On Monday, April 5, an explosion in West Virginia’s Upper Big Branch mine killed over 25 workers in the industry’s most deadly disaster since 1984. This tragedy is not the first incident to reveal that Massey Energy, the company that owns the underground quarry, may not be adhering to safety protocols. The company has been cited for 3007 safety violations since 1995, with 516 violations occurring in 2009 alone, according to the Mine Safety and Health Administration. Although Massey Energy is contesting about one third of these violations, the stark reality is that coal miners face dangers inherent to the coal mining process every time they go to work.
In addition, many of these coal workers don’t have the opportunities to work anywhere else. West Virginia has the third-lowest per capita GDP in the United States, and, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, a meager 17 percent of adults possess Bachelor’s Degrees. These factors, in addition to coal’s abundance throughout West Virginia, contribute to the attractiveness of working in a mine, as a person with no college degree is limited mostly to jobs that require manual labor. The phenomenon of limited employment opportunities for poor workers is a global one, and contributes to environmentally destructive practices.
In 2008, “60 Minutes” reported that companies sent electronic waste, or e-waste, to China to be disposed of more cheaply (and more toxically). Run by gangs, the e-waste dumps in the city of Guiyu hire destitute local villagers in need of employment. Unfortunately, this e-waste contains lead, cadmium, mercury, chromium, and PVCs, and these chemicals are extracted using outdated and unsafe methods, with workers often inhaling the hazardous byproducts. This extraction process contributes to the fact that Guiyu has the “highest levels of cancer-causing dioxins in the world, pregnancies being six times more likely to end in miscarriage, and seven out of 10 kids containing too much lead in their blood,” according to the CBS report.
In a one-hour documentary on “Planet Green in 2010,” investigators found evidence of Taiwanese companies based in poor Central American towns plundering the oceans for shark fins. “Shark finning” involves capturing the shark, cutting off its fins, and discarding the maimed body to drown on the ocean floor. Its death can sometimes be drawn out for multiple days.
Coal miners, e-waste handlers, and shark finners all contribute to the degradation of the environment. Who is to blame? Are workers, the lowest men on the corporate totem pole, truly responsible for these environmental injustices? Aggressive environmental groups and writers carelessly throw around phrases and mantras suggesting that yes, it is their fault.
On the website of Planet Green, the same organization that exposed the barbaric practices of “shark finning,” one reporter states that “shark finning has long been illegal but it hasn’t necessarily stopped among a good population of fisherman who find shark fin soup a tasty treat.”
Shark fin soups cost over $100 a bowl. Demand stems primarily from the economic ascension of the Chinese middle class, which utilizes shark fin soup as an emblem of wealth at weddings and other social gatherings. To allege that a modest fisherman from Central America could afford a bowl of shark fin soup is laughable.
Similarly misguided in their lan guage are environmental organizations that broadcast the chant: “If you have a soul, put an end to coal.” I know this chant because I participated in a rally for the environmental group 350 (you can watch the video of this rally at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g8TzKihOvg). Surely, many miners would like to maintain coal’s dominance in the United States’ energy policy, as is exemplified by the pro-coal group Coal Mining: Our Future. As an environmentalist, I do not possess the gall to announce to a coal miner that he is soulless, which is why I stopped chanting the slogan.
Coal miners are not evil nor are they soulless. They are (no matter what environmentalists chant) people like you and me, trying to make a living. In fact, some of these workers may be just as opposed to their practices as environmentalists are, but cannot express such thoughts openly for fear of losing their jobs.
That being said, the workers are the ones doing physical harming to the earth, and so it is easy to direct anger concerning the destruction of an ecosystem toward these them. When watching the video of the shark fisherman slicing off the fins of a shark, I had to look away from the television screen, sick to my stomach at the image of the helpless shark being robbed of its own body, then sinking, tragically peaceful, into the ocean depths.
However, it is important to resist these initial reactions in order to recognize the real offenders, who are mucher farther up in the corporate hierarchy. In the case of the e-waste dump, it is the gangsters that are attempting to hide illegal polluting activities. Let’s move higher: it is the CEO of Massey Energy, whose company, according to a former employee interviewed by the Richmond Times-Dispatch, “wanted production more than they wanted safety, myself… they speak safety first, but production’s really first for them.”
Yet, even higher on the business ladder than the CEO is the body that the CEO works for: the general public. The Chinese people are the ultimate drivers of shark fin soup demand. When they demand it, there will always be a CEO to buy boats, regional managers to hire workers, and poor people to perform the hard labor.
However, pure consumer demand isn’t always the only reason for the perpetuation of unsafe environmental practices. Don Blankenship, the CEO of Massey Energy, makes it nearly impossible to establish alternative energy sources by furthering the claim that coal mining is the only practical energy source. In a memo to his managers, Blankenship wrote the following: “If any of you have been asked by your group presidents, your supervisors, engineers or anyone else to do anything other than run coal . . . you need to ignore them and run coal. This memo is necessary only because we seem not to understand that the coal pays the bills.”
You can’t pit paying the bills against living in the Stone Age. What you can do is search for ways to pay the bills using energy sources that are ultimately more economically and environmentally sustainable than coal mining. For example, the Coal River Mountain Wind project proposes an alternative to a mountaintop coal mine: a wind farm. Its website asserts that an increase in property tax revenue, sustained jobs (wind turbines have a vastly greater life span compared to coal deposits), and recreational opportunities can provide greater economic gains compared with leveling the mountain for its coal. This leveling, consequently, would eliminate the economic impetus for creating a wind farm since it would drastically reduce the wind potential of the farm.
The night of the Upper Big Branch mine explosion, President Obama announced that the federal government “stands ready to offer whatever assistance is needed” in the rescue effort. The best thing the President can do to rescue future generations of coal miners is to provide a workable alternative to destructive processes such as coal mining in West Virginia, unsustainable fishing, and e-waste processing.
When a Chinese e-waste worker was asked why he doesn’t give up his dangerous job, the worker told him, “I have thought of it” but that he keeps it “because the money’s good.” As Jim Puckett, one of the investigators in the “60 Minutes” investigation, aptly pointed out: “Well, desperate people will do desperate things. But we should never put them in that situation. You know, it’s a hell of a choice between poverty and poison. We should never make people make that choice.”
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