G.R.E.E.N.
Grass Roots Environmental Effort Newsletter

        Ojibway Prayer

At our November board meeting the WVEC board developed a list of legislative priorities for the 2003 session of the West Virginia legislature. These priorities were established based on issues put forward by the WVEC membership at the fall annual meeting.

The list includes the following, in no particular order of importance or significance: air and water pollution rules and regulations; coal issues such as the mining regulations and overweight coal trucks; passage of a "bottle bill"; advancing research opportunities for the industrial hemp bill passed by the legislature last year; election campaign finance reforms; and reform of the Logging and Sediment Control Act and its impact on flooding.

In addition, the board is supporting a number of economic and clean energy proposals loosely grouped into a "Green Energy Campaign" package.

More details on all these issues will be included in the WVEC Legislative Updates published every Friday during the legislative session. Don’t miss out – renew your membership today!

Return to Index

The WVEC lobby team for the 2003 session of the West Virginia legislature has been hired and is ready to go.

Members of the team this year include Rick Eades, Conni Lewis, Allan Tweddle, Chuck Wyrostok, John Taylor, Denise Poole, Chris Hogbin, Amy Strege and Dot Henry. Don Garvin will serve his second year as the team’s legislative coordinator.

There are no "rookies" on this year’s team – everyone on the team has experience in the legislative lobbying arena.

Retaining a paid lobby team of this size and strength represents a significant commitment by the WVEC board and membership. So your contributions to WVEC are more important than ever. Please remember that when renewing your membership.

Return to Index

Enviros, Faith Community and Labor Meet to Discuss Common Ground

On December 12, representatives of labor, the faith community, environmental organizations and citizen groups met in Charleston to discuss their legislative issues and common goals. The meeting was attended by representatives of the Affiliated Construction Trades Foundation, Catholic Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston, Citizens Coal Council, Coal River Mountain Watch, Interfaith Global Climate Change Campaign, Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, United Mine Workers of America, West Virginia Citizen Action Group and West Virginia Rivers Coalition.

The issue of overweight coal trucks will continue to unite many of the organizations, which worked together during both the 2002 regular session and a special session in July to defeat legislation to raise the legal weight limit for coal trucks. The groups will continue to work together to convince the governor and the legislature to put health and safety, and respect for West Virginia taxpayers above the interests of the coal industry.

Several of the organizations are also active in Citizens for Clean Elections, a coalition that supports passage of the West Virginia Clean Elections Act. The Clean Elections Act would establish a voluntary system of public financing for qualified candidates who agree to limit their spending and reject all private donations. The Clean Elections Act was introduced during the 2002 legislative session and will be reintroduced during the upcoming session.

The groups plan to meet again in January to continue to look for common goals on other issues. The individual groups are working on a wide variety of issues including air emissions from vehicles such as school buses and coal trucks, workers compensation, the West Virginia Jobs Act, tort reform, water quality, reforming timbering and mining practices and a West Virginia Bottle Bill.

Return to Index

Organic Consumers Association Needs Us

After 26 years in West Virginia, I’ve moved temporarily to northeastern Minnesota, where I’m doing a six months internship with Organic Consumers Association. OCA’s main office is a straw-bale structure, with a well-insulated yurt beside it, about 100 yards from the shore of Lake Superior. It’s pretty, but ridiculously cold here. They have to bury water lines six feet!

Organic Consumers Association works on food issues like genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and irradiation, as well as defending organic standards and fighting for fairly traded, as well as organically grown food. They also connect consumers with sources of organically grown food. There is a campaign to pressure supermarket chains to remove GMO ingredients from their store brand lines; another to get Starbucks to push Fair Trade coffee and remove rBGH from the milk and GMO ingredients from their baked goods; as well as a new campaign, Clothes for a Change, to encourage clothing producers to switch to non-sweatshop, non genetically engineered cotton, ideally also organic. The OCA website, www.organicconsumers.org, has links to these campaigns and a huge news section which is updated daily.

