Photos from West Virginia

I just got back from Coal River Road in West Virginia. I was taking pictures for my friend Anand Gopal of Leftwords, who's doing a story for Wiretap Magazine on the mining communities out there. It was a fascinating trip and I want to write a bit more about it, but I'm moving house today so I'll content myself with putting up a couple of pictures.



This is Marsh Fork Elementary School, with a coal silo towering over it in the background. We got started because Anand heard from some folks in Philly about this spot. A lot of kids here have been getting sick, either from the coal dust or from the chemicals the company uses to treat the coal. Out of view in the background is 2.8 billion gallons of water full of mine waste, held back by a leaky dam.



This is Anand with Larry Gibson, a local activist, in Kayford, WV. Larry is pointing out a fissure opened up by explosives used in mountaintop removal mining. The mountain we're standing on top of is honeycombed with old mineshafts which are also full of wastewater; a fissure in the right place could flood the valleys and displace thousands of people.



This is what mountaintop removal looks like: the Samples mine in Kayford. The peak of this mountain used to be 700 feet above where we are standing. Towards the right you can see some of the attempts at restoration - native species don't grow back well on the fill from MTR, so they use imported grasses as a covering. You don't get a good sense of the scale from this picture, but if you look at it at full resolution you can just barely see the dumptrucks they use to pour the rock over the side of the mountain; they have tires the size of an SUV. It's also pretty impressive in Google Maps. Google Earth has a recent picture superimposed on out-of-date topographic information, which helps give a sense of how much the area has changed.



This is the memorial to 12 miners who died after being trapped by an explosion in Sago last year. The company had been cutting corners on safety, and locals say they held back a team that was ready to go in and cut these guys out. Mine safety has deteriorated tremendously with the expansion of aggressively nonunion companies like Massey Coal, who also push mountaintop removal.

Hangovers from 2000

I'm only even writing this post because Kim Stanley Robinson has written the best political scifi out there. His best known works are Red Mars and its sequels, which played a big role in my getting political. Plenty of his other works are, if anything, even better. The Three Californias Trilogy (reprinted not long ago) and Years of Rice and Salt are absolutely astonishing, as are some of his less remembered works, like Icehenge and The Memory of Whiteness. He's written a lot of clangers, though.
I've just picked up Kim Stanley Robinson's Fifty Degrees Below (the middle of a trilogy on climate change) again after a break. It has some good parts, but on the whole it's probably his worst book so far. There are plenty of reasons for this, but I'm particularly struck by the asinine politics.

A good deal of it centers around a miracle democratic presidential candidate, Phil Chase, who likes to talk about getting along with the rest of the world, pays attention to what scientists say about global warming and so on; in spite of that, he feels so threatened by a hypothetical independent 'scientific' candidate "polling about five percent in the blue states" in spite of not being on the ballot or even actually existing that the protagonists feel obliged to have it 'withdraw' from the race.

It's one of the best examples of the really bizarre reactions a lot of folks on the left are still having to the 2000 election. Robinson, who is pretty sharp politically, seems to have been so traumatized that he thinks that even an imaginary third party candidate - that is, even the idea that we might be able to do better than what's on the official menu - needs a sort of ritual exorcism.

Of course, we shouldn't forget that real democratic nominees are nowhere near as attractive as Phil Chase, but that every four years millions of people try to convince themselves that they are. Before Al Gore reinvented himself last year as a born-again environmentalist, he had worked hard to kneecap the Kyoto protocol - something that I think a lot of Nader voters knew or suspected in 2000.

This is part of the reason that, in spite of some reservations, I'm still glad I campaigned for Nader in 2000 and voted for him in 2004. There is a big problem with the political culture in the US, and one small but important part of it is that so many of the people who should be trying to do something about it are too pessimistic to even think seriously about it.

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Incidentally, there was an excellent piece by Garret Keizer in this month's Harper's to do with Al Gore and the politics of global warming. Among the many interesting points, he suggested that global warming could be a good counterpart to the "war on terror" in keeping people from thinking about everything else that's going on. That's an interesting way of looking at what's happened to Robinson.

I've been quiet for a while...

I've just started posting again after something of a hiatus. I've been having some health problems over the last few months - nothing serious, but it's been keeping me from stringing more than a couple of words together. Hopefully I'm through the worst of it now, and I'm agonizing over a couple of more long-winded articles.

Incidentally, I've been listening more or less continuously from the soundtrack to Children of Men, which is just as awesome as everything else about the movie. Kode9 and Spaceape are especially amazing, and I finally found out that I kind of like John Lennon.

Some observations on the Left in the French elections

Glancing over the exit polls from the first round of the French presidential election, I noticed a few interesting comparisons with the results from last time around.

I'm including the Communist Party and the Greens as well as the Trots and José Bové in these counts.Perhaps not surprisingly given what happened in 2002, the far left (broadly defined) went down from 19% of the vote to 15%, and generally the centrist parties did significantly better. More interesting is the relative performance of the groups.

The LCR's Oliver Besancenot was the only one to hold steady, at about 4.3%; in 2002 that put him 8th, after the Greens and Arlette Laguilier of Lutte Ouvrière; this time 4th with as many votes as the Greens and Arlette put together.

The "Non collectives" were the main organization of the "Non de Gauche", the campaign against the proposed EU constitution of 2005. They later reinvented themselves as "antiliberal collectives" and subsequently as "the Popular and Anti-Liberal Left". Apparently the Communist Party managed to maneuver itself into a controlling position in the network over the last several months. José Bové did remarkably poorly, perhaps because of his decision to spurn the "antiliberal collectives". He came 3rd to last, ahead of only the Hunting and Fishing Party and the tiny Lambertiste Parti des Travailleurs. Marie-George Buffet of the Communist Party - which from the'40s to the '70s could count on 20% of the vote - got only 2%. This was a third lower than in 2002, even though she was officially the candidate of the former Non de Gauche.

On the whole this seems to reflect rather favorably on the LCR, and particularly on the perspective the LCR majority adopted leading up to the election. I have to admit that I was rather skeptical, but events seem to have proven them right.

Support our soccer players

I read recently that sales of those magnetic "support our troops" ribbons you see on SUVs have collapsed since last year. It looks like someone is getting desperate to get rid of them.