According to the editors, “There is work to be done, and Americans have no time for the smug complacency to which the antics of Earth First and Greenpeace entice them.” Click here for their opinion. Fayetteville Observer

Texas Court First to Restrict Regulation of Waterbodies in Light of Recent Supreme Court Ruling

According to court documents, the Environmental Protection Agency argued that discharges of oil into intermittent streams are not “exempt” from the Clean Water Act even if the streams were not flowing at the time of the spill. Chevron countered that EPA has no jurisdiction over a discharge into dry waterways.

Judge Cummings based his opinion on Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s recently unveiled “significant nexus” test for determining Clean Water Act jurisdiction over intermittent streams.

Jusitce Kennedy explained his reasoning as follows: “A ‘mere hydrologic connection’ should not be enough to establish a significant nexus in all cases, but rather the test should be based on whether an environmental impact within an individual stream ‘significantly’ affects traditionally navigable waters.”

Judge Cummings, relying on Justice Kennedy’s jurisdictional blueprint, held that “as a matter of law in this circuit, the connection of generally dry channels and creek beds will not suffice to create a ‘significant nexus’ to a navigable water simply because one feeds into the next during the rare times of actual flow,”

“While he prevented the Court from reversing the traditional reach of the Clean Water Act, Justice Kennedy’s opinion will create confusion into the foreseeable future,” said Scott Gollwitzer, Staff Attorney with Appalachian Voices. “Until the Army Corps of Engineers clarifies what constitutes a ‘significant nexus,’ we’ll have to live with these disappointing case-by-case jurisdictional determinations.”

Although I am not a native of WV, I love this place and its people.  West Virginians are hard working, modest people who unfortunately sell themselves and their state’s resources short.   What follows is a saga of selling out a football game to the Coal Companies, without a competitive bidding process.  This is the story of how the intrastate football rivalry became “The Friends of Coal Bowl.” While the story probably won’t make the national wire, it is an important illustration of the power of the big energy companies.  It will be a long hard road to cleaning up American politics, energy and the environment, because we sell out so cheap every time.WV loves its football, and it has two University Football Programs that have produced some remarkable teams, coaches, individual players and an astonishing loyal fan base: West Virginia University Mountaineers and the Marshall University Thundering Herd. We live in small towns in a rural state, and football is both big time entertainment and an economic boom for these towns.

West Virginia University in Morgantown had a great run last year: number 3 in the nation, with an upset 38-35 victory in the Nokia Sugar Bowl in Atlanta against the heavily favored Georgia team with the home-field advantage.   This football game was played out against the national news coverage of the Sago Mine Disaster- Governor Joe Manchin left Georgia and missed the game to return to the state to personally manage the crisis response.  I have never been so proud of a team- they just wouldn’t give up.  Last year they had some of the most amazing come-back victories and they are poised to have another great year.   WVU has had some other fantastic teams, including 1993 and 1988, but 2005 team won the big bowl game, so they were really greatest WVU team ever.

Marshall University in Huntington is perhaps best known for its football, both for an incredible tragedy and a remarkable comeback.  In 1970, bad instrument settings and a rainy November night led to a deadly plane crash into the mountains surrounding the TriState Airport.  

75 people perished in the plane crash: 37 players, 12 coaches and university staff members, 5 crew members and 21 townspeople who were big fans and flew on the chartered team plane.   This crash remains the single largest sports-related disaster in U. S. history.   Tragically, 70 minor children lost one parent, and 18 children lost both parents.  The town of Huntington and Marshall University were devastated by the loss- no one was untouched.  I recommend reading the heart wrenching article “Its Always With You” on the aftermath in the community.   It is written by Huntington native and  Marshall graduate Julia Keller, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 and is a three-hanky read.

Astonishingly, Marshall put together a football team for the 1971 season, that came to be known as “The Young Thundering Herd”.   There were walk-ons, freshmen, and a few players who had missed the plane.   On the 30th anniversary of the crash, local documentary filmmakers made a film shown on lots of PBS stations called “From Ashes to Glory” which told the moving story of the come-back.  Keith Morehouse, a local sportscaster, wrote in a review of this film:

“There was talk within the community to forget about football, the memories too tough to handle, the games too tough to win. But Marshall pressed on, hiring Jack Lengyel from Wooster College in Ohio, to lead the Young Thundering Herd. The football season was a painful one in 1971 – loss after loss and the whispers followed. Could Marshall ever win another football game? That question was answered when the Young Thundering Herd—comprised of walk-ons, and freshman, and others who had no business playing college football—beat Xavier 15-13 on a last second touchdown pass. The players exalted on the field, the fans cried in the stands. Marshall football had withstood a devastating tragedy and resurrected itself.”

Keith’s father was a sportscaster too, and died in the plane crash.  There is a Warner Brothers film named after the school’s cheer “We Are…Marshall” being made of this story. It will premier this December in Huntington.  It was filmed on campus with many local people cast as extras and lots of local scenes.  

Marshall has gone on to some remarkable victories and has climbed to NCAA Division IA after its national championship 1992 season in NCAA Division IIA where they were a powerhouse. In 1996 they had an undefeated season and one of the best NCAA IIA teams ever.  They were the football team with the most wins in the 1990s, and they have produced some great players in the NFL today: Randy Moss, Chad Pennington, Byron Leftwich, and now Darius Watts.  Coach Bobby Pruett was a former Marshall player who recently retired with a remarkable 94-and-23 win-loss record.

As in all states with two football programs, there has been some interest in getting the teams together for an annual game.  Florida/Florida State; Kansas University/Kansas State: These are some great games.  

WVU has resisted for years, citing financial reasons.  WVU has a huge stadium, holding 65,000 (roughly twice the size of Morgantown).  Marshall has a smaller stadium, holding 38,000.  That’s a lot fewer tickets to sell to pay for athletic programs.  Marshall has done well nationally by getting ESPN coverage. In the 2000s Marshall had some excellent Bowl games, two players nominated for the Heismann Trophy, and last year joined Conference USA.  In Huntington, Marshall fans insinuated that WVU was afraid to play Marshall, since Marshall might win.  Marshall has really turned up the gas in the basketball rivalry game, which plays in Charleston on neutral ground and beat a WVU team with a better record the last two outings.