A recent item, for example, is on Morphotek, which is experimenting with splicing human cancer-causing genes into various organisms to enhance the mutation rate, thus speeding up the breeding process. They assure us it’ll be no problem to remove the cancer genes once they find what they want. (While they’re putting things back where they go, maybe they could pop a few mountains back into place in West Virginia. That’s sure to be no problem either.)

Organic Consumers Association is a national organization with some international ties, including a permanent office in Chiapas, Mexico. With a network of thousands of volunteers, links to several thousand natural food stores, and 500,000 names in their database, they have the clout to make real change.

I noticed, however, that the West Virginia section of the database is awfully sparse. Chris Treter, the organizer whose territory includes West Virginia, admitted to me that he’s never been there and has done little with the state. So I volunteered to make some connections.

Right now, OCA is working to expand its network. We’d like to have your name, perhaps your address and phone number, and definitely your e-mail address. We don’t share our e-mail list with other organizations, but use it to send out action alerts, look for volunteers for local actions, and send out Biodemocracy News every six weeks. If you like, we’ll also put you on the list for a shorter electronic newsletter that comes out every other week with one paragraph on each of the top five or so stories on the website, with links in case you want to read the whole story.

The link on OCA’s webpage for organic food sources is also very incomplete for West Virginia; it has only three stores, one of which I know to be out-of-business. Please tell us about the others! Where do you buy natural foods? It helps them, of course, if new customers can find them.

You can sign up by clicking Join the Action Network on the upper right of the OCA homepage, or call Chris at: (231) 256-9667, or me toll-free at: 888-403-1007 (you have to ask for Mary Wildfire as there’s another Mary here).

All our struggles are connected. The fight to preserve the purity of our food supply and the livelihood of family farmers comes from the same place as the fight to protect mountains and forests, and rivers and livelihoods and non-commercialized education and access to health-care. Joining OCA’s network is a way to strengthen that paradigm, so that it may overtake the reductionist, profit-obsessed one now dominating our world.

Return to Index

A Different Kind of DEP

Two years ago when Mike Callaghan became head of the Department of Environmental Protection (he is now "Secretary" Callaghan) I noted in our newsletter that he was seemingly a "different kind of DEP director," a marked contrast from the mold of past directors.

DEP actions this year seem to bear this out. The most dramatic evidence of this was the DEP flood advisory task force report that was highly critical of the contributions to flooding of bad mining and timbering practices. The task force report and recommendations were soundly based on valid science that was peer reviewed, and it took courage for the DEP not to give in to industry pressure to bury that study. If only Governor Wise had shown similar courage and promulgated the DEP recommendations as an emergency rule . . . well, that’s another story.

Two more recent actions by DEP are further evidence that we are dealing now with a different DEP:

The first is DEP’s recent decision to deny a longwall mining permit revision for Mettiki Coal to undermine a native brook trout stream in Grant County. The stream is Hind Leg Creek and it is a tributary of the North Branch of the Potomac River. DEP also denied the earlier original permit, which Mettiki appealed to the surface mine board, and then submitted a permit revision. In denying the permit revision, DEP said, "The (longwall) method would cause subsidence and water loss in the stream."

In a press release DEP Division of Mining and Reclamation Director Matt Crum said, "We denied the permit based on a cumulative hydrologic impact assessment . . . In its permit revision, Mettiki focused on remediation of Hind Leg and not on the protection of the stream. Hind Leg is one of the few remaining trout streams in the North Branch of the Potomac watershed and it needs to be protected. While the agency encourages the development of new technology and remediation techniques, the native trout stream is the wrong place to experiment."

These are definitely not the sort of words we have come to expect from previous DEPs.

