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50th anniversary flashback: Reporting the world's biggest environmental stories.
From oil spills and nuclear waste to climate change, covering the environment has long been a crucial part of the magazine's mission.
By Jeff Goodell
16 hours ago
In September 2015, I spent more than an hour in an empty classroom in Alaska talking with President Barack Obama. We sat in blue plastic chairs, paper ice crystals made by elementary-school kids hanging from the ceiling above us, discussing melting glaciers, national security and the lobbying power of the fossil-fuel industry. It was, as far as I know, the only time a sitting president has talked about climate change in such depth with a journalist. And it didn't happen because the president wanted backstage passes to a Kendrick Lamar show. As one of the president's advisers told me earlier that day, "We have seen the impact of your work in Rolling Stone, and it's been significant."
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Five decades ago, Rolling Stone and environmentalism were forged in the same crucible. Rivers were burning, the suburbs were sprawling, the Vietnam War was raging, hippies were tripping ("LSD made it possible to have a decent conversation with a tree," a pair of historians quipped) and the electric guitar was emerging as a revolutionary force. The word "environmentalist" first appeared in the magazine in December 1969, in a story about Internet pioneer Stewart Brand, whose Whole Earth Catalog was written for people Brand described as "outlaws, dope fiends, and . . . hope freaks." In other words, environmentalists. "Caring about the planet is part of the zeitgeist of our generation, part of where we came from," says Rolling Stone founder and editor Jann Wenner. "We understood from the beginning that social justice is deeply linked with environmental justice."
Rolling Stone's coverage acknowledged that building a better world would require waging war against corporate polluters and corrupt politicians. In the 1970s, one of the first big flashpoints was nukes. We covered protesters at the site of a proposed nuclear plant in Seabrook, New Hampshire, where demonstrators carried signs with slogans like split wood, not atoms, as well as a blockade of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant near Los Angeles that resulted in the arrest of 1,850 people. In 1977, Howard Kohn wrote "The Case of Karen Silkwood," a 12,000-word investigation into the mysterious death of a plutonium worker killed in a car crash on her way to talk to a reporter and a union representative about safety lapses at her facility. Kohn's story suggested Silkwood, who believed she was being deliberately poisoned by plutonium contamination, may have been murdered. The allegation has never been proved, but Kohn's story helped make Silkwood's death emblematic of the corruption and ruthlessness of the nuclear-
power industry.
A 2015 cover story with Obama on how the world should respond to a warming planet.
In 1989, one of America's worst environmental catastrophes occurred when the Exxon Valdez plowed into a reef in Alaska's Prince William Sound, ripping open the hull of the ship and dumping 11 million gallons of crude oil into the pristine waters. Tom Horton, a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, arrived a few weeks later to cover the spill for Rolling Stone. "It was my first story for the magazine," Horton recalls. "My editor just said, 'Go to Alaska and write what you think should be written' – so I did." Horton spent a month flying through the fog in bush planes to visit native Alaskan communities and riding in oil tankers through Prince William Sound. Horton's epic 27,000-word story, "Paradise Lost," captured the full tragedy of the Exxon Valdez, from the still-inexplicable mistakes of the ship's captain to the sorrow of the Alaskan villagers whose lives were upended by the spill.
The most consequential environmental story of our time, of course, is climate change. Rolling Stone was on it early. In 1983, five years before NASA scientist James Hansen's famous congressional testimony that laid out the risks of rising CO2 pollution, Tim Cahill wrote a startlingly prescient story about the dangers of melting ice and sea-level rise on a rapidly heating planet. By 1988, William Greider was already shaming Congress for failing to take action to slow the warming. As Greider wrote, "Nothing illustrates the breakdown of American democracy more starkly than the refusal of the political system to respond . . . to an aroused public's concerns about the environment." In 2003, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. slammed the abuses and hypocrisy of George W. Bush's environmental record in "Crimes Against Nature," which may be one of the most nuanced and passionate takedowns of energy and environmental policy we've ever published.
Mother Nature delivered her own warning about climate change in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina spun into New Orleans. Al Gore's post-storm story in Rolling Stone previewed many ideas he later expressed in his Academy Award-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. "It is now clear that we face a deepening global climate crisis that requires us to act boldly, quickly and wisely," he wrote. " 'Global warming' is the name it was given a long time ago. But it should be understood for what it is: a planetary emergency that now threatens human civilization on multiple fronts." Gore, who is a longtime contributor to the magazine, notes the challenge of gaining coverage for the issue "in an era when Big Carbon polluters' advertising dollars are important revenue streams for corporate media conglomerates." He adds, "By its very nature, the climate crisis touches nearly every part of our lives, so it is fitting that an outlet known for melding pop culture, politics and news should delve into the wide-ranging implications of climate change. It's critical to have independent voices like Rolling Stone to call climate deniers to task and disseminate the facts about the climate crisis."
In 2011, Gore wrote about fighting climate deniers.
The 2008 election of Obama, who on the campaign trail repeatedly brought up climate change, looked like a major victory for the environmental movement. But during his first term, Obama kept his distance while a landmark bill that would have put restrictions on carbon pollution died a slow death in Congress. Our January 21st, 2010, cover summed it up in two words: you idiots! In the accompanying article, I wrote, "Climate activists like to talk about mobilizing all of America's resources, as we did during World War II, to fight global warming. But as the failure to pass the climate bill reveals, it may be easier to defeat . . . Hitler than to overcome internal threats to our future as powerful as Big Coal and Big Oil."
Just how difficult the war had become was underscored in Bill McKibben's 2012 story "The Reckoning." "When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic," McKibben wrote. "But to grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to do a little math." McKibben reported that we can burn only 565 gigatons of carbon if we want to keep the Earth's temperature from rising more than two degrees Celsius, the internationally recognized limit for dangerous climate change; however, the world's proven reserves of fossil fuels contain about 2,795 gigatons of carbon – if we burn it all, we'll literally cook the planet. "That story was the foundation on which the divestment movement was built, a movement that's now gone past $5.5 trillion in endowments and portfolios divested in part or in whole," Mc-Kibben says.
The story of life on our superheated planet grew more urgent each year. In 2009, and again in 2016, I interviewed Hansen, the godfather of climate science, who laid out a grim future – including a sea-level rise of more than 10 feet by 2100 – if we did not dramatically reduce carbon pollution. I traveled to Greenland to write about melting ice sheets; to Australia to chronicle drought, flooding and dying coral reefs; to Beijing to cover a secret deal to bring China to the table in international climate negotiations; and to Miami to witness the slow drowning of a great American city. And I was in Paris in December 2015, when virtually every nation voted to adopt an agreement to reduce carbon pollution. "There are plenty of devils in the details," I wrote, "but the larger message was unambiguous: After decades of arguing, fighting and betrayal, the people of the world stood together and said goodbye to fossil fuels."
Contributors Matt Taibbi (wearing bandana), Sean Penn and Douglas Brinkley (with pole) held an elderly man to safety in New Orleans in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina. Craig Warga/NY Daily News Archive/Getty Images
President Trump, of course, proved me (and everyone in Paris) wrong. We're back in medieval times now, with a leader of the free world who openly disparages science and thinks the best way to create energy is by burning black rocks. At Rolling Stone, we have amped up the fight. In recent months, Tim Dickinson exposed the campaign to kill rooftop solar power in Florida; Mc-Kibben offered new strategies for resistance in the age of Trump; and I investigated EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, the fossil-fuel-industry stooge who masterminded Trump's decision to pull out of the Paris deal. "The environment really is a moral story," Greider argues. "At first, only a few hippies and crackpots under- stood that. And it turned out some of the hippies and crackpots knew what they were talking about." Still, despite all the progress over the past 50 years, the dream of a better world remains elusive. "The fight is not nearly over," says Wenner. "Right now, the stakes are higher than ever."
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Mississippi Power: Kemper plant was, will remain asset to state.
As Mississippi Power Co., Public Utilities Staff and others struggle to come to an equitable agreement, the utility's CEO maintains that the power plant was and will continue to be an asset to the area.