When Governor Joe Manchin ran in 2004, word on the street was that as a WVU grad (and a huge football fan) he would favor funding for WVU over Marshall.  There was even a more Marshall friendly Democratic primary candidate vs. a WVU friendly candidate.  Manchin made one of his first priorities setting up the Marshall University/WVU game and leaned hard on WVU to deliver the game.  This was an extremely popular decision.

Under terms of the agreement for the seven-game series, Marshall will visit Morgantown’s Mountaineer Field at Milan Puskar Stadium in 2006, 2008, 2011 and 2012 while WVU will visit Huntington’s Joan C. Edwards Stadium in 2007 and 2010. The host school for a 2009 match up will be the winner of two of the first three games in the series.

 link

Everyone knows the game will be popular and even much watched on television.  Both teams are playing for bragging rights, and either team could win.  Anyone with half an ounce of creativity could predict this game will be called “The Coal Bowl” since that is the product WV is best known for.  Should be a great game, right?  A football fan like me should be happy.  But….

It will have a sour taste for me and many other West Virginians this year.  The power brokers in the state just gave a no-bid award to “The Friends of Coal” to sponsor “the Friends of Coal Bowl.”

And what does Governor Manchin have to say about this?

“I am so pleased that a sponsor like Friends of Coal has now stepped up to take this game to a level of national prominence similar to the great in-state rivalries of such schools as Florida-Florida State, Alabama-Auburn and Clemson-South Carolina,” West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin said.

How much did this cost?   Roughly 1 million dollars for 7 years which the two schools will split.  

That is $140,000 each of the first two years, then 5 percent more — $147,000 — during years three through five, and an additional 5 percent, or $154,350, in years six and seven.

 Roughly $75,000 per school per year.  A drop in the bucket compared to the number of times “Friends of Coal” will be said on the national airwaves for 7 years.  Right now, it is definitely a national ESPN game- WVU is picked to be a top 5 team and Marshall is always a good ESPN draw- they are the little team that could.  A mini Green Bay among major college teams and a sentimental favorite.  Plus, there will be a huge tie in to marketing the up-coming movie.  

What does “Friends of Coal” get for all this?

A game logo that features the Friends of Coal emblem and helmets representing both universities’ football teams was also unveiled. The contest was named the Friends of Coal Bowl in honor of the more-than-50,000-member grassroots organization that supports state’s coal industry

In other words, a constant barrage of publicity in the state and around the country, especially this year when the Coal Industry looks exceptionally greedy and uncaring.  Why were they interested?  The Charleston Daily Mail reports:

“Shortly after Gov. Joe Manchin announced in May 2005 that the schools would play the series, the coal association called to express interest in naming rights, Parsons said.

“They are the ideal sponsor,” Parsons said. “They represent one of the leading industries in the state. Many of their members are supporters of both schools already. It is an opportunity to enhance their image in the state.”

Yes, an opportunity to enhance their reputation- and sell out West Virginia for very little.  Others weren’t given the opportunity to bid on the deal- not the huge power companies or prosperous banks.  These folks just figure a million dollars was a good deal for buying some helmet logos.  And did the state get the best sponsorship deal possible?  After all, we are a poor state- we should shop our intra-state football game and get the best deal at least.  Nope.  We went right to the coal people- or else we just smiled and signed on when they waved a million dollars in our face.  

Denise Giardina is a local novelist who has written some excellent historical novels about life in the coalfields of West Virginia.  Her local alma mater, West Virginia Weslyan writes about her

Her two “Appalachian” novels, Storming Heaven and The Unquiet Earth, are critical of the power of the coal companies (and the politicians who empowered them) and lift up the struggles of the miners for union recognition and human rights as a kind of holy war — a fight to reclaim the inheritance of a people from those who have conquered and degraded it.

Ms. Giardinia is a politically active progressive, and ran for Governor on the Mountain Party as a third party candidate in 2000

She feels passionately about mountaintop removal.  
She wrote a moving Letter to the Editor in the Charleston Daily Mail yesterday which I have excerpted heavily because the link won’t stay active long.

Shame on both schools for allowing this, and shame on the Daily Mail for a promotional front-page headline when an article reporting crime would be more appropriate.

It would be wonderful to have a Coal Miners’ Bowl to memorialize our miners past and present. But the Friends of Coal are the folks responsible for those mining deaths over the decades.

And what they will have in mind is a “celebration” of mountaintop removal, which is carried out by heavy equipment operators, not coal miners.

Mountaintop removal is an immoral activity that destroys mountains, trees, streams, wildlife and people.
In other words, it destroys West Virginia.

How this horrible destruction of the state can be tied to a football game is beyond me. But it has certainly ruined the game for those who love West Virginia.

Who are The Friends of Coal?  

The Friends of Coal is dedicated to informing and educating West Virginia citizens about the coal industry and its vital role in the state’s future.

Our goal is to provide a united voice for an industry that has been and remains a critical economic contributor to West Virginia.

Yes, they are lobbyists and PR hacks and proud of it.  They are trying to convince the state that coal mining is good for them.  So buying the most popular, most hyped sporting event in the history of the state, on the eve of its best nationally recognized game (great teams, great human interest), well that is some brilliant marketing.  I have to admire the guy who thought this one up.  It is so logical and yet so venial and cheap.

And what is Mountaintop removal?  A blight on our landscape AND on our economy:

This is a picture from the great and sad book “Lost Mountain” by Eric Reese.  

