Tuesday, December 16, 2014

WE BLEW UP PARADISE

John Denver sang it too in Rocky Mountain High. "They try to tear the mountain down to bring in a couple more." Or the song with the refrain "they paved paradise and put in a parking lot."

We've allowed the multinationals to use precious fresh water in this country to frack for natural gas to sell overseas. The corporations rip the guts out of the mountains here to sell the coal somewhere else. What's left behind by our unique form of American Socialism? Fouled streams, choked valleys and quiet places that fall to the bulldozers. Destroying what the Creator gave freely would be bad enough if we at least saw the benefits from the resources. Instead the gas and coal go overseas. The profits go to a mulitnational headquartered in some tax haven and WE end up with the mess to clean up.

"When you get the time to do it and you drive up here and leave your truck and walk into the woods and stay awhile in a pretty place where you don't hear no noise and nothing's bothering you, and you go back the next week and that place is not even there, that's hard."
Joe Begley (1919-2000) of Blacky, Kentucky
speaking of mountaintop removal mining. 

I dream by night the horror
That I oppose by day.
The nation in its error 
In its work and in its play

Destroys its land, pollutes
Its streams, and desecrates
Its air and light. From the roots
It dies upwards, our rights,

Divinely given, plundered
And sold to purchased power
That dies from the head downward,
Marketed hour by hour. 

The market is a grave 
Where goods lie dead that ought
to live and grow and thrive,
The dear world sold and bought

To be destroyed by fire,
Forest and soil and stone,
The conscience put to hire
Rules over flesh and bone. 

To take the coal to burn
They overturn the world
And all the world has worn
Of grace, of health. The gnarled

Clenched, and forever shut
Fist of their greed makes small 
The great life. Hollowed out,
The soul like a green hill

Yields to the force of death.
The crack in the despots skull
Descends into the earth, 
And what was bright turns dull. 

Wendell Berry 2007 

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