Mississippi Power: Kemper plant was, will remain asset to state
By Jim Brock  jbrock@themeridianstar.com Sep 13, 2017
Kemper Power Plant
As Mississippi Power Co., Public Utilities Staff and others struggle to come to an equitable agreement, the utility’s CEO maintains that the power plant was and will continue to be an asset to the area.
“This is the biggest project in the history of Mississippi,†said Mississippi Power Chairman, President and CEO Anthony L. Wilson, who visited The Meridian Star on Monday. “Can you imagine what the recession of 2009 would have been had we not invested $7 billion in Mississippi?â€
Wilson said the lignite coal gasification operation was far from a failure. One of the problems, he said, was the decrease in the price of natural gas, mainly due to fracking. If money was “unlimited, I think we would have gotten there,†he said.
“The plant worked — it did exactly what we wanted it to do,†Wilson said. “The problem was we could never make the process work consistently.â€
Mississippi Power spokesman Jeff Shepard said more than 560 companies provided services and equipment to the project.
In late June, Mississippi Power announced it was suspending its lignite coal gasification operation at the Kemper plant.
Per an order from the Mississippi Public Service Commission, the plant will be relicensed as a natural gas facility — which means hundreds of jobs lost.
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Anthony Wilson
Mississippi Power, Chairman, President and CEO
Wilson said since the utility issued Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, there are about 125 employees “actively working at the site,†down from 285. About 60 employees have since been “absorbed†by the companies and sent to other locations, while 100 have “released†since the WARN was issued. Once the plant is fully converted to a natural gas facility, there will be 40-45 employees left at the plant.
Meanwhile, the commission on Tuesday said it would decide by the beginning of next year how much Mississippi Power customers should pay for the $7.5 billion power plant in Kemper County.
Since Mississippi Power Co., the Public Utilities Staff and others have been unable to reach a settlement, commissioners have set a Dec. 4 hearing to decide how much customers should pay for the natural gas part of the plant unless settlement talks resume.
In response, Mississippi Power said its most recent filing was equitable enough.
“We will continue discussing reasonable outcomes to the Kemper settlement docket, but we do believe the agreement we filed in August is a fair resolution for all parties concerned,†according to a statement from Mississippi Power. Items in said agreement include removal of risk to customers for the gasifier and related assets, no rate increase and operation of the Kemper plant as a 700-megawatt natural gas facility.
According to a Mississippi Power statement, “We believe the facts contained in the company’s filing demonstrate that Mississippi Power is operating in the best interest of customers and what is required to ensure the company’s financial stability.â€
The commission in July ordered the utility and other parties to reach a settlement concerning the plant within 45 days. The order included relicensing the plant as a natural gas facility and ensuring that rates do not increase. The commission also suggested that customers see a decrease in rates.
Mississippi Power and Public Utilities Staff were unable to reach a settlement by Aug. 21, so the commission extended the deadline to Sept. 5, which has since passed.
According to a recent Associated Press report, Mississippi Power says it wants customers to pay for $277 million more in assets than the Public Utilities Staff believes is necessary.
Atlanta-based Southern Co., the parent company of Mississippi Power, announced recently that it would absorb an additional $2.8 billion in losses from the Kemper County power plant’s lignite coal operation — bringing the total to nearly $6 billion in losses.
Charges recorded through May 2017 were $3.07 billion, according to a statement from Mississippi Power.
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New Antarctic iceberg echoes old problem.
The break in the Larsen C ice shelf highlights the vulnerable nature of other Antarctic environments and the impact people are having on the continent.
It’s winter in Antarctica, and dark. Only passing satellites can see the continent’s latest giant iceberg. But news of the massive break in the Larsen C ice shelf, and the jagged section that now floats free, has raced around the world. Size sells. The chunk of ice has been described as twice as big as Luxembourg or Samoa, or about the size of Delaware.
Luxembourg and Samoa, unlike Delaware and the rest of the United States under the presidency of Donald Trump, are still officially behind the Paris climate agreement, which among its goals seeks to limit temperature increases in order to keep more of Antarctica together. Iceberg calving is a natural and ongoing process: Antarctic ice is constantly squeezed towards the edges of its rocky base by its own enormous weight, and some breaks off from time to time. This week’s arrival of the Larsen C iceberg, which some climate campaigners are trying to name after the oil company Exxon, cannot be connected directly to our warming climate.
The same can’t be said about the Thwaites Glacier: a gigantic hulk of frozen water that sits brooding and unstable further inland. Part of the mighty West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the fate of the Thwaites Glacier is what keeps most polar scientists awake at night. Most suspect that they know how its story will end, and the real question is, as the title of a review in April on the science of the glacier puts it: how much, how fast? (T. A. Scambos et al. Glob. Planet. Change 153, 16–34; 2017).
In the past decade, measurements show that Thwaites is changing more rapidly than other similar environments. It is melting faster, sliding faster towards the sea and pushing sea levels higher. The system, scientists say, is a textbook case of a potentially unstable marine ice sheet. If greenhouse-gas emissions continue unchecked, Thwaites could survive for centuries or it might go in a few decades. If and when it fails, it could trigger a wider collapse of the rest of the western Antarctic ice reserves. It won’t take satellite images for the rest of the world to notice the effects of such a collapse. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet contains enough water to raise global sea level by 3 metres.
While society ponders the future impact of Antarctica on people’s lives, it’s worth highlighting the way that people are already changing Antarctica. Presented as remote and pristine, in many ways the continent remains untouched. But, numbers of visitors are soaring and, however careful they are, they leave behind more than footprints in the snow.
Using figures for fishing crews, tourists and researchers, an analysis in April estimated that the number of person days spent on the Southern Ocean or Antarctic coastal regions swelled from 1.5 million in 2004–05 to 2.6 million in 2013–14 (C. L. Waller et al. Sci. Total Environ. 598, 220–227; 2017). Most take specialist clothing made of synthetic materials. Many take toiletries and medicines. Some take recreational drugs.
“However careful visitors are, they leave behind more than footprints in the snow.”
We know this because a suite of surveys show that Antarctica is full of human litter. The sea bed in Terra Nova Bay is spotted with fragments of plastic including polyethylene, polypropylene and polystyrene. The shallow waters above swim with fragrance chemicals, chiefly amyl and hexyl salicylate, which are commonly used in soap, hair spray and fabric conditioner for their ‘floral and herbal odour’. Meanwhile, the sea north of the Antarctic Peninsula, where the Larsen C iceberg could soon visit, is contaminated with drugs ranging from caffeine and ibuprofen to benzoylecgonine, a metabolite of cocaine. The strong circumpolar ocean currents around Antarctica normally seal the Southern Ocean off from the rest of the world’s seas, so scientists think that most of these marine pollutants were released by visitors. One of the biggest sources is their clothing: a typical laundry load of fleeces and specialist waterproofs can liberate more than 728,000 synthetic fibres.
Another visible impact, almost certainly down to the warming climate, is an increase in moss growth where the sea washes against the rocks of the Antarctic Peninsula. Ironically, unlike the rest of the world beyond its icy frontiers, the fringes of Antarctica are going green.
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The future of coal country.
A local environmental activist fights to prepare her community for life beyond mining.
One Sunday morning, just after deer-hunting season ended, Veronica Coptis, a community organizer in rural Greene County, Pennsylvania, climbed onto her father’s four-wheeler. She set off for a ridge a quarter of a mile from her parents’ small farmhouse, where she was brought up with her brother and two sisters. “Those are coyote tracks,” she called over the engine noise, pointing down at a set of fresh paw prints.
At the crest of the ridge, she stopped along a dirt track and scanned in both directions for security guards. Around her stretched a three-mile wasteland of valleys. Once an untouched landscape of white oak and shagbark hickory, it now belonged to Consol Energy and served as the refuse area for the Bailey Mine Complex, the largest underground coal mine in the United States.
Five hundred feet below the ridgeline lay a slate-colored expanse of sludge: sixty acres of coal waste, which filled the valley floor to a depth of more than a hundred feet. Coptis stared; it was twice as deep as it had been when she’d visited a year before. “How can it be that after two hundred years no one has come up with a better way of getting rid of coal waste?” she asked. A flock of geese cut a V through water puddled atop the sludge. Recently, activists in West Virginia had paddled an inflatable boat onto a similar pond to bring attention to the hazards of coal waste. Maybe the same tactic could work here, Coptis said. It was dangerous, though; the slurry was too thick to swim through, and at least one worker had fallen in and drowned.