Publisher’s Weekly said of this book:

Reece’s up-close assessment of a rapacious coal industry is a searing indictment of how a country’s energy lust is ravaging the hills and hollows of Appalachia. The first-time author chronicles how, in one year, from October 2003 to September 2004, strip miners sheared away the top of Kentucky’s aptly named Lost Mountain. This process of “mountaintop removal” left a barren wasteland that, months earlier, had supported songbirds, fox, deer and other wildlife, and a rich cover of trees. Reece’s elegiac book–much more than just an eyewitness report on ecological decimation–also offers a concise history of how the coal industry long exploited workers; hints at harrowing tales of industry intimidation of antimining activists; details how toxic mining runoff has poisoned well water and how landslides have washed away homes and entire hamlets; and in a cautiously optimistic coda, reports how activists have reclaimed a few thousand acres of stripped land with reforestation projects. The Kentucky-born author, who canoed clean Appalachian rivers as a youth, has written an impassioned account of a business rife with industrial greed, devious corporate ownership and unenforced environmental laws. It’s also a heartrending account of the rural residents whose lives are being ruined by strip-mining’s relentless, almost unfettered, encroachment.

I haven’t finished the book yet- I keep crying.  I have driven the back roads of Appalachia and seen first hand what the devastation is.  I have traveled from Charleston and Huntington airports and flown over these mines.  Here is what sludge looks like:

You get sludge from washing coal.  It can spill and wipe out all the fish and people, as with the Buffalo Creek Disaster.

Here is what strip mining looks like:

They are creating deserts of coal.  And the coal merchants sold out West Virginia to get Bush elected so he could neglect enforcement of environmental and safety laws on the books.  John Roberts is Supreme Court Justice so the courts will overturn environmental laws that would cause these coal companies to have to remediate after blowing the tops off mountains and plowing the waste into the streams and valleys.  He was a mine company lawyer.  It is everything for the coal barons and nothing for the people who work and live near these mines.  Counties with mines suffer economically!  It is like waiting for Wal-Mart to fix your retail employment problems.  Looks like good salaries for a few, but it destroys everyone ultimately.  

In the words of Colleen Anderson’s song, West Virginia Chose Me.  I moved here 7 years ago this month to take a job teaching in one of these universities (you might guess which one).   I love football and I was excited by the game- which I certainly would watch and maybe try to attend.  Now, I have a bitter taste over this sell-out.  I am disappointed in Governor Manchin and both schools for selling out, and selling out so cheaply.  
I just hope they don’t bring in the Appalachian Power (Local 1A baseball Team) Dancing coal and flames mascot.  That would make me puke. I predict the half-time show will include a tribute to lost miners, and there will be fund-raising for the Sago Mine Disaster families as the throngs enter the stadium. The ultimate in image restoration for the “Friends of Coal”.

Welcome to Appalachia The National Sacrifice Zone and watch them try and make us happy with their clever sports marketing.

Please recommend if you can.  This is a local story that tells us all how hard it will be to fight and win, when it costs so little to buy out our leaders who should know better.  Donate to a local campaign to try to make up in numbers what we can’t make up in $$$ vs. the Bush administration and their economic overlords.

(Jeff Biggers is the award-winning author of The United States of Appalachia: How Southern Mountaineers brought Independence, Culture, and Enlightenment to America. Buy it now…it’s awesome. – jdub)

An Interview with renowned Appalachian poet P.J. Laska

Thirty years ago, visiting Antioch College-Appalachia in the coal fields of Beckley, West Virginia, renowned poet Donald Hall stumbled onto a burgeoning poetry renaissance in the Appalachian South, led by the self-proclaimed Soupbean Poets. Fun, freewheeling poets with an attitude, undauntingly polemic, wonderfully provocative, and informed about their history and conflicts in the mountain region, the Soupbean Poets had emerged on the heels of the Appalachian Identity movement and a reawakening of the area’s longtime tradition of verse. Hall didn’t leave unimpressed; in a subsequent American Poetry Review, he would praise one of the Soupbeans’ main players, P.J. Laska, and his first collection of poems, D.C. Images and Other Poems, published by the Appalachian Press. The praise didn’t go unnoticed; Laska’s volume became a remarkable National Book Award finalist, losing out to John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.

A lot has happened to Appalachia, the world of poetry, and P.J. Laska in those three decades. Now back in Beckley, having retired after traveling and working around the world, Laska finds himself one of the last practitioners of an ancient tradition: the poet-philosopher. He is currently at work on a new collection of verse, Turning Words: New and Selected Poems, that draws not only from his early experiences in the Soupbean collective but also from his world travels and most recent interest in Eastern philosophy. Raised in the brewing coal camps around Farmington, West Virginia, by coal miners of eastern European ancestry, Laska foretold his outmigration, like that of many Appalachian writers and workers in his generation, in his title poem, “D.C. Images”:

B&O train runs
all night from W. Va.
alumni dance into
Union Station
at 6 a.m.
for the last time
that whole graduating
class has gone
to cities

Author of eight collections of poetry, former editor of The Unrealist, a poetry journal in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Laska has written works that have been alternately described as “bold” and “memorable” and with a “hair-raising comic vitality.” Given the complexity of his occasionally dark, unabashedly political, philosophical, and underground writings, he has been described as an Appalachian Fyodor Dostoyevsky. In fact, he earned a Ph.D. in philosophy, focusing on the works of Kant. Over the past several years, having taught at various universities around the country, he has taught himself Chinese in order to translate Taoist writings. The Bloomsbury Review caught up with Laska at his home in Beckley, West Virginia.

The Bloomsbury Review: The first part of your new collection, The Abbot and Sativa, often unfolds in a series of fascinating musings that conjure an otherworldly image of someone like Thomas Merton sitting at a roadside diner with a modern hipster goddess. Can you talk a little about the art of conversational poetry, and how you decided to incorporate such a form into your latest work?

