Hannah Feldman
Blog Post 8

I think it has been well established that coal mining is not all that great for the environment. Coal waste gets dumped in creeks and other water bodies, even though there are currently laws against doing just that. There is a reason for those laws: people drink that water.

A recent study published last Tuesday “found more lung cancer deaths, overall hospitalizations and overall deaths in coal-producing counties compared to other parts of the region and to the nation as a whole” (The Charleston Gazette ). Adjusted for smoking and other factors, the numbers were still higher than normal. A major reason for all of the sickness and deaths is the water. Coal waste contaminates Appalachian water. It makes it smell bad, according to the little girl in the video below, and it can tarnish a penny in mere minutes.

Coal waste is a general term. Here’s what it means: when coal is mined, it is not pure. Rock is mined along with the coal, and there are other substances in there as well. Coal companies “wash” the coal with water and chemicals to separate just the coal from the rock and other materials. They then take the coal and sell it. But, they’re left with a huge amount of waste. Coal waste is a mix of rock, water, and highly toxic chemicals such Aniline, Benzidine, Pyrene, and many others that I can’t even begin to pronounce (Sludge Safety Project ).

People are drinking toxic waste.

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Hannah Feldman
Reflective Post 4

There is still quite a bit that needs to get done for this project. The list piles up. One downfall of having the project broken down into pieces is backlog. When I fell behind on blog posts, I then fell behind on subsequent assignments, because I was working on the posts instead of the newer assignments. The other option would be to just forge ahead with the new assignments, but with that the original late piece would be forgotten and never get done.

A combination of both is what happened to make me behind. At first, when my elevator pitch was first late, I focused on finishing that and therefore ignored the other deadlines coming up. Then, I realized I needed to do those. So, I started catching up with the blog posts (no, I’m not fully caught up with those) and the elevator pitch was put lower on the to-do list.

On top of all that, there are the technical difficulties. I am making an iMovie for my elevator pitch, and I have video clips that I would like to incorporate into it, but whatever format they are in isn’t compatible with iMovie, and I have no idea what formats are and how to change the format. I really want my pitch to be professional and effective, and I’m not willing to compromise on that.

Change agent: I know who I want. I hope they respond. PECO is a powerful company that can easily help with my issue, and I hope they listen.

Hannah Feldman
Blog Post 7

I have been reading A Walk in the Woods, as you may know, and while Bill Bryson, the author, tries not to inject too many facts and science, there is quite a bit of information. However, I am not going to talk about those parts of the book in this entry.

This entry is for nature.

Nature, the natural world, is what we humans are from. Much as we may attempt to distance ourselves from nature with fiberglass and concrete, without it we would cease to exist. Sorprendo a la naturaleza (Just to add some interdisciplinary learning – sorprender is a Spanish vocab word this week!).

I marvel at nature. Have you ever stood in the middle of the woods and just looked up at the trees? It is humbling.

I had the privilege to attend an elementary school with a wonderful program – once a week each grade went out to a Girl Scout camp in the woods for the whole day. In the younger grades, we mostly just ran around and made forts and had loads of fun. However, we also learned about the plants we saw, and took time to appreciate the natural setting that was so different from our own urban environment.

I will always remember the hours I spent sitting by a creek, shaded by tall stately trees, writing poetry about the sheer beauty of my surroundings.

We need to slow down and appreciate the splendor of nature. I know I need to remember this so as to remember why I care about this topic. No issue is devoid of emotion, and every so often we all need to remind ourselves why we care.

Photo Credit: denis collette on Flickr

Hannah Feldman
Reflective Post 3

Boom! I’m starting my elevator pitch with a bang – but you’ll have to wait to see it! That is due this Friday, but I am going away tonight, so it will get done after that. I know what I want to do for it. It’s just a matter of figuring out the technical difficulties and just plain getting it done. Spring break is going to be a work week.

I will be finishing A Walk in the Woods on the plane, and that will be the material for posts 7 and 8, due up by the end of next week. Thankfully, I caught up with post 4, and finished posts 5 and 6 – all on time! They were a bit short, but I continue to learn more about my issue and what people are doing. I included pictures in my last two posts. At first, to my untrained city eye, it looks fine, just a nice prairie or something? But upon closer examination, you start to notice how bare the landscape is, and how this area is flat and brown amid the green mountains. It’s quite a contrast.

I feel the spacing of this project has been wonderful. In some projects in other subjects, we are given the assignment and the final due date, and expected to pace ourselves out. I am a procrastinator. This approach does not work well for me. Having multiple due dates and the project broken down into parts has helped me immensely with not getting overwhelmed by the workload. It’s probably teaching me how to space myself out so when I get a project that isn’t sectioned, I can help myself out and structure it so. It’s going well, and it’s definitely going, so keep reading!

Hannah Feldman
Blog Post 6

The Clean Water Act, a law to regulate detrimental practices to bodies of water, was amended in 2002 to allow mine waste to “fill in streams for development and other purposes.” Now, the US Office of Surface Mining (which, apparently, exists) has proposed more changes to the Act. According to the New York Times, these new regulations would only serve to legalize mountaintop removal mining. Their article, Ravaging Appalachia , from last August, blasts politicians for continually attempting to condone this horrendous form of mining.

And apparently it’s not enough that hundreds of mountains have been obliterated. Now coal companies want to destroy streams. As per the article, 1200 miles of streams have been buried under mine debris, known as ‘spoil.’ To compare, that the same length as Florida’s entire coastline (Source ).

Having coal mines in such close proximity to streams and other water sources has many negative effects. Drinking water in West Virginia can be brown, and it is dangerous to drink, as shown in the trailer for the documentary, Burning the Future: Coal in America. West Virginia is a poor state, and people there cannot afford to buy something else to drink. These people are dying from coal mines without even going in one.

Photo credit: cindy47452 on Flickr 

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.