Coptis directs the Center for Coalfield Justice, a regional organization that advocates for people living with the effects of resource extraction. Industrial mining, she believes, leaves places like Greene County environmentally ravaged and reliant on a single, dwindling resource. At thirty, Coptis is an unlikely activist. She grew up among miners, and her father, a surveyor, sometimes works for the oil industry. She heard the word “environmentalist” for the first time in college, at West Virginia University. (Local hunters and fishermen, whom Coptis sees as some of her best potential allies, prefer to identify themselves as “conservationists.”) After graduating, she moved back to Greene County and married Donald Fike, a former marine who worked in the mines. When Coptis brings in outside activists, she often warns them not to expect issues to break down along tidy ideological lines. “The assumption is that rural America is this monolithic community, and it’s not,” she told me. She also warns them to be prepared for shotguns leaning against kitchen walls. Like many locals, Coptis learned to shoot when she was a child. “I find firing handguns relaxing,” she said. “Maybe because I’m so powerless over so much of my life.”
Around Greene County, Coptis carries a Russian Makarov pistol, partly to reassure her father. Her fight against coal mining often puts her in opposition not only to energy companies but also to miners concerned about their jobs, and he fears that someone will run her Nissan Versa off a rural road one night. “The coal mines are multimillion-dollar projects,” he told me. “Stopping them can be a nasty thing.” Coal has dominated the area for more than a century, and mining companies own about fifteen per cent of the county’s land. Above ground, their dominion is marked by yellow gates that block roads into valleys designated for waste; when Coptis was younger, a coal company that was expanding its waste area bought a neighboring village and razed it, leaving only a single mailbox. Below ground, the practice of “long-wall” mining, which removes an entire coal seam, can crack buildings’ foundations and damage springs and wells, destroying water supplies.
In 2005, this process led to an environmental catastrophe in Ryerson Station State Park, a twelve-hundred-acre preserve that contains some of the county’s only pristine land. The center of the park was Duke Lake: a reservoir, created by damming a fork of Wheeling Creek, where people had gathered for decades to swim, paddle canoes, and fish. While Consol was mining nearby, the dam ruptured, and the water had to be drained away. The lake has not been restored; a survey commissioned by the state found that the ground was too unstable. But more than fifteen million dollars’ worth of coal remains under the park, and now Consol wants to return and mine it. Coptis’s organization, along with the Sierra Club, has filed suit to block the mine from acquiring the necessary permits, arguing that the mining would destroy three endangered streams. According to Consol’s own survey, the mining is predicted to crack the streambeds, draining the water and spoiling the last fishing in the park. “This is property owned by every resident in Pennsylvania,” Coptis said. “They don’t get to keep plowing through our communities as if we didn’t matter.”
Since the mid-eighteenth century, Appalachia has supplied coal to the rest of the country, in an arrangement that has brought employment but also pollution and disease. Coptis’s opponents argue that the benefits outweigh the costs. Recently, on Twitter, an industry organization called Energy Jobs Matter taunted Coptis: “How much is the Sierra Club paying you to put these families on unemployment?” One of her neighbors warned that if she won her suit the Bailey mine would go bankrupt, devastating the local economy. There are two thousand jobs underground in Greene County, and, according to state estimates, each one supports 3.7 others at the surface. Shutting the mine could eliminate more than seven thousand jobs, in a county of thirty-seven thousand people. “Greene County will become a ghost town,” the neighbor wrote.
Coptis argues that the county is already dying. In the past eight years, as coal has ceased to be the dominant fuel used in power plants, production in the United States has dropped by thirty-eight per cent. Until recently, the Bailey mine had three competitors in Greene County; one has closed and another has gone through bankruptcy. Some six hundred jobs have disappeared. In Coptis’s old school district, enrollment has declined twenty-four per cent. For Coptis, the changes are urgently personal—her husband was among the miners who lost jobs when the mines closed. “As a community, we need to start to talk about what happens when coal mining stops,” she said. “In my lifetime, it’s going to happen.”
When Coptis goes out to canvass her neighbors, she has the advantage of familiarity. She is brown-eyed and sturdy, with deep dimples that make her look gentle and friendly, even when she is pressing a point, and she is skilled at breaking down the arcana of lawsuits and rights-of-way. “I come from the working class and struggled hard in college,” she said. “I had to read aloud to understand things.”
But some of her tendencies make her seem strikingly out of place; one local official referred to her, fondly, as a “radical.” When Coptis drives to appointments, she often blasts the cast recording of “Hamilton.” She teases her husband that she’s going to put a sign in their yard bearing their nicknames, Roni and Donnie, so that passersby will think that their brick bungalow belongs to a same-sex couple. She has already planted one controversial sign, near their chicken coop. In black and red letters, it announces, “coal ash is toxic.”
In Greene County, “Make America Great Again” placards are far more common than anti-coal signs: sixty-eight per cent of the county voted for Donald Trump. Miners say that they considered Obama’s environmental regulations a “war on coal,” and believed, not without reason, that Hillary Clinton intended to continue his initiatives. When Clinton said, at a speech in Ohio, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” it didn’t matter that she was laying out an economic plan for life beyond coal, or that she immediately added, “We don’t want to forget those people.” Trump, for his part, denounced “job-killing” regulations. In May, 2016, he told a group of miners at a rally, “Get ready, because you’re going to be working your asses off!”
Last month, as Trump announced that America would withdraw from the Paris climate accord, he said that he had been elected “to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.” (Pittsburgh’s mayor was quick to point out that Clinton had received eighty per cent of the city’s votes.) In Trump’s telling, repealing regulation was going to restore Pittsburgh to a manufacturing haven for the middle class. For Coptis, who was born in Pittsburgh, this idea is not just naïve; it is dangerous. “Trump is doing what the government has long done in Appalachia—promising to make changes that only the market can control,” she said. Her family had left Pittsburgh when she was in third grade, part of a decades-long wave of migrants fleeing the Rust Belt. Veronica’s mother, Alice, worried about her children growing up in a postindustrial city, where gangs and crack cocaine were rampant. She was especially concerned about her son. If the family had not left, Alice told me, “I truly believe my son would be dead now.”
Coptis’s grandparents had retired to Greene County, near the West Virginia border, and Alice found a two-bedroom farmhouse for sale there, across a dirt road from where they lived. The house was “undermined”—a mining company had bought rights to the land, then tunnelled underneath—and now a spring spurted from a wall in the basement. But there was space for the family, if the parents slept in an alcove off the living room, and it cost only twenty-five thousand dollars. No bank would offer a mortgage on such a property, so Alice borrowed from her parents and paid for the house in cash.
Coptis’s older siblings struggled to adjust to country life, but she loved it. She and her father spent hours in a canoe on Duke Lake, fishing for bluegill. With her grandfather, she hiked through the hills, learning to identify bullfrogs by their call and red-tailed hawks by their raked wing tips. Although the Bailey mine had begun operating a decade before, most of the surrounding valleys were still open land. Coptis grew up listening to the rumble of a conveyor belt, thirty-one miles long, that brought coal to market and carried away waste. As a child, she mistook its lights for those of a distant roller coaster.
Alice was determined that her daughters be given every opportunity that a boy would. She gave Veronica and her older sisters, Andrea and Becky, male nicknames—Roni, Andi, and B.J.—to ease their way in a male-dominated professional world. At West Greene High School, Veronica had a sympathetic English teacher, who helped her procure books—by Truman Capote, Jack Kerouac, and J. D. Salinger—that the school district had banned. Coptis was outraged that “In Cold Blood” had been disallowed because Capote was gay. “Catcher in the Rye” impressed her less. “Holden Caulfield was just some rich white kid,” she said.
Despite her contrariness, Coptis was popular. “Roni was so cute—she fit in,” Alice said. She ate lunch every day with Donald Fike, the class clown, and studied intently, especially science. Inspired by “CSI,” she decided to become a forensic pathologist, and designed an audacious experiment for the state science fair: using the school’s electron microscope, bought with a science grant for rural schools, she compared gunshot residue from two of her father’s pistols, to see if the higher-calibre one left a larger burn pattern.