P.J. Laska: Well, I didn’t know at the outset it would take the form of conversations. I started out working with epigrammatic speech as a way of bringing philosophy into poetry without putting readers to sleep. I had a vague idea of some sort of outrageous e pluribus unum assemblage. I think I was driven to the epigram out of fatigue and dissatisfaction with the lyric monologue. Poems of the poetic self, about the self, were beginning to oppress me—my own as much as the poems of others.
It was dissatisfaction with what wasn’t being said, with what I wasn’t able to get into poems. For a while I thought I had some success with the antilyric, but it was limited to satire, and satire has its own limitations. Anyway, my frustrations came to a head at the close of the nineties, and I had to do something different or give up poetry altogether. So I started trying to suture diverse fragments of
inner speech, the personal shorthand or idiolect we all use in thinking.
That and some found phrases, things I heard people say and things you pick up from print media. Paying close attention to inner speech, you begin to see that a lot of it is brief dialogue that takes up one side and then the other. I noticed that the same thing was happening in my dreams, only
there it appeared as a dialogue with another person. So I began writing down what I recalled of
these brief dream conversations. And it occurred to me that philosophical dialogue had a literary history and might work for philosophical poetry. Without the voices of dialogue, philosophy tends to be dry and abstract. Sometimes even dialogue can’t make it interesting. In my case, I had a man’s and
a woman’s voice and the interest factor of the significant other.
It was a matter of fleshing out the identities and letting the dialectic play out on the verbal stage. Conversational poetry is closer to theater, more so when you begin to connect the conversations in the design of a larger narrative. That also pushes it in the direction of “novel poetry.”

TBR: Over the past several decades, you’ve been involved in leftist poetry circles, such as the Left Curve, and more recently, Taoist philosophy. The Tao admonishes the reader to accept the natural ways of all natural things. In some ways, a leftist like Pablo Neruda echoed this concept, as a poet and lover, in his Love Sonnets: “and the slow habit of natural things/they compose my rustic heart.” How do you see the various strains of politics and Eastern philosophy affecting (conjoining) your work?

PJL: Taoist philosophy is an ancient wisdom tradition that tilts the poetics of any creative effort toward spontaneity and away from design and engineering. It doesn’t dismiss design and engineering. It puts it in its cosmic place by giving it a subordinate role—in philosophy, politics, economics, poetry and every other human endeavor. Neruda does this beautifully in his poetry. I don’t know that he’s echoing the Taoist concept, though. I think cultural relativism leaves open the possibility of separate local or regional transmissions of some common prehistoric naturalism. There’s a passage in Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture in which a Native chief of one of the southwestern tribes explains how this is possible. He said, referring to the many different tribal ways of life, “We drank from the same stream, but our cups were different.” He meant there’s a commonality even in difference. There’s a
diversity of cultural cups, but they all draw their sustenance from a common source. There’s diversity, but there’s also this common unnamed stream. The various cultures name it differently, but in truth it precedes them all and is without a name. This is chapter 1 of the Tao Te Ching. Yet here is the identical thought in the words of a nonliterate Indian sage unfamiliar with that text. So what I would say is that most likely, Taoist wisdom is only one of the lineages transmitting some unnamed prehistoric understanding about nature. Neruda was in touch with the ancient heritage of the people of the Andes, and the naturalism in the line you quoted may have come down from prehistoric cultures of that region. I bought my first translation of the Tao Te Ching in 1962, when I was an undergrad. Now I have more than 20. It’s one of the books I would take to a desert island. Its thought transmits a wisdom that’s both holistic and dynamic. It has impermanence and change as its basic intuition. And this is the same insight we see carried forward in the Ch’an and Zen traditions— impermanence at the heart of everything. Uncle Lao’s response in the Tao Te Ching is that magnifying the importance
of technology and control is not the best way to handle change. Change belongs to the nature of things and has in the end to be adapted to. But standardizing our global response through a monoculture of means that makes us all drink out of the same type of cup makes us less flexible and more vulnerable, not to mention more stressed out. Monoculture runs counter to the natural diversity of the greater global context that we are only a small part of. We humans have been enhancing our position on the planet and making ourselves more comfortable ever since the rise of vertical civilizations founded on power cults. Now our sophisticated technology is about to take enhancement to an entirely new level. You even hear talk of children becoming the product of genetic design and therefore more refined instruments of their parents’ ambitions. The achievements of design cause the older streams of prehistoric wisdom to be dismissed as “primitivist,” and also, in the case of the Tao Te Ching, as “quietistic.” The former objection is ahistorical and therefore meritless, and the latter is a conclusion
you can draw only if you completely miss the point of what is being said. With regard to change, the ancient Taoist wisdom doesn’t have a pat response. The response is tailored to the situation. It’s quietist only in relation to a situation of excessive activity that disrupts or threatens to disrupt global alignment, the very thing that ensures a people’s overall well-being. Faced with the loss of well-being—take for example the current enhancement addictions involving designer pharmaceuticals—the Taoist response is sensible and pragmatic. Reverse course by elevating the values of spontaneity and natural diversity over exclusionary values that monoculture finds easy to manipulate. Our market society runs on exclusionary values, and capitalism is the quintessence of the market strategy of bait and switch, so you can see the revolutionary potential of what the ancient wisdom is saying.
As for poetry that has the value priorities of the Taoist response, I would mention Charles Olson as one of the first American poets to bring forward the importance of global alignment in his poetics. He talked about proceeding without intervention or artifice, so that the poem is not a designer artifact
functioning as a well-oiled machine. Form, the designer element, is a secondary consideration, or as Olson said, an extension of content. Another thing Olson saw is that our writing and thinking are weighed down by meaning structures that are in effect the theoretical baggage of civilizations directed by power elites pressing their advantage through monoculture.
The implication is that genuine creative writing will be inevitably dialectical. It has to contest what it receives and be prepared to toss out the freight that needlessly burdens the poet’s or artist’s native sensibility and insight.

TBR: The second part of your collection offers several poems in senryu form; short, three lines of “human nature.” The Beats are often credited with bringing the haiku and senryu forms into the contemporary American experience. Have you been influenced by fellow poets like Gary Snyder, and can you discuss your experience in Japan and its impact on your work?

