Environmental Discourse

Was just speaking with a friend about Al Gore's acclaimed documentary *An Inconvenient Truth,* and bitching about the film's shortcomings. As most of you know, the issue of mountaintop removal coal mining is very important to me. I consider it the greatest environmental injustice of our time, and I wish more people would care about it as much as I. In this film , Al Gore didn't mention MTR a single time. The closest he came was when he off-handedly said something to the effect: "and now instead of shovels, we have huge draglines " that delve into the earth to extract engergy etc etc. It was purposely vague, but some of us, including WV Sierra Club rep, Bill Price, noted that he was referring to MTR without explicitly talking about it. Incidentally, a dragline is a huge piece of machinery (sometimes called Big John) that scoops up coal from recently blown up mountaintops.

Herein lies a big problem with some environmentalists. It seems that in the public discourse about global warming, most people only want to talk about environmental problems from an emissions standpoint. I suppose this makes sense, to a certain extent, because much of environmental discourse is focused on global warming, C02 emissions etc etc. But we also need to be aware of the production of engery, on the shop floor, if you will. Most environmentalists don't want to talk about the extraction of energy sources, like coal, and what this does to nearby communities, and how this contributes to our current environmental mess. We have to start talking not only about emissions, or consumption, but also production if we are really serious about saving the planet.

joyce