During her high-school years, the Bailey mine grew into a catacomb the size of Manhattan, and the waste from it filled the valley, finally consuming more than two thousand acres of woodlands. The mines shut down roads to move trucks more efficiently, adding thirty minutes to her father’s commute, but her parents weren’t concerned. “Pittsburgh back then was so polluted that we didn’t think about it,” Alice said. The mining companies helped quell dissent with gifts, paying for employees’ Thanksgiving turkeys and funding Little League teams. In the nearby village of Graysville, the elementary school’s marquee bore the logo of its corporate sponsor.
Yet the waste in the valley disturbed Coptis. Even if the company owned the land, what gave it the right to spoil the place where people lived? At school, other students told her that speaking out against coal could cost their parents jobs. Coptis, hoping that older people had answers, drove to Graysville, which consists of a single street, anchored by a Presbyterian church and the Creekside Kitchen diner. Outside the general store, she asked two elderly men about coal. They said that living alongside industry entailed “give and take.” Cleaning up pollution was often left to the community, especially when companies went bankrupt, as many did. In Pennsylvania, the legacy cost of restoring mine land and streams has been estimated at five billion dollars. But if the mines vanished how could people afford to live?
One afternoon, a few weeks after Coptis graduated from high school, she was driving by Duke Lake, on her way to her parents’ house, when she caught the rank smell of rotting fish. Through the window, she saw that the water had drained from the lake, leaving a sprawling mud pit, glistening with bluegills’ bodies. “Fish were left flopping in the muck, and people were scooping them up and trying to move them downstream,” she said. The smell lingered for months, and Coptis drove another route to avoid it. Consol, whose mines lay near the lake, denied responsibility. But miners working below said that their digging had clearly breached the dam, according to Coptis: “One of my miner friends told me later that they were waist-deep in water.”
That fall, Coptis was accepted to West Virginia University, and began pursuing every scholarship she could find for science students. Still, even with student loans, an additional loan from an aunt, and income from three part-time jobs, she could barely afford room and board on top of tuition. She applied for food stamps but didn’t qualify. “They told me to have a kid,” she said. Instead, she hunted deer for protein.
In school, Coptis became fascinated by Indiana bats—tiny, playful creatures that, she noted, are more closely related to humans than to mice. After graduating, in 2009, she wanted to work as a field biologist, so she trawled list boards and applied to field jobs. She heard nothing. Her personal life was stalled, too. During college, she’d got engaged, to a young man from a mining family, and they moved to an old coal-patch town called Nemacolin. Coptis, thrilled to be starting adult life, bought gifts for her fiancé on credit: a washer/dryer, a big-screen TV, a motorcycle. When she discovered, a few days before their wedding, that he’d left her for her best friend, she loaded everything she’d paid for into her father’s truck and moved home. “I realized that I was making my decisions based on a man,” she said. “I promised myself never to do that again.”
Without any other job prospects, Coptis began waiting tables at the Creekside Kitchen, where her mother also worked. Greene County seemed diminished. As family farms and coal mines failed, the population was shrinking, on its way from a high of 45,394, in 1950, to about 37,000. At the restaurant, Coptis listened as laid-off miners and homeowners spoke about the loss of jobs and of drinking water. Some were distraught when undermining forced them out of their family homes. Others, eager to leave the county, were happy to be bought out, and thought of themselves as winners of the “long-wall lottery.” But, when companies bought people’s homes, they often instructed them not to discuss the deals. “Most are terrified that if they violate the terms, even in talking casually to a neighbor, the company will take the money back,” she said.
Many customers had no Internet access, so Coptis brought her laptop to work for them to use. One morning, one of her regulars, a fisherman and conservationist, asked to look something up. Dunkard Creek, a stream that follows the Mason-Dixon Line, had recently suffered one of the worst fish die-offs in state history, and he wanted to know what had happened. As they were searching online, Coptis came upon the Web site for the Center for Coalfield Justice, founded in 1994 by activists from West Virginia, Ohio, and southwestern Pennsylvania to address the problems of long-wall mining. The site had a listing for a job: a yearlong position, funded by AmeriCorps. She applied and was hired. Later, she discovered that she was the only person to have inquired.
The C.C.J. office, in the Rust Belt town of Washington, Pennsylvania, occupied a brick storefront on Main Street, next door to a clinic for opioid addicts. When Coptis first arrived at the office, she was elated. “It was the first time I’d ever seen people other than me challenging coal,” she said. C.C.J. was involved in a lawsuit, trying to force Consol to take responsibility for the draining of Duke Lake. Coptis, assigned to inform people about the case, organized an event called the Dryerson Festival. Standing at a table next to the dried lake bed, she discovered the first principle of organizing in poor communities: always offer food, and, when people who don’t care about the cause come up for a second helping, smile and fill their plates. When she visited neighbors, trying to raise support, she learned not to lead with an argument. “I just listen,” she said. “Sometimes I don’t even mention what we’re working on. Most people have never had the chance to tell their stories.” The festival became an annual event, and the number of local attendees tripled, from thirty to a hundred—a small victory.
When the AmeriCorps position ended, Coptis moved to the Pittsburgh suburbs to organize against fracking, but it didn’t engage her as coal had. “The reason that people pay more attention to fracking is that fracking threatens rich white suburbs,” she said. In 2013, C.C.J. offered her a job as an organizer, and she moved back to Greene County. A few months later, the fight over Duke Lake came to an equivocal end: Consol paid the state a thirty-six-million-dollar settlement, without admitting responsibility for the lost lake. In exchange, the company was granted rights to the coal and gas under the park.
In 2013, Coptis and Donald Fike were married in the park, on the ruins of an old church. A wedding photograph of Coptis—smiling, in sunglasses and a white satin dress, a beer can in hand—hangs in their living room, next to a Semper Fi plaque from Fike’s days as a marine. One afternoon, Coptis was in the kitchen, feeding applesauce to their three-month-old daughter, Rory—a name that Coptis selected, as her mother had, because it was gender-neutral. She’d just returned from a nearby shooting range, where she’d held a firearms-training session for African-American and Native American women recently returned from Standing Rock. “I wish we didn’t live in a world where women need firearms to protect themselves,” she said. “But we do.” Now she was taking over childcare from Fike, who was headed to work.
They started dating after Fike returned from Iraq, where, as a Marine lance corporal, he’d trained police in the town of Haditha. Back in Greene County, living with his parents, he didn’t want to resume his previous job: working alongside his father in the food-services department of West Virginia University. Like most men his age, he hoped to land a job in the mines. Coal miners in the area earn about thirty-six dollars an hour, which, with additional pay for overtime, often amounts to as much as a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, three times the county’s median household income. “In Greene County, miners are treated like gods,” Coptis said.
Fike’s military record helped him get a job maintaining equipment at Emerald Mine. Most of the time, he sat in a shop at the surface, waiting for the phone to ring with orders for new shuttle-car tires, or for cutter shafts, which kept blades spinning to cut coal twenty-four hours a day. One afternoon, bored and lonely, he posted on Facebook that he wanted to go see “The Avengers.” A friend told him that Veronica was single, so he called her.
Over dinner at T.G.I. Friday’s, Fike bristled when their conversation turned to politics. He was a miner, and Coptis was the enemy. But Fike thought of himself as “open-minded,” and they agreed to go out again. After a few months of dating, he asked if she’d be his girlfriend. She said yes; the next day, she headed to an anti-fracking demonstration in Washington, D.C.
Not long afterward, as they drove to ikea to buy a dresser, she risked a gentle lecture on the economic prospects of the white working class. “As a man from Appalachia, you have three choices,” she told him. “The military, the mines, or prison.” To Coptis, this wasn’t abstract; her brother, Zach, had served tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. At first, Fike shrugged off her ideas. He felt proud of working at Emerald, where the camaraderie among miners helped him readjust to rural life. “Being a miner is a lot like being in the military,” Fike said. During the two world wars, coal miners were often exempt from service, because their jobs were essential to the war effort, and miners retain the sense that they are risking danger to benefit their country. As Fike worked, accumulating underground hours to qualify as a “black hat”—a senior miner—he averted conflict by keeping Coptis’s work a secret. “He could’ve been fired because of what I did,” Coptis said. In one tense moment, Fike told her, “I love you, not your job.” She replied, “But my job is a lot of who I am.”
Still, her activism often riled her neighbors. When her father went out on surveying jobs, he would tell employers not to disclose his last name, for fear of being associated with his daughter. Coptis avoided situations in which talk of her work might lead to fights. “I don’t go to high-school reunions,” she said. Drinking in local bars, she told people that she handled bats at the zoo.
In 2013, as the E.P.A. worked to tighten mercury regulations, two local power plants announced that they were shutting down. The closings were the result of corporate strategy as much as of regulations (the parent company had recently shut down a string of plants), but people in Greene County blamed C.C.J. Soon after the announcement, a woman came into the office and said that her husband was losing his job at the plant. Distraught, she shouted at Coptis, “Are you going to pay our mortgage?” Coptis invited the woman to sit and talk, but she refused, and Coptis lost her temper. “We had nothing to do with closing those plants,” she snapped. “That was the company’s decision, not ours.” When the woman stormed out, Coptis’s boss, Patrick Grenter, admonished her: “Roni, you can’t talk to people in the community like that.” Later, he corrected himself—Coptis was part of the community.
In 2014, Obama proposed the Clean Power Plan, a sweeping effort to limit carbon emissions and to diminish communities’ reliance on mining; his companion budget dedicated ninety-two million dollars to train workers for renewable-energy jobs, to pay for community-college programs, and to fund local businesses and develop tourism. Coptis supported the plan assertively, telling her neighbors, “It’s the only time in history that the federal government has helped our communities transition out of dying energy jobs.” But the law also mandated that states decrease emissions by thirty-two per cent—which effectively forced them to replace coal-fuelled power plants with natural-gas plants.
That summer, rumors spread that Emerald Mine was running out of coal and was going to close. Fike quit his job and enrolled in a nearby college, where he studied geology. “My bosses said it’s probably the smartest thing I could be doing,” he said. “They don’t want to admit it, but there’s no future in mining.” Without his mining income, he and Coptis struggled to pay their mortgage, so he began working the night shift at Walmart.
A year later, on August 3, 2015, Obama released the final Clean Power Plan. The same day, the company that owned the Emerald and the Cumberland Mines declared bankruptcy. Joseph Cornelius Culp, a third-generation African-American miner who lives a few miles from Coptis, had worked at Cumberland before it went bankrupt. “Obama’s Clean Power Plan cost me my job,” he said. As a foreman, he’d spent forty-one years in mines, overseeing white miners who sometimes scrawled “KKK” on walls. Culp had voted twice for Obama. Now, as he saw it, Obama had taken away his livelihood. The idea of new training seemed futile, he said: “I have every certification you can imagine, and I can’t get another.” In places like Greene County, the federal investment in retraining meant little to miners. No job making solar panels was going to pay someone without a college education a six-figure salary.
As tensions grew between miners and environmental regulators, Coptis became a more visible advocate. In 2014, Consol stopped providing health care for twelve hundred retirees, and the miners came to C.C.J., which assisted in organizing a publicity campaign. Coptis helped lead a protest outside the Consol Energy Center, an arena in Pittsburgh, where the Stanley Cup playoffs were then being held. If the company could afford to pay millions of dollars for naming rights, the miners argued, it could afford health insurance for men who’d devoted their lives to mining. “The companies treat their workers as pawns,” Coptis said later. In the following months, C.C.J.’s membership grew from hundreds to thousands, including a hundred and fifty current and retired miners.
Last year, the Obama Administration announced the Stream Protection Rule, which would make it more difficult for companies to dump waste. At a public meeting in a Pittsburgh suburb, a hundred miners in hard hats gathered to protest the law. Bob Murray, who owns the United States’ largest independent coal company, argued in a speech that if the mines closed “the lights will go out in this country, and people will freeze in the dark.”
Coptis was the first to dispute him. She talked about learning to fish in Duke Lake and the threat of losing what was left of the park’s water. “For my entire life, I’ve seen the impact of long-wall mining on streams,” she said. Undermined streams can vanish entirely, and companies are legally permitted to repair them by pumping water through a hose set in the dry stream bed. Coptis had been building relationships with other advocates for clean water. In her free time, she served as the vice-president of the Izaak Walton League, a national conservation society named for the author of “The Compleat Angler.” The league, made up of hunters and fishermen, argued for more cautious exploitation of natural resources, hoping to preserve the wilderness for future sportsmen. In Pittsburgh, as she walked back to her seat, three Greene County miners nodded and gave her a thumbs-up. Patrick Grenter told me that Coptis’s status as a local was invaluable. “All the familiar caricatures they have for us—outsider, tree hugger, élitist,” he said. “Good luck trying to paint Veronica with that brush.”
Other than occasional visits from recovering addicts trying to find the clinic next door, the C.C.J. office is a quiet place. In the window is a sign that Coptis made, notifying citizens that the Pennsylvania Constitution guarantees their right to clean air and water. Inside, posters for the Dryerson Festival hang on the wall, along with a placard that reads, “They tried to bury us. They didn’t realize we were seeds.”
Last December, Coptis was at the office, preparing for a rally, when she heard a rumor that the state Department of Environmental Protection was going to allow Consol to mine under the streams in Ryerson park. The D.E.P. had scheduled a public hearing the next day at its headquarters, the Rachel Carson State Office Building, in Harrisburg. At three o’clock that morning, Coptis left Rory at her mother’s house and drove two hundred miles to attend the meeting. Seated in front of two D.E.P. advisory boards charged with improving community outreach, Coptis demanded to know if the state had issued a permit. The D.E.P. refused to answer; the director of external affairs said that it could only accept public comment at the meeting, not offer any replies. Furious, Coptis ducked into the stairwell to regroup.
The next day, she learned that the D.E.P. had issued the permit. C.C.J.’s attorney scrambled to appeal and to file an emergency injunction. Coptis doubted their prospects; no environmental group had ever won such a measure in Pennsylvania. Two days later, though, Grenter checked the docket and saw that a judge had blocked the permit, citing the potential for “immediate and irreparable injury” to the streams. “We won!” Grenter said. Coptis high-fived her colleagues and then braced for the response.
Consol laid off two hundred employees, and suggested that the layoffs would be permanent unless the decision was reversed. An industry group put up billboards around the county with depictions of social ills—a laid-off miner, a foreclosed house, a dejected-looking girl wearing a hard hat—and described them as “brought to you by Center for Coalfield Justice.” An ad attacking C.C.J. ran on the local country radio station. “They don’t respect us—our way of living, our values,” it said. “They’re not from here. We are.”
On a frigid afternoon in January, two hundred coal workers—burly young men with beards—gathered with their wives outside the office. They walked a continuous loop on Main Street, holding signs that said, “Energy Jobs Matter” and “Support Coal: It’s Red, White, and Blue.” Blair Zimmerman, the Greene County Commissioner, stood on the sidewalk, trying not to seem as if he were taking sides. Zimmerman, who worked in coal for forty years, told me, “I’ll always support miners.” But the environmental cost of coal was clear to him. “Two things we need on this earth are water and air,” he said. “That’s what we need to survive.”
Among the marchers were Christina and Frank Zaccone, a married couple in their early thirties. Frank didn’t mind the cold: every workday, he travelled an hour underground to reach the face, where he sheared coal from the Pittsburgh seam. Christina was excited to be part of something, although she wished she’d designed a sign of her own, instead of simply carrying the one handed to her by a Consol public-relations employee. She and the other miners’ wives had been talking on the phone late into the night, while their husbands were underground, worrying about the lawsuit. Christina noted that the industry claimed the fight over the Bailey mine could cost as many as two thousand jobs. “That’s a lot of jobs lost over a stream,” she said. “My husband could lose his job over this for sure.”
Christina was a good ally for the mining industry, posting support on a Facebook page called “A Coal Miner’s Wife.” When I met her one morning, a few weeks after the protest, she suggested that the activists were outside agitators. “If this Center for Coalfield Justice was a bunch of farmers who grew up in Ryerson State Park, then I probably wouldn’t have marched,” she said. She suspected that Coptis was the only C.C.J. member who’d actually “set foot” in the county. She knew that the Sierra Club, based in California, was part of the suit. “I almost feel like they’re bullies,” she said. “Maybe that’s why Trump won, because people were getting bullied.”
She and Frank lived with their two young daughters near the town of Prosperity, in a red brick Colonial they rented from Consol. The house had once been worth a hundred thousand dollars, but in 2013 Consol, which was then buying properties in the area, paid more than eight times that amount, intending to rent it to employees, who were unlikely to complain about the effects of undermining. In subsequent years, mining spoiled the water supply and damaged the foundation. The Zaccones now rented the house for six hundred dollars a month and paid a local company to fill the water buffalo—a portable tank that sat on a trailer outside. “I’ve seen what coal does,” Christina said. “It’s not pretty, but it’s necessary.”
Frank, who had worked the graveyard shift, was still sleeping. The Zaccones were planning to take their daughters to the Build-a-Bear store that day, to fashion Teddy bears from the movie “Trolls.” The bears were expensive, eighty dollars apiece, but Frank made good money: a hundred and ten thousand dollars a year, enough to allow Christina to stay home. During the recent downturn in the industry, Frank’s work had dwindled to three days a week, and Christina, who was then eight months pregnant, had waited tables. Their deductibles shot up; when Christina needed a C-section, she had to pay eight thousand dollars out of pocket. Many miners blamed Obamacare for the change in insurance fees. Since companies were forced to help provide insurance for everyone in America, the argument went, they could no longer afford the same standard of care for employees.
The Zaccones voted for Trump. “We’re not a bunch of toothless, uneducated miners,” Christina said. Her daughters ran into the dining room; the older one, who was four, wore a T-shirt that read, “never underestimate the power of a girl.” “No one wants to repress anyone else, no one wants to see Roe v. Wade overturned,” she added. “We voted for coal here, and just crossed our fingers that Trump wouldn’t go too far.”
By the time Frank woke up, the girls had got into a box of doughnuts on the dining-room table. He rifled through, looking for a chocolate one. Voting for Trump was the first time he felt that his opinion mattered, he said: “People like me made it happen.” Since the election, his overtime hours had increased. Trump might not be able to change the market, but in the short term he could restore jobs. “Coal will never go back to the way it was, but if Trump cuts back on regulation he can give us jobs for the next ten years,” he said. “We’ve got car loans and school loans and kids,” Christina added. “Honest to God, if we can make it ten more years, we’re cool.” But ten more years of burning coal will continue to help drive up the earth’s temperature, as well as increase the costs of health problems from pollution, which in Pennsylvania have been estimated at more than six billion dollars a year.
One morning, Coptis sat at a table at the Creekside Kitchen, picking at an egg burrito. Before Duke Lake went dry, the Creekside Kitchen’s owner ran an ice-cream shop nearby, which attracted some three thousand visitors each summer. After the lake vanished, she closed the shop and opened the diner, to serve miners. Now the seats were mostly filled with gas-well workers, who arrived in trucks with license plates from Texas, Arkansas, and North Dakota. They ate quietly, and were usually gone in a few weeks.
When Coptis wants to be left alone, she wears a T-shirt that says, “beyond coal.” Very few people in Greene County want to contemplate a future without coal; most, like the Zaccones, hope that deregulation can preserve their way of life. But regulation isn’t the essential problem. Since the nineteen-thirties, when the rise of unions drove up the price of labor, coal operators have increasingly turned to automation—a process that the unions supported, because it improved safety and efficiency. In the past three decades, employment in the industry has shrunk from a hundred and eighty thousand jobs to about fifty thousand.
More recently, the greatest factor in the demise of coal has been natural gas, which fracking has made abundant and cheap. Coal, which until not long ago generated half the country’s electricity, now provides only a third. Consol has put the Bailey Mine Complex, its last coal asset, up for sale in favor of developing natural gas. Yet gas is not the only competition. “It’s not just coal versus gas,” Ed Morse, the global head of commodities research at Citigroup, said. “It’s coal and gas versus renewables.” Solar and wind power are already inexpensive enough to compete with fossil fuels, and, even if the Trump Administration withdraws subsidies for renewables, they are likely to remain economically viable. Trump complained, in his speech about the Paris accord, that under the agreement “China will be allowed to build hundreds of additional coal plants.” But China, responding to dismal air quality, has promised to close a thousand coal mines and has increased its use of renewable fuels. “You’ve really got to overcome market forces, not just in the short term but systemically,” Phil Smith, the communications director of the United Mine Workers Association, said. Opening a power plant is a fifty-year investment, and no investor is willing to gamble that coal will be the fuel of choice in fifty years. “Poor Mr. Trump will have a problem living up to his commitment to people whose future of employment is bleak,” Morse said. “The age of coal is over.”
On February 16th, Trump rescinded the Stream Protection Rule, in one of his first legislative acts. “In other countries, they love their coal,” he said at the signing. “Over here, we haven’t treated it with the respect it deserves.” In recent months, the industry has been mining about six per cent more coal than it did last year, which Trump has claimed as a success, saying, “We’re bringing it back, and we’re bringing it back fast.” But energy analysts say that the increase has more to do with a temporary slowdown in production of natural gas, caused by record-low prices. Last month, Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, suggested that the Administration’s policies had revived fifty thousand coal-mining jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the real number at a thousand, compared with fourteen hundred in the final months of Obama’s Presidency. “Trump saying ‘I love coal miners’—that’s empty promises,” Blair Zimmerman, the county commissioner, said.
To Coptis, the Zaccones’ faith in Trump’s ability to bring back jobs exemplified how his promises delayed the necessary change. “The miners are going to have to be part of this process,” she said. That meant giving up six-figure salaries—just as Fike had, when he went to work at Walmart. “Everybody’s going to have to sacrifice something,” she said.
According to county estimates, Greene County has thirty years left to mine at current rates of production. Now, Zimmerman said, he was facing the question “What can we do when coal leaves?” This conversation was already difficult under the Obama Administration, when federal money was beginning to flow into Appalachia. Now that money is almost sure to disappear. Trump hopes to defund hundreds of projects, such as the Appalachian Regional Commission, which helps retrain miners as coders and farmers. Greene County’s power plants used to pay some thirteen million dollars a year in taxes; now they pay none. If not for environmental-impact fees coming from the natural-gas industry, Zimmerman said, his budget would collapse. He is struggling to find a way for the county to reshape itself, with almost no state or federal help. “This should’ve been looked at fifty years ago,” he said.
He’d heard about a commissioner from Kentucky bidding for a zip line to attract tourists, which Zimmerman considered a well-meaning fantasy. “A zip line isn’t going to replace thirty coal mines,” he said. He hoped for a G.M. or a Toyota factory, or, better yet, an Amazon distribution warehouse, which could supply as many as a thousand jobs. Coptis argues that managing environmental damage is essential to attracting new business. “No one’s going to move here if we don’t have parks or clean water,” she said. She is placing her hope in the reclaim Act, now under consideration in a House committee, which would invest a billion dollars in cleaning up mines in ways that support new industries, including tourism and sustainable farming.
After breakfast, Coptis and Fike were going to Ryerson, bringing along Rory. Coptis strapped the baby into the back seat of her Nissan. Along the way, she pointed out the church ruins where she and Fike were married. Nearby, a creek flowed toward one of the endangered streams. Their future remained uncertain. The coal company was appealing the court’s decision, and Coptis worried that the mood was against C.C.J. Under Trump, the Environmental Protection Agency is being radically diminished, and the Administration’s hostility toward regulation has emboldened local politicians who are sympathetic to coal. Last month, the Pennsylvania senate passed a bill to exempt underground mining from state clean-water regulations, which would eliminate the basis for the suit against Consol. Governor Tom Wolf, a Democrat, opposes the measure. But Coptis predicts more fights. “If Consol is allowed to destroy these streams, I’m not sure we can stay here,” she said. “We’ve got nothing left to give.” To her thinking, the county’s residents had already sacrificed enough. “The coal companies took the valley by my parents’ house,” she said. “They depopulated the county. They took the lake. Why do I have to keep sacrificing?” ♦
This article appears in other versions of the July 3, 2017, issue, with the headline “Undermined.”
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LastWeekTonight/YouTube
VIDEO: John Oliver picks a fight with coal on 'Last Week Tonight.'
John Oliver responded to a cease and desist letter from a coal company with the help of a giant squirrel named Mr. Nutter Butter.
TELEVISION
John Oliver and a Giant Squirrel Picked a Fight with the Coal Industry on Last Week Tonight
Melissa Locker
Jun 18, 2017
On Last Week Tonight John Oliver looked at coal, or as he called it “cocaine for Thomas the Tank Engine." Before he was President, Trump campaigned hard in coal country promising coal miners that he would bring their jobs back, even though, as Oliver pointed out, Trump may have no clue what a miner actually does. “He may very well think it’s running up to things he wants and yelling, ‘mine!’,” Oliver said.
Now that he’s in office, Trump has created some 1,300 coal jobs (which Oliver noted is far less than the number he claims to have created) and cited coal mining as one reason for pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement.
But according to Oliver, coal only has about 76,000 coal jobs vs J.C. Penney which has 114,000 jobs despite being on the brink of bankruptcy. Oliver did say, though, that coal mines are central to the economies of the few cities in which they are located. “When coal jobs go away, communities feel it,” said Oliver, particularly because coal jobs are high paying jobs.
Oliver noted that coal mining jobs declined under former President Obama, but pointed out that such work had been declining for decades like “careers in the Zeppelin industry and babies named Adolf.” According to Oliver, that decline is correlated to the drop in natural gas prices and growth in renewable energy. Solar power is frequently much less expensive than coal, so much so that the Kentucky Coal Mining Museum is solar powered, which Oliver noted was like “finding out the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was brought to you by Smashmouth.”
Oliver also said that one of the biggest threats to coal miners is coal company CEOS, which reportedly claims to workers that it’s an us versus them situation, even while cutting health and life insurance benefits and giving themselves a hefty raise. To illustrate his point, Oliver turned to Bob Murray, the CEO of Murray Energy, despite the fact that Murray’s lawyers sent Oliver a cease and desist letter before the show aired.
Of course, asking Oliver to “cease and desist” is simply asking for trouble. “Let’s talk about Bob Murray,” said Oliver, admitting that he knew he would get sued and opting to tread carefully: “I’m not going to say he looks like a geriatric Dr. Evil even though he clearly does.” He went on to discuss accusations against Murray Energy, including one claiming Murray was inspired to found the company after a chat with a talking squirrel.Oliver’s producer asked Murray Energy about that talking squirrel and they denied Murray had ever been spoken to by a talking squirrel. So Oliver decided to rectify that immediately with the help of a giant squirrel named Mr. Nutterbutter.
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Who shot Kuki Gallmann? The story of a Kenyan conservationist heroine.
There is thunder and the equatorial rain falls perfectly straight, drenching the lawn and a pair of towering candelabra trees that frame the driveway which leads to a two-storey, colonial-era house. Inside, logs burn in the grey stone fireplace, worn kilims are spread on the parquet floor and Kuki Gallmann – 74 years old and recovering from two bullet wounds in her abdomen – sits regally upon a chair of wrought iron and stained glass shaped like a resting bird.
Who shot Kuki Gallmann? The story of a Kenyan conservationist heroine
Since she moved to Kenya, she’s lost her husband and son. Now she’s been shot by tribesmen determined to take her land. But Kuki Gallmann’s going nowhere
Tristan McConnell
Sunday 18 June 2017 04.05 EDT
There is thunder and the equatorial rain falls perfectly straight, drenching the lawn and a pair of towering candelabra trees that frame the driveway which leads to a two-storey, colonial-era house. Inside, logs burn in the grey stone fireplace, worn kilims are spread on the parquet floor and Kuki Gallmann – 74 years old and recovering from two bullet wounds in her abdomen – sits regally upon a chair of wrought iron and stained glass shaped like a resting bird.
The first shot hit Gallmann and as she fell sideways she felt another bullet tear through her guts
After she was shot on a Sunday morning in April, Gallmann, a celebrated conservationist and author, spent a fortnight in hospital before being discharged to convalesce in her house in Nairobi. Every surface in the large living room is covered with picture frames, pretty paperweights, dainty pottery bowls, delicate baskets, gilt candlesticks, tiny cairns of semi-precious stones and stacks of books. But Gallmann is not yet truly home.
She longs for Ol Ari Nyiro, “The Place of Dark Springs”, an 88,000-acre nature reserve in Kenya’s central highlands overlooking the Great Rift Valley, where her husband and son are buried and which has become, in recent months, the epicentre of a violent struggle pitting private landowners against semi-nomadic herders. Gallmann’s shooting dragged these tensions into the light and while her wounds were grievous, she is unbowed.
“As soon as I’m allowed I will go back,” she says. Her doctors tell her that she is not yet strong enough and security officers advise her it is not yet safe, but “in my heart, I’m there,” she says.
Gallmann dismisses talk of banditry (the government’s preferred term for the attacks) and of desperate drought-stricken pastoralists seeking pasture (another common framing of the issue). “The people who attacked me, they were militia,” she says firmly. “Prior to every election I’ve seen there has been a similar build-up of violence.” But she has never been shot before.
Sad story: Gallmann with an elephant killed by poachers on her land. Photograph: AFP
Kenya’s Laikipia plateau is bordered by Mount Kenya’s jagged 17,000ft peaks to the east and the Rift Valley’s plunging slopes to the west. In between are undulating savannah, forests, winding rivers, waterfalls, rocky hills and steep-shouldered escarpments. The land is home to elephants and rhinos, giraffes, zebras and antelopes, wild dogs, bat-eared foxes and lions.
It was here that white, often British, settlers came to farm wheat and raise cattle during the first half of the 20th century, before independence. Gallmann was a latecomer, arriving in 1972 with her husband Paolo, her young son Emanuele, a pile of luggage shipped from Venice and a ready-made, romantic nostalgia for a place she had never been. Italian-born and aristocratic, Gallmann swiftly fitted into the privileged lifestyle of the wealthy expatriates she found here, but she and Paolo were on the hunt for land.
In Ol Ari Nyiro, on the western edge of Laikipia, they found their imagined Africa. In her best-selling memoir, I Dreamed of Africa, Gallmann describes, “The uncanny feeling of déjà vu… as if I had already been there.” From the extravagantly folded ridges of the ranch’s highlands, “Africa was there below us in all its unsolved mystery.”
“I totally and utterly fell in love with Ol Ari Nyiro and I felt – and it’s irrational and difficult to explain – that I had come home and there was a reason for me to be there,” she tells me, her English still heavily accented and melodic even after all the years away from Italy. When her husband died in a car crash in 1980 while she was pregnant with their daughter Sveva, she stayed. Three years later, when her son, then 17, was bitten by a puff adder and died, she stayed.
A pair of yellow-barked fever trees mark their graves outside her Laikipia home and she plans to be buried alongside them when she dies. “I am a bit of a veteran at overcoming tragedies and challenges,” she says with a smile that stops short of her pale blue eyes. “Losing someone you love is a test of endurance.”
Beautiful country: a Maasai warrior gazes towards Mount Kenya across Laikipia Plain. Photograph: John Warburton-Lee/Getty Images
It was between those trees that Gallmann lay bleeding on the morning of 23 April as she waited for a rescue helicopter to whisk her to hospital in Nairobi, nearly a six-hour drive away. Usually, Gallmann wakes at dawn, walks into her south-facing garden and sits at a wooden table to feed the birds, of which there are hundreds of species. The first to arrive are the superb starlings – iridescent blue, beautiful and common as muck – followed by bright yellow weaver birds, master builders whose nests resemble miniature Andy Goldsworthy sculptures.
But that morning Gallmann was in a rush: she wanted to inspect the smouldering ruins of Mukutan Retreat, her luxury tourist lodge, which had been set ablaze the day before. She drove there, accompanied by armed Kenya Wildlife Service rangers and one of her scouts, to find the stone walls of the cottages blackened, the cedar floors turned to char and the thatched roofs gone. Ash hung in the air like snowflakes. Decades of poaching, illegal logging, encroachment and occasional violence had taught her caution so the visit was brief and, as she always did, Gallmann left by a different dirt track to the one she had driven in on.
Reaching the higher plains she found a felled tree blocking the route. The rangers had finished moving the trunk when her scout called out: “Mama! Mama! Iko watu tatu!” There are three people, in Swahili. Before she could turn to look the first shot hit Gallmann “like a punch in the lower abdomen” as she sat in the driver’s seat of her open-backed Land Cruiser. She fell sideways and felt another bullet tear through her guts. Three more shots hit the side of the car before returning fire from the rangers chased the ambushers away.
They lifted Gallmann into the back of a 4x4 and drove her home. On the way she called the local police station to report the incident, and a neighbour to ask for a helicopter. Bumping and bleeding up the track, the pain coming in excruciating waves, Gallmann stubbornly willed herself away from death.
Hard breaks: Gallmann holds her arm after her hadn was crushed by illegal grazers in 2009. Photograph: Reuters
“I did not think that I was going to die because I won’t allow myself to die,” she says. Nevertheless, she told the rangers to lay her on the grass between the fever trees to wait. “It was a clear day with birds. It was a good place to be,” she says.
The helicopter landed and took Gallmann to the regional capital, Nanyuki, where British army medics at the large training base gave her a blood transfusion and staunched the bleeding. Then she was flown on to Nairobi for surgery. After that, “I don’t remember anything for two days. Two days lost,” she says.
The shooting was “only the culmination of years of threat, vandalism, attack,” says Gallmann. Her left hand is crippled from being hit by a rock in 2009 and last Christmas Day bullets were fired over her Laikipia home.
Nobody has been arrested, but Gallmann has no doubts about the motivation for the attack. “They want the land, and the way of the raiders is to burn the homesteads to take the property,” she says. “They” are Pokot pastoralists who have invaded private ranches and conservancies along Laikipia’s western fringe, bringing with them tens of thousands of livestock, poaching wildlife, stealing cattle and intimidating landowners and workers. Similar, though mostly less violent, incursions have been launched by Samburu pastoralists from the north and east.
Some ranches have closed and some owners are considering selling, but others, among them Gallmann, are hunkering down. “They are going to get tired of it. I know I will outlast them. There is no doubt in my mind.”
New horizon: a view of sunrise over Mount Kenya and the Laikipia valley. Photograph: Alamy
Yet Kenya is transforming at breakneck speed. The population has more than tripled, to around 45 million, in the years since she arrived. Villages have become towns, and towns have become cities. Wilderness has shrunk, wildlife has declined, livestock has increased and grassland has been grazed into dust while a changing global climate has made droughts deeper and more frequent. These chronic, underlying factors are spurred into violence by politics.
As soon as I’m allowed I will go back. In my heart, I’m there. I am a veteran at tragedies and challenges
The increasing pace and aggression of the Laikipia invasions comes ahead of an election in August which, like all others since Kenya’s first competitive vote in 1992, is characterised by a violent jockeying for position ahead of the polls. Nearly a decade ago more than 1,100 people were killed and hundreds of thousands forced from their homes when a stolen election was violently disputed, but that year was remarkable only for the scale of the killings and for the fact they came after, not before, the vote.
The rupture led to a constitutional referendum to replace Kenya’s tightly centralised government with devolved power. But with it has come devolution of corruption – national conflagration has been replaced by dozens of smaller, local ones, none more violent or dangerous than in Laikipia.
The unprecedented effect has been sometimes deadly insecurity in Laikipia, the destruction of the region’s tourist economy and the threatening of wildlife populations’ already tenuous existence. Estimates of those killed or injured run into the scores, the vast majority of the victims are smallholder farmers with just a few rain-fed acres of maize and a handful of goats, whose livelihoods are wiped out – and sometimes their lives, too – in a single night raid by armed pastoralists.
In the weeks running up to Gallmann’s shooting, the violence in Laikipia had intensified as a belated government security response made matters worse. Soldiers were accused of shooting at pastoralist herds then retreating, leaving landowners to face revenge attacks. Thomas Minito, a local Pokot politician from Baringo county to the west, was charged with incitement in late March over the arson attacks on Gallmann’s property.
Minito denied the charges, but was never put on trial because in May he was found dead, his battered corpse floating in a river hundreds of miles from where he had last been seen, in the company of men claiming to be police officers. His murder remains unsolved. Another local political leader, Mathew Lempurkel, a Samburu and the MP for Laikipia North, was charged with incitement over the March killing of ranch owner Tristan Voorspuy, a former British officer. He denies the charges.
Protecting his assets: an armed tribesman with his cattle in Kenya. Photograph: Goran Tomasevic/Reuters
Amos Olempaka, a human rights activist, aspiring politician and member of the Ilchamus pastoralist tribe, who traditionally fish the fresh waters of Lake Baringo in the Rift Valley, says raids by armed Pokot have been going on for more than a decade, but have changed in nature and worsened recently. “It has shifted from local cattle-rustling to a well-planned and executed mission,” he says, blaming Pokot politicians for driving the violence. “This thing is like a cartel, because it has taken a commercial shape, and they are using it as a form of territorial expansion.”
The tensions of modern Kenya are writ small in the clash between Gallmann and her assailants – the wealthy white landowner and outsider, committed to protecting the environment and its wildlife, versus impoverished local men whose traditional livelihoods have been disrupted by powers beyond their control and who are illegally armed and politically incited.
The Laikipia situation is just the most recent expression of a toxic brew of politics, ethnicity and land that lies at the heart of Kenya’s most intractable problems, yet despite the dangers and the challenges, Gallmann still believes coexistence is not just possible, but necessary. “Since many, many years my aim is to try to prove that people and environment can survive together, you have to have a balance,” she says.
“The people have increased, the cattle have increased and the weather has changed. But I am an optimist in the capacity of the environment, if given a chance, to rejuvenate itself, and restore itself. We have to sit back and let it be.”
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Millions of Colombians at risk from climate change.
Climate change has put nearly 12 million Colombians at risk from natural disasters like flooding and landslides, which could kill hundreds and cause serious infrastructure damage, the environment minister said on Tuesday.
By Luis Jaime Acosta | BOGOTA
Climate change has put nearly 12 million Colombians at risk from natural disasters like flooding and landslides, which could kill hundreds and cause serious infrastructure damage, the environment minister said on Tuesday.
Recent heavy rains have endangered residents in dozens of towns and cities, especially in neighborhoods of makeshift construction on deforested slopes of the Andes mountains. Deadly avalanches and flooding in the cities of Mocoa and Manizales killed more than 330 people this month.
At-risk cities in the Andean country, which has a population of 49 million, are typically located along riverbeds or in mountainous areas, Environment Minister Luis Gilberto Murillo told Reuters in an interview.
Disaster prevention efforts include relocation of high-risk neighborhoods and construction of retaining walls to hold back landslides, Murillo said.
"Colombia is very vulnerable to phenomena of extreme climate variability and climate change," Murillo said, adding that around 500 municipalities are constantly in medium or high alert for flood and landslide risks.
"We have to move toward a culture of prevention and response to early warnings. Close to 12 million people are in high-risk conditions," said the minister, a former mining engineer.
Deforestation of mountainous and jungle areas in Colombia significantly increases the risk of disasters like landslides.
Colombia has reduced annual deforestation to 124,000 hectares from 282,000 hectares in 2010 and hopes to take the level below 100,000 hectares next year, Murillo said.
Some deforestation is caused by ranchers and farmers looking to expand arable land. Illegal logging, gold mining and the cultivation of coca, the base ingredient for cocaine, also contribute.
"If we don't take urgent, extreme measures to implement our climate threat prevention policies, we could be facing the possibility that some of these events take place again," Murillo said, referring to the disasters in Mocoa and Manizales.
(Reporting by Luis Jaime Acosta; Writing by Julia Symmes Cobb; Editing by Andrew Hay)
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