PJL: Let me start with your last question. I spent two formative years in Japan and then came back and got immersed in the ferment of the sixties. It was only later that I understood some of the impact Japanese culture had on my thinking and writing. Shortly after I arrived, I encountered the work of
Basho in a Japanese bookstore in a Donald Keene anthology. His translations of “The Narrow Road of Oku” and the “Prose Poem on the Unreal Dwelling” still hold up well. With Basho’s travel poems as a guide I began to see the way poetry and nature are linked in Japanese culture. It’s not just that haiku
and the haikai tradition have this fund of kigo words and phrases that mark or suggest seasonal change. There’s also a spatial aspect having to do with utamakura, places recognized as poetic either because they are landmarks of cultural memory or because they occasion an experience of the sublime.
Many of the places Basho visits in his travel poems are famous utamakura. Growing up in rural West Virginia, I was familiar with such places—waterfalls, cliff formations, mountain vistas, coal mine explosions, Civil War battlefields—but in Japan they were drawn into a rich cultural tradition that made having certain aesthetic feelings of depth in relation to nature and history emotionally and psychologically rewarding, and worthy of poetic effort. This tradition is beneficial to the individual.
To cultivate the experience of awe for the natural environment, for example, you have to slow down, turn off the ignition, and get into a tranquil state of mind. The Taoists say to know what’s natural you have to cultivate tranquillity.
This attitude carried over from Taoism into Zen, and the influence of Zen Buddhism on Japanese aesthetics is profound. I was immediately attracted to the way of Zen, and it had a profound effect on me, not so much zazen, which is the practice of sitting meditation, but later on in my encounter with
the koan. The koan is the Zen equivalent of a deprogramming task. It comes across as an “exercise” only if you fail to complete the task. The object of Zen deprogramming is to correct the identity disorder called self-importance, or ego. To realize that all rankings of the self are cultural distractions from your real identity is a life-altering revelation. This shows up in the arts. Zen feeds the poetic sensibility. Things you overlooked before or tended to ignore take on intensity and can become the subject of haiku. Similarly, things you previously thought were important or imperative take on a comic aspect and may become the subject of senryu.
The haiku form had some popularity in the U.S. before the Beats gave it a boost. But the senryu, which is a brief, haikulike satire and therefore belongs in the tradition of the antilyric, is still, I believe, mostly unknown. Even in modern Japan it doesn’t have anywhere near the popularity it had in the 18th century. The antilyric is what I liked best about the Beats. The antilyric doesn’t fit easily into the “song of the self.” It generates resistance because it sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from “good taste.” That’s where you find the iconoclasm and satire and the poetry that exposes what’s hidden beneath the sanctimony. The Beats did that. Of course they did a lot more. I admire Gary Snyder’s poetry. It helped raise my ecological consciousness. And it was his translations that turned me on to the poems of the great Chinese poetrecluse Han Shan.

TBR: Raised in a West Virginia coal camp, the son of eastern European immigrants, you have often placed your work within the Appalachian context, and took part in several regional and folk poetry revivals in the 1970s. Nearly 25 years ago, you wrote in a paper, “Poetry at the Periphery,” about the possibility of poetry being a bellwether of regionalism and cultural pluralism. Looking back now, do you still see “regionalism offering new possibilities for the renewal of the genuine people’s culture of Appalachia”?

PJL: Well, yes and no. A lot has changed since I wrote that speculative essay. The American economy is more integrated. It is closer to being the “megamachine” that Lewis Mumford railed against in his last books. Regional differences appear less important. Corporations are more powerful. Governments behave like chambers of commerce. With the completion of the interstate highway system, all regions of the country, even mountainous Appalachia, are open to franchises marketing
the products of corporate monoculture. So the core-periphery model has to be rethought. Electronic and print media are everywhere, and except on the Internet they are almost entirely controlled by interests whose goal it is to augment and automate the megamachine. On the other hand, the country’s natural regional variations continue to assert themselves, whether mountain, desert, plains, scrub pine, bayou, or coastal regions. So the potential for bioregionalism is still there, and so is the potential for a renewal of cultural diversity. Culture is not an abstract thing. It resides in individuals who have varying degrees of culture-consciousness. Charles Olson said culture is confidence. And he was right on target. Culture is what you are confident about, what you don’t have to seek outside confirmation for. The potential for a renewal of people’s culture arising out of autonomy and real diversity is still there, but it’s repressed by marketing tools that make us feel inadequate in some way and shake our confidence. It’s no secret that the main reasons for ad campaigns are to manufacture needs and
weaken independent judgment. Then people are more susceptible to commercial and political manipulation. This is how the system works. But it’s shocking when you stop to think how much commercial media time is given over to the artful destruction of people’s self-confidence and self-image, not to mention their attention span. Is it a coincidence that America consumes over 60 percent of the world’s supply of pharmaceuticals, has 11 million teens on Prozac and millions of younger children on Ritalin? I don’t think so.
“Mind-forged manacles,” Blake said. And now they’re reinforced by a technology beyond anything he imagined. It’s not an easy situation to reverse, but it can be reversed if people assert their cultural autonomy. Poetry, music, theater, and now independent film are ways artists and musicians can work for that end, regionally or locally. The true image of Appalachia, for example, is not the hillbilly incest innuendo silkscreened onto an Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt. It’s the symbol of struggle on the T-shirt bearing the name Don West. It’s in the music and in the writing and in the history of the region’s struggle to preserve its strong core values opposed to outside domination and exploitation. Appalachia is a region where people opposed slavery and fought the mine guard system of coal camp peonage. Out of the latter struggle in West Virginia, the UMWA forged the first integrated industrial union and
set the example for the larger union struggles. Today, the land is under assault by a megamachine-enhanced form of stripmining called mountaintop removal, which brings destruction on a scale you have to actually see in order to believe. Where the mountains are threatened, Appalachia itself is under
assault. The word means “endless mountains.” So now renewal of the people’s culture is bound up with the need to protect what makes it possible to have a regional identity. That’s potentially a powerful force for change.

TBR: In one of your last poems in the third part, “Recollection,” you write of a vision in the lonesome woods of a gatekeeper, declaring, “I have no inkling/what is to come.” Having returned to the hollows of West Virginia, do you find your poetic vision has become more reflective, less conflicted, even more accepting of our times?

PJL: “Recollection” is about starting out, where there is always a question of doubt about access, symbolized in that poem by a gatekeeper. It contrasts with a poem of return in the same collection in which there is no gatekeeper and no gate. Or, as the Mumonkan says, it’s a gateless gate, meaning
access is not in doubt, unless our attachment addictions throw up roadblocks and we are complicit in our own disability.
Then access requires that we break away from the programmed spectacle, desert the machine-dream, and recover our confidence for independent judgment and action. And it’s not necessary to go underground and dwell in nihilism in order to do that. Once you step away from blind conformity and sedation, you find there’s a long countertradition that offers plenty of mutual support and solidarity. That countertradition is alive in the mountains of Appalachia, as it is elsewhere in the country. And having returned to live here, I would say that my poetic vision is less conflicted. But just for that reason I’m less accepting of our current fix, which seems to me to be a dead end. The countertradition is marginalized, in poetry and politics and across the intellectual spectrum, but the pull of a more egalitarian, more diverse, more eco-conscious, planetary, and cooperative vision is strong and growing. When you come to a dead end, the only sensible way out is to reverse course.
This is what we find in the most ancient wisdom text of the countertradition: “Reversal is the movement of the Tao.” Nonacceptance, therefore, is incipient change. In my view
that’s the right way to go.

INTERVIEWER: Jeff Biggers is a contributing editor to TheBloomsbury Review. He lives in Illinois and Italy.
Reprinted from The Bloomsbury Review®, Vol. 24, #4. © 2004, Jeff Biggers. All rights reserved. May not be copied, reproduced, or transmitted in any fashion without the written consent of Jeff Biggers; info@bloomsburyreview.com.

BOOKS BY P.J. LASKA
The Abbot and Sativa: Dialogues of Return (in preparation)
D.C. Images and Other Poems (Appalachian Press, 1975)
The Day the Eighties Began (Igneus Press, 1991)
Hillbilly Baroque: An Illuminated Poem (Illuminated Books, 1995)
The Mason-Dixon Sutra (Igneus Press, 2000)

Everybody these days knows at least something about ozone. It’s that gas that helps protect the planet from solar radiation. There’s a hole in it somewhere, and it keeps getting bigger blah blah blah. What a lot of people don’t know is that ozone is a very common air pollutant, produced primarily by cars and electric generating stations. And it’s dangerous. Sometimes seriously so.

Now, I know we live in an age of danger. If the terrorists don’t get you, the burger you eat for lunch will give you heart disease, sitting in the sun will get you skin cancer, drinking soft drinks will erode your throat, drinking hard drinks will give you liver disease, and the list goes on. To that, you may add the following: Ozone, on a bad day, like the Code Red day Charlotte just had, will cause breathing problems in normal people, and dangerously increase the risk of asthma attacks for asthmatics. I addition, ozone has been linked to a whole host of problems for infants, including premature birth and cardiac birth defects. It is considered enough of a hazard that risk groups (children, the elderly, asthmatics, pregnant women) are advised to do as little as possible outdoors and run air purifiers indoors on a Code Red day.

The general guideline for ozone is “good up there, bad down here.” Yes, ozone protects the planet from harmful solar rays. It’s just not great to breathe with your morning coffee. In the US, ozone is emitted primariy by cars and coal-fired power plants, and at the moment more of both are in the process of being built. The difference is that cars have pretty tight emissions standards in this country. Coal plants, on the other hand, don’t. At least not right now. When the Clean Smokestacks Act comes online in 2009 it’ll be a different story, but for now coal plants are being built left, right and center with preciously little in the way of pollution control devices. An exception might be the proposed Duke Power plant in Cliffside, and that thing’s still going to produce tons of ozone-causing nitrogen oxide every day.

About the only thing the average citizen can do is be prepared for this sort of thing. And to that end… viola! Links to ozone monitoring stations!
This link goes to the Great Smokey Mountain monitor: Great Smokey Mountain Monitor and Webcam
This link goes to the NC Department of Air Quality Ozone reporting page: NC Dept. Air Quality: Ozone
This link goes to the US government ozone monitoring site: Air Now National Page

CNBC has an online poll on lifting the drilling moratorium for USA coastline.

I just voted and opponents are way behind.

Please vote and pass it on. It takes 10 seconds.

The deadline is 6/24.

Click here to vote

This letter from NC senator Elizabeth Dole was written in response to a letter from Mr. Cliff Brisson Jr., P.A., attourney at law practicing in Fayetteville, NC regarding the sale of national forest lands to fund the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act of 2000.

June 5, 2006

Mr. Cliff Brisson Jr.
806 Hay Street
Fayetteville, North Carolina 28305

Dear Mr. Brisson

Thank you for contacting me regarding the proposed sale of national forest land in order to fund the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act of 2000. I appreciate hearing from you and would like to take this opportunity to respond.

As you may know, the Administration has announced a proposal to auction off more than 300,000 acres of national forests and other public lands – including about 10,000 acres in North Carolina – in order to generate $800 million for the Secure Rural Schools Program. The plan also calls for a phased reduction in funding for the program to zero by 2011. In exchange for 10,000 wooded acres, North Carolina would get an estimated $1 million, while more than a quarter of the money raised nationwide would benefit rural schools in Oregon and Washington. On March 21, 2006, I wrote to the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, urging them to oppose this proposal.

The Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act has been so important to the livelihood of North Carolina’s many rural counties, which rely on these funds for public schools and road maintenance. I am a cosponsor of a bill that would extend the Act through fiscal year 2013. In light of today’s tight budget, it is imperative that we look for offsets for government programs; however, I do not believe it is a wise investment to sell our public lands in return for short-term funding of a program that deserves full-funding on its own – especially when the lands have been selected without the input of local communities and park rangers.

Again, thank you for contacting me with your concerns about the sale of national forest land. I will be sure to keep your views in mind when the Senate considers related legislation. Should you have any additional questions or comments, please feel free to contact me or visit my website at https://dole.senate.gov.

With my warmest best wishes,

Elizabeth Dole

Letter reproduced with permission of recipient

PC(USA), the Presbyterian Church General Assembly, passed a resolution against mountaintop removal early this morning. This resolution was two years in the making and the success is due to the tireless dedication, hard work, and continued belief of our volunteers.

The resolution was passed with no alterations and reportedly only one dissenting vote. Tomorrow there should be a news update on the PC(USA) site with the text of the resolution available to read.

The PC(USA) site can be found at PC(USA) News

Driving into Wise County, you’d be hard pressed to discover the presence of some of the most ecologically damaging mining practices legally allowed. The drive is scenic, winding up Highway 58 through the valleys of southwest Virginia. But every once in a while, you may notice a hint of coal. It might be a coal chute crossing over the highway, or a refining station by the side of the road, or railroad cars waiting under a dumping station. These are the signs that say “big coal” to an outsider.

To the residents of the county, however, the evidence of coal mining is hard to ignore. Ecological damage is only one of the problems facing the residents of the county. They also tell tales of mining practices gone awry. Several residents related stories of grandparents being blown off their feet by a series of nearby explosions. Others told tales of midnight coal trucks waking up the neighborhood. Residents of one hilltop enthralled the room with stories of streams blackened by runoff and dumping from the mining sites. Other stories detailed quick pumping of sludge ponds the night before inspections, and overloaded trucks barreling down the highways. In short, the overwhelming consensus among the residents in attendance was that the Wise County mines consistently dodge the law.

Worse than these stories, though, were the experiences of people who had called in the state inspectors to address these problems. Every person who spoke on this subject revealed a pattern of negligence, apathy, and outright refusal to face reality. When reporting an incident in which his mother was blown off her feet by repeated blasting (in violation of timing ordinances designed to prevent such an event), a local man was assured by inspectors that what his family had experienced was, in fact, not possible. Reporting waste dumps into a local stream, another family was assured by an inspector that it wasn’t a problem, because the stream was “dead anyway.” Citizens who have filed repeated complaints have been slapped with frivolous lawsuits by the mining companies. Although none of these cases made it to court, one local man stated that he’d had to pay over $6,000 in lawyer fees before the case was tossed out.

In response to this sort of disregard, the some of the citizens of Wise County have started organizing, both to prevent further mining excesses and to oppose the installation of a new fluidized bed coal plant in their county. They are currently working with the Sierra Club, volunteer groups and local environmental organizations to attempt to gather enough evidence to force the state of Virginia to do something to help them.

They are working to oppose the new fluidized bed plant for an entirely different reason. The new coal plant will be installed just a few miles from AEP’s Clinch River facility, one of the dirtiest power plants in Virginia. AEP claims that once the new fluidized bed plant is operational, it will finally shut down the Clinch River facility, which has been in operation for over forty years. Local residents, however, fear that AEP will simply use the pollution credits it will gain from operation of the new fluidized bed facility to ensure that the Clinch River plant stays in operation for years to come, despite pending pollution control legislation. For anyone unfamiliar with the credit system, this is how it works: Someone had the brilliant idea that power companies would be inspired to pollute less if they were allowed to buy, sell, and transfer pollution “credits” between plants. These “credits” represent thousands of tons of pollutants. The state or region involved has maximum pollution limits over a large area, and simply requires power companies to meet those limit. This is where the credits come in. Power companies can lower pollution at one plant, then used the saved credits from that plant to allow another plant to pollute more, thereby removing any incentive these companies had to clean up all their power plants. They just have to have a few very clean facilities in order for the rest to pollute as much as they can. Power companies leap at this opportunity because they would rather play the credit game than install $10-$20 million in pollution controls on every power plant.

The citizens of Wise County are fighting a juggernaught. Between the mining regulations and the fight against the new power plant, hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake, and the companies involved are not going to let that kind of investment just slip away. So keep your eye on the news from Wise County, and if there’s anything you can do to help, don’t hesitate to contact Appalachian Voices. Every little bit helps.

The National Energy Technology Laboratory, a division of the US Department of Energy, recently released a report entitled Tracking New Coal-Fired Power Plants that dropped a metaphoric bombshell on environmental efforts in the US today. This report lists 140 new coal-fired power plants planned for the United States, as of March 20, 2006. There are 22 new coal-fired power plants going into our eight state area (NC, SC, VA, WV, GA, AL, TN, KY). Most of these plants will be old-style, pulverized coal power plants. They will be nasty, polluting monsters, and they will be grandfathered into the existing air quality legislation so that they will not have to install pollution controls for a decade or so after construction. I think we can all agree that this is a bad thing. Not that I have anything against coal power. I think it’s a great idea, so long as you slap about $20 million in pollution controls on each plant, dispose of the waste in specified containers, and quit blowing up mountains to get at coal veins. But other than that, it’s peachy.

So how does this concern you? I could rattle off some statistics if you like, and I will if anyone asks me to, but the long and the short of it is this: if you like kids, you’d better hate coal-fired plants with no pollution controls. These plants emit three things which are really quite harmful to young children: nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and mercury. Now, I can feel the blank stares and “I didn’t take chemistry” complaints through the ether, so I’ll explain. Nitrogen oxide in the atmosphere converts to ozone. Breathing ozone is really bad for children; it causes asthma and other respiratory diseases. As a matter of fact, the American Lung Association has linked ground-level ozone to a rather staggering number of asthma cases (about 500,000). The next contestant, sulfur dioxide, does pretty much the same thing, causing wheezing, coughing, general respiratory irritation and making asthma worse. On to contestant number three, my personal favorite, mercury. Mercury, which occurs naturally in coal, causes all sorts of neurological problems in babies. It can cause mental retardation in high doses, and a whole slew of physiological and intelligence-related problems at lower doses. Here’s the kicker: nationally, 400,000 babies are born every year with defects caused by mercury poisoning in the womb. (Additional information on mercury poisoning can be found here.) These kids are affected permanently; there’s no going back on in-vitro mercury poisoning. In case anyone’s wondering, yes, all of these conditions apply to adults as well, but children are more susceptible to harmful effects from all of these pollutants. That’s just the way it is.

Now I know a lot of people are saying, “Well if not coal, what then?” and I hear you. The alternative fuel market is rough, and oil just gets more politically charged every day. At the beginning of this post, I talked a little about “old style, pulverized coal” powerplants, implying that there were other kinds. There are, in fact, two new types of coal power plants. They are called Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) and Fluidized Gas Bed plants (FGB), and they improve in every way on the old pulverized coal plants. Both of these new varieties are more efficient and pollute a little less than traditional pulverized coal plants. Oddly enough, neither one is exclusively limited to coal as a fuel. In fact, they’ll both burn pretty much anything, as long as that “anything” started life as a biological something or other, but coal is cheap and available. These new plants are what people are talking about when they let the words “clean coal” escape from their lips. Let’s get one thing straight. These plants, by themselves, do not constitute a “clean coal” solution. The both pollute, just a little less. They both require coal, and that coal has to come from somewhere (see the MTR page for more details on that). However they are much better than pulverized coal plants, and only slightly more expensive. Honestly, I have to say “only slightly more expensive” with a wink and a grin, since we’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars, but that’s an investment the power companies would recoup very quickly. An average 1000 megawatt coal plant will earn its company anywhere from 5 to 7 BILLION dollars in net profit over a 25-year lifetime. Wait a minute, did I just drop the B word? Yep! I did! Why, next to that, a hundred million more for an IGCC of FGB plant and another twenty million or so for pollution control just doesn’t seem like much. Like maybe a drop in the bucket.

But I digress, quite often and with great enthusiasm. I was saying something earlier about 140 new coal power plants. Ah, I remember, they’re being planned and permitted as you read! Now, 140 is a big number and pollution talk quickly leads into the abstract, so let’s get back to concrete examples. Like, for instance, Los Angeles. That’s about as much concrete as you can find anywhere. Now, in my time I’ve been to a few places on this ol’ planet of ours, and I count myself fortunate to have had the opportunity to visit a country that exists on coal: China. Why am I talking about China? Well, a good day in China looks like the worst day anyone in LA has ever seen. 140 new pulverized coal plants are a step in that direction. It ain’t pretty. It ain’t healthy. It’s not what I would like to envision when I look to the future. Now, in a very short time Appalachian Voices is going to start putting up information on air quality and these 140 new coal plants. It’ll be under the air pollution heading. If anything in this post intrigued you, please, take a look at the rest of the information.

And make sure to check your backyard. A coal plant might have moved in.

The High Country Farm Tour (July 22-23) has been organized by the High Country Chapter of Carolina Farm Stewardship Association to educate local residents about progressive agricultural practices. Local residents with an interest in sustainable forestry practices are encouraged to attend this event as many of these farms maintain productive forestland.

High Country Farm Tour Showcases Agricultural Innovators

On Saturday, July 22 and Sunday, July 23, several area farms will open their doors to High Country residents and visitors interested in learning more about diversified and innovative agriculture. Farms will be open for visits from 1 PM until 5 PM each day. The tour, jointly sponsored by the High Country Chapter of Carolina Farm Stewardship Association (CFSA) and North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service (NCCES), will give a “behind the scenes” look at sustainable production of foods, fibers, and other agricultural goods.
The farm tour spans ten farms in Watauga and Ashe counties, with crops and livestock as diverse as organic broccoli, llamas, sorghum, shiitake mushrooms, alpacas, orchard fruits, and much more. Brochures with maps and farm descriptions are available at the Ashe and Watauga Cooperative Extension offices, the Ashe and Watauga visitor centers, and at the Watauga Farmers’ Market in the Horn in the West parking lot.
People interested in taking the farm tour may drive their own vehicles, and car-pooling is encouraged. CFSA will ask for donations to cover costs of the tour and other work promoting sustainable agriculture in the High Country. Recommended amounts are $20 per car for the whole tour, or $5 per car per farm.

Bees play a vital role in the pollination of spring-flowering plants. This excerpt from the summer ’06 edition of Agriculture, Natural Resources, & Environment explains the importance of these helpful insects, and details strategies for promoting their habitation of your land.

Increase Your Pollination and Farm Diversity with Native Bees

Most farmers are aware that honeybees face a number of parasites and other problems that have reduced their populations across the country. Here in Watauga County, our beekeepers association is doing excellent work in promoting the knowledge and techniques to keep honeybee populations viable on High Country farms. But, given many of our important crops’ need for bee pollination, what is the non-beekeeper to do to insure that apples, squash, melons and other fruits and vegetables get the pollination they need? One good answer is to join the Beekeepers’ Association, and learn to keep honeybees. Another good answer (especially for those without the time or inclination to work with honeybees) is to encourage native, solitary bees, such as the Orchard Mason Bee – Osmia lignaria. Such bees are incredibly effective pollinators, and are also very easy to keep.
Orchard Mason Bees are wood-nesting bees: in the wild they use the tunnels in trees and dead wood made by beetles, borers and even woodpecker drillings. You can help them along by drilling wood blocks with 5/16” diameter holes 4” to 6” deep. You can also fashion nests for them by buying paper straws of the same inside diameter and length, and bundling them into a coffee can, PVC pipe, or other shelter. Whatever nest material you choose, the nests should be placed at least three feet above the ground, and in a place where they will receive morning sun. They should also be placed near streams or wetlands, as the bees will use mud to cap their nest holes. Finally, the nests should be placed within 100 feet of the crop you want to pollinate, as these bees do not fly very far. In exchange for their homes, these bees will gladly pollinate apples and other spring-flowering crops: it only takes 500 orchard mason bees to pollinate an acre of orchard. For honeybees to do the same work, as many as 100,000 would be needed!
Orchard Mason Bees are only one species of many native pollinating bees: pollination also happens thanks to carpenter bees (Xylocopa spp), leafcutter bees (Megachile spp), and bumblebees (Bombus spp), among many others. You can help all of these species by conserving woodlands (particularly those with birch, maple, oak, poplar, and willow), wetlands, hedgerows (particularly those with honeysuckle, dogwood, and kalmia), and other natural areas on your farm. Minimizing the use of insecticides will also make life easier for your native pollinators. For more information about conserving or raising your own population of native bees, contact Richard Boylan at the Watauga County Cooperative Extension office.