The second DEP action of note is that on December 12 the DEP filed a lawsuit in Hardy County Circuit Court against the Pilgrim’s Pride poultry processing facility for massive water quality violations in the South Branch Potomac watershed. The DEP alleges in the lawsuit that the Moorefield company violated discharge limits, failed to sample for pollutants, and had sloppy maintenance practices at its truck-washing facility. DEP is seeking civil penalties and "requesting that the court order the company to submit a plan that provides for the correction" of the violations.

It should be pointed out that DEP took this action only AFTER a notice of intent was filed by the West Virginia Rivers Coaltion to initiate a similar lawsuit against the company. Nonetheless, previous DEPs would no doubt have filed a "friend of the court" brief in defense of the polluting company.

I am writing all this to applaud the agency for these recent decisions. We should support the agency when it makes the right decisions and takes the right actions.
And for the skeptics among us, let me add firmly that I do not believe we could have possibly been too critical of this agency in the past, and of course, we should continue to hold DEP’s feet to the fire to make sure they do the right thing in the future.

Return to Index

"Fiending On Telecom"

"The days are stacked against
what we think we are.
After a month of interior weeping
it occurred to me that in times like these
I have nothing to fall back on
except the sun and moon and earth."

Jim Harrison - The Theory and Practice of Rivers

Kayford Mountain

Just at dusk on Kayford Mountain sow bear and her
cubs walked past the mining machines and sheds and headed
down toward the left hand hollow hoping to find
their next meal and a place to lay down their heads.

We were just below the ridge looking down on the
empty flattened dirt where the giant machines had worked.
Larry said, "when I was a kid up here we stood right here
And looked up, way up, to the top of it. Now you have to
look down and its just flat dirt and rocks and the trees
and the water and the animals and the birds are gone.

They got their coal and they killed our mountain
and killed our home place too.

They took our ancestral ground, our sacred
ground where we, in our generations, have lived, gone to church,
married, made and birthed babies, taken family meals, 
slept in peace, died and been buried. Its wicked and unnatural
to mock God’s creation the way they’re doing to get their coal.
God is not mocked. That’s all I have to say about it.”

Last Christmas day three men were found dead on top 
of Kayford Mountain under a cell phone tower.
All night they thought they were following the Christmas Star
to redemption and life. Dazzled and beguiled by the strobing
light they fell over a rock cliff into a valley fill.
The rocks in the fill broke and crushed their bodies.

There are some who say these poor fools died of broken hearts, 
dead before they hit the rocks in the fill. That’s probably true.
Their hearts shattered when they saw the shallow emptiness
of what the dominating light on the mountain meant.

Ritter Park. Huntington

How strange, but how usual to walk in Ritter 
Park along Fourpole Creek with office workers
from the tall buildings downtown with cell phones
transplanted into their ears. 

No roots, no vines,
just fungoid growths in their heads. Ignoring the
cool sweet summer morning air, they’re doing 
business and staying in the main stream
of commerce and finance. 

They’ve forgotten, if they ever knew,
that there’s been many a fool found floating 
face down in the mainstream. 

At three o’clock they’ll be on their breaks,
standing outside the tall buildings, 
cell phones in their ears, and smoking their cigs.
Fiending on cigs, fiending on cell phones. 

We are all fiending on oil, 
fiending on coal, fiending on gas,
fiending on central air, fiending on cars, 
fiending on four-lanes, fiending on S.U.V.s
fiending on the flesh and bones of long-dead
species, with no thought of our children, their 
grandchildren, their great-grandchildren, the generations
to come. How will they live on the little we’ll leave them?

Our national mantra is “Produce to consume.
Consume for production. 
It’s not working out. Why do we accept the unacceptable?
Why are we leaving so little to sustain the 
lives of those who will follow us?

Fourpole Creek, Ritter Park

It is late summer and our rivers teem with life.
In the New, the Greenbrier, the Kanawha, the Cheat,
The Gauley, the Cacapon, clouds of shad, shiners, chubs,
Fathead minnows, soft and hard shell crawdads, 
frogs and all manner of aquatic insects
fatten the waters and all that lives in them.

You can stand quietly and watch the bass
herd the minnows and eat them. If you watch
carefully for minnows jumping frantically out of the
water and skipping over the surface, you will
know where to cast for the mighty smallmouth bass, 
and join the beautiful, complex and complete circle
of predation and prey. Quietly watching Fourpole Creek
a small school of minnows is a very welcome 
sign of life in this gravely befouled stream. 

The County Hospital has dumped its medical wastes
leftover from its life-giving activities into it. Are the 
nurses and doctors throwing tumors and viruses at us?

My only wish when I finally get my genie
is: let’s make Fourpole Creek permanently habitable
for a breeding population of Smallmouth Bass. 
O what a mighty time! when we rejoice
and party all night for the re-birth of
long-dead streams and long-dead species.

Sustainable Development

“Sustainable development?” Sustainable what?
“Do what now, Buddy? You wanna run that by me again.”
A strange concept to most everyone.
A vague concept except in its concrete applications.

A concept enshrouded by mist, speculation and 
mystery. But for sure we have to do it or else
our coming generations will live most miserably
and curse us if we do not make provision now for their survival.

O sweet strong sisters. O strong sweet brothers.
Sustainable development is not optional. We have to do it.
We must all take our best hold, our best grip, 
And make concrete from mist and speculation.

Let a thousand sustainable fairs blossom. Let solar
Panels, fuel cells and wind turbines appear nightly
on the evening TV death news so we can all see 
the possibility of life and the replenishment of God’s Creation.

Bring it on! O bring it on with the speed and power
Of a Nolan Ryan fastball! Bring it on!
Bring it on with the grace, speed and power
Of a Venus Williams serve. Bring it on! Bring it!

O bring it! Bring it. Bring it. Bring it. O bring it on now!

Return to Index

E-Day! 2003 Scheduled!

Tuesday, February 25th
10:00 am ~ 3:00 pm
Upper House & Senate halls

Enviro Displays & 
Demonstrations
Green Business Displays
Citizen Lobbying
Award Presentations

More details announced as date grows closer. Stay tuned to your Legislative Update each week during the session!

Annual E-Day! Fund-raiser

Tuesday, February 25th
The Brick Cellar
1611 Washington Street East
Charleston, WV

5:00 till 9:00

Live Music
Delicious Buffet
Silent Auction

Honoring our Award 
Recipients

A suggested donation of $5.00 (or whatever you can afford) will go towards meeting our legislative budget.

Return to Index

Legislative Update

Beginning Friday, January 10, 2003 we will be publishing our WVEC Legislative Updates weekly during the session.

The Legislative Update keeps you informed on our issues and all the latest news from the capitol.

Stay connected through WVEC!! Please let us know if you have a change of address, e-mail, etc. we need to know about to keep our list current.

As always, we need your e-mail address to help save postage so your Update can be sent to you electronically.

Check our web-site at: www.wvecouncil.org for continuing coverage of the 2003 legislative session as well.

Return to Index

Thank You WVEC!!!

The response to our recent fund-raising letter has been overwhelming! We have received a number of donations continually flowing into the office - keep em' coming!!!

We also appreciate all the wonderful, delightful, and insightful comments included with these donations. Your support of our lobby team and gratitude for all the work WVEC does year round goes a long way to lift our spirits!

Thanks to all of you for your generosity and words of encouragement.  As always, the legislative effort could not be sustained without the support of our members.

Thanks to the following folks for donating several (much needed) pieces of office equipment & items over the past year: 

Greg Caroll,
Bob Marshall
Fred & Liz Sampson
Dot Henry
Larry Gibson
Don Garvin
Denise Poole
Shelli Turner
David Grubb

Return to Index

E-Council's Christmas Wish List

Postage Stamps
Computer Printer
Small Refrigerator
$$$$$$$$$
Scotch Tape
Sturdy Staplers & Staples
Kitchen Trash Bags
Letter Size Paper
General Office Supplies

Return to Index