice, state agencies that regulate mining are generous with granting waivers to coal companies. Most sites receive little more than a spraying of exotic grass seed” says ilovemountains.org. Mountains are not just grass. What about the forests that used to thrive? Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither do forests grow back in a day, especially not hardwoods. According to PBS , “300,000 acres of hardwood forest in West Virginia have been destroyed by mountaintop removal mining.” West Virginia is the Mountain State, and hopefully it stays that way. I also strongly encourage you to go here and see your connection to this disastrous practice.

Note: Hold on tight, topic is shifting! The reason I chose the topic of deforestation in the beginning was because I remembered an article I read a year ago in the Philadelphia Inquirer about deforestation and how Pennsylvania is one of the better states in reforestation efforts. So, I guess I should have realized that PA doesn’t really need help! However, in my research, I have stumbled upon the problems outlined above in Appalachia, and have decided to focus on the negative effects of strip mining and mountaintop removal.

Blog Post 2: The Amazon Rainforest

Hannah Feldman

As I was reading an article from Forbes on Amazonian deforestation, two statistics jumped out at me. First, the article states that burning and other forms of deforestation have “claimed an average 8,000 square miles - an area the size of Israel or New Jersey - each year of the past decade.” That’s the size of a small country. That’s a lot. Farther along, it states that “Deforestation - both the burning and rotting of wood in the Amazon - already releases an estimated 400 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, accounting for up to 80 percent of Brazil's greenhouse gases.” When I asked my friend, who does quite a bit of research along environmental lines, for an idea of how much that is, she said, “Wow. That’s a lot.” I believe her. Almost all of Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions come from the destruction of the Amazon. I see no reason for that. Why destroy the Amazon, this amazingly huge and beautiful rainforest? Well, the only website I found as to that is this. In that page, it states that the Amazon is just a big waste of space. While that site may be a joke, burning the entire Amazon would definitely not leave people laughing. According to the Forbes article referenced above, if the entire Amazon were to be burned, it would release an estimated total of about 100 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere, which is roughly equal to ten years of the total global emissions. That couldn’t possibly help the current environment status.

An article from the BBC states that “almost a fifth of the entire Amazon has now been cleared.” I have no idea what to say about that. It’s insane. According to this site, there are over 200 indigenous tribes residing in the Amazon, and virtually each tribe speaks a different language. Those languages will be lost with the forest, as will the cultures of all of the tribes. That’s a lot to lose, and there’s a whole lot more loss where that came from. The list would go on for miles.

When I first sat down to read through all of my information on the Amazon, I was not expecting these numbers. I have never been a “Save the Rainforest!” person, if ‘types’ exist, but it’s making a little more sense now. One-fifth of the Amazon is gone. Twenty percent of the largest rainforest in the world is destroyed.

 The next question that pops into my mind is why. Why is the forest getting burned? According to here, the reason is profit. It says that the two main businesses causing harm to the rainforest are agriculture and cattle. “Both activities need land to prosper and [since] all other regions in Brazil are already saturated, there is no place for new crops or more cattle.” 

Here is one organization helping. Luckily for us there are many more as well.

Blog Post 1

Hannah Feldman 

To start off, what is deforestation? Why should anyone care? Well, I will start with forests. Forests are important for a number of reasons. They provide a habitat for a multitude of flora and fauna. According to Jocelyn Rochen, tropical rainforests alone provide for the habitat of 50 to 90% of all organisms (site here). She also says “Trees are what cool and regulate the earth’s climate in conjunction with other such valuable services as preventing erosion, landslides, and making the most infertile soil rich with life.” According to the World Rainforest Movement, 25% of medicines come from rainforests. Now, take those trees away, and a lot is lost. Deforestation is “A non-temporary change of land use from forest to other land use or depletion of forest crown cover to less than 10 percent,” as per this site. In layman’s terms, that means that deforestation is when a forest is razed permanently, never to be a forest again. Unfortunately, many countries are losing their forests. Looking at this graph, it can be seen that most countries with tropical forest coverage have lost at least some of that area. 

And yes, that is bad. No trees is equal to no home for many species, which could drive them to extinction. Also, with so many new drugs coming out, where will pharmaceutical companies get their material? We could lose out on a new groundbreaking drug for high cholesterol or ED! Okay, so not discovering the next painkiller might not harm anyone, but not discovering a drug for AIDS or, even, cancer, would cause harm. But, that is another issue. Back to trees. 

As a self-professed treehugger, I may be a bit biased. I like trees. I think they are nice. I would love them even if they did not do all of the awesome stuff said above. They’re extremely photogenic. But, it’s good to remember that they do do everything listed above. They hold in soil so other plant life can grow. They provide shade on a hot day. They provide food for caterpillars. They are a home for monkeys. They are so much. And yet, we raze entire forests. This is a problem. Luckily, there is much people can do. Stay tuned!