David W. Orr is a member of the board of directors of the Center for Ecoliteracy and professor of environmental studies at Oberlin College.

Having seen pictures of the devastation did not prepare me for the reality of New Orleans. Mile after mile of wrecked houses, demolished cars, piles of debris, twisted and downed trees, and dried mud everywhere. We stopped every so often to look into abandoned houses in the Ninth Ward and along the shore of Lake Pontchartrain, to see things close up: mud lines on the walls, overturned furniture, moldy clothes still hanging in closets, broken toys, a lens from a pair of glasses…once cherished and useful objects rendered into junk. Each house with a red circle painted on the front indicated results of the search for bodies. Some houses showed the signs of desperation: holes punched through ceilings as people tried to escape rising water. The smell of musty decay was everywhere, overlaid with an oily stench. Despair hung like Spanish moss in the dank, hot July air.

Ninety miles to the south, the Louisiana Delta is rapidly sinking below the rising waters of the Gulf. This is no "natural" process, but rather the result of decades of mismanagement of the lower Mississippi that began as federal policy after the great flood of 1927. Sediments that built the richest and most fecund wetlands in the world are now deposited off the continental shelf—part of an ill-conceived effort to tame the river. The result is that the remaining wetlands, starved for sediment, are both eroding and compacting, sinking below the water and perilously close to no return. Oil extraction has done most of the rest by cutting channels that crisscross the marshlands, allowing the intrusion of salt water and storm surges. Wakes from boats have considerably widened the original channels, further unraveling the ecology of the region. The richest fishery in North America and a unique culture that once thrived in the Delta are disappearing and with them the buffer zone that protects New Orleans from hurricanes. "Every 2.7 miles of marsh grass," says author and filmmaker Mike Tidwell, "absorbs one foot of a hurricane's storm surge" (M. Tidwell, p.57).

And the big hurricanes will come. Kerry Immanuel, an MIT scientist and former greenhouse skeptic, researched the connection between rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, warmer sea temperatures, and the severity of storms. He's a skeptic no longer (Nature, August 4, 2005). The hard evidence on this and other parts of climate science has moved beyond the point of legitimate dispute. Carbon dioxide, the prime greenhouse gas, is at the highest level in at least the last 650,000 years. CO2 continues to accumulate by 2.5+ parts per million per year, edging closer and closer to what some scientists believe is the threshold of runaway climate change. British scientist James Lovelock compares our situation to being on a boat upstream from Niagara Falls with the engines about to fail.

If this were not enough, the evidence now shows a strong likelihood that sea levels will rise more rapidly than previously thought. The third report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2001) predicted a rise of about one meter in the twenty-first century, but more recent evidence puts this figure at six to seven meters, the result of accelerated melting of the Greenland ice sheet and polar ice along with the thermal expansion of water (Science, March 24, 2006).

Nine hundred miles to the northeast of the Delta as a sober crow would fly, Massey Energy, Inc., Arch Coal, and other companies are busy leveling the mountains of Appalachia to get at the upper seams of coal in what was one of the most diverse and relatively undisturbed forests in the US, and one of the most diverse ecosystems anywhere. Throughout the coalfields of West Virginia and Kentucky, they have already leveled 456 mountains across 1.5 million acres, and intend to damage a good bit more. Coal is washed on-site, leaving billions of gallons of a dilute asphalt-like gruel laced with toxic flocculants and heavy metals. An estimated 225 such containment ponds are located over abandoned mines in West Virginia, held back from the communities below only by earthen dams that are prone to failure, either by collapse or by draining down through old mine tunnels that honeycomb the region. One did fail in October 11, 2000 in Martin County, Kentucky when the slurry broke through a thin layer of shale, into mines, and out into hundreds of miles of streams and rivers. The result was the permanent destruction of waterways and property values of people living in the wake of this ongoing and mostly ignored disaster. This is typical of the coalfields. They are a third-world colony within the United States, a national sacrifice zone in which fairness, decency, and the rights of old and young alike are discarded as so much overburden on behalf of the national obsession with "cheap" electricity.

For his role in trying to enforce even the flimsy laws that might have held Massey Energy slightly accountable for its flagrant and frequent malfeasances, the Bush administration tried unsuccessfully to fire Jack Spadaro from his position as a mine safety inspector in the Interior Department, but eventually forced him to retire.

I have joined Jack in a four-seat Cessna piloted by Hume Davenport, founder of Southwings, Inc., a nonprofit conservation organization that provides pilots and aerial education to enhance conservation efforts across the Southeast. We take off from Yeager field in Charleston, West Virginia. The ground recedes below us as we pass over Charleston and the Kanawha River, which is lined with barges hauling coal to power plants along the Ohio River and points more distant. Appearing quickly on the horizon to the west is the John Amos plant owned by American Electric Power; by one estimate, it releases more mercury into the environment than any other facility in the US, as well as hundreds of tons of sulphur oxides, hydrogen sulfide, and CO2. For a few minutes we can see the deep green of wrinkled Appalachian hills below, but very soon the first mountaintop removal site appears. It is followed by another and then another. The pattern of ruin spreads out below us for many miles, stretching to the far horizon on all points of the compass. From a mile above, trucks with twelve-foot diameter tires and drag lines that could pick up two Greyhound buses at a single bite look like Tonka toys in a sandbox. What is left of Kayford Mountain comes into sight. It is surrounded by leveled mountains and a few still being leveled. "Overburden," the mining industry term for dismantled mountains, is dumped into valleys, covering an estimated 1,500 miles of streams in the past twenty-five years. Many more miles will be buried if the coal companies have their way. Coal slurry ponds loom above houses, towns, and elementary schools. When the earthen dams break on some dark, rainy night, those below will have little if any warning before the deluge hits.

Jack Spadaro, our guide to the devastation, is a heavyset, rumpled, and bearded man with the knack for describing outrageous things calmly and with clinical precision. A mining engineer by profession, he spent several frustrating decades trying to enforce the laws (such as they are) against an industry with friends in high places in Charleston, Congress, and the White House. In a flat, unemotional monotone he describes what we are seeing below. Aside from the destruction of the Appalachian forest, he says, the math is all wrong. The slopes are too steep, the impoundments too large. The angles of slope, dam, weight, and proximity of houses and towns are the geometry of tragedies to come. He points out Marsh Fork Elementary School, situated close to a coal-loading operation, below a huge impoundment up the hollow. In the event of a dam failure, the official evacuation plan calls for the principal to use a bullhorn to initiate the evacuation of the children ahead of a 50-foot wall of slurry that will be moving at maybe 60 miles an hour. If all works according to the plan, the children will have two minutes to get to safety, but there is no safe place for them to go. And so it is in the coalfields—ruin at a scale for which there are no adequate words, ecological devastation to the far horizon of topography and time. We say that we are fighting for democracy elsewhere, but no one in authority in Washington or Charleston seems aware that we long ago deprived some of our own of the rights to life, liberty, and property.

CONTINUED

David W. Orr is a member of the board of directors of the Center for Ecoliteracy and professor of environmental studies at Oberlin College. At Oberlin, he directed a collaboration of students, staff members, and some of the most innovative designers and architects in the world. Together they designed and built the Environmental Studies Center, a building selected as one of 30 "milestone buildings in the 20th century" by the US Department of Energy. He is a contributing editor to Conservation Biology, the author of The Last Refuge: Patriotism, Politics, and the Environment in an Age of Terror, The Nature of Design, Earth in Mind, and Ecological Literacy, and coeditor of The Global Predicament and The Campus and Environmental Responsibility.

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