Bank executives see what President Bush did not

By Jim Minick

01/13/2009

Once I traced a mountain stream to its source. I hiked through a high meadow, clambered over rocks, detoured steep ravines, and always the music of the tumbling water filled the air like some ancient, unknowable chorus. As I ascended, the stream became a creek, then a smaller run, the music quieting to a gurgle, till finally at the head of a hollow I found the springhead, a clear, pebble-bottomed pool. Like my parents and grandparents and generations before me, I kneeled before the spring, cupped its clear fluid in my hands, and drank.

Such a ritual, the chance to take such a journey, steadily disappears as the mountains in Appalachia come tumbling down. Blast by blast, miners dynamite their way to seams of coal, black rock hauled off to power our lights, computers and TVs. The scale of these operations is hard to imagine, but try to picture a verdant forest, one of the richest ecosystems in the world, suddenly turned into a wasteland resembling the moon. And then try to imagine this area equaling the size of Delaware. Through all of this blasting, the waterways get buried, smothered, killed by the remaining rubble, what miners call "overburden."

Until recently, a law protected these streams by creating a 100-foot buffer zone. Poor enforcement of this regulation allowed over 1,200 miles of streams to be buried, but the law still provided most waterways a last bit of protection. Thanks to an end-of-term action by President George W. Bush's Environmental Protection Agency, the rule no longer exists, and our streams no longer have even this shred of a safeguard. Now miners can dump their burdens anywhere they please, and we'll all suffer the destruction of clean water and moisture-retaining forests along with a poverty of spirit.

Ironically, as President Bush offers his last giant farewell gift to the energy industry, the business community has begun to move towards a greener way of living. One of the starkest indicators of this contrast comes with Bank of America's recent announcement. No longer will one of the world's largest banks invest in companies that practice this form of coalmining. The bank's new policy states, in part:

If Bank of America holds true to its new proclamation, its investments with eight of the United State's top coal companies will soon disappear. It seems these bank executives have also tried to trace a mountain stream to its springhead and suddenly found a rock wall of rubble destroying that very source.

In recent remarks before Congress, longtime environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. called the Appalachian Mountains the "mother forest for all of North America." During the last Ice Age more than 12,000 years ago, glaciers of ice two miles thick scoured our land. But the ice could not reach these highlands, and the region became an island of refuge. Kennedy explained that the Appalachian Mountains hold the "most abundant, diverse temperate forests in the world because it is the longest lived." He continued, "Today, these mining companies...are doing what the glaciers couldn't do-flattening these mountains and destroying these forests."

Kennedy called for Congress to reinstate the many regulations that the Bush administration has rolled back, and we all need to do the same. Congress and President-elect Barak Obama must understand that we, like the executives of Bank of America, demand clean energy that does not destroy our mountains and the very source of so many waters.

We need to save the higher ground, both physically and morally, before